So, which politician do you think is most likely to have dissed hedge fund managers as the spawn of the devil?



They just “shift paper around and they get lucky”, this individual said scathingly. “They didn’t build this country.”

Worse yet, hedge fund managers are “getting away with murder” because “they pay no tax. It’s ridiculous.” And as a result, “the middle class is getting absolutely destroyed”.

It sounds almost like something Bernie Sanders might say, doesn’t it? Or Elizabeth Warren, who has campaigned vigorously to rein in Wall Street’s worst excesses. Or even Hillary Clinton, who took aim at the ever-popular target of hedge fund compensation – and its preferential tax treatment – in her very first days on the campaign trail, just as she did eight years ago.

Nope. It was Donald Trump.

Yup. That Trump.

The same guy who has been heating up the airwaves with his inflammatory retweets about “bimbos”. The same Donald Trump who has suggested deporting all the illegal Mexican immigrants because, in his view, that country is “sending” the US its criminals and rapists.

The same Donald Trump who claims “I beat China all the time” and who asserts with a bewildering lack of evidence that the actual US unemployment rate is somewhere between 18% and 20%, not below 6%.

But hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And Trump – who seems to have failed to master the fundamental fact that a president of the United States isn’t the ultimate CEO, with the right to fire unsatisfactory employees, but instead the ultimate employee, hired by all the voters and accountable to each of us – may be saying one or two things that actually have some value.

The reason? He knows the financial world and at the moment, he’s not beholden to it.

That hasn’t always been true. In the past, he has played high-stakes poker with banks in bankruptcy court restructuring games on four separate occasions, even allowing them on one occasion to dictate the sale of his airline and yacht, and how much he could personally spend.

But now Trump is able to finance his own campaign, meaning that unlike other candidates, he doesn’t have to think before he speaks about Wall Street, taxes or pretty much anything else. The result, of course, has been that he has been an equal-opportunity offender – literally.

What is intriguing is that among those he is offending are some who would love to support a leading Republican: business interests and especially Wall Street. But Trump instead is doing what other candidates have feared to do, and standing firm as the “disrupter”.

He blasted Jeb Bush’s ties to Wall Street, arguing that the latter’s job as an adviser to Lehman Brothers (for which he earned $1.3m a year) should disqualify him from the presidency. He has suggested changing the tax code to punish companies that base factories in other countries, and forcing companies to give up plans to dodge that tax code by merging with non-US businesses and shifting their headquarters abroad, a process known as “inversion”.

Admittedly, a lot of these ideas are poorly developed when you sit down to scrutinize them. Trump’s plan to get US businesses to repatriate profits now stuck overseas, for instance, is either very clumsily expressed or will prove to be a massive tax holiday for corporations.

But the fact remains that he is willing to declare publicly that the economic system as it exists today isn’t just – and he is a billionaire, who benefits from that very system. That’s just as shocking as some of his horrifying comments have been.

If you struggle to think of Warren Buffett – a modest, low-key kind of guy who would shudder at the flashy lifestyle that “The Donald” embraces – in the same breath as Trump, well, it seems as if the two just might have something in common.

Buffett famously criticized the US tax code, pointing out that he pays a lower rate than does his secretary. Now Trump, too, has indicated (at least in passing), that he would be willing to pay more in taxes, in pursuit of a more equitable tax code and if it meant lowering the burden on the middle class.

Billionaire Warren Buffett: taxed at a lower rate than his secretary Photograph: Rick Wilking/Reuters

“I’m OK with it,” he told a Bloomberg interviewer. “You’ve seen my statements, I do very well, I don’t mind paying some taxes.”

Sadly, it’s true that a large part of Trump’s appeal is to the ugliest side of American popular opinion: to that part of the country that is insular, narrow-minded and arrogant.

But we ignore at our peril the fact that he also draws on a very real strand of economic resentment among Republicans who find that more establishment-oriented candidates simply don’t speak to their concerns.

It isn’t only Democrats who are left furious by what has unfolded since the 2008 financial crisis and the recession that followed. Yet even Rand Paul, whose platform includes scaling back the power of the Federal Reserve, didn’t use the first debate as an opportunity to address economic issues or criticize the power of business or financial interests. Of the major candidates, only Mike Huckabee managed a half-hearted comment on that score.

It is this economic populism – whether real or assumed – as much or more than Trump’s more radical and hair-raising pronouncements, that might keep him among the frontrunners in the presidential race.

Given that economic issues will be front and center throughout the campaign, if the rest of the Republican candidates want to dethrone Trump, they might want to study what it is that lets people who talk about economic populism – like Warren, like Sanders – gain such fervent followings.