![]() Second, the same wide and increasingly bitter divide between the two major political parties that helped Trump gain office also made it difficult for him to assemble an effective governing coalition. First, the divisions in political authority associated with the country's unusual political institutions limited Trump's room for action while strengthening the role of ‘establishment’ conservatives in Congress. Once the drama shifted from campaign to governance three extant features of American politics reasserted their centrality. Those already in place possessed their own concerns, as well as formidable capacities for action (Hacker and Pierson 2010 Hertel-Fernandez and Skocpol 2016). Thus, once the election was over, ‘Trumpism’ – itself largely inchoate – had to be grafted onto a set of organizations and institutions that predated his ascendance. Moreover, while he occupied the most visible site of political authority in the US, the American presidency is quite far from hegemonic. Populism's ostensible tribune, Donald Trump, had no real affiliation to any durable populist organizations. The transition of Donald Trump from campaigner to president has highlighted the complexity and variability of right-wing populism as a social phenomenon. Indeed, the cross-national variation is likely more significant than the points of similarity. If one shifts from thinking about populism as a cultural or electoral force to examining its influence on governance – its actual impact on the control of public authority, and the priorities towards which that authority is directed – the story becomes more complicated. ![]() Yet when one looks beyond polling and election results, the image of populism as a relatively uniform wave of social change sweeping across the landscape of liberal democracies begins to break apart. Populist politics in France, Britain and the United States and much of Europe share striking commonalities in rhetoric (anti-globalization, anti-immigrant, anti-technocrat) and core bases of support (older white voters with limited education, in areas outside the most economically dynamic urban centres). ![]() The evidence that this is a cross-national phenomenon is abundant. Understandably, this combination has intensified an already growing interest in right-wing populism. In little more than ten months, elections featuring Brexit, Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen took place in three of the world's oldest democracies. The chasm between Trump’s rhetoric and his actions justifies a more skeptical assessment of the breadth and depth of American populism, one that acknowledges how its contours are shaped by the nation's unusual political institutions, its intensifying political polarization and the out-sized influence of the wealthy. Yet the administration’s substantive agenda constitutes a full-throated endorsement of the GOP economic elite’s long-standing demands for cuts in social spending, tax reductions for the wealthy, and the gutting of consumer, worker and environmental protections. American political institutions offered a distinctive opportunity for a populist figure to draw on this fury to first capture the nomination of the GOP, and from that position to ascend to the White House. Although American right-wing populism has real social roots, it has long been nurtured by powerful elites seeking to undercut support for modern structures of economic regulation and the welfare state. ![]() In the process the analysis provides a multilayered contribution toward understanding how these normcore plutocrats in gold elevators have achieved and extended their power.Any effort to situate Trump’s ascendance in the broader currents of cross-national developments, or in the longer course of American political development, must begin by recognizing it as a curious hybrid of populism and plutocracy. That Trump and friends are not on a ladder but in an express lift symbolizes the attempted velocity of this phase of corporate meritocracy. Asking how a depiction of glittering luxury can be presented as populist revolt, it discusses how elites draw on discourses of meritocracy, of “traveling up the social ladder,” to validate their actions. Analyzing the symbolic and material contexts of these two images, it considers the physical context of the lift within Trump Tower the tangled web of relationships uniting the men in the lift and the first photograph’s later life as a social media meme. The article provides a cultural and political analysis of the plutocrats who are playing at being ordinary “winners,” or what it calls normcore plutocrats. This article analyzes two notorious photos of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage-one on their own, and one alongside Arron Banks, Gerry Gunster, Andy Wigmore, and Raheem Kassam-standing in a gold-plated elevator after Trump had won the US election. ![]()
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