No one articulated this vision more than his former aide, Steve Bannon. “Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” Bannon enthused after the 2016 election in an interview with Michael Wolff. “It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution—conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.” This new populism would ensure that the Republicans will get “60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years.”

Alas, there will be no Trump Shipyards or Bannon Ironworks. Bannon lost his White House job in less than a year, and now, after the release of Wolff’s tell-all book, Bannon seems to be estranged from Trump—as does Bannon’s economic populist agenda.

Krugman has a theory to explain Trump’s hollow infrastructure proposal. “[W]hy is there nothing here but a big fat zero?” he tweeted. “Trump is terrified of trying to make actual policy. After all, a real infrastructure plan means deciding what needs to be built; it requires that somebody in the administration have some professional expertise. And this admin actively hates employing such people, either because they weren’t loyalists in the past. Or because people who actually know what they’re doing in any field other than propaganda—be it defense, diplomacy, science, economic policy—might, you know, turn out to have independent minds and even consciences. They’re dangerous! So Trump won’t produce a real infrastructure plan because he doesn’t dare employ anyone who would know how to do that.”

Because Trump doesn’t have strong policy preferences, he has handed over his economic policy to conservative Republicans, thus explaining the disappearance of Bannonite economic populism. To compensate, Trump is even more firmly embracing the white nationalism he ran on. As Axios reports, “A source close to the White House tells me that with an eye to getting Republicans excited about voting for Republicans in midterms, the president this year will be looking for ‘unexpected cultural flashpoints’—like the NFL and kneeling—that he can latch onto in person and on Twitter.” The source told Axios that Trump “is going to be looking for opportunities to stir up the base, more than focusing on any particular legislation or issue.”