How Can Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders Both Be ‘Populist’?

[tomm2thumbs]

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders share an upbringing in New York’s outer boroughs and a repugnance for trade deals, but the similarities pretty much end there. Sanders routinely inveighs against “corporate America”; Trump is an executive of almost 500 business entities, more than 200 of which are named after himself. Trump lends his name to a line of power ties and cuff links; the adjective most often applied to Sanders’s wardrobe is “rumpled.” Yet journalists routinely refer to both men as “populists.” How can a word that purports to describe both a proud socialist and an arrogant billionaire have any meaning?


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/magazine/how-can-donald-trump-and-bernie-sanders-both-be-populist.html

[dchill]

1. For Trump, there's only one "popule."

[Baobab]

5. Trump is not a populist

nt

[TDale313]

2. They are both using a populist appeal.

Populist doesn't break down left/right. It's about speaking to working class issues and grievances- and yeah, in a very cynical an scapegoating way Trump is doing that. I've said for years- Dems need to figure out how to embrace a populist message cause eventually there will be those on the right who use a populist message to con those working class disaffected people. Trump's doing just that.

[dchill]

6. That's what I said...

[Kip Humphrey]

3. I suggest the people for whom "of/for/by the people" refers are different sets of people.

[MisterP]

4. answer? as long as the Dems run finger-clicking aristos whose acolytes jeer as they abandon

the blue collars--why, look how many of them support Trump! they're unconvertible!

[fasttense]

7. Great question

The truth is Trump is not a populist. The corporate media did not want to use racist or facist so they settled on populist. It's like calling Hitler a populist. (They actually called Hitler a socialist when he never resembled a socialist.)Hitler was funded by the uber rich to stop the socialist. So missidentifing him makes him seem less threatening. It worked for Hitler.

[malthaussen]

8. No, Herr Hitler was funded to stop the Communists.

There is a difference.

-- Mal

[yurbud]

9. Trump is more a demagogulist

[Myrina]

10. Trump is capitalizing on the low IQ 'angry mob' mentality ...

.... Bernie is attracting the other end of the spectrum.