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Trump’s Theory of Politics w/ Kim Phillips-Fein | The Nation Podcast · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to the nation podcast where we take you behind the scenes of our biggest stories with the journalists who write them.
• 0:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm D.D.
• 0:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Guttenblan, special correspondent for the nation.
• 0:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our Trump and Trump is invest understood as the consolidation of an elite economic program, as a nostalgia-laced brew of prejudice and rage.
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: or as a coherent, forceful new style of authoritarian rule.
• 0:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if it's the latter, why is this happening now?
• 0:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the question that historian and Columbia University Professor Kim Phillips fine asks in her latest piece for the nation, which you can read now in our November issue.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: In this piece, Phillips finds considers a book that might offer at least a partial answer to that question.
• 0:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Melinda Cooper's counter-revolution, published just before Trump reclaimed the White House.
• 0:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cooper she writes, frames Trump as part of a larger shift in how people generate and preserve wealth.
• 1:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Specifically, a shift away from the shareholder model of corporate oversight, and towards the kind of privately held unaccountable wealth that has defined Trump for decades.
• 1:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that Philips Fine writes can now be seen in the way he runs his government.
• 1:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're delighted to have Kim Philips Fine on the nation podcast to talk us through all this.
• 1:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kim, welcome.
• 1:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for having me on.
• 1:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a pleasure.
• 1:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to start by
• 1:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: By beginning with something that you probably had little responsibility for, but that I think is a very happy occurrence, which is the subtitle of your piece, which is Donald Trump's theory of politics.
• 1:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: I assume that was David Marcus's doing not yours, but it leads me to wonder, does Donald Trump have a theory of politics?
• 1:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: What do you think?
• 2:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, yes, so first of all, I'll credit to David who is a fantastic book review editor and editor in general and yes, I think so so let me so this is a my essay is really a review of Melinda Cooper's book is you as you mentioned and I also I sort of a lot of ways but I'm really writing about is her interpretation as much as my own and I should say that for pretty listeners.
• 2:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Counter-revolution is a book with a lot of different perks to it.
• 2:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a whole angle of the book which is really about fiscal politics and government spending and my essay focused on one slice of her argument, her larger argument about private family wealth and its role in politics today.
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I should also say the book her book is not really about Trump per se because as you mentioned, she was writing this, it came out before Trump was in the White House.
• 3:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, but I do think that Cooper offers a really interesting way to think about Trump, and I think it has to do with this question of Trump's theory of politics.
• 3:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think yes,
• 3:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: clearly do have a theory or maybe many theories of politics.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: What is so interesting to me about Cooper's approach though is that she really grounds the emergence of the Trump style and vision in changes in our broader political economy.
• 3:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And many ways of looking at Trump
• 3:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: his cultural politics, his racial and ethnic political vision, his a sense that maybe he has no particular theory but is just completely chaotic.
• 4:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: So there's a lot of, and the sense that Trump is really working in conjunction with Christian nationalists via the project 2025
• 4:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: the kind of a broader neo-reactionary vision and Cooper highlights something else that doesn't get as much attention, which is Trump as not just a representative of the business class in general, but of a very particular business vision and surrounded by people who also come out of a part
• 4:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: has become more forceful, more dynamic, and more economically important, in a recent year.
• 4:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: That sector of the business world to be clear is essentially family run or privately held corporations or to put it a little bit more broadly, corporations that are not answerable to even the sector of the public that a publicly held company would be answerable to.
• 5:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's a kind of concentrated and privately exercised and unconstrained power.
• 5:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I want to say a couple things.
• 5:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I understand that this is a book review and, you know, it sounds like a fascinating book.
• 5:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: But,
• 5:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: I in a sense wanted to talk to you, and I do want to get to that because as a crude materialist myself, there was something exciting about the idea that there's a kind of material basis for Trumpism and not just for Trumpism as a political philosophy fee,
• 5:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: by those who wield it, but also a political basis that might help to explain some of Trump's support among sectors that we used to think of as democratic supporting.
• 6:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm avoiding the term white work in class for a lot of reasons.
• 6:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: and partly because as you and Cooper demonstrate, we're not really talking so much about manufacturing workers, at least in terms of her explanation.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I want to start where you start, because I want to see if we can sharpen something which may or may not come from Cooper, but which I suspect does come from you,
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: which is, you say that for liberals after the election in 2016, and again, I think Cooper's book came out after Trump's first term, but before his second term.
• 6:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: So after he won the election the first time, you say many liberals refuse to recognize
• 6:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: that in addition to being a bankrupt real estate speculator, a reality TV star, a huxter, and somebody from frequently seen on page 6, he was also president of the United States, and that having placed their hopes in Hillary Clinton, they marched to slogans like not my president, and the Trump might be in the White House, but it was unfathomable to view him as an enduring threat.
