If Donald Trump Is A Populist Then I Am a Yellow-Bellied Marmot

The Populists opposed the tariff and favored a progressive income tax. Trump wants to discard the progressive income tax and restore tariffs as the principal source of federal revenue.

Independent People’s (“Populist”) Party, 1890. Note the lack of any resemblance to Donald Trump. From History Nebraska collection.

Jonathan Chait and I are having a Vulcan mind-meld today on the subject of Donald Trump’s tariff politics. You can read Jon’s piece here. Chait argues that Trump has conned the press into believing there is some great gulf between himself and establishment Republicans, when in fact most of what scares me about Trump’s possible return to power (Chait too, I presume) resides in those parts of his agenda that establishment Republicans like best. Consider Trump’s proposed replacement of the progressive income tax with tariffs. Establishment Republicans may not love tariffs—or at any rate, they didn’t before Trump came along—but they seriously hate the progressive income tax, and any move to dismantle it is AOK with them. The great irony of calling Trump “populist” is that the Populists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries came into being partly in opposition to tariffs. The progressive income tax is one of many Populist ideas that the Progressive movement of the 1910s and 1920s enacted into law.

I get into all this, and also into Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” gaffe, in my latest New Republic piece. (Remember gaffes? They existed in 2012. They don’t exist anymore.) You can read my piece here.

(PS. If you need proof that I am not a yellow-bellied marmot: Here is a photograph of a yellow-bellied marmot and here is a photograph of myself.)