The government of the people, by the people, for the people. This ending statement to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address has become a motto of the American Identity. Specifically, it refers to the government’s purpose – a motto that Donald Trump embraces.
Sort of.
Trump ran an incredibly populist campaign to appeal to the common public. In his inauguration speech, he said, “For many years, a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair.”
However, while Trump speaks with words that sound like the pages of Karl Marx or Bernie Sanders, his policies are the opposite. This paradoxical message uses populism to break down intuitions that help the common man, all while a new motto rises: The government of the elite, by populism, for the wealthy.
“Drain the swamp” is one of Trump’s most famous populist mottos. It calls out career politicians and the elite who enter politics to enrich themselves. While both sides would generally agree that a government should be represented by those who are more qualified and closer to the regular man, Trump has not followed through on this.
The Trump cabinet is far from the swamp Trump has claimed to drain. As the most prominent example of his hypocrisy, he’s appointed many career politicians such as Marco Rubio and Kristie Noem, and billionaires and CEOs like Scott Bessent, Doug Bergum, Howard Lutnick, Chris Wright, Linba McMahon, and Kelly Loeffler.
Kelly Loeffler, who is set to be in charge of the Small Business Administration, has never actually started her own business. She has spent most of her career working for Intercontinental Exchange, a company worth over $100 billion, of which her husband is the CEO. In January 2020, Leoffler and her husband sold stock that could be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. That decision, however, was influenced by Leoffler’s attendance at a closed-door Senate briefing on the coronavirus before the national quarantine.
Leoffler is about as far as you can get from a populist, people-first candidate as you can get. She is a representative of the swamp — a billionaire who spent her career in one of the biggest companies in finance and used her position as senator to enrich herself even more. This is Trump’s ideal candidate to lead our government’s policy on small business.
Trump recently signed an executive order to close the Department of Education. While the Department of Education is not perfect, it does represent the philosophy of our founding fathers. Thomas Jefferson argued the U.S. should set up a system of education for the common people to attend to, as he believed a well-informed citizenry is key to the success of a nation.
But Trump, instead of trying to improve the Department of Education or following the words of Thomas Jefferson, wants to throw it away and hopes that Linda McMahon, his nominee for Secretary of Education, works herself out of a job. This affects Iowa and our rural communities, many of whom voted for Trump. Many rural districts already struggle, and with federal help potentially going away, this could be a fatal blow to their districts.
While many former presidents appointed members of the elite to their cabinets and passed measures that hurt the common man, no president has done this before, claiming to be for the people he’s hurting, until Trump.