Trump's following the populist playbook

His style is chaotic, but the "elite" targets are very predictable

The past month of U.S. politics has been shocking, unprecedented, and dangerous, but it has not been unpredictable. The targets the Trump administration has set its sights on are, broadly, the same targets we’ve heard conservative populists complaining about for decades.

The Trump era Republican Party is deeply in the thrall of populism. Of course, populism has both liberal and conservative versions. Both of them see a corrupt elite as the chief problem in American society, with that elite thwarting the needs of the virtuous “people.” But the identity of the “elite” varies importantly across ideological lines. To liberal populists (think Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, etc.), the elites are concentrated wealth — billionaires, banking conglomerates, etc. Elon Musk is just the sort of villain they’ve had in mind for many years.

But a longstanding project of conservative populists is to identify an “elite” that has nothing to do with wealth. These are shifting targets, but they generally encompass four main groups, toward which the Trump administration has directed much of its ire and activity:

• Arts and cultural figures

• University professors

• The mainstream media

• Unelected bureaucrats

• Sneering cosmopolitan liberals

I’ll address each of these in turn.

1. Arts and cultural figures

Conservative populists often complain about filmmakers and actors, writers, and others who seem far to the left and offend the sensibilities of “regular Americans.” You can see this any time there’s a conservative pushback against a Super Bowl halftime show or an Oscars broadcast, with complaints that it was too racy or too unintelligible or too Black or something else. This is a convenient target for conservative politicians and a way to rebut the fact that so many artists tend to support Democratic candidates.

But Trump has taken this several steps farther, not just complaining about artists but actually going after them. This is the context for understanding his purge of the Board of Trustees at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts and his naming himself its chairman. This has led to widespread resignations, cancellations of shows, and more, and a dramatic devaluing of something that has been a national cultural treasure for half a century.

2. University professors

As Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser write in their book Populism: A Short Introduction, a tenet of conservative populism is that a “cultural ‘liberal elite’ works through (higher) education, particularly the Ivy League universities, where they ‘pervert’ the bureaucrats, judges, and politicians of the future with ‘un-American’ ideas.” Again, this is a pretty old idea. Spiro Agnew was campaigning against elite university professors in the 1960s, and he wasn’t the first.

But again, Trump is actually putting this resentment into action. His attempt to cap the indirect costs for National Institutes of Health grants, to freeze or terminate National Science Foundation grants that mention diversity or women, and more, if actually permitted by courts, will have a devastating effect on higher education in the United States. It would cut a major source of revenue for research universities (particularly those without large endowments or internal research budgets) while telling a wide range of highly productive scholars that if they want to get research done they need to find another country in which to do it. There’s a reason that parents around the world send their children to study at American universities and that the United States dominates the Nobels and other academic awards; Trump is trying to end this.

(As a side note, it is particularly dispiriting to see some schools trying to stay on Trump’s good side, or at least stay out of his crosshairs, by removing DEI programs or references to them, by suggesting they’ll cooperate with campus ICE raids, and more, in order to keep their federal funding. Chances are this obeisance will not work, that government scholarly grants are going to get slashed regardless, and these schools will just have broadcast a message to prospective students and parents that students are expendable when funding is on the line.)

3. The mainstream media

Again, politicians complaining about the media is nothing new, and conservative populists have been complaining about the New York Times and the Washington Post since at least the middle of the last century. It was this revulsion against the mainstream media that fueled the rise of Fox News in the 1990s and prompted a generation of alternative media in recent decades.

But Trump’s approach to the media is not just to complain, but to attack. He has filed massive and poorly argued lawsuits against media organizations that say mean things about him, even suing the Des Moines Register for running a survey that said he could lose to Kamala Harris. Despite criticizing public figures being a broadly protected right of news media, some organizations, like ABC News, have done their darnedest to stay on Trump’s good side by settling these lawsuits and paying Trump multiple millions of dollars. The White House has barred the Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One because it won’t kowtow to him by referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. He has called for “Sixty Minutes” to be taken off the air and is suing CBS to try to make that happen.

4. Unelected bureaucrats

In 1964, Ronald Reagan, campaigning for Barry Goldwater, said that the main issue of the election was:

whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

Unelected bureaucrats have been a familiar punching bag for conservative populists for a long time, and are a way to complain about government regulations, taxes, and other impositions on the business class without drawing attention to their own wealth.

But like so many other areas, Trump has massively ratcheted up this campaign. Working with Elon Musk, Trump is attempting to fire (with highly doubtful legal authority to do so) hundreds of thousands of federal employees. These have included business regulators, people responsible for keeping track of nuclear weapons, staffers at Veterans Affairs and the Department of Education, and far more.

5. Sneering cosmopolitan liberals

This is an admittedly vague category. The 2004 ad that the Club For Growth ran against Howard Dean, describing his supporters as a “tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show,” definitely captures some of it.

But basically, this is a catchall for coastal urbanites whom conservative populists are convinced are looking down upon them. And it’s always been something of an artifice, but Trump is leaning into it like he is everything else. It’s a stretch to call trans girls trying to play on high school soccer teams as some sort of vast cultural elite, but Trump and his supporters treat them as such and portray themselves as a radical underground trying to free the nation from the tyranny of “gender ideology.” This is the same thing that motivates the massive pushback against DEI programs in government and in the private sector. It motivates the attack on “sanctuary cities” that try to prevent the deportation of undocumented immigrants. It motivates the modern conservative populist “free speech” campaign, which is generally an effort to let people say more bigoted things without being criticized or made to feel guilty. It motivates renaming military bases for Confederate soldiers, renaming an Alaskan mountain for a white president, and renaming a body of water that has been know as the Gulf of Mexico since before the United States existed.

To be sure, Trump’s approach has been more aggressive and more chaotic than in his first term, and possibly more extensive than most people predicted. But his choice of targets comes from a long pedigree of conservative populism that has been taking over the Republican Party since before Donald Trump even thought about running for office.