Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now? - What David Brooks got wrong!

 

In his November 6, 2024 post election opinion entitled “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?” David Brooks blames America’s elite and the Democratic Party for the Trump election. While millions can agree the Democrats have failed miserably in their number one job to “combat inequality,” Brooks ignores that corporate America has controlled the government and the economy and he ignores our pathetically out-of-date Constitution that allows small numbers to block anything progressive.

As Brooks was wrapping up he wrote “Well, Donald Trump hijacked a corporate party, which hardly seemed like a vehicle for proletarian revolt, and did exactly that.” Really! The Republican Party is certainly a corporate party, but Donald Trump has yet to hijack corporate America or take over running the economy. Recall Trump had a first term and during his 2016 campaign he made some very populist proposals to benefit the working class, all opposed by corporate America.

Start with 2016 candidate Trump who asserted the NAFTA trade agreement needed significant improvements, calling it a “disaster” and the “worst agreement ever negotiated.” He threatened to have the United States withdraw without the changes he demanded. From the beginning in 1994 NAFTA succeeded increasing trade, foreign domestic investment and Gross Domestic Product in the United States, Canada and Mexico to the great satisfaction of corporate America. When negotiations for a new Trump NAFTA began May 18, 2017 corporate America was there watching to make sure changes would be acceptable to them. From the beginning in 1994 critics like Ross Perot insisted NAFTA benefits flow to corporate America at the expense of U.S. jobs and the working class, and so contribute to inequality in income distribution. Trump had a point: unregulated free trade equals cheap labor at the expense of the working class, but corporate America ran the show to make sure nothing much happened. NAFTA remained while corporate America gave public relations deference to their brush off to Trump’s populist appeal.

Next came Trump’s populist demand to build a border wall and cut immigration that corporate America opposes and the Republican establishment blocked during the Obama years. Corporate America wants foreign immigration to provide cheap labor, but the Trump campaign promised to the working class that voted for him required that he fight corporate America and the Republican Party establishment and be aggressive in his efforts to restrict the flow of immigrants. Further he wanted to cut the number of legal immigrants coming in through the foreign labor certification program that permits U.S. employers to hire foreign workers on a temporary or permanent basis instead of American workers. These were the H1-B jobs as professionals, the H-1C jobs, as nurses in disadvantaged areas, H-2A, for seasonal jobs in agriculture, and H-2B, temporary certification for non-agricultural employment. Trump appealed to voters tired of having immigrants taking their jobs.

Trump made building a border wall be evidence of his commitment to cut immigration. After Trump’s inauguration corporate America remained silent and let him demonize and debase Mexicans and Mexican families to suit his political purposes. He separated families and put young children in detention while corporate America looked the other way knowing his threats were tall talk while they continued with foreign labor certification and continued to hire and employ documented and undocumented immigrants as their cheap labor.

These first term proposals would have benefited the working class had they been phased in over the four years of 2017-2021. It would have been the beginning of a limit on the flood of labor, but corporate America blocked them all; they want cheap labor. Trump agreeably signed corporate America’s new round of corporate and upper-class tax cuts and then they had him appoint a good and competent Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell, to manage the macro economy while the micro economy lurched forward generating more inequality of income and wealth.

There is nothing populist or beneficial for the working class in Trump’s 2024 proposals, but Brooks ignores these policy reversals and the danger January 6 attacks implies for a second term. Consider Trump’s new mass deportation demand. It offers stark contrast to slowing immigration from the first term. The reported eleven million undocumented immigrants came here for jobs and we might suppose many have two of them. Deporting them will require confronting people at their work place and disrupting and depressing production, employment and the economy, not to mention the potential for violence. His tariff proposals reverse decades of lower tariff policy and trade agreements like NAFTA preferred and controlled by corporate America.

In 2024 Trump controls a majority of voters and controls the sycophants of the Republican Party, and he had little trouble getting corporate media to do their daily best for four long years to make him a legitimate candidate and get him elected. They have succeeded, but they did so figuring to control him in his second term as easily as they did in the first. Trump’s second term policy is to challenge corporate America’s long held prerogatives and allow him to displace their decades of control over politics and the economy.  His proposals make clear how badly he wants to divide and defeat America’s corporate Oligarchs in his second term. That Jeff Bezos of Amazon and the Washington Post would sit down with Trump just before the 2024 election and make an utterly corrupt deal illustrates how that might work. After getting outwitted by corporate America in his first term Trump views them as his last frontier.

Brooks writes that “Trump is a sower of chaos, not fascism. Over the next few years, a plague of disorder will descend upon America” but he fails to mention the chaos will result from a pitched battle between Trump and our corporate Oligarchy. Recent Presidents like Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden either served corporate America or got brushed aside by them; