What’s behind the Trump alliance between self-dealing plutocrats and blue-collar voters.

By Amy Chua @ Politico Magazine, March/April

[.....] There are a number of familiar explanations for how Trump gets away with all of this. One is that it’s all a con. Trump is an incredible salesman, the thinking goes, and he’s duping the white working class on behalf of a new set of overlords who put on their MAGA hats and sell false hope and snake-oil policies. Another explanation is that it’s all racism. Some of his white supporters from lower-income households are fine with the wealthy making off like bandits, as long as they can comfortably look down on immigrants and others of racial minority groups.

These characterizations may describe some in Trump’s base. But they also reflect the same condescension that helped get Trump elected in the first place. More fundamentally, they miss what’s truly powerful about his style of politics—call it “billionaire populism”—and just how profoundly it’s connected to the nation’s history.

In a sense, Trump has brought together two powerful strains in the U.S., forging a connection between the traditional, deeply rooted American dream and the glitziest, celebrity-obsessed aspects of modern culture, totally excluding professionals and tastemakers. A year into the experiment, there’s no question it’s working. If we want to make sense of this American moment, we need to understand what drives the strange alliance between flamboyant billionaires and blue-collar voters, what makes it so profoundly American, and where it might go next [....]