As Trump Drifts Away From Populism, His Supporters Grow Watchful.
'President Trump visited the Tennessee estate of Andrew Jackson last month to symbolically claim the mantle of the first genuinely populist president since the 1830s. Just like Jackson, Mr. Trump defeated a political dynasty to take power and was now determined to challenge what the new president called “the arrogant elite.”
But last week suggested the limits of the comparison. Where Jackson made it his mission to destroy the Second Bank of the United States, which he viewed as a construct of the nation’s wealthy to wield power over the people, Mr. Trump saved the Export-Import Bank and signaled that he may preserve the leadership of the Federal Reserve, two modern-day tools of federal power in the economy.
As he nears 100 days in the White House, Mr. Trump has demonstrated that while he won office on a populist message, he has not consistently governed that way. He rails against elites, including politicians, judges, environmentalists, Hollywood stars and the news media. But he has stocked his administration with billionaires and lobbyists while turning over his economic program to a Wall Street banker. He may be at war with the Washington establishment, but he has drifted away from some of the anti-establishment ideas that animated his campaign. . .
Mr. Trump, after all, was always an unlikely populist, a self-proclaimed billionaire with a private plane and gilded estates. Mr. Trump, who by one count switched political parties seven times before last year’s campaign, seems less driven by ideology than by instinct borne out of his own resentment of elites who, in his view, have never given him the respect he deserves. . .
Populism can be found on the political right and left, often fueled by economic disparities, a sense of dislocation and anger at elites. In the United States, populism after Jackson gained steam in the 1890s with the formation of the People’s Party and Bryan’s presidential campaigns. It was revived in the 1930s by Huey Long and his Depression-era Share the Wealth Clubs and had a brief return in the 1990s with Ross Perot’s independent campaigns.
While populists have rarely won the White House, they prodded those who did, like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who enacted progressive policies expanding government power over the “malefactors of great wealth,” as the first Roosevelt put it. On the other side of the spectrum, Richard M. Nixon appealed to the “silent majority,” while Ronald Reagan was boosted by aggrieved working-class Americans who abandoned the Democrats.
Mr. Trump did not have a monopoly on populist appeal last year. His analog on the left was Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who ran a Wall Street-bashing campaign for the Democratic nomination. While the two share a loathing for free-trade agreements and support for expansive spending on new roads and bridges, Mr. Sanders said the opening months have shown Mr. Trump to be a “right-wing extremist,” not a populist.
“You’re not a populist if you want to, as he did in his health care bill, raise premiums for low-income senior citizens,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview. “You’re not a populist when you want to throw 24 million people off health care. You’re not a populist when you want to do away with nutrition programs for pregnant women and children.” . .
Richard D. White Jr., the business school dean at Louisiana State University and author of “Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long,” said Long would have seen Mr. Trump as an example of the plutocrats he spent a lifetime battling. But what they have in common, he said, was a pugilistic approach to politics that touches a chord with many constituents.
“Probably the best word to define it is ‘anger,’” Mr. White said. “There’s an anger in the people, whether it’s Huey Long or Andrew Jackson or Donald Trump. Populism feeds on that anger, and astute politicians can take advantage of it.”'
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/us/politics/populism-donald-trump-administration.html?
No sh*t, Sherlock! 
