Whatever your views on Donald Trump, future historians will depict him as one of the most transformational of American presidents—rivaled only by Lincoln, LBJ, and FDR. Though hardly the most eloquent of his predecessors, Trump has demonstrated an uncanny ability to choose language that taps into the fears, dissatisfactions, and hopes of millions of voters who believe that they have been left behind economically and marginalized socially and that our political institutions have long since ceased to serve them.
Arlie Russell Hochschild’s new book, Stolen Pride, vividly captures the despair and anger of these Americans. Trump presented himself to them, and particularly to white working-class voters, as an enemy of the political and economic establishment who reviled the elite just as much as they did. The narrative worked. The higher the level of poverty in a county, the greater the percentage of voters that chose him—in 2016, 2020, and 2024. In last year’s election, 56% of those who lacked a college degree supported him, and his margin of advantage over Joe Biden within this voting bloc was double what it was in 2020. Trump did even better among white working-class men, winning nearly two-thirds of their votes, in all three elections.
It would be easy to attribute this to class-based voting, but it’s more complicated than that. Trump’s appeal to traditional values and his tirades against the “woke left” also hit home, notably among white Evangelical Protestants, who constitute 20% of the electorate. He won 77% of their votes in 2016, 83% in 2020, and 80% in 2024. Trump’s portrayal of undocumented immigrants as the equivalent of an invading army also struck a chord with his MAGA acolytes.
What makes Trump’s appeal to these various groups all the more remarkable is that he has virtually nothing in common with them, be it social class, life experience, income, or religiosity. Moreover, on the strength of his business career, which he touts time and again as spectacularly successful even though the reality—bankruptcies and failed businesses—was different, he vowed to tame government spending, even pledging during his first run for the White House that he’d eliminate the national debt, which totaled $19.9 trillion in 2016, within eight years. (During his first term the debt increased by $7 trillion.) He proclaimed that his economic policies would bring greater prosperity, above all to the working class.
In reality, Trump, who ran as a system buster and champion of traditional values, is, through and through, a card-carrying member of the elite and the establishment he delights in demeaning while addressing adoring MAGA crowds. Trump inherited a huge fortune from his father’s real estate empire ($413 million today, adjusted for inflation), graduated from an Ivy League school (Wharton at UPenn), made vast sums of money on his own, and consorted with the rich and famous. Religion was never central to Trump’s sense of self, and no devout Christian would present the president’s private life as a model worthy of emulation.
The key to Trump’s electoral victories has been his uncanny ability to convince his political base that he is something that he is not. And in that respect, he has been masterful, indeed peerless, among our presidents. The GOP has been reduced to a slavish cult; the Democrats are leaderless and rudderless. Trump’s success is remarkable if one considers some of the contrasts between his assiduously cultivated populist image and the reality.
During his most recent campaign, the super-rich were his biggest donors, whether in direct contributions or (mainly) to Trump-aligned Super PACs. Elon Musk’s $250 million donation has garnered much attention, but he is one of many benefactors. Miriam Adelson, casino magnate, widow of billionaire Sheldon Adelson, and ardent supporter of Israel, gave$100 millionto a pro-Trump Super PAC and urged other fat cats to chip in. Timothy Mellon—he of the Mellon banking dynasty—outdid her with a contribution of $150 million during the campaign, $100 million to a Trump-supporting Super PAC, the rest to various rightwing political groups.
Numerous others from the mega-rich gave lesser, though still eye-popping, amounts, and not a few were rewarded with top jobs in Trump’s administration. For example, Linda McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, who, together with her husband, has a net worth of $3 billion-plus, was a big donor to Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns. In 2024, she gave more than $10 million to PACs supporting him. Having served as head of the Small Business Administration for most of Trump’s first term, she’s now his Secretary of Education. Warren Stephens wrote checks worth $21.9 million to help GOP candidates in 2023 and 2024. He is now ambassador to the UK, arguably the most coveted of diplomatic posts. Eight of Trump’s cabinet appointees were big contributors to his campaign, and more than twenty others hold senior positions in his administration.
To be fair to Trump, our politics has long been corrupted by money that ensures political access and top jobs to those with deep pockets, making the act of voting all but symbolic. Recent Supreme Court decisions—McCutcheon, but more so Citizens United—have made this problem much worse, especially by enabling Super PACs, which allow an end run around the legal limits on individual donations, and “dark money,” the sources of which remain anonymous. My point here is the stark contrast between Trump’s populist narrative and his practical politics, which resemble those of a plutocracy.
His latest inauguration ceremony reveals this same discrepancy. The $239 million price—covered by some 140corporations and individuals who ponied up at least $1 million apiece—made it resemble a coronation. A raft of Hollywood celebrities and corporate, banking, and tech moguls attended and occupied choice seats and tables. The extravaganza—more than twice as expensive as Trump’s previous inauguration—made Obama’s ($43 million) and Biden ($62 million) look like backyard picnics. Some of the people and businesses that paid for the glitz and glamor faced pending official litigation, others stood to gain from dismantling or paring down government regulations.
