John Ratcliffe confirmed as Trump's new CIA director

John Healey says the vessel is used to gather intelligence and map the UK's underwater infrastrcuture.

On the day of Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration, a group of his top billionaire donors, including the casino magnate Miriam Adelson and the future Republican National Committee finance chair Todd Ricketts, hosted a small private party, away from the publicly advertised inaugural balls.

It was the sort of event that carried no interest at the time for the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. He greeted Trump’s first presidency by publicly identifying his wife’s parents and his own ancestors with the immigrants targeted by Trump’s early executive orders. “These issues are personal for me,” Zuckerberg wrote in a public letter of concern a week after Trump took office.

But this month, as the same donors made plans for Trump’s second inauguration, Zuckerberg successfully maneuvered to become a co-host of their black-tie event, scheduled for tonight. The party quickly became one of the most sought-after gatherings of the weekend, overwhelming organizers with RSVPs from people who had not received invitations.

Even more striking: Zuckerberg sat in front of Trump’s incoming Cabinet in the Capitol Rotunda at his inauguration—at the personal invitation of Trump himself, according to two people briefed on the plans who, like some other sources interviewed for this story, requested anonymity to describe private conversations. (A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment.)

[Charlie Warzel: We’re all trying to find the guy who did this]

Zuckerberg was not alone. Trump’s inauguration events featured a Silicon Valley smorgasbord, with leaders from Apple, Google, and TikTok in attendance, as well as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Tesla’s Elon Musk. Several of the tech moguls also joined a small prayer service this morning at St. John’s Episcopal Church. Later, they blended in with the Trump clan directly behind the incoming president as he officially assumed power just after noon, like honorary family members.

The scene announced a remarkable new dynamic in Washington: Far more so than in his first term, the ultra-wealthy—and tech billionaires in particular—are embracing Trump. And the new president is happy to entertain their courtship, setting up the possibility that Trump’s second turn in the White House could be shaped by person-to-person transactions with business and tech executives—a new kind of American oligarchy.

Eight years ago, Trump landed in Washington in a fit of defiance, denouncing in his inaugural address “the American carnage” wrought by “a small group in our nation’s capital.” Four years later, he left as an outcast, judged responsible for the U.S. Capitol riot and a haphazard attempt to undo the constitutional order. He returns this week with a clean sweep of swing states and the national popular vote, the loyal support of Republicans in Congress, and the financial backing of corporate donors who are expected to help the inaugural committee raise twice what it did in 2017. Organizers of the Women’s March, which stomped on Trump’s 2017 inauguration by sending hundreds of thousands of protesters to the streets, settled for a series of unremarkable Saturday gatherings. The Democratic opposition, which treated Trump’s first term as an existential threat, now lacks an evident strategy or leader.

Like nearly every entity that has tried and failed to bend Trump to its will—his party, his former rivals, his partners in Congress, and his former aides among them—the tech elites largely seem to have decided that they’re better off seeking Trump’s favor.

[Read: ‘If there’s one person who keeps their word, it’s Donald Trump’]   

Just months ago, Trump released a coffee-table photo book that included a pointed rant about Zuckerberg’s $420 million donation in 2020 to fund local election offices during the coronavirus pandemic, an undertaking that Trump called “a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT.” “We are watching him closely,” Trump wrote of Zuckerberg, “and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison.”

But since Trump’s victory, Zuckerberg has worked to get himself in the new president’s good graces. The Meta CEO traveled to Mar-a-Lago; added a Trump pal to his corporate board; extolled the importance of “masculine energy” on Joe Rogan’s podcast; abandoned the Meta fact-checking program, which MAGA world had viewed as biased; and personally worked with Trump to try to resolve a 2021 civil lawsuit over Facebook’s decision to ban him from the platform, a case that legal experts once considered frivolous.

Bezos, meanwhile, worried aloud in 2016 that Trump’s behavior “erodes our democracy around the edges” and spent his first term taking fire from the president for the aggressive reporting of The Washington Post, the newspaper that Bezos owns (and where, until recently, we both were reporters). Now Amazon, like Meta, has given $1 million to the 2025 inaugural committee, and the company recently announced it would release a documentary about, and produced by, the first lady, Melania Trump. Even Musk, who spent more than $250 million last year to elect Trump and now is one of his top advisers, called for the aging Trump to “sail into the sunset” as recently as 2022.

