Trump’s victory: Why Americans chose the man who impoverished them

In electing Trump, US voters chose the President who made them poorer not richer. Sam Fowles investigates why

In all the analyses of the Trump election victory, we’ve missed an important point: good government no longer wins elections. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the economic sphere, where low-income voters chose the man who impoverished them over the party that made them richer. 

Under Trump, households in the top one per cent enjoyed tax cuts worth three times those for the bottom 60 per cent. Despite promising to reduce the national debt, Trump increased it by $7.8 trillion (before the pandemic), the third largest relative increase in history. The promised economic benefits never materialised. Corporate tax cuts, for example, produced no increase in the average earner’s income. Income inequality grew by nine per cent annually, the fastest since Regan. 

Biden and Harris, despite dealing with a global surge in inflation, reversed the decades-long trend of increasing income inequality. They delivered record high household wealth, record job creation and brought inflation back under control. As Forbes reported in March, “the American economy and people are much better off than four years ago”. Yet voters rejected them in favour of a President who used the power of the state to hand working class tax dollars to the one per cent. 

Trump understood something the left have never grasped: how voters feel matters more than reality. Over half (52 per cent) of Americans feel worse off than they were four years ago, even though most are not. Since the advent of cable news, the American right has dedicated itself to control of the public’s perceptions. The charge was led by Fox News, long accused of producing partisan talking points packaged as “news”. In the social media age, Republicans have proved far more adept at influencing perceptions online. Trump ally Elon Musk took over Twitter, once “the global town square” and transformed it into what some have called a “pro-Trump echo chamber”. The right successfully flooded social media and podcasts with (often AI-generated) fake stories, videos and misinformation. As a result, Americans are increasingly detached from reality. Some 52 per cent, for example, believe in the “Great Replacement Theory”, a far-right conspiracy theory which claims a secret cabal controls the world and is plotting to replace white people with Muslims. 

That playbook has already come to the UK (as the conspiracy theory-driven, summer riots showed). GB News has introduced Fox News-style coverage to the UK. Musk has used X to spread the “two tier policing” conspiracy theory. Nigel Farage and a host of far-right “content creators” have embraced Tiktok. The mainstream media uncritically reports their talking points.

The reaction to the Budget is a case in point. Removing the agricultural exemption from inheritance tax will impact less than 0.1 per cent of farms every year (200 of 216 000). Most properties affected do no farming at all. They are held by the super rich as a way to avoid tax (this practice has, in turn, made family farming uneconomical). The money raised will pay for essential investment in schools and hospitals. Yet the press has been flooded with headlines about the impact on “family farms” and warnings of food shortages. Writing in The Sun, Jeremy Clarkson claimed Labour wants to “ethnically cleanse” farmers and “carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants”. Clarkson has previously admitted that avoiding tax was the “critical factor” behind his purchase of his £4.25m “farm”. His grift: misleading ordinary farmers to convince them to vote for his interests (while dropping in hints of conspiracy theory) is straight out of the Trump playbook. 

Government sources say Labour believes voters will see the benefits by themselves and reward them at the next election. But they’re about to face a Kemi Badenoch-led Conservative Party along with a fortified Reform Party. Both know that control over perception is everything. Labour needs to wise up.

Sam Fowles is a barrister