It’s one of the photos of the year: Nigel Farage laughing like a jackass next to Donald Trump in the blinged-out lift at Trump Tower.

On Twitter, the writer Matt Haig quipped: “Look at these two young earnest revolutionaries plotting the downfall of the global elite from their humble golden elevator.”

In 2016, Trump’s presidential victory took the longstanding culture war phenomenon of “elitist anti-elitism” to a bizarre new level.

During the campaign, he positioned himself as the anti-establishment candidate, a human wrecking ball smashing the American elite into pieces. Yet he did so while boasting of his wealth and his fame and his luxury lifestyle, without any sense of disconnect whatsoever.

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When Donald Trump Jnr told the press that the presidency would be a “step down” for his dad, he was reiterating a central theme of the Trump push: the notion that The Donald represented the antidote to “Crooked Hillary” and her establishment backers as much because of as despite his billion dollar bank balance.

Already, we’re witnessing the reverberations in Australia.

Almost immediately after the election, former MPs Mark Latham and Ross Cameron announced they’d teamed up with the Spectator’s Rowan Dean for a Trump-flavoured talk program on Sky. The show would, they said, be called Outsiders – an antidote to “an out-of-touch, inner-city leftist class”.

Think about that for a second. A newspaper editor and two ex-politicians (drawing the usual huge pensions from the public purse), sufficiently well-connected that they can make a few calls to Murdoch’s men and get themselves on air.

Somehow, though, they’re “Outsiders”.

Latham’s at least put some effort into his anti-elitist shtick, devoting his taxpayer-funded retirement to paint himself as a humble western suburbs bloke relentlessly persecuted by mean feminists and politically correct leftists and goodness knows what else.

You can’t say the same about Malcolm Turnbull. The prime minister remains the quintessential silvertail: a Sydney Grammar boy, barrister, Goldman Sachs partner and tech millionaire.

Yet after Trump’s win, Turnbull, too, began sticking it to The Man. On the ABC’s 7.30 program, he responded to tough questioning by decrying the “elite media” and its preoccupations.

How is this possible? How did anti-elitism become such an easy rhetorical strategy that even Malcolm Turnbull can employ it?

The “one weird trick” for rightwing demagogues works like this.

You tap into the immense discontent bubbling away in every developed nation, and you direct that simmering anger against the pillars of the status quo (the media, the parliament, the education system and so on), infusing your denunciation with a dose of whatever strain of bigotry prevails at that particular moment. The press is biased toward Muslims! The schools fail heterosexual students! The hospitals are in crisis because of immigrants!

Now comes the crucial part.

Your charges might be nonsensical but with luck you’ll draw liberals and the left into your snare. Rightly appalled by your racism, they’ll respond with a defence of the institutions you’ve impugned. The press isn’t biased at all! The schools are great and there’s nothing wrong with the nation’s hospitals.

Bam!

Suddenly, the charge of liberal elitism looks credible.

You’ve successfully lured progressives into taking responsibility for a status quo that most of the population, at some level or another, despises. Your opponent might think he’s standing up xenophobia but most voters will only hear an outraged leftist defending the health system that condemned poor old Auntie to wait for hours on a trolley.

Of course, the problems in the hospitals really pertain to funding cuts rather than immigration – but that doesn’t matter. You’ve manoeuvred liberals so that, instead of voicing aspirations for change, they’ve identified themselves with a hated business-as-usual.

The Trumpite slogan “Make America Great Again” offers the perfect real-world example. In his rallies and press conferences, Trump implied (or simply asserted) that Mexicans and Muslims were responsible for the nation’s decline. Clinton shot back by declaring that America was already great – and so the trap was sprung.

Rather than persuading the public that immigrants weren’t to blame for low wages, the Democrats sounded like they saw nothing wrong with declining living standards. Clinton thus became the candidate of status in an election in which voters desperately wanted change.

Unfortunately, progressives have learned little from the result.

In recent weeks, American liberals have seized, with increasing shrillness, on assertions from anonymous CIA agents about Russian involvement in Wikileaks’ Podesta files.

It’s a disastrous focus, an orientation certain to boost Trump’s fortunes.

For what does the insistence that “Putin hacked democracy” do? The Podesta emails were, after all, entirely genuine. The Democrats were not the victim of a smear or a fabrication. On the contrary, the Wikileaks data base revealed how party insiders actually conducted themselves. By blaming defeat on the Podesta leaks, liberals are acknowledging that a Clinton victory depended on concealing the truth, that voters gaining accurate information about her campaign was a terrible blow to her chances.

You could not have planned a strategy more calculated to reinforce and amplify all of Trump’s talking points about liberal duplicity and elitism.

There is, however, an alternative.

This week, we’ve witnessed Tony Abbott and Bronwyn Bishop run a tag-team operation against disabled pensioners. The former PM kicked things off by decrying the supposed ease with which individuals with “a bad back and a bit of depression” could quality for the benefit, before Bishop chimed in to explain that many of those claiming a pension for depression were actually “drug addicts”.

“There are a large number of people were rorting it,” she said.

Now you may remember that, when Bronwyn Bishop served as Speaker in Abbott’s administration, she charged the taxpayer $5,000 to fly by helicopter to a Liberal party fundraiser in Geelong. After a public outcry, she resigned her post and left parliament the following year. She did not, however, go empty handed – in retirement, she’s drawing $255,000 from the public purse along with 10 free domestic return flights a year.

As a former PM, Abbott’s entitled to even more. Had he quit politics after the leadership spill in 2015, he would have taken with him, even then, more than $300,000 a year for the rest of his life, plus an assortment of perks.

Here’s the formula, then, for busting elitist anti-elitism.

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Rather than defending the status quo, progressives need to say loudly and clearly that, yes, the shirkers and parasites must be exposed. But the problem lies at the top, not at the bottom: there’s something deeply wrong with a system in which Bronwyn “Helicopter” Bishop can lecture disabled pensioners about rorting.

When we identify the real hierarchies, the claims of the rightwing anti-elitists dissolve into dust.

On Friday, we learned that the 17 people selected for Trump’s cabinet (and associated positions) will own more money (a cool $9.5bn or so) than the 43 million poorest families in America combined. Yes, that’s right. The inner circle of the Trump administration will be personally richer than the bottom third of all American households.

It’s an utterly obscene statistic.

Yet that disparity between the very rich and the very poor is indicative rather than anomalous, with the gulf between the tiny ranks of the ultra wealthy and everyone else growing under Republicans and Democrats alike. Earlier this year, Oxfam noted that the richest 62 people owned as much as the poorest half of the world’s population, a grim milestone achieved during Barack Obama’s tenure.

That’s the point. Trump isn’t a change-maker or an insurgent. Like most of the other “anti-elitists”, he’s deeply invested in the inequalities of the status quo – something that will becoming increasingly clear the more that people push for real change.