More important than the financing of Trump’s 2024 campaign and inauguration, at least insofar as working-class Americans are concerned, is what comes next: governance, specifically legislation that could affect their day-to-day life. Here, too, the difference between Candidate Trump and President Trump is stunning.
Nothing reveals this better than the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB), one of the biggest wealth transfers from low-income households to affluent ones in American history, never mind that it has been trotted out as legislation designed to help Trump’s working-class followers. The bill, which runs over 900 pages, is certainly big, but beautiful it isn’t when it comes to the consequences for households within the bottom fifth of the nation’s income distribution. Nor does this legislation square with Trump’s promises to use his business acumen to slash the national debt.
At the risk of some oversimplification, OBBB makes Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent. The latter bill was not only skewed to benefit the wealthiest individuals, it increased the annual budget deficit from $665 billion to $3.1 trillion (an increase of about 366%). OBBB is far worse on both counts. That’s not all. On net—that is, accounting for OBBB’s changes in tax rates and deduction allowances and its cuts in government benefits, mainly Medicare and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) —households with incomes in the bottom three deciles will lose between $504 and $1,500 in annual income on average through 2034. But those in the top three deciles will make the biggest gains, the amount increasing sharply to match increases in household income: households in the top decile will see $12,044 in added income compared to $2,144 for those in the next highest decile.
What about the standard GOP claim, being made yet again to defend OBBB, that tax cuts for the rich—individuals and corporations—will eventually help low-income people? Its underlying logic is that the rich who benefit the most from big tax breaks will use their windfalls to make bigger economic investments, which, in turn, will create more jobs, boost wages, and put more money in workers’ pockets. But as two studies—one by Brookings and the Urban Institute, the otherpublished by the National Bureau of Economic Research and authored by Princeton’s Owen Zidar—demonstrate, the evidence doesn’t back up this perennial argument. Nor do the results of the 1981, 2001, and 2017 tax cuts. The wealthiest Americans, not Trump’s working class and lower-income base, will reap most of the gains from OBBB, by a big margin, and workers should not expect to see an economic boom that lifts their boats.
That’s not all. Trump voters will also be hit hard by OBBB’s cuts to Medicaid and SNAP.
OBBB’s $1.02 trillion spending reduction on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)—including provisions that limit states’ leeway to raise revenues to fund local Medicaid benefits—will be achieved in part by imposing requirements that could exclude millions of people from coverage. Focus groups with Trump voters revealedthat they had not expected the president to reshape Medicaid, which more than half described as very important for their lives. The program, which covers 68.6 million people, is particularly important to those who live in low-income counties, many of them Trump strongholds. At least 25% of the residents in Louisiana, Arkansas, Kentucky, and West Virginia, all Trump strongholds, rely on it.
Indeed, the greater an electoral district’s dependence on Medicaid, especially in predominantly white counties, the greaterthe proportion of pro-GOP votes. Little wonder that MAGA star Steve Bannon warned against deep cuts to the program, noting that “a lot of MAGAs are on Medicaid…[I]f you don’t think so you’re deeeeeead wrong.” OBBB imposes restrictions on access to Medicaid, including by requiring cumbersome, recurrent paperwork certifying income, employment status, and other details. The bill imposes similar reporting requirements to qualify for participation in the health insurance exchange markets created Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) to enable low-income Americans to purchase affordable health insurance. Plus, OBBB reduces government subsidies, which Biden had increased substantially, that support the ACA. These changes to Medicaid and the ACA could leave an estimated 17 million people without coverage.
SNAP—aka Food Stamps—covers some 41.6 million, and in Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky and West Virginia, depending on the state, between 13% and 18% of residents benefit from the program. Of course, not all of them are MAGA voters. Still, given the correlation between economic distress and votes for Trump and the GOP, cuts to SNAP—estimated at $300 billion, a reduction of 30% over ten years and the biggest in the program’s history—are bound to hurt many low-income Trump loyalists.
The GOP narrative has been that these cuts are aimed at eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse, but there’s no evidence that such misuse comes even remotely close to the dollar value of OBBB’s funding reductions. For one thing, two-thirds of Medicaid recipients who are under age 65 and are able to work already do; the rest are disabled, ill, elderly, are care-givers. As for reining in the national debt, not only are the bill’s cuts insufficient to do that, its tax reductions will slash revenue and raise the cumulative national debt, currently $36.2 trillion, by a projected $3.3 trillion during the next decade.
Interest payments on the national debt alone totaled $1.13 trillion last year—more than the entire budget proposed for the Pentagon in 2026. Covering increases in annual payments could require the Fed to maintain high interest rates to attract skittish bond buyers. That, in turn, will drive up the cost of basic purchases such as cars, homes, and appliances, adding to the increases Trump’s tariff hikes will produce. Low-income Americans, who spend a far greater proportion of their earnings on everyday purchases than those who are affluent, will be hit the hardest by the added expenses. Many of them will be Trump voters.
Trump will go down in history as a virtuoso politician who reshaped American politics in multiple ways. And the key to his success has been the skill with which he has presented himself to voters—the facts be damned—as a maverick who will declare war on the establishment and side with the long-neglected American working class. Will the magic continue to work? The results of the 2026 mid-term elections will provide a clue.