Is President Trump a populist or a corporatist?
Is he appealing to white supremacists as a form of political opportunism—or because, deep down, he sympathizes with their views? Is he the hard-core “fire and fury” hawk of his North Korea statements? Or is he actually a non-interventionist who disdains foreign engagement?
The answer to all these questions is: Who knows? There is absolutely no way of establishing what Trump believes. He says whatever he feels he has to say at any given moment to get attention, strike back at foes or advance his personal (especially economic) interests.
But Trump’s decision to let go of his right-wing-populist-in-chief Steve Bannon sends a clear signal that the president’s “populism” has always been a ruse. And Bannon committed the cardinal sins of dishing to a liberal journalist and dissing his own base within the Republican Party.
One reason Bannon has always inspired fascination is that he has a set of beliefs that, while not always coherent, are strongly held. Faced with a president whose ideology verges on nihilism, here was someone in the Trump orbit who cared about certain things passionately. Bannon was allowed to fill in the blanks left by an empty man.’
This explains Bannon’s seemingly fatal decision to call my friend Robert Kuttner, a left-of-center economic populist who disagrees with Trump on all manner of issues but does share Bannon’s skepticism about China’s role in the global economic system. Bannon seemed to think that he could strengthen his position by seeking allies on the left. This, we have learned conclusively, is not how this fundamentally right-wing White House works.
Kuttner’s account of the conversation, published in The American Prospect, was striking because (1) Bannon declared, against Trump’s bellicose public bloviating, that “there’s no military solution” to the North Korea problem; (2) Bannon sees the U.S. facing an "economic war with China" that we have to be “maniacally focused on”; (3) he’s been in “a fight ... every day” on these matters with the Treasury Department and Trump’s chief economic adviser Gary Cohn; and (4) he called the ethno-nationalists with whom he is often associated “a collection of clowns.”
Yet Bannon also seemed to welcome the public battles that Trump’s moral equivalency toward neo-Nazis and their foes in Charlottesville has unleashed. “The Democrats,” Bannon told Kuttner, “the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
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