“In the first term, everybody was fighting me,” Trump marveled at a mid-December news conference. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”

The sheer quantity of money flowing to, and surrounding, Trump has increased. In his first term, he assembled the wealthiest Cabinet in history; this time, his would-be Cabinet includes more than a dozen billionaires. Sixteen of his appointees come not just from the top one percent, but from the top one-ten-thousandth percent, according to the Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer-advocacy organization. Democrats, too, have long kept their wealthiest donors close, inviting them in on policy discussions and providing special access, but never before have the nation’s wealthiest played such a central role in the formation of a new administration.

As recently as last week, before the inauguration proceedings were moved indoors because of cold weather, a donor adviser got a last-minute offer of $500,000 for four tickets, according to the person who fielded the call and had to gently decline the request. Trump’s 2017 committee raised $107 million, more than twice the 2013 record set by Barack Obama, and spent $104 million. So far this year, the 2025 inaugural committee is expected to raise at least $225 million and spend less than $75 million on the inaugural festivities, according to a person familiar with the plans. At least some of the unspent tens of millions could go to Trump’s presidential library, several people involved with fundraising told us.  

Trump’s first inauguration had all the markings of a hastily arranged bachelor party put on someone else’s credit card. Trump’s company and the 2017 inaugural committee ultimately paid $750,000 to the District of Columbia to settle claims of illegal payments, including allegations of inflated charges to a Washington hotel then owned by Trump. (Neither entity admitted wrongdoing.) This time, the inauguration organizers have been more disciplined, and donors have been eager to reward Trump’s victory.  

“People were prepared, so when he did win, Trump was looking for checks,” a person involved in all of the Trump campaigns and both inaugural events told us. “Once Elon got in there, that was kind of the holy water that allowed all the other tech guys to follow. They all followed each other like cattle.”

What wealthy donors could get in return for their support of Trump remains an open question. Zuckerberg’s, Bezos’s, and Musk’s federal business interests include rocket-ship and cloud-computing contracts, a federal investigation of Tesla’s auto-driving technology, a pending Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against Meta, and a separate antitrust case against Amazon. Just last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Musk for allegedly failing to disclose his early stake in Twitter, the social-media giant he later took over and renamed X. (A lawyer for Musk has said he did “nothing wrong.”) When Trump promised in his inaugural address to “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” the cameras panned to Musk, whose SpaceX is racing Bezos’s Blue Origin; Musk raised both thumbs and mouthed “Yeah!” as he broke into an ebullient grin.

[Read: He’s no Elon Musk]

Existing federal ethics rules were not designed to address the possibility of the world’s wealthiest people padding the pockets of the first family through television rights or legal settlements. The Trump family’s recently announced cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, creates yet another way for the wealthy to invest directly in an asset to benefit the commander in chief. “There is no enforcement mechanism against the president under these laws,” Trevor Potter, a former general counsel for the late Arizona Senator John McCain’s campaign, told us.

Even as Silicon Valley elites try to ingratiate themselves with the incoming president, some of Trump’s populist supporters are murmuring that the emerging tech oligarchy is diluting the purity of the MAGA base. Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Trump who has clashed in recent weeks with Musk over immigration policy, has fashioned himself as the field general for a fight against the tech bros and their outsize influence on a president eager to cut deals.

“He’s got them on display as ‘I kicked their ass.’ I’m stunned that these nerds don’t get anything to be up there,” Bannon told us last week, referring to the tech leaders appearing in prime camera position at Trump’s inauguration. “It’s like walking into Teddy Roosevelt’s lodge and seeing the mounted heads of all the big game he shot.”

For now, the ragtag populist figures like Bannon who defined Trump’s early years in politics are still celebrating. Roger Stone, the convicted and subsequently pardoned Trump kibitzer, attended inauguration events in his anachronistic morning suit—with plans for evening white tie. The British MP Nigel Farage hosted a party Friday at the Hay-Adams hotel, while former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson managed to get a ticket for the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

On Thursday, Bannon threw his own party, titled “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” or “A New Order of the Ages,” at Butterworth’s club on Capitol Hill. Drinks included, perhaps predictably, the Covfefe Martini (vodka, Fernet, espresso) and the Im-Peach This (gin, peach, Cocci Americano). Bannon arrived fashionably late and was followed from the moment he ducked through the door by a mob of iPhone documenters, and even a man with a flashbulb. He received an impromptu line of frenzied well-wishers that one British journalist quipped was “as if for the Queen.”

