For the last decade, the media, Democrats, and Never Trump Republicans have denounced Trump as a tool of the rich and of Wall Street. Trump’s populism was fake, they said. He doesn’t really care about the working class. He just cares about himself and his Wall Street buddies.
Trump’s tariffs and Wall Street’s reaction to them prove that all of that was a lie, says Batya Ungar-Sargon, the author of two important recent books, one about the media (Bad News) and the other about the working class (Second Class).
“Liberation Day should go down in history as the day that finally put to bed the myth that Donald Trump only cares about the rich,” she said in a new podcast with me today. “It's the exact opposite. He is waging class warfare on Wall Street for the sake of the American working class. And to punish him, Wall Street is literally just shorting him. They're shorting his agenda. They are betting against America, they are betting against the president because they cannot stand the idea that there is a person with power in America was not on his knees in front of Wall Street asking them, ‘And what would you like next?’ the way both parties have been doing for 60 years.”
The media has been even worse. “Our economic policy for the last 60 years was put in place by people who are too lazy to get out from behind their laptops,” she said. “They imagine that nobody would want to work in a factory because they would rather die than work in a factory. They would rather die than watch their own children work in a factor or clean their own toilets. So they imagine that no one would want to do these things. And so they shipped manufacturing overseas and imported a slave caste.”
Over half of Americans have money in the stock market, and so we shouldn’t discount the pain many people are feeling right now or the possibility that Trump’s tariffs could backfire, cause a recession, and lower living standards.
