The world has no grander seaside houses than those of Newport, Rhode Island, where the money made in America’s Gilded Age was spent on all kinds of unnecessary architecture.

Its weird variety – classical revival, gothic, beaux arts, American shingle, English Tudor – gives a touch of theme-park whimsy to the tree-lined avenues that stretch down to the Atlantic, though the houses themselves are solid enough, and have withstood all the ocean can fling at them for more than 100 years. A 70-room mansion called The Breakers, perched just above the crashing waves, is arguably the grandest in this grand collection: the most visited historic building in the state. I went round it last week with some American friends, was thrilled by its wonderful excess and stupidity – and thought, inevitably, of Donald Trump.

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Cornelius Vanderbilt II had The Breakers built as his summer home in the 1890s. His grandfather, Cornelius Vanderbilt, had been the richest man in America; his father, William Henry Vanderbilt, was known as the richest man in the world. And yet at the beginning of the 19th century, the Vanderbilt family owned nothing more than a ferry that crossed New York harbour under sail. An early investment in steamboats and a later, and much larger, financial interest in railways paid off.

After the American civil war, the US came into its own as an industrial power, with an economy that grew faster than at any other time in its history. In the 30-odd years to 1900, everything multiplied – railway track mileage by five times, pig iron production by eight, coal extraction by eight. Everything, in fact, except income tax, which remained stubbornly at zero – the prospect of even a 2% rate was described in Congress as “socialism, communism, devilism”.

The consequent fortunes turned the people who made them into household names: Vanderbilt (railways), Rockefeller (oil), Carnegie (steel), Astor (real estate), as well as dozens of lesser-known millionaires with steam yachts and a penchant for sailing who settled for a few weeks every year into their palatial “cottages” – as they chose to think of these houses – on the low cliffs of Newport.

At The Breakers, we paid our $24 a head and went inside. Here was the morning room that craftsmen had assembled and then de-assembled in France, to assemble it again on the other side of the Atlantic after both the stone and the craftsmen had made the journey. Here was the billiards room with its walls of Italian marble; the library with its walls of hand-tooled Spanish leather and its 16th-century fireplace taken from a French chateau; the dining room with its vast chandeliers that could be lit by both gas and electricity, so that if one of these light sources failed the 34 diners seated below could still locate their hock and lobster thermidor.

The style overall was described as Italian Renaissance, but the persistent feature was gold – gold glistening from the coffered ceilings, the walls and the furniture. The Gilded Age was so called because of a Mark Twain novel but, as a later writer noted, it merited the name. “There was gold everywhere,” the society hostess Elizabeth Wharton Drexel remembered in 1935. “Gold was the most desirable thing to have because it cost money, and money was the outward and visible sign of success.”

It seemed to us as we trudged round the floors with our audio guides looped around our necks that the house represented the opposite of domestic comfort, that you might as well set up home in a cathedral or the Albert Hall. “White elephants” was how the novelist Henry James described Newport’s seaside mansions, but he may have missed the point. The sociologist Thorstein Veblen got nearer it when in 1899, four years after The Breakers was completed, he first published the phrase “conspicuous consumption”. The chief function of grand houses such as these – and the Vanderbilt family had built another 16 of them by the start of the first world war – was to advertise wealth.

How do we react to the rich? The inequalities of the Gilded Age are infamous and, according to economists such as Thomas Piketty and Paul Krugman, well on their way to being repeated. Between 1860 and 1900, the richest 2% of American households owned more than a third of the country’s wealth, while the richest 1% received a fifth of the country’s income – a figure that again holds good today.

The Trump family penthouse at the top of Trump Tower has more gilt than any Vanderbilt could have imagined

Populism, then as now, was a consequence. In the 1890s the mainly agrarian People’s party deployed arguments and rhetoric that became familiar again last year in both Britain and the US. As the historian Richard Hofstadter writes, there came “a great revulsion against the outside world … Everyone remote and alien was distrusted and hated … the old agrarian conception of the city as the home of moral corruption reached a new pitch. Chicago was bad; New York, which housed the Wall Street bankers, was farther away and worse; London was still farther away and still worse.” Jews were mentioned. Immigrants, welcomed by factory owners as cheap and eager labour, had made cities disgusting and “more foreign than American”.

In Hofstadter’s words, the problem “assumed a delusive simplicity”. The power of money concentrated in the hands of people like Cornelius Vanderbilt – the “robber barons” – had caused these social ills and it was against “money power” alone that the populists directed their crusade.

The comparison with the campaigns for Trump and Brexit are obvious enough, and yet there is a significant difference. Unlike rural Americans at the turn of the last century, the disenchanted and neglected portions of the populations of the US and Britain don’t have the rich in their sights, no matter how much they have disfigured politics or avoided tax.

The elite that Britain’s billionaire-owned press chooses to identify as the enemy is not, naturally enough, comprised of billionaires; rather it is the “liberal metropolitan elite” that the Daily Mail so despises, perhaps with its readers’ prejudices in mind as well as its proprietor’s. If, that is, the perceptions of California law professor Joan C Williams also apply on this side of the Atlantic.

According to Williams, the white working class resents the professional class but admires the rich. Last year, in the Harvard Business Review, she wrote that her only surprise at Trump’s success had been her friends’ astonishment that it was possible.

For blue-collar workers, the dream wasn’t to join the upper middle class, “with its different food, family and friendship patterns”, but for the family to stay as it was, “just with more money”. They had, after all, little direct contact with the rich, and tended to believe that hard work had got them where they were. Professionals, on the other hand, ordered the working class about every day. Hillary Clinton, in particular, exemplified the “smugness of the professional elite”.

Can it really be that salaried professionals – managers, professors, judges – have replaced the super-rich in the popular imagination as “enemies of the people”? It seems so. The Trump family penthouse at the top of Trump Tower has more gilt than any Vanderbilt could have imagined – it must be like living inside an ingot – but the poor among Trump’s supporters don’t seem to mind. A rich man who might once have been the cause of public disaffection has now become its political consequence.