[Read: The MAGA honeymoon is over]

As seared foie gras and freshly shucked oysters moved through the room, Bannon urged his supporters to “set new lows tonight,” reminding them that once Trump took the oath of office on Monday, “then the real fun happens.”

“You have two to three days to get sober,” he exhorted. “Go for it!”

The tech barons also fanned out through the city in celebration. The next night, across town, Bezos and his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, dined at Georgetown’s new hot spot, Osteria Mozza, sitting at a window table with leaders of the Post. On Saturday, Palantir and the PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel hosted a party at his Woodley Park mansion; a bow-tied and mop-topped Zuckerberg arrived before the sun had fully set. And yesterday, Trump called Musk up onstage during his pre-inauguration rally inside the Capital One Arena—“C’mere, Elon!” he growled—briefly ceding the spotlight to the Tesla executive and his young son X.

During the 2024 election, many liberals and some conservatives feared that Trump’s second term would usher in a new kind of American autocracy, à la Hungary. But on its first day, at least, Trump’s new administration seems, more than anything else, oligarchal—albeit one where the transactions mainly flow one way, at least so far.

“They’re lining up to obey in advance. because they think they’re buying themselves peace of mind,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarianism who has been critical of Trump, told us. But, added Ben-Ghiat, who noted the overlap between autocracy and oligarchy: “They can give that million and everything can be fine—but the minute they displease Trump, he could come after them.”

Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at dearjames@theatlantic.com.

Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get “Dear James” in your inbox.

Dear James,

I have a literary crush. Since first encountering this woman’s work several years ago, I have read her sentences aloud to more friends, acquaintances, and pets than I can count. At the end of each piece, I can’t help thinking: I want to meet this person. I want to pour a couple of drinks, pull a thread of ideas, and follow wherever the conversation wanders.

Why can’t I just enjoy her work and leave her alone? I know the gulf between art and artist can yawn wide. I also know I may simply be craving glory by association. Mostly, though, I think my life would be qualitatively richer for knowing the person behind those delightful and insightful words. Also, dare I say, her life might be enriched by knowing me.

Have you ever tracked down one of your living heroes? If so, how did it go? If not, what did you do with the unrelenting impulse to know them personally?

In all seriousness,

Not a Stalker

Dear Reader,

Very interesting. Do you know many writers? Because if you do, you’ll already be aware that the person on the page, so stylish and alluring, is very different from the person in the world—who is petulant and broody and self-absorbed, and can’t find their socks, and shakes their fist in the night at invisible editors, and takes three days to change a lightbulb, and weeps gently when they find they’ve run out of whiskey. I won’t say that a writer’s writing is the best part of themselves, but it is the most coherent; the writer’s actual personality is more of an afterthought. It lies around in glowing lumps, like the by-product or drossy sublimate of some violent industrial process. All of which is to say: Yes, you’ll be disappointed.

But that’s not the real question here. The real question is what to do with this crush, this “unrelenting impulse” of yours. To quote my friend John: Sweat it out. Digest, metabolize, transmogrify, do push-ups, take trains until it ceases to fill your imagination. You’re not a stalker (yet). But I get the feeling you’re in the grip of a fantasy. I’ve been there. So do not pursue or even virtually prowl around this writer. That way lies confusion. Do not so much as send a chastely admiring note—you’ll get wound up waiting for a response. Disentangle yourself from her beautiful sentences. Read some other books, by some other voice-y, glittery writers. Leave her in her realm, and get back to yours.

In solidarity,

James

By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it in part or in full, and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

If there was any place in America where President Joe Biden’s economic agenda ought to have won him votes, it would have been Lordstown, Ohio. A September CNN article noted that, thanks to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, “a gleaming new 2.8 million-square-foot manufacturing plant symbolizes something that has been fleeting in recent years: hope.” Biden was bringing well-paid union jobs in the cutting-edge battery industry to a struggling region long written off as the Rust Belt.

