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Paul Krugman
Trump’s Biggest Con: Pretending to Support American Workers
Opinion Columnist
Donald Trump has always been a con man. As a businessman, he left behind a trail of investors who lost money in failed ventures even as he profited, students who paid thousands for worthless courses, unpaid contractors and more. Even amid his current presidential campaign he has been hawking overpriced gold sneakers and Trump Bibles printed in China.
But Trump’s biggest, potentially most consequential con has been political: portraying himself as a different kind of Republican, an ally of working Americans. This self-portrait has been successful so far, notably in gaining Trump significant support among working-class people of color — although the carnival of racism at his Sunday rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, in which a comedian opened the event by describing Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage” and made a watermelon joke in reference to a Black man, may dent that support in the campaign’s closing days.
The truth is that to the extent that Trump’s policy plans — or, in some cases, concepts of plans — differ from G.O.P. orthodoxy, it’s because they are even more antilabor and pro-plutocrat than his party’s previous norm.
Background: Since the 1970s our two main political parties have diverged sharply on economic ideology. In general, Democrats favor higher taxes on the rich and a stronger social safety net; Republicans favor lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy paid for in part by cutting social programs.
Kamala Harris is, in this sense, a normal Democrat, calling for tax hikes that would primarily affect high-income Americans while expanding tax credits for families with children; she has also proposed expanding Medicare to cover home health care for seniors, which would be a big deal for millions of families.
An aside: I really don’t understand people who claim that Harris hasn’t supplied enough policy detail. All I can think is that they’re looking for something to complain about so they can sound evenhanded.
Has Trump deviated from Republican norms? While he was president, not really. His 2017 tax cut strongly favored high-income Americans. Now he wants to make that tax cut, many of whose provisions will expire in 2025, permanent. He has also floated the idea of a further large cut in corporate taxes (much of which could, by the way, ultimately benefit foreign investors).
As president, Trump tried to push through deep cuts in Medicaid, although he didn’t succeed. And while he says that he won’t cut Social Security and Medicare, his policy proposals would undermine these programs’ financial foundations.
Trump has also made some tax proposals that may sound pro-worker but aren’t, such as ending taxes on tips; many tipped workers don’t make enough to pay income taxes, and those who do are mostly in a low tax bracket.
If Trump has broken with standard G.O.P. economic policy, he has done so by intensifying efforts to redistribute income upward. For he is proposing higher taxes on the working class in the form of a large national sales tax — which is essentially what his tariffs would be. And this tax would be highly regressive — a large burden on middle- and lower-income families, a trivial hit to the 1 percent.
If you put reasonable estimates of the effects of the Harris and Trump tax plans on the same chart, they’re more or less mirror images. Trump would raise taxes on most Americans, with only the top few percent coming out ahead; Harris would do the reverse.
So, no, Trump isn’t a friend to working-class Americans; quite the opposite. Why, then, do millions of people believe otherwise?
Some of it probably reflects racial tension: White men without college degrees have lost ground relative to other groups since 1980, and some of them, alas, surely feel an affinity for the racism and misogyny we saw at Madison Square Garden. But as I said, some Latino and Black Americans also appear to have bought into Trump’s spiel. Why?
Well, Americans correctly remember Trump’s prepandemic economy as an era of strong job growth and rising wages — largely, I’d argue, because Republicans in Congress opened the fiscal spigots after austerity during the Obama years slowed recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. Many also implicitly discount or memory-hole the high unemployment of Trump’s final year in office. And they’re still frustrated about higher prices, the consequence of the inflation surge of 2021-22 — even though this surge was a global pandemic phenomenon, and wages adjusted for inflation are now higher than they were right before the Covid-19 pandemic.
What relatively few people realize, I believe, is that if he wins next week, Trump’s anti-worker agenda will be much broader than anything he managed to do in 2017-21. Back then, he raised average tariffs on Chinese goods by about 20 percentage points, but China accounts for only about 15 percent of U.S. imports; now he’s talking about imposing similar tariffs across the board, and 60 percent on imports from China. Overall, we’re talking about a sales tax roughly 10 times as large as his last venture.
Trump, then, is anything but pro-working-class Americans. If many believe otherwise, well, they aren’t the first victims of his lifelong career as a con man.
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Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman
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