Income inequality

The second strand of inequality is what happened to the rich. They got a lot richer. The majority of Americans tend to believe that being rich is deserved and/or natural in a market economy. Income and wealth inequality is higher in the United States than in most developed countries. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office,[37] income inequality in the United States has been rising for decades, with the incomes of the highest echelon of earners rapidly outpacing the rest of the population. The growth of CEO pay is illustrative of this trend. In 1965, a typical corporate CEO earned about twenty times that earned by a typical worker; by 2018, the ratio was 278:1, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. Between 1978 and 2018, CEO compensation increased by more than 900 percent while worker compensation increased by just 11.9 percent.[38]

How does wealth inequality, particularly the exponential increase in the wealth of the top 1% explain Trump? After all, Trump is rich and many of his policies fuelled inequality by benefitting the rich. In a survey Americans under the age of 30 expressed contempt and resentment by mostly agreeing with the statement, “Most rich people in the United States got rich by taking advantage of other people” [39] and resentment of the rich has grown in the US     roughly three-in-ten Americans (29%) adults say it’s a bad thing for the country that some people have personal fortunes of a billion dollars or more, the majority continue to say it is neither good nor bad[40]

 Why are ordinary Americans who struggle to pay their bills not repelled by  Trump, who flaunts and exaggerates his wealth, and brags about avoiding taxes? The answer might be that Trump is able to distance himself not from being rich but from not being the kind of rich that millions of Americans have come to view as the ‘elites’. 

The right-wing Heritage Foundation declared ‘With Trump’s Win, “Ordinary” Americans Declared Independence from the Elites’[41]In this assertion there is an expression of the symbolic separation that Trump represents between his wealth and privilege and wealth and privilege as it manifests itself in the minds of millions of Americans. Trump is vulgar rich, he is crass and unashamed rich and he is the kind of rich millions of Americans can identify with.

 Bernard Shaw observed that vulgarity in the rich flatter the masses[42] since it either reinforces their bourgeois pretensions or it legitimises their own level of consumption. The vastly rich Roman patrician, Cicero wrote that slaves don’t dream of freedom they dream of owning a slave[43] and so those who work and scrimp and save can believe that Trump is how they would behave if they were rich. When Trump states that only stupid people pay taxes many hear this as refreshing honesty, free of virtue signalling and moralising. In this sense, Trump becomes an authentic expression of aspiration bound up with resentment. Bruce Springsteen’s songs may evoke images of rustbelt decline and abandoned communities, but he’s a rich entertainer who never worked a day in a steel mill or auto shop. The denim and dirty fingernails are stage makeup and costumes.  The paradoxical sense in which one of the most inauthentic individuals ever to grace the American political landscape, could establish himself with such technicolour veracity in the minds of millions as ‘the real deal,’ can partly be explained as a visceral reaction to the glittering know all’s and celebrity liberals. In hindsight Kamala’s glitzy celebrity drenched rallies only reinforced the  reek of entitlement which surrounded the Democrats. If you are horrified that people might not want to pay their taxes, you don’t understand the realities of most people’s lives.

After the election Bernie Sanders blamed Trump’s success on the failure to convince millions of ordinary American that the Democrats spoke for them "It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them, First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right."[44] Trump’s campaign understood this better than Kamala’s when they ran ads which said "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you"[45]