But if Biden was expecting the community to reward his efforts, he was sorely disappointed. In 2024, the county in which Lordstown is located shifted toward Trump by six percentage points compared with 2020, the second-highest swing to Trump of any county in the state.

Lordstown offers a test case of a political theory that has not only guided the Biden administration’s economic policy but also sought to explain the past several decades of American politics. The theory holds that Donald Trump’s 2016 election represented a voter backlash against “neoliberal” economic policies that had impoverished people in the heartland, who in their desperation turned to a populist outsider promising to smash the system that had betrayed them.

From this analysis, it naturally followed that if Democrats abandoned neoliberalism, they could win back the working class and become competitive in more of the country. A post-neoliberal party would curtail free trade, ratchet up enforcement of antitrust and other regulations, run a high-pressure economy with rising wages even at the risk of higher inflation, support labor unions categorically, and subsidize manufacturing employment to reindustrialize hollowed-out areas left behind by globalization—all of which Biden ended up doing.

On the substance, Biden’s economic agenda has registered some meaningful successes. The hot labor market raised wages; union organizers at a handful of companies, such as Starbucks and Amazon, have made breakthroughs; and the administration’s public investments in chip production and green energy have built up strategic domestic industries. As a political strategy, however, post-neoliberalism has clearly failed. Biden’s popularity dropped to catastrophic levels in his first year and never recovered, leaving his successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, unable to escape his gravitational pull. If rejecting neoliberalism for four years did nothing to pull working-class voters away from Trump, perhaps Trumpism was never a revolt against neoliberalism in the first place.

Some Democrats have responded to the disaster of 2024 by insisting that the way forward for the party is to keep doing what Biden did, but louder and more insistently. In fact, Trump’s reelection ought to call into question the whole foundation upon which the strategy was constructed.

People tend to believe that events with profound consequences must have profound sources. The shock of Trump’s 2016 victory led many Democrats to search for an origin story that matched the scope of such a traumatic outcome. A belief took hold, especially on the party’s economic left wing, that working-class voters had revolted against an economic order perpetuated by Democrats and Republicans alike. In this telling, every president since at least Ronald Reagan had governed in the service of corporations and wealthy elites, at the expense of ordinary Americans and “left behind” places. After all, Trump had pulled off his surprise Rust Belt sweep while denouncing free-trade deals and intermittently posing as an enemy of Wall Street. Defeating him would consequently require reestablishing a full-fledged populist program rather than the warmed-over variety of the Clinton and Obama years.

This theory always contained fatal flaws. The Democrats had maintained a coalition divided between business and labor since Franklin D. Roosevelt—who also established the modern free-trade order. The recent versions of the two parties did narrowly agree on a handful of policies, including the virtues of globalization, but starting with the Reagan era, they had grown more divided, not more united, on economics. Barack Obama had bailed out the auto industry, regulated Wall Street, and redistributed hundreds of billions of dollars from the rich to the poor. Even Bill Clinton had engaged in bitter showdowns over taxes and spending. The notion that Clinton and Newt Gingrich, or Obama and Paul Ryan, were partners with a shared ideology that could be usefully defined by a single term ignores almost everything that happened during these years. It is a measure of the incoherence of “neoliberalism” that the term can be, and has been, applied as an epithet to almost anything: Paul Krugman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, public-employee unions, Beatles fandom.

[John McWhorter: When people were proud to call themselves ‘neoliberal’]

What’s more, the 2016 election’s shocking outcome can be adequately explained by any one of a number of perfectly mundane causes: Hillary Clinton’s drawbacks as a politician, Democrats’ leftward moves on social policy, the difficulty that incumbent parties have winning a third straight term, the mainstream media’s fixation with the email scandal, James Comey’s last-minute intervention to reopen the FBI investigation into it.

Still, the narrative that neoliberalism was to blame took hold widely—including, most fatefully, during the Biden administration. Even though Biden had served as Obama’s vice president, and won the nomination in large part because Democratic voters looked back on that partnership with fondness, he filled his administration with staffers who believed that Obama and Bill Clinton had failed the working class. The administration’s policies accordingly departed in ways that those post-neoliberal theorists deemed especially important. Biden supported organized labor almost unconditionally, even in policy areas that conflicted with other liberal priorities; pulled back on unfettered free trade; gave policy-making roles to lawyers over economists; and appointed crusading reformers to the top antitrust-enforcement positions. Perhaps most important, the administration saw its subsidies for green energy and chip manufacturing not merely as targeted responses to market failures but as the core of a new industrial policy that would restore prosperity to large swaths of America.

