‘Populist’ Trump Punks His Credulous Fans (Again)

The following article by Joe Conason was posted on the National Memo website February 3, 2017:

After signing, President Donald Trump holds up an executive order rolling back regulations from the 2010 Dodd-Frank law on Wall Street reform at the White House, February 3, 2017. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

There was never any reason to think that Donald Trump’s stump-speech assaults on Wall Street banks and hedge funds were even momentarily sincere — but millions of working and middle-class voters loved his ‘populist’ rhetoric.  

Emerging from that gold-plated jet, Trump would roar about cracking down on the financial vultures who had fattened while everyone else suffered, as his fans cheered.

 He wouldn’t let those paper-shuffling crooks escape their share of taxes any more. He was paying for the campaign from his own massive fortune, so he would owe allegiance to nobody but the American people. He excoriated Hillary Clinton, who had accepted tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, warning that the Democrat would dance to Wall Street’s tune.  He even aired a television commercial, late in the campaign, that vowed to free the country from the “globalist” designs of Goldman chair Lloyd Blankfein and investor George Soros. Continue reading “‘Populist’ Trump Punks His Credulous Fans (Again)”