But far from boding well for the current occupant of the White House, the success of Duda’s party in Poland helps explain why Trump’s approval rating is stuck at about 40 percent. Law and Justice has built a political majority by doing more than just playing on public fears and resentments. Unlike Trump, it has offered its working-class supporters genuine material benefits, too.

Poland, like the United States, is divided between young, educated, urban, internationalist cultural liberals and older, rural, nationalist, and nativist cultural conservatives. But unlike the United States, Poland isn’t equally divided between parties of the left and the right; Law and Justice is politically dominant. That dominance may stem in part from the party’s growing control of the press. But there’s more to it than that. The single biggest reason for Law and Justice’s popularity, Aleks Szczerbiak, an expert on Polish politics at the University of Sussex, argued in a blog post last year, is that “the government has delivered on several of the high-profile social spending pledges” it made when first elected, including an initiative that offers every family a monthly subsidy of roughly $125 a child. This program has helped cut Poland’s rate of extreme child poverty from almost 12 percent to less than 3 percent. Law and Justice has also increased payments to the elderly and pledged to hike the minimum wage. Business groups have grumbled, but as the Times notes, Duda’s government has “built a floor under low- and middle-income families” that is “wildly popular.” It has established a political majority by doing what Trump has not: going right on culture but left on economics.

Law and Justice isn’t alone. Other far-right European parties have also expanded—or promised to expand—the welfare state. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has established what The Economist calls “New Deal–style public-works programmes.” Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom has slammed the Dutch government for cutting spending on health care. Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigrant National Rally has criticized the free-market reforms of French President Emmanuel Macron while demanding higher welfare payments and a lower retirement age. Even Boris Johnson has irked corporate leaders in Britain by proposing to boost the minimum wage and spend more on the National Health Service.

Trump hasn’t done any such thing. Other than on trade, he’s utterly abandoned the economic populism that he touted during the 2016 campaign. As a candidate, he vowed not to reduce Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. In office, he endorsed a push to turn Medicaid into a block grant, thus leaving it vulnerable to dramatic cuts. On the campaign trail, he pledged to end the carried-interest deduction that benefits the private-equity and hedge-fund industries and promised not to cut taxes for the rich. As president, though, he signed a tax cut whose benefits go mostly to the wealthiest and offered little support when Republican Senators Marco Rubio and Mike Lee pushed for a child tax credit vaguely reminiscent of what Poland offers. Candidate Trump suggested raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour and instituting a $1 trillion infrastructure plan. In office, he has backed off both.