Triumphant headlines such as “Biden Is Getting Ready to Bury Neoliberalism” and “Why Neoliberalism Is Finally on the Way Out” celebrated the populist left’s newfound influence. “The Biden administration has explicitly disavowed all aspects of neoliberalism, including the assumptions about free trade and the alleged efficiency of outsourcing, the lack of support for trade unions, and the bipartisan contempt for industrial policy,” Robert Kuttner wrote in The American Prospect in 2023.

As recently as this past fall, the Biden administration and many of its supporters continued to insist that his post-neoliberal policies constituted a genuine revolution in American politics and economic life—a return to the Democratic Party’s New Deal–era identity as the champion of the working class.

That conviction helps explain why Biden felt entitled to a second term and why, once he finally abandoned his candidacy, he chose to pass the baton to his vice president rather than an outsider who could more credibly distance themselves from his politically toxic record. “I think one of the arguments that get made, you have the most successful presidency of any president in modern history, maybe since Franklin Roosevelt,” he said last July, by way of explaining his reluctance to drop out of the race after his disastrous debate performance.

This belief also explains why much of the party’s left wing—including Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, and Ro Khanna—lined up behind him, even as members of the party’s centrist wing fought to replace him as the candidate. “He’s been the best president of my lifetime, and we have his back,” Omar told The Washington Post. One of Biden’s final gambits to retain the nomination was a vow, apparently influenced by Sanders, to expand Social Security benefits and eliminate medical debt during the first 100 days of his second term—as if pushing the “Populist” button even harder would finally cause the public to wake up and realize all the positive change that Biden had wrought.

In reality, Biden presided over the most unpopular Democratic presidency since Jimmy Carter’s. In November, working-class voters of all races, the very constituency that Biden’s anti-neoliberal turn was supposed to court, deserted the party. Perhaps hoping for Roosevelt-size majorities was a bit ambitious, but Biden’s sweeping, historic changes ought to have had at least some positive directional impact for the party. Unless, that is, the post-neoliberal theory of politics was wrong all along.

Rather than considering that possibility, however, many of the post-neoliberals have strained to explain why the theory is still sound despite its apparent real-world failure. These explanations fall into a few main categories. Some leftists have tried to pin the blame for the election result on Harris’s decision to run toward the center once she became the nominee. Harris did embrace a more overtly moderate message than Biden, and gave less attention to his populist economic themes. But Harris performed better in swing states, where voters were inundated with her campaign messages, than she did in the rest of the country. This strongly suggests that Biden’s record was pulling her down, and that her centrist campaign themes made her more popular, not less.

Another defense holds that Biden’s successful policies simply haven’t produced political rewards yet. “The 40-year damage of neoliberalism to the living standards and life horizons of working Americans was so profound that three years of modest improvement was far from FDR-style transformation,” Kuttner argued in a postelection Prospect essay. “Many of Biden’s initiatives will take many years to bear fruit.” The outgoing president has sounded a similar note. “It will take years to see the full effects in terms of new jobs and new investments all around the country, but we have planted the seeds that are making this happen,” he recently argued in a Prospect essay under his name.

It’s true that most of the spending in Biden’s major infrastructure laws is still in the pipeline. But these delays are themselves a result of Biden’s post-neoliberal ideology, which insisted on attaching a long list of social criteria to its projects, while failing to enact legislation to speed up the permitting process. In any case, industrial policy is just one piece of Biden’s allegedly transformational agenda. Other elements—including on trade, labor, and fiscal policy—have taken immediate effect. None of these actions has shown any sign of helping Biden politically. The president’s stream of actions to forgive student debt did not produce higher support among young voters, his unwavering deference to labor unions did not yield more support among union members, and so on.

[Rogé Karma: Reaganomics is on its last legs]

And although many of the administration’s infrastructure investments remain stuck in the planning stage, some of them, such as the new Lordstown factory, have come online, bringing jobs with them. These projects offer localized mini tests of the hypothesis that delivering concrete benefits will lead to political support.

