For a decade, the Democrats and their loyal stenographers in the media have cast Donald Trump as a corrupt billionaire with a singular purpose in running for office: to enrich himself and other people like him. The truth, however, is that the wealthy have been gravitating ever more toward the Democratic Party, while working-class voters have increasingly voted for the GOP.
“This was devastating to American workers, but a windfall for those who employed them.”
This week’s economic news is a reminder of why. President Trump already angered Wall Street during his first term by limiting the supply of cheap labor when he secured the southern border and starting a trade war with China to protect American steel and aluminum. And now that he has massively expanded his tariff program, Wall Street is once again expressing its dismay with tumbling stock prices. So much for catering to the rich!
Trump’s plan, as he has explained ever since his first run for president, is to take an economy whose biggest sector—at 20 percent—is finance and attempt to fundamentally reorient it so that America will once again be the manufacturing powerhouse it was in the past. At the high watermark for working-class wages in 1971, manufacturing—not Wall Street—represented a quarter of our GDP, and the largest share of that went to the middle class. Trump’s tariffs encouraging productive industries to set up shop in the United States are an attempt to reverse the economic arrangements that have disinherited American workers over the past four decades.