Trump isn’t a real populist, he just plays one on reality TV... Why, then, does anyone consider him a “populist”? It’s basically all about affect, about coming across as someone who’ll stand up to snooty liberal elitists (and of course validate salt-of-the-earth, working-class racism.) - Paul Krugman
Part of the post-truth movement is the post-definitions phenomenon, which holds that words mean whatever the lying sack of shit who originally uttered them says they mean in retrospect. - Betty Cracker
Providing health care to those previously denied it is, necessarily, a matter of redistributing from the lucky to the unlucky. And, of course, reversing a policy that expanded health care is redistribution in reverse. You can’t make this reality go away. - Paul Krugman
It’s not just that the winners fail to compensate the losers. It’s that they use their winnings to buy the politics and policies that further hurt the losers. When Trump and Bernie and even Hillary said “the economy’s rigged,” this is what they meant: the benefits of growth (including those from globalization) are going largely to the rich, who then use those resources to advance more inequality-inducing government policies (real time examples include ACA repeal and the big, nasty, regressive tax cut that’s coming). The fact that Trump pulled this message off may seem remarkable, but history is littered with carnival barking faux populists tapping this play. - Jared Bernstein
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