David Brooks breaks down the anti-populist behavior of the "populists" in the Republican Party:
If America elected a populist as president, you would expect him to devote his administration to addressing these inequities, to boosting the destinies of working-class Americans. But that’s not what President Trump is doing. He seems to have no plans to narrow the education chasms, no plans to narrow the health outcome chasms or the family structure chasms. He has basically no plans to revive the communities that have been decimated by postindustrialization.
Why is that? The simplest answer is that Trump really seems not to give a crap about the working class. Trump is not a populist. He campaigns as a populist, but once he has power, he is the betrayer of populism.
What’s going on here is not a working-class revolt against the elites. All I see is one section of the educated elite going after another section of the educated elite. This is like a civil war in a fancy prep school in which the sleazy kids are going after the pretentious kids.
Here’s the essence of Trumpism: It’s to be blithely unconcerned that people without a college degree die about eight years sooner or that hundreds of thousands of Africans might now die of AIDS but to go into paroxysms of moral panic because of who competes in a high school girls’ swim meet.
Sure, the upper reaches of the federal work force are generally left or center left, as you’d expect from a group that possesses a plenitude of advanced degrees. But they are also mostly nonpolitical patriots who often work 60-hour weeks to keep us safe, to save lives, to make America work. This is a complexity the Trumpists seem incapable of contemplating. They are people who would destroy your home because they don’t like your lawn sign.
Anne Applebaum agrees in principle, but frets that these nihilist idiots are perpetrating the same kind of regime change in the US that others like them have managed in Venezuela and Hungary.
The next election is 625 days away. That is a very long time.