President Donald Trump remains “obsessively focused” on “personal glory and enrichment” — ignoring the economic suffering of the working people he last week dismissed as the “little man,” Jeet Heer writes in The Nation.
“Donald Trump is annoyed that he can’t celebrate the massive profits oil companies are making due to the war he launched in the Middle East,” writes Heer, The Nation’s national affairs correspondent. Trump would be “exulting in the hundreds of billions of dollars produced by skyrocketing oil prices—if it weren’t for the pesky fact that it comes at the expense of ordinary Americans.”
Americans are paying roughly 40 percent more at the gas pump than they did before Trump started his war in Iran three months ago, Heer notes. But in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity last week, Trump said, “I don’t want to say we’re making a fortune, you understand that? Because if I say that, they’re going to say ‘oh, he forgets about the little man with the $4 gasoline.’”
Meanwhile, Republicans’ response “to the harm caused by Trump’s policies” is not to change course “or even to appear sympathetic about their effects,” but rather, “to express their total indifference to the suffering of the American people.”
Heer looks at a Bloomberg report from last week that revealed Trump or his financial advisors made over 3,700 trades during the first quarter of this year, “a flurry totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration.”
Trump won the White House — twice — by promoting a message of economic populism, but that has gone by the wayside. Heer writes: “allowing Trump to steal the rhetoric of economic populism” was one of “the most catastrophic mistakes” Democrats have made in the last decade.
Now, Trump is making the same messaging error Biden did — an error that cost Democrats the White House in 2024. But that error opens the door for Democrats to “reclaim economic populism” as their own message.
Citing the “apocryphal words misattributed to the French Queen Marie Antoinette: ‘Let them eat cake,’” Heer writes that Trump said: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.”
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