The focus is robbing the treasury to give tax breaks to the rich.
People on the left are going to be caught totally flat-footed if they don't pull their head out of their bubble. Trump is a populist president. He was elected by working class individuals and so far he has shown every intent of following through for them. People on the left don't recognize it because they don't recognize the tools that right wing people use to stimulate the working class.
Right now, if Trump has his way, people under $150k will pay no income tax, no tax on tips, increased tax on millionaire earners, and tariffs to shield American blue collar jobs.
Trump is dangerous because he is an idiot and recklessly pulling levers. He is clearly bent on the idea of abolishing democracy so he can be the king of America savior of the factory worker.
He is clearly not working for billionaires when he tanked the stock market and spiked bond rates playing his tariff game. Stop using that dog whistle because it makes it clear you are ungrounded from what is happening, unless all you care about is praise from other detached people.
[1]https://www.ft.com/content/93a064db-624d-413f-a751-0b957f8e3...
This has been countered better elsewhere, but the gist is that this proposed taxation is for posturing only -- it's taxes on wages, not on income, and the rich don't get their wealth from wages.
Great, so he won't need to cut the NSF then?
Except that Trump's tariffs are causing massive financial uncertainty for small/medium-size businesses. If you want to onshore manufacturing and production, and specifically build up the blue-collar class, you don't implement tariffs immediately and unilaterally. You plan for them to be implemented over time and give businesses the opportunity to shift their procurement and production to domestic sources.
When you implement tariffs with no warning, the only businesses that can absorb those increased costs are the largest businesses. Then those large businesses can also start to buy up every other business, or at least outcompete on price long enough to monopolize the market.
>Trump is dangerous because he is an idiot and recklessly pulling levers
> He is clearly not working for billionaires...
Not working for Wall St or Main St.
It's a food fight between opposing elites. ("The grass suffers when elephants fight.")
As you surely know, some do advocate crashing our economy, enabling them to seize even more power. They use shibboleths like dark enlightenment, free enterprise, taxation is theft, yadda yadda.
"Trump said..." is the precursor to winning the fooled me again award.
Trump might have a populist appeal, but it doesn't make him a populist. The weight of Trump's actions and promises lie in all this deportation and culture war nonsense, not actually populist solutions to popular problems. None of these cuts are going to benefit the American populace at all. I doubt there will be a reduction in the taxes most Americans pay (this is just some new rhetoric from Trump, likely stemming from his horrible approval ratings because his administration is operating like shit), but there is already a reduction in the services populist America receives like social security and medicare.
The idea that a politician who seems to fundamentally want to destroy the mechanical functions of the government, operate an executive branch that is beyond the reproach of the courts, and privatize America's crucial social programs, does not comport with populism.
I don't even think the notion that Trump isn't working for billionaires because he tanked the stock market even makes sense. Did you not see the video where he points to his friend who made hundreds of millions that day? While smiling, joking, laughing? He's letting his best friends do inside trades on the huge market-moving moves Trump makes in the news and you think it's somehow not cronyism? I'm sorry, but your intuitions are off.
>People on the left don't recognize it [populism] because they don't recognize the tools that right wing people use to stimulate the working class.
I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole because it takes years to escape the ideological camp you grew into. But suffice to say, both sides ultimately want the same things and disagree on the route to take to that destination (while telling their base that obviously they are right, and obviously the other side is just evil).
I'm not talking about the route, I'm talking about the destination. A socialized medical plan is incredibly popular on both sides of the political spectrum and polls well with Trump's supporters. That's not an avenue, that's a destination. I have a feeling you will twist this around and try to make it how it can either be served by market forces or the gov't and that's just "idealogical" but populism is an ideology which I am accusing you of not understanding. You didn't engage with that. You just repeated your premise.
For as long as you have the cult of personality going, anyway. Which is plenty of time to put your men in key positions of power for when your charisma is no longer convincing enough.
Pulling someone out of that "it's an oxymoron" hole takes a long time. I don't want to go back and forth with you here trying to explain what right wing populism is here, and the philosophy behind it.
I don't "not believe" in right wing populism, I disagree with your assertions of how it functions and what its goals are and how that relates to your notion that populists want the same thing regardless of whether they are "left" or "right" and that it's just "different paths."
>It's because most people on the left are not aware that there even is a right wing populism.
This isn't even remotely true. What "left"ist stuff are you reading?
What actually matters is what he does. And nothing that he has done suggests to me that he will actually push for tax increases on the rich. It would be great to be proven wrong here, but I'm not holding my breath.
(Regardless, Trump can't raise taxes on anyone. Congress does that. On tax policy, it's not clear that even the MAGA fools in Congress will play ball if it upsets the rich people in their states.)
He also said he would end the Ukraine war on day 1.
> He is clearly not working for billionaires when he tanked the stock market and spiked bond rates playing his tariff game. Stop using that dog whistle because it makes it clear you are ungrounded from what is happening, unless all you care about is praise from other detached people.
Of course not. Why would anyone get the idea that Trump is working for billionaires? It's not as if he hawked cars on the White House lawn for the world's richest man.
Speaking of ungrounded, detached people..
Trump makes the billionaires work for _him_.