It’s hard to admit, but President Donald Trump has triggered progress on a long-simmering issue: economic inequality. The notion that the rich ― billionaires in particular ― have too much at the expense of too many has taken off in recent weeks. There’s talk of “banning billionaires,” and in the U.S. there are serious ― and popular ― policy proposals looking at how to raise taxes on the ultra-wealthy, most notably from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Americans have actually long supported raising taxes on the wealthy, surveys show. But for years, the ultra-rich, Republicans and anti-tax extremists like Grover Norquist have kept that popular sentiment at bay, partly with rhetoric about freedom and partly by philanthropic deeds, not to mention good PR to portray themselves as benevolent, self-made geniuses. Now that Trump’s in office. The tide has turned. “The current occupant of the White House has rather taken the sheen off the billionaires,” said Justin Wolfers, an economics and public policy professor at the University of Michigan. “It’s easier today to believe that a bunch of them are grifters rather than the value-creating entrepreneurs that we might hope for.”

Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and his wife, Louise Linton, hold up a sheet of new $1 bills on Nov. 15, 2017, at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington.

In the past, Americans wanted to tax the rich to pay for specific policies. These days, the reasoning goes that taxing the ultra-wealthy will tamp down extreme inequality, said Matt Grossmann, a political science professor at Michigan State University. “You’re seeing more willingness to say it’s just a moral issue that someone shouldn’t start out with that much of an advantage in life,” he said. The recent popularity of tax-the-rich policies isn’t simply a reaction to Trump, Grossman added, but part of a natural tendency in American politics for public opinion to swing in opposition to whichever party is in power. “Public opinion moves ‘thermostatically,’” he said. “When Republicans are in office and policy moves to the right, public opinion moves leftward.” Still, it’s fair to say that the Democratic Party’s reaction to Trump has been more extreme than it would’ve been under, say, a President Jeb Bush. Trump has energized progressives on issues, like women’s rights, in resistance to the president, which has inspired record numbers of women to run for office. He’s also been a catalyst for environmental issues, in a way. Before Trump took office, activists and scientists had trouble getting attention for climate issues, but now it’s become much easier, in part thanks to opposition to Trump, FiveThirtyEight recently reported. Of course, there are a host of other non-Trump reasons why tax-the-rich ideas are taking off now, including a rise in economic inequality that is hard to ignore and the work of economists, such as Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, who’ve been able to demonstrate, with hard data, how bad the situation has become. There’s also the lingering effects of the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign, which pushed Democrats to the left on these issues. Sanders proposed raising taxes on wealthy Americans and railed against income inequality. And outrage over inequality really hasn’t gone away since the Great Recession a decade ago led to the protests of Occupy Wall Street.

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times via ASSOCIATED PRESS Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, with his wife, Hilary Geary Ross.