America Needs Real Economic Populism

The vulnerability Trump exploited is MAGA's Achilles Heel

When Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because her jobs report made him look bad, it was more than a signal that the U.S. economy isn’t doing as well as the White House brags that it is. It was a declaration that Trump doesn’t think he needs reliable data on the economy. His supporters don’t trust the numbers. They trust him.

Like other authoritarians around the world, Trump came to power in the United States by exploiting a growing lack of trust in both Democrats and Republicans who have neglected the growing affordability crisis in today’s economy. Poverty is not an isolated event in the United States. It is everywhere. And while it disproportionately weighs on Black and brown people, this basic fact of American inequality remains hidden in plain sight: white people are by far the largest racial demographic among America’s poor.

The poverty and financial vulnerability that isolates millions of white people is the experience of more than half of Americans who lack financial security. Poverty isn’t a rare glitch in the current US economy. It is a feature of our economy’s design.

Because both Democrats and Republicans lost the trust of low-income Americans, Trump was able to win a plurality of voters in a national election where more eligible voters chose not to vote than opted for either party’s candidate. His so-called “populism” promised a way out of the economic vulnerability that many white Americans experienced as factories left their communities, opioids consumed their loved ones, and traditional pathways to economic stability vanished. If you can’t trust politicians, MAGA said, then maybe you can trust an outsider who knows how to make deals.

Despite his considerable vulnerabilities, this has been Trump’s political gold: he promised to deliver for poor people after decades of both Republicans and Democrats refusing to say the word “poor.”

But Trump has not delivered for poor and working people. He has, instead, persuaded Republicans in Congress to join him in passing the largest transfer of wealth from low-income Americans to the rich in US history. As his executive tariff tax goes into effect, prices will rise for everyday Americans while they face the very real consequences of higher health insurance costs, cuts to healthcare services, shuttered rural hospitals, and family farms filing for bankruptcy.

“Believe me,” Trump said, and millions of Americans did. But lies about the numbers don’t pay the rent, and MAGA’s effort to divide poor people by attacking immigrants has already created labor shortages in farm country and the hospitality industry. As long as poor white people remain isolated by racist lies about immigrants and “takers,” they are susceptible to politicians who blame someone of a different race who is in more or less the same predicament they are. But shared suffering can unite people who are disappointed by their political leaders. When you can’t pay your light bill, we’re all Black in the dark.

The silence about poverty – especially white poverty – that Trump exploited to gain power has now become his political Achilles heel. Fewer voters turned out to support him in 2024 than in 2020, when he lost to Joe Biden. His MAGA majority in the House rests on an even slimmer margin – mere thousands of votes across a handful of districts where many low-income voters have sat out of elections from decades. Just a 10% increase in voter participation in these districts could completely upend next year’s midterm elections, not only halting the agenda of the Trump regime, but creating an opportunity for Democrats to present economic policy that would actually raise wages, guarantee access to healthcare and education, and bring down prices for people who are feeling the pain of Trump’s giveaways to billionaires.

Trump wouldn’t be calling Governor Greg Abbott of Texas to demand a gerrymander that he hopes will give him more House seats if he didn’t understand his vulnerability. Democrats are right to stand up to this abuse of power and support the Texas delegation that fled the state to deny a quorum, but they better be smart enough to realize that Congressional candidates who speak directly to the issue of low-income Americans in Texas and elsewhere could change the political map in 2026. Now is the moment for a true economic populism to awaken the sleeping giant of low-income voters and bring down the MAGA movement that has exploited them with lies.

Our book White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy (Liveright) is out this month in paperback. You can learn more about it and order from your favorite bookseller here.