• 7:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it was like, you know, let's view him as a fluke.
• 7:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's get past this and then of course one Biden one in 2020, many liberals and even someone in the left came to the reassuring conclusion that while Trump and Trump has had been a troubling interlude, it had been supplanted by a new liberal age.
• 7:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think in a way, what's interesting about that, which struck me as an entirely accurate summary of at least a lot of the people I was in contact with at the time, is it it seems
• 7:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: offer a kind of difference or maybe even pick in a kind of implicit fight with the kind of what's the matter with Kansas explanations, not just for Trump, but for the rise of his version of the Republican Party, which is that essentially working class voters are dupes who are
• 8:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that always struck me as both too facile and not persuasive, but I wondered what you thought and whether you are explicitly offering a kind of different view.
• 8:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I mean, I do think that that view is too simplistic and I guess not to bring it back to Cooper again.
• 8:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sure, work.
• 8:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: In her earlier book as well, family values is really devoted to showing the ways that things that we think of as cultural, especially ideas about the family, ideas about reproduction, ideas about sexuality, have a material and economic vision behind them as well, that it's
• 9:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: that these are actually quite deeply fused and in particular in the thinking, the intellectual life, the organizing life of the right.
• 9:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: ideas about the family have a strong economic morality around them as well.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in a way, I think she's taken some of those insights and brought them into new territory with this book.
• 9:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And yes, I do think, I mean, I think, you know, there are different elements to the way she develops these ideas in the book, but there is one strain of it, which is about not just the private fortunes that have lined up.
• 9:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: behind a certain style of conservative politics and that she that are heavily represented in what were heavily represented in Trump's first cabinet and administration and even more so this time around.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: But she also suggests that a significant part of what people perceive as working class support for Trump actually is more, it comes more deeply
• 10:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: small business people and small entrepreneurs, or perhaps even working class people, workers who conceptualize themselves as small business people, people in the gay economy, even perhaps
• 10:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: small entrepreneurs rather than as members of a collective that one might think of as the working class.
• 10:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so in a way, they think of their economic interests as aligned with those of the family businesses that Trump and the privately held corporations that Trump.
• 11:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: is represented about himself.
• 11:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right.
• 11:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think that's, you know, that's really to me both fascinating and revelatory because it's just, I mean, there are kind of two strands to that.
• 11:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: One is that the Trump Trump is in me is in some sense growing out of the transformation of our larger economy from corporate managerial capitalism to kind of
• 11:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what you would call it.
• 11:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Unbounded personal family business.
• 11:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I suppose they would call themselves entrepreneurs, but you know sort of autocratic and authoritarian capitals.
• 11:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And where where the boss doesn't really care what you think of them.
• 11:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: They just want you to do what they say and they're not really interested in hearing your feedback or anybody else's criticism and they've
• 12:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so that when people do attempt to convey it, they regard that as an imposition rather than a source of useful information.
• 12:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's that, there's the transformation in the kind of upper tier of capitalism in the US from somebody like even Bob Wright, who was not a particularly nice person, but let a large company and had to care about how
• 12:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, shareholders across the country thought about GE to somebody like Elon Musk who really doesn't give an F what you think of him or his company and isn't interested in hearing your views and doesn't have to pretend to be.
• 12:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's that.
• 12:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's the transformation of the American economy with more and more wealth held in more and more unaccountable and private hands.
• 12:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: But then there's also the kind of, as that transformation happens and as the organized basis of working class power and support and solidarity got decimated so that
• 13:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: people were more and more atomized.
• 13:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The family became a kind of, you know, the only refuge in a very cold environment.
• 13:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it became more important, more reified, and more kind of feverishly defended in its traditional form.
• 13:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I just thought those were, you know, those two things happening in concert, which I assume is what her books,
• 13:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, trace.
• 13:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 13:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a really fascinating.
• 13:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I think I should say there are two other authors who I think have developed some of these ideas.
• 13:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: The historian Steve Fraser has written a bit about this idea in a kind of the of patriarchal capitalism as a
• 14:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: form that capitalism takes, which is different from the corporate capitalism of mid-century, and also the economic journalist and regulation contributor, Doug Hennward.
• 14:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: has developed some of these ideas as well.
• 14:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's interesting.
• 14:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think they've been working parallel to Cooper.
• 14:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not sure that the three have been in dialogue so much, but it's interesting to see this line of thinking, taking shape among these different writers, at pretty much the same time.
• 14:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think there's a lot here for people to develop further in the future, too.
• 14:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: That may be just the,
• 14:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: the historian and history teacher and professor in me, but I can see many different potential.
• 14:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Disretations, blooming in some of the ideas of this book.
• 14:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's much to go out and work on further.
• 15:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think some of these ideas about what happens to working class consciousness in the age of social atomization.