In an October story for The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann described visits to five places on the receiving end of Biden-enabled investment: Fort Valley, Georgia; Menominee, Michigan; Kokomo; Indiana, and Manitowoc and Milwaukee, in Wisconsin. “If you squint, you can see the outlines of a new post-neoliberal Democratic coalition,” he wrote. “Fast-growing clean-energy industries—wind, solar, batteries, hydrogen, electric vehicles—could join Hollywood and Silicon Valley in supporting the Democratic Party.”

In fact, every one of the counties Lemann visited wound up voting for Trump at a higher level in 2024 than it had four years earlier.

The pro-Trump swings were small, ranging from 0.1 percent to 3.5 percent—well below the national average. One could spin this as evidence that Biden’s domestic build-out had brought some marginal benefits—fractional gains concentrated in areas that were chosen as the staging grounds for gigantic national expenditures. But we are talking about small local shifts, obtained via many billions of dollars of federal investment. That is not a scalable national strategy.

Biden’s defenders also insist that his otherwise winning policies were simply overwhelmed by the headwinds of inflation, which felled incumbent parties around the world last year. But letting down your guard against inflation is, in fact, a key tenet of post-neoliberal doctrine. A 2020 strategy memo from the Hewlett Foundation, a major proponent and funder of post-neoliberal thinking, argued, “If economic developments over the past decade show anything, it is that there is greater headroom for spending without causing undue inflation,” and that the task was to focus on bringing down unemployment “without worrying about inflation quite so frantically.”

Supporters of Biden’s ambitious spending—I was one of them—were clear that events would prove out this doctrine’s soundness, or lack thereof. “If there were any doubt that Joe Biden’s economic proposals represent a big break with the policies of the Obama and Clinton Administrations, the debate about Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan dispelled it,” The New Yorker’s John Cassidy wrote in February 2021. “The only definitive way to find out whether the inflation threat is real or chimerical is to pass the $1.9 trillion package and see what happens.”

Inflation was always going to be a problem that Biden had to deal with. He dealt with it less effectively because the post-neoliberal argument that inflation either wouldn’t rise, wouldn’t last, or wouldn’t matter politically carried the day. Ignoring fears about inflation was a sound policy choice before the pandemic-induced price spike, but a dogmatic one after it. Biden’s inability to alter his course was a direct consequence of the ideological rigidity that his advisers embraced.

Finally, there’s the excuse that Biden’s policies would have been popular if only he hadn’t been too old and inarticulate to sell them properly to the public. “Biden wasn’t up to the kind of explanatory duties that the presidency requires—much less a presidency that was advancing landmark economic policies to benefit workers and consumers,” The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson wrote. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy has made a similar argument. “One of my frustrations is that President Biden and Vice-President Harris didn’t lead their economic messaging by talking about their break with neoliberalism,” he told New York magazine shortly after the election. “So the policy was really good. I just don’t think the rhetoric always matched the policy.”

[Chris Murphy: The wreckage of neoliberalism]

A great deal of evidence from political science suggests that presidential rhetoric has little ability to change public opinion, so the expectation that better speeches would have led to dramatically different outcomes is far-fetched. Even if that were not the case, the emphasis from post-neoliberals on rhetoric as a driving force of history is deeply strange. The whole point of their theory was to explain Trump’s rise as a proletarian revolt against neoliberal immiseration. Now that neoliberalism has supposedly been overthrown, we’re told that the crucial dialectical stage was for the president to deliver West Wing–quality inspirational speeches? What kind of materialism is this?

The theory that Trump’s popularity was a reaction against neoliberalism had an irresistible attraction to progressive elites. For the labor movement and other parts of the economic left, it supplied a political rationale for policies they’d long supported. For social-issue progressives, it implied that they had no need to compromise with the socially conservative positions held by working-class voters; all Democrats needed to do was address people’s “real” material concerns.

Public policy, of course, is not just about winning elections; it’s about improving people’s lives. Some of the policies Biden implemented are worth preserving on the merits. The blue-collar workers of Lordstown may well be in a better position than they were four years ago. But the electorate’s diffidence in the face of these measures is bracing. The notion that there is a populist economic formula to reversing the rightward drift of the working class has been tried, and, as clearly as these things can be proved by real-world experimentation, it has failed. It turns out there’s more to popularity than populism.

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