Some politicians are tragic figures, others are comic ones. North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis is the latter.
What’s funny about Tillis has less to do with the man himself than with his predicament. He’s up for reelection in one of America’s most closely divided swing states, is likely to face a top-tier Democratic opponent, and might end up saddled with a recession for which the leader of his party is unambiguously to blame. Watching Tillis day to day, trying to satisfy the demands of swing voters on the one hand and MAGA diehards on the other, is like watching Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton walk a tightrope, tipping precariously to and fro, flapping his arms frantically to keep his balance, almost toppling over. But not quite.
Desperate not to anger the president or his base, Tillis has rubber-stamped every lousy Trumpist nominee to come before him—until now. After exhorting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “go wild” in leading the Department of Health and Human Services (challenge accepted!) and rescuing Pete Hegseth’s indefensible nomination to lead the Pentagon (for reasons of pitiful cowardice), Tillis has at last found a line he can’t cross. On Tuesday he announced that he won’t support Ed Martin, the president’s grotesquely unfit choice to be the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C.
Tillis’ logic was straightforward. Martin is a diehard apologist for the January 6 insurrectionists, even having represented some of them legally, and that simply won’t do. “We have to be very, very clear that what happened on January 6 was wrong,” Tillis told reporters.
See why I call him a comic figure?
It’s funny enough that the senator insists on framing his confirmation votes as products of careful deliberation rather than tightrope-teetering caused by gusts of political wind. Kennedy is every bit as unqualified as Martin for his job and will do far more damage to the country, but he had the good luck to come before the Senate when Trump was riding high. Martin is coming after “Liberation Day,” with the president’s polls sinking and the GOP staring down the barrel of economic calamity. Had the timing of the two nominations been reversed, there’s every reason to think that anti-vaxxism rather than January 6 would have been Tillis’ very principled red line.
But if that doesn’t make you giggle, just try to keep a straight face at the idea of a Trump-supporting Senate Republican insisting that he can’t abide public power being wielded by someone who … supports January 6.
Tillis had the nerve to say that a few scant days after Trump’s Justice Department agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by the family of Ashli Babbitt, the rioter shot afnd killed by a police officer on January 6 while attempting to climb through a window as the mob tried to breach the House chamber. Terms of the settlement haven’t been disclosed, but Babbitt’s family was asking for no less than $30 million. It’s a safe bet that her relatives will soon be rich because of her role in one of the most disgraceful events in U.S. history.
Taxpayer money—lots of it—is now being showered on the foot soldiers of America’s first coup attempt, with potentially plenty more to come. No longer is the president content to express his admiration for seditionist criminals with burblings about a “day of love” or the occasional musical tribute. Having been restored to office last November, he intends to reward their moral and civic corruption with every lever of power available to him, in broad daylight. And Thom Tillis, invertebrate clown, has to somehow be okay with that.
Most Americans won’t be, though, any more than they were okay with Trump’s clemency for the J6ers. News of the Babbitt settlement has me wondering how much damage the president is doing, and will do, to the long-term political prospects of populism in America.
Good government.
I’m not the guy to turn to for a thoughtful defense of populism’s virtues, but it seems to me that the case ultimately rests on good government.
Or better government, at least. Populism is a reaction to the excesses of a ruling class that came to prioritize its own interests over those of the ruled. That meant setting economic policy to benefit favored special interests instead of the people writ large and lending the force of law to cultural preferences shared by ideological allies instead of those held by the majority.
Too much financial corruption and moral corruption—that’s the essence of the populist case against the so-called establishment. And too much incompetence as well. The supposed trade-off in being governed by corrupt elites is that they’ll make smart policy choices to avert disasters looming for the country. After the Iraq war, the financial crisis, and the pandemic, amid intractable problems like deindustrialization, the opioid disaster, and unchecked illegal immigration, what’s left of that trade-off?
Populism promises to do better. More economic opportunity for the working class, more “common sense” in crafting cultural policy, more seriousness about enforcing the country’s borders, and a heaping helping of “retribution” for the ruling class that lined its pockets for decades at the average joe’s expense. The less corrupt, more competent, and more responsive to popular will that a populist regime is relative to what preceded it, the more likely it is to endure as a viable electoral alternative to traditional establishment politics.
A skeptic (ahem) would answer all of that by saying that populism in theory bears about as much resemblance to populism in practice as communism in theory and practice does, especially when inflamed by a revolutionary spirit. It’s packaged as a good government initiative in order to gain public support—drain the swamp!—but upon attaining power the movement’s vanguard congeals into its own corrupt ruling class that’s more cutthroat, radical, greedy, and prone to playing favorites than the ancien régime it replaced. It may or may not begin in a spirit of earnest idealism but inevitably it deteriorates into a lavish grift that justifies shocking ruthlessness and remorseless power consolidation in the name of “the people.”
The most lucrative new economic opportunities it creates end up accruing mainly to the leaders and their cronies. If populist government in theory is about empowering the majority, populist government in practice is about getting your cut of the action while you’re in charge.
Eventually the suffering working class starts wondering whether they weren’t better off with the old ruling class. A populism that comes to power promising greater democratic accountability in government and then promptly delivers less is thus a populism whose shelf life at the polls is likely to be short—which may explain why, despite their rhetorical celebrations of the people, populist demagogues reliably take a dim view of elections.
We’re now 100 days and change into the president’s second term. Tell me: Which view of populism, the proponent’s or the skeptic’s, would you say more accurately describes his administration so far?
Bad government.
I’d say it’s remarkable how little Trump seems to care about the image he’s creating for populism except that it isn’t remarkable at all. He’s not an ideologue. He betrays no sense of caring about anything except his own self-interest. If you told him that the GOP would never win another election after he retires, I expect he’d be pleased as punch.
He does have some classically populist victories to point to in his first three months, notably on the border and in rolling back leftist cultural programs like diversity initiatives in institutions and transgender women playing women’s sports. But if the core promise of populism is a government that’s more competent, more responsive, and less corrupt than what the establishment would offer, uhhhhhhhhhh …
The financial corruption of the Trump administration is so grotesque that even doomsayers like me failed to anticipate its full extent. The president’s sons are jetting from continent to continent, putting Hunter Biden to shame by striking deals on everything from property to cryptocurrency with players who are eager for access to the White House—in some cases with Trump himself profiting directly. Trump is also raking it in with his big “memecoin” scam thanks mostly to foreign investors, never mind that American law is supposed to prevent overseas money from influencing domestic politics.
Never has the presidency been sold so openly. The man who supposedly leads a reformist movement bent on draining the swamp is thisclose to auctioning off the White House silverware. And as tends to happen when populists govern, the people at the top are getting richer while those at the bottom are getting poorer: There are fewer than 60 big winners among the investors in Trump’s memecoin versus more than 750,000 losers.
What about responsiveness? Is the president laser-focused on the people’s highest policy priorities?
In one respect, sure. Americans wanted stricter immigration enforcement after four years of Biden neglect and that’s what they’re getting. But Americans also really, really wanted lower inflation and cheaper goods and they sure ain’t getting that after “Liberation Day.” Poll after poll after poll shows voters are hostile to his tariffs; a CBS survey taken a few weeks ago found 69 percent said he hasn’t focused enough on lowering prices and 62 percent said he’s focused too much on taxing foreign goods.
A core complaint of populists is that the “elites” are out of touch with the people, yet it’s the populist-in-chief who insists on riding his protectionist hobby horse in defiance of the popular will. The most one can say in his defense is that his trade war is designed in theory to benefit the working class by reshoring lost jobs, but higher prices and the growing risk of an economic slowdown have left blue-collar households under pressure. Facing layoffs at American ports as imports slow to a trickle, the longshoremen’s union recently condemned Trump’s tariffs as “nothing less than an economic war on working people.”
If you want to prosper from the president’s trade policy rather than suffer from it, it helps a bunch to be politically connected—which is precisely the sort of swampy establishment pathology that populism was supposed to cure.
And for every White House initiative that really does respond to some core voter concern like immigration, there are two or three from out of left field that no one asked for and that stand to do America more harm than good. Alienating Canada, a key trade partner, will create more economic hardship; saber-rattling at Greenland risks destroying the transatlantic alliance with Europe. Neither was an issue during the campaign, but somehow they’ve become pillars of Trump’s foreign policy during his first three months. Populists are supposed to be able to avoid the “elite” seduction of bumbling into needless crises abroad due to ideological blinders, yet here we are.
As for competence, where to begin?
The secretary of defense seems to be a walking, talking security breach. DOGE’s war on federal spending looks likely to cost Americans money on balance. An immigrant was deported to the one country where an American judge said he couldn’t be deported to, then Trump admitted that he could bring that guy back to the U.S. while everyone else in the administration was insisting that he couldn’t. The “Liberation Day” tariffs had and have no consistent strategic logic, were calculated based on a formula that contained an error, and did so much damage to markets so quickly that they had to be drastically dialed down almost immediately after being imposed.
I could go on and on—and have, at length, in dozens of newsletters since January 20. But we can leave the argument about incompetence at this: Despite the fact that America will soon officially be in the midst of its worst measles outbreak in 30 years, the new Thom-Tillis-supported leader of America’s public health bureaucracy is urging Americans to “do your own research” on whether to vaccinate children.
“Measles, memecoins, and mercantilism” sounds like a snide caricature of populism coined by someone who despises the ideology, but that’s literally what the new administration is offering. Which seems like not the best branding if you’re viewing Trump’s presidency as an opportunity to cement the ideology as a durable alternative to the dreaded neoliberal establishment.
Ugly government.
Where something like the Ashli Babbitt settlement fits into all this is hard to say.
It’s a civic abomination, but last fall’s election results proved conclusively that Americans have a high tolerance for civic abominations. You and I might be mortified to learn that a crank Trump mouthpiece like One America News will soon be supplying content to Voice of America, but I’d bet my last dollar that most voters won’t be. What do they care if a government media platform created to counterprogram authoritarian propaganda is, er, now an outlet for authoritarian propaganda?
That’s the cynical view (and therefore my view). But I concede that it’s possible that as the public grows more skeptical of Trumpist populism as incompetent, unresponsive, and corrupt, it’ll also grow angrier about its ugly civic vision.
A poll published last week by the Public Religion Research Institute found 52 percent of Americans agreed when asked whether they believe Trump is “a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.” That number included 56 percent of independents and more than 60 percent of blacks and Latinos, two groups with whom the president made inroads last fall.
It coincides with other polling showing strong disapproval of Trump rising and strong approval falling since his first days back in office. The key drivers of that decline are younger voters, Latinos, and independents, groups that aren’t diehard MAGA but contained meaningful numbers of Trump-curious voters last fall who were won over. They were his “softer” supporters, in other words, precisely the types who were willing to give populism a chance but also precisely the types who might plausibly view raining cash on insurrectionists less as an odd quirk than an alarming bit of fascist inducement. As they sour on him over the economy, their willingness to empower populism in the future might be souring too.
It’s not a coincidence, I’m sure, that the rare bits of flak he’s taken from populists in the media have come from figures like Dave Portnoy and Joe Rogan whose fans span the political spectrum. Right-wing media is too ideologically committed to lib-owning and too ethically compromised by audience capture to resist Trump’s worst impulses, but more independent-minded critics of the old establishment like Rogan and Portnoy are destined to see things about populism—or at least Trump’s version of it—that they don’t like.
Which raises the question: What will Trumpists do in 2028 if his presidency comes to be seen widely not just as a failure but as a disastrous experiment in populist governance?
“They’ll renounce populism and re-embrace conservatism,” you might say. Fat chance of that, my man. That would be like a heroin user giving up junk so that they can take up their old marijuana habit instead. Drug addiction doesn’t work that way.
“They’ll nominate an old-school conservative for president instead,” you might say. They could, especially if they think the GOP is likely to lose the general election and are keen to shift blame for the defeat away from Trump and populism. But it’s unlikely.
I think populists will do the same thing revolutionaries always do when their ideology fails in practice. They’ll claim that true Trumpism has never been tried.
That’ll be a neat trick, if so, as it’s hard to imagine America ever getting a harder dose of “true Trumpism” than it’s getting right now. That was the whole point of reelecting him last year, in fact: In his first term he was supposedly too shackled by the “deep state” and nerdy RINO deputies like Sarah Isgur to realize his vision. In his second term he’s free to build the kakistocracy of populist dreams and to act on his dumbest nostalgic impulses. It’s Trump unleashed. True Trumpism at last!
But if “true Trumpism” goes belly-up the way communist regimes always do, an explanation will be needed—and, as with the communists, that explanation will assuredly not be “true Trumpism is dumb, it turns out.” Scapegoats will be needed and will be found. Scott Bessent and the “globalists” got to him. The “uniparty” wouldn’t move his agenda. Collusion by hostile foreign elements disrupted his plans. True Trumpism has never been tried.
Maybe J.D. “Trump, but smart” Vance will emerge as the avatar of true Trumpism. Or Marco “Trump, but Latino” Rubio. Or Tucker “Trump, but more evil” Carlson. (The Republican base being what it is, bet on Tucker.) But someone will, rest assured. Just as the president cannot fail but can only be failed, we’ll be told that the only solution to problems with populism lies in more populism.
Still, Trump will almost certainly leave his movement much weaker politically than it might have been under more responsible stewardship, assuming a universe exists in which “a more responsible” populism could have succeeded politically. (That was Ron DeSantis’ pitch, no?) Not weak enough to lose control of the GOP, but certainly weak enough to make populist-curious Americans less curious in the future.
