Is Trump Really Against the Establishment?
by Jeffrey Rubin, PhD
Welcome to From Insults to Respect.
This week, I witnessed a guy saying he respected Donald Trump because he is a fighter against the establishment. A skeptic nerve in my body, like an overheated teapot, started going wild.
Upon thinking about this, it occurred to me that Trump is a big time businessman whose main businesses are high end hotels, residences, and private golf clubs. Doesn’t Trump seek to stay in the good graces of members of the establishment?
And then it occurred to me that he picked as his running mate, Mike Pence, hardly someone viewed as an anti-establishment kinda guy.
Having said that, I hasten to point out that I mean no disrespect toward the former vice president, nor to any who fall under the vaguely defined headings of “establishment” or “anti-establishment.” I’m quite certain many are folks of good character. Of those that I know personally, we might respectfully disagree on a political issue or two, but, unlike Trump who hastens to vilify individuals with whom he disagrees, that’s not an approach that sits well with me.
On the day I was writing this post, when I took a quick break I just happened to notice a remarkably relevant analysis by CNN. Dated December 16, 2023, it’s titled, “Donald Trump is now the GOP establishment.” To support this contention, the analysis utilizes data on the number and types of his endorsements, fund raising, and who is supporting him in the polls.
To explore this issue more deeply, I put the title of this post into the Google search engine to see what others thought about this. A top Google hit was by Quora, a social question-and-answer website. Someone there had asked back in 2016, when he first won the presidency, “Is Donald Trump really anti-establishment?” The most highly rated answers stated:
No. Look at the people with whom he has surrounded himself.
The greatest trick Donald Trump pulled was convincing voters he’d be ‘anti-establishment.’
President-elect Donald J. Trump, who campaigned against the corrupt power of special interests, is filling his transition team with some of the very sort of people who he has complained have too much clout in Washington: corporate consultants and lobbyists.
Mr. Trump was swept to power in large part by white working-class voters who responded to his vow to restore the voices of forgotten people, ones drowned out by big business and Wall Street. But in his transition to power, some of the most prominent voices will be those of advisers who come from the same industries for which they are being asked to help set the regulatory groundwork…. If you voted for Trump because he’s “anti-establishment,” guess what: you got conned.
My Google search also came up with an article by NPR titled, “People Keep Talking About ‘The Establishment.’ What Is It, Anyway?” There I learned that the word “Establishment” has different meanings to different people. Among those reported in the NPR article are:
It’s kind of what we used to call ‘The Man,’ when you are against The Man. The establishment has become ‘The Man.’
[T]he Establishment’ … precisely because of its vagueness and its shapelessness, can be used in almost any country about almost any thing.
[T]he establishment was a conspiracy of a few secret kingmakers based in New York [who] selected every Republican presidential nominee from 1936 through 1960.
The establishment was also not blue-collar. The key to next November lies in the real fears and deep resentments which are beginning to agitate the working and lower-middle classes of white America.
It wasn’t the common man.
Powerful, rich, old, out of touch, secretive, moderate — these are how the establishment has been painted over the years. The players may have changed, but those connotations have stuck around for decades.
I was able to find a Google hit that supported the idea Trump was a successful anti-establishment president. It’s a statement released by the White House during 2020, the last year of Trump’s presidency, and clearly designed to promote his bid for reelection. Titled, “Donald Trump Fought the Establishment—and Won,” it begins:
Donald Trump won the presidency by challenging both the Republican and Democrat Party establishments. For too long, the political class of party leaders, paid consultants, lobbyists, donor-funded think tanks, and partisan media outlets ignored the concerns of millions of working- and middle-class American families.
It goes on from there to insult career politicians, and then it blames Democrats in Congress for Trump’s inability to achieve many of the things he had promised. It then provides a lengthy list of what it claims are Trump’s accomplishments that are benefitting the working-and middle-classes. The first item on the list states:
He replaced NAFTA, something both Republican and Democrat politicians had promised to do for years. His new USMCA rebalances trade, protects American labor, and levels the playing field for U.S. manufacturers and automakers.
This was actually a bipartisan bill supported by Republicans and Democrats alike. In the Democrat controlled House of Representatives the vote was 385 for, and 41 against. In the Senate with a one vote Republican advantage, the vote was 89 for, and 10 against. Trump, by supporting this effort and agreeing to sign the bill, eagerly takes credit for it without mentioning all of the hard work of all of those on both sides of the aisle that actually wrote the bill.
The second item on the list states:
He cut taxes for over 80 percent of Americans by lowering rates for middle-income families, doubling the child tax credit, nearly doubling the standard deduction, and lowering costs for employers.
Critics of this bill express concerns that actually eighty-five percent of the money saved by tax payers went to the wealthiest Americans, and those cuts were made ‘permanent’. The remaining fifteen percent of the dollars went to the remaining tax payers, and those cuts were made ‘temporary’ (ends in five years). Meanwhile, the loss of tax revenue results in an additional national debt of a trillion dollars per year, a debt burden left for tax payers in the future. To many, the tax cuts actually feel like a bribe, to secure votes in the following election cycle.
This claim that Trump is offering a sweeter reward to the wealthy establishment and a far less valued reward to those who are not wealthy brought to my mind a study by primatologists Sarah F. Brosnan and Frans B.M. de Waal. They trained capuchin monkeys to perform a certain task for which they receive, as a reward, cucumber slices. The monkeys performed the task just fine until they were permitted to see another monkey being rewarded with grapes, a higher-value payment. Suddenly many of the cucumber-receivers refused the cucumber, sometimes even throwing those measly, unfair cucumber payments at the experimenter who was giving out the reward. Behavioral economists call the behavioral characteristic exhibited by the monkeys “inequity aversion”—the tendency to turn down a perfectly good offer if others are getting a better deal.
Upon recalling this study, I wondered why so many people who are getting so much less than rich folks under Trump’s tax plan aren’t as angry as these monkeys. Then I realized that the monkeys that received the cucumber rewards could plainly observe the other monkeys getting the grapes. In contrast, in our society, many Trump supporters get their information from so-called news agencies and internet groups they belong to that support Trump’s anti-establishment hero image.
Trump’s tax plan, not only gives an extra sweet deal to the wealthy’s personal taxes, it also cuts corporate taxes as well, also reducing significant government revenue. Claims are conveniently made that these benefits will be trickled down, despite the lack of convincing evidence to support this. Meanwhile, executives, and disproportionately wealthy corporate shareholders, clearly reap economic gains from the Trump corporate rate cuts.
Dr. Jeffrey Rubin
As I looked over the rest of the 2020 White House list of benefits of the “Trump Fought the Establishment” document, I see items completely irrelevant to this issue, while others are designed to indeed help those who are not super well off in our society. However, in the end, when all of Trump’s economic policies are taken together, it seems to me the super well-off got the grapes and the rest of society got the cucumbers.
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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional and social intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.
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