Michelle Goldberg: Trump is no longer even pretending to champion the working class

The most consequential moment from Donald Trump’s glitchy interview with Elon Musk on Monday came during a discussion of government cost-cutting. “Well, you, you’re the greatest cutter,” Trump told Musk, before launching, apropos of nothing, into a reverie about how Musk dominates his employees. “They go on strike,” said Trump. “I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone. You’re all gone. So every one of you is gone,’ and you are the greatest.”

Trump’s sympathy with plutocrats over unions is not a surprise, given his record in office and his desperate desire for the approval and admiration of other billionaires. Although the ex-president made successful electoral appeals to the working class – particularly the white working class – his record on labor was that of a standard conservative Republican.

He appointed union busters to the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that enforces labor law. His Department of Labor reversed the “persuader” rule, which had forced transparency on companies waging anti-union propaganda campaigns. His Supreme Court appointees dealt a severe blow to public sector unions in the Janus decision, an outcome Trump celebrated. His signature policy accomplishment was a tax cut that disproportionately benefited the rich.

Nevertheless, Trump’s jocular delight in a centibillionaire’s war on labor shocked some of his populist sympathizers. Sean O’Brien, who last month was the first Teamsters president to speak at a Republican National Convention, told Politico, “Firing workers for organizing, striking and exercising their rights as Americans is economic terrorism.” Conservative writer-editor Sohrab Ahmari, one of the rare figures in the new right to take organized labor seriously, wrote, “By cheering Musk’s brutal treatment of his workers, the Trump campaign has sadly vindicated those who saw its pro-worker rhetoric as a mere facade.”

It’s easy to roll one’s eyes at anyone gullible enough to imagine that Trump was ever serious about curbing the influence of concentrated wealth. This is a man, after all, who consistently stiffed his own workers, and who ran a fake university that scammed his economically vulnerable fans. But if Trump’s oligarchic orientation hasn’t changed, the way he talks about the economy has. “Why has Trump stopped attacking big business?” asked a recent essay by Matt Stoller, a progressive writer and activist who’s been willing to make common cause with right-wing populists such as Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri in the name of fighting corporate power.

Stoller compared the language Trump used in his first presidential campaign, when he regularly attacked Wall Street and corporate America, to his more recent speeches. “In terms of what he promises, he’s mostly stopped challenging big corporations, except in cultural terms acceptable to Wall Street,” wrote Stoller. You could see this in the meandering speech about economics that Trump delivered Wednesday afternoon. At one point, he invited Wall Street investor Scott Bessent – who, as it happens, is the former chief investment officer of George Soros’ Soros Fund Management – to the podium, calling him “one of the greatest on all of Wall Street respected by everybody.” He said next to nothing about corporate greed, workers’ rights, or breaking up Big Tech.

Aside from his plan to levy heavy tariffs on imported goods, Trump often sounded like an ordinary Republican promising fiscal austerity. “We will stop wasteful spending and big government special-interest giveaways and finally stand up for the American taxpayer,” he said. Ahmari lamented, “He’s running a conventional GOP message but meaner.”

The reason for the ex-president’s change in tone seems obvious. Trump might once have shared working-class resentments against elites in business and finance, but only because he felt disrespected by them. The antimonopoly cases brought by his administration often seemed intended to punish his adversaries rather than promote competitive markets. When Trump tried to stop AT&T from acquiring Time Warner, wrote the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, “many people suspected that his objection was a matter of petty retaliation against CNN,” a Time Warner subsidiary. His administration launched antitrust cases against tech companies that he accused of censoring conservative viewpoints.

But since then, the politics of Big Tech have changed, with many Silicon Valley titans, Musk chief among them, lining up behind Trump. So have many figures on Wall Street, who’ve been angered by Joe Biden’s policies increasing protections for workers and consumers. These multimillionaires and billionaires are the people whose approbation Trump has always wanted, and whose financial support he needs, particularly since he could go to prison if he loses this campaign.

And so he’s come out for many things he once opposed, including cryptocurrency, TikTok and, at least in theory, electric cars, though he’s still against Biden’s pro-electric vehicle policies. “Trump Keeps Flip-Flopping His Policy Positions After Meeting With Rich People,” said a Politico headline.

After Trump’s election in 2016, there was a long and often frustrating debate about whether he owed his gains with the working class to his break with conservative economic orthodoxy or to his indulgence of cultural grievance. It will be interesting, then, to see if his warm embrace of America’s economic overlords costs him working-class support.

He clearly doesn’t think it will. “Today we are going to talk about one subject,” he said near the start of his speech on economics. “They say it’s the most important subject. I’m not sure it is.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.