• 15:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's much there to develop and to work to think about it and to do kind of social history research to build out.
• 15:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: The different sectors of this business class, the technology, founders, and entrepreneurs, the financial
• 15:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: the hedge fund and the different parts of the financial sector that break down this way, there's much to keep writing about and exploring.
• 15:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
• 15:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: For economic analysts, there's also the kind of big casino aspect of it all.
• 15:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: When what was good for general motors was good for the country, general motors was making cars.
• 15:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, they actually had to like get the steel and make the cars and sell the cars.
• 16:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, how somebody like Howard Lutnik or a crypto person or, you know, somebody who's running a hedge fund makes their money is much less tied to a tangible economy and to things that people make and buy.
• 16:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Since you can't see it, it just feels less secure.
• 16:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: In other words, if you work on the line at GM, you may not like your job, but you know that you're making cars, and you can see that people are buying them, so you have a role.
• 16:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's very hard to see what people's role is in this new kind of casino like economy.
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that also adds to the sense of uncertainty, rootlessness, and desperation.
• 16:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right.
• 17:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think yes, it becomes a kind of a,
• 17:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Another kind of interesting thing about this approach is that it offers another way of thinking about the popularity of conspiracy theory.
• 17:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know somebody is controlling things.
• 17:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know somebody is profiting from what seems to be an exploitative situation, but it's really very difficult to identify who or what.
• 17:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so this becomes a very fertile ground for elaborate conspiracy theories to flourish.
• 17:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now there's one, I mean, since we don't have a whole lot of time left, I want to steer it a little bit in a different direction because, you know, as you said, there are many fertile directions for further research open by this, but there's also, it seems to me, possible immediate tangible lessons for electoral politics.
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you don't say this explicitly
• 17:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: It certainly I read the review and I thought so essentially what the Democrats offered voters in 2024 was a choice between managerial capitalism and family business capitalism.
• 18:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's like, you know, with Kamala Harris, it wasn't that we were going to give workers more power or that the collective life is going to flourish or that the public sector is going to get big or that people are going to be taken care of by society.
• 18:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was not on offer by any, you know, by Kamala Harris at all.
• 18:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was just that we're going to have the kind of
• 18:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: business suited capitalism of the past or we're going to have the kind of ruthless authoritarian but personalist capitalism of Trump.
• 18:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you know, what is that suggest for the Democratic Party going forward?
• 18:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think the peace ends with a suggestion that what in a way the changes that Cooper is pointing to are more fundamental than
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's not an electoral fluke, and it's not just something that is altogether bound up with Trump alone.
• 19:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think one of the questions that people are asking now is what will happen when Trump leads to White House, as he hopefully will, and is this a politics that will sustain itself afterward, or how bound up is it with this one individual?
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that Cooper, you know, does not offer a sense that this is a transitory.
• 19:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: If Namananshi is suggesting that something has changed in the way that the economy functions and it may not be, you know, if not Trump, somebody else will.
• 19:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: speak to these politics.
• 19:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: So how to respond given that?
• 19:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I do think that this is a complicated question and it's no short term or easy or immediate answer to it.
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think that yes, giving a vision that places a sense of working class and the power of
• 20:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: ordinary people in the institutions in which they live and that make up their lives.
• 20:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: So how speaking to that channeling it and articulating a vision that gives life to it is has to be the way forward for
• 20:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: the Democrats if possible in the country as a whole.
• 20:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's, and there are many ways you could imagine this flourishing, I mean both in terms of unions, local organizing.
• 20:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I do think that there's something about the Mamdanic campaign, which speaks to this, a sense of the need to find ways to counter the power of private and unaccountable wealth.
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: through the public sector and public organizing that can just embody the reality that the world is not just the fantasy and the minds of a few wealthy individuals.
• 21:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's made up of people whose labor and effort keep things going.
• 21:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think that's kind of the where the peace ends up.
• 21:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if it's hopeful or not, because I think it's hard to, there's many obstacles
• 21:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: but at least gives a sense of where one could start to get traction to fight back.
• 21:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I suppose what I found helpful is where you said those at the top might appear all powerful, but they alone do not control the world.
• 21:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think, in a way, what's interesting about the Mombani campaign is precisely the parts that the kind of traditional corporate Democrats find most unrealistic, you know, things like, like, freeze the rent.
• 21:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, essentially, it's just a reminder that
• 22:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Democracy without economic democracy is ultimately hollow and you know that's what democracy without economic democracy is what clintonism offered us.
• 22:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's interesting to me to find you know a kind of really thoughtful analysis that makes sense of why that didn't work.
• 22:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
• 22:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: All right.
• 22:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, can I know you have to go, but it's been a pleasure as always.
• 22:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks so much for coming and talking to us on the nation podcast.
• 22:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: A total pleasure.
• 22:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for having me.