Alex Wong/Getty Soapbox Donald Trump Is Not a Populist To beat him, Democrats will have to show voters what real populism is all about.

Robert M. Shrum is Carmen H. and Louis Warschaw chair in practical politics, professor of the practice of political science and director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California.

Donald J. Trump is a populist in the same sense that the Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea is democratic.

He is a demagogue who, under the cover of a contrived populism that traffics in resentment of “the other,” pursues a plutocratic course that betrays the very people he tricked into voting against themselves. After an election in which he played on their economic insecurities, he now proposes to cut taxes mostly for corporations and the top 1 percent, not for them; to strip away their health coverage; to dismember protections for workers on the job; to let the highest bidders poison our water and pollute our air. The list goes on and on—from opposing an increase in the minimum wage to calling for draconian cutbacks in college loan programs for hard-pressed middle and working-class students.


Trump himself constantly offers a conspicuous profile in plutocracy. Think of his treatment of the Secret Service – bankrupting jaunts to Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster, his private clubs in Florida and New Jersey. And he is far from alone in the arrogantly gilded ranks of this administration. Consider the wife of Treasury secretary and multi-millionaire Steve Mnuchin, a bejeweled B actress named Louise Linton, who Instagrammed a photo identifying her lavish designer clothes by name and then berated a critic, a mother of three, by belittling her lesser wealth and deriding her life as “cute.” The episode instantly went viral.

How do Trump and his minions get away with this – and they do, at least with a so-called “base” that’s shrinking toward 30 percent of the voters? And why are Democrats struggling to make him pay for his plutocratic ways? The answer is rooted in the history of American populism and the apostates who perverted it into a toxic brew of cultural and ethnic resentments.

I doubt Trump has read that history or, for that matter, much history at all. But Tom Watson, a Georgia politician who spanned the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is a prime exemplar. He was one of the original populists, elected to Congress in 1890, who proudly proclaimed that his cause was the plight of poor farmers, white and black. In Washington, Watson helped push through then-radical measures like free postal delivery to remote rural areas. In 1896, he was originally William Jennings Bryan’s vice presidential running mate for the Populist Party, although Bryan, once he became the Democratic nominee, chose someone more conventional to form a more balanced ticket.

After his one term in Congress and his short-lived vice-presidential bid, Watson spectacularly abandoned what had been a hallmark of his politics – the reach across racial barriers to mobilize a common fight for economic justice. Once he had advocated voting rights; he now remade himself as a white supremacist. In 1908, he even ran for president against Bryan as the candidate of a misnamed Populist Party that had lost its soul and ceased to exist after the election.

As an influential newspaper editor in Georgia, Watson relentlessly purveyed prejudice – and not just against African-Americans. He incited and applauded the infamous lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman wrongly convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old factory employee in Atlanta. Frank’s sentence had been commuted to life in prison by Georgia’s governor, who then had to leave the state after an angry crowd tried to storm his home. After Watson, according to the historian C. Vann Woodward, “pulled out all the stops,” a mob led by some leading citizens broke into Frank’s cell, drove him nearly 90 miles to Phagan’s hometown, and hanged him as soon as they arrived.

Watson’s newfound prejudice knew no bounds. He not only denounced “the Jewish aristocracy,” but scorned the Knights of Columbus as the knife’s edge of a Catholic conspiracy and attacked immigrants as “Goths and Vandals.” Elected to the United States Senate in 1920, he died two years later and was soon commemorated with a statue at the Georgia State Capitol. It was removed in 2013 and replaced by a statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. four years later.

But Watson’s fraudulent and poisonous populism has lived on in politicians like Alabama’s George Wallace, whose serial presidential candidacies in the 1960s and early 1970s tapped into a white backlash against civil rights in a number of northern states.

So Trump is not unique as he exploits his own updated version of this scar on American public life. To my knowledge, he has not engaged in overt verbal assaults on African-Americans, although his Potemkin voter fraud commission aims to disenfranchise perhaps millions of them. But Trump launched his campaign by accusing Mexico of sending “rapists” across the border. He has turned Muslim refugees and immigrants into the modern equivalents of Watson’s “Goths and Vandals,” even creating a special government unit to track crimes perpetrated by the undocumented. He has scapegoated immigrants in general as the reason why dispossessed Americans no longer have jobs in old and dying industries; his other culprit is trade – especially and menacingly with countries like China and Mexico. Watson, I think, would have approved of all this – and of the Trump barrage against coastal elites and “globalists,” a code phrase if ever there was one.

Trump’s politics is infected with racial antagonism and anti-Semitism, especially when he says there were “some very fine people on both sides” after counterprotesters stood against white supremacists in Charlottesville who were chanting: “Jews will not replace us.” Such immoral equivalence may not reflect personal bias; as with Watson, at least early in his pivot away from tolerance, the likeliest reason is political calculation. Trump offers psychic satisfaction to the worst of his constricted base, with very little or nothing at all in the way of an economic program genuinely on the side of the Rust Belt voters who (barely) put him over the top.

So what does real populism look like? To call Trump a populist is to malign the populism that was so memorably expressed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936 when he said: “Never before in all our history have these forces of [selfishness] been so united in their hate for one candidate – and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it these forces … met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it they met their master.” And Roosevelt backed his words with the deeds of a New Deal that lifted the standards of life of tens upon tens of millions who had been left behind by the Great Depression.

Other politicians have followed in FDR’s footsteps without resorting to cheap demagoguery. In 2000, Al Gore pledged to serve “the people, not the powerful.” And even as he triangulated, Bill Clinton in 1992 promised to “put people first” – and then raised the top rate and made the tax code fairer. While he didn’t always govern as a populist, Barack Obama, who did pass health reform, campaigned for re-election on a populist theme, arraigning Mitt Romney for his business practices and his “one point plan… to make sure that the folks at the top play by a different set of rules.”

The real populists today are Democrats—and not just Elizabeth Warren—but it’s not a story they’ve been successful in telling. They have to convince the country, especially the economically stressed who are struggling to pay their bills as they watch the rich get richer than ever, that they’re on their side. Saving Obamacare was a good and essential first step. There is not just a Better Deal, but another New Deal to be advanced—and effectively communicated.

The current and fashionable critique about Democrats and “cultural elitism” posits a false choice for the party. It cannot and should not downplay the cause of social justice—the fights for compassionate immigration reform, choice, women’s and LGBTQ rights, voting rights and criminal justice reform. They are all part of a seamless commitment to both social and economic justice that is the ground of the Democratic Party’s being.

So the imperative now is not to pose each against the other, but to shape and communicate a message that convincingly responds to the needs and hopes of so many pressured and anxious Americans in the heartland who also must be at the heart of our concerns. Never again should Democrats make the mistake of 2016, when, according to Lynn Vavreck at UCLA, only 9 percent of Clinton’s campaign ads focused on jobs, and often in the context of renewable energy. No wonder Clinton lost the decisive Michigan swing area of Macomb County, a bellwether for the country. Democrats have to get places like Macomb back, and they can—Trump offers voters there nothing other than resentment. Democrats, if they are true to their defining values, are the real populists; the challenge is to tell the voters.

Finally, FDR, like the Kennedys, illustrates another decisive reality here. There is nothing wrong with a leader who comes from privilege. Americans don’t care about where you come from, but where you stand—and whether you stand for them, for the many and not the few.

Trump fails that test, and in the end will not be saved by a perverted populism designed to appeal to the basest elements of his base. Tom Watson was swimming against the tides of history. So is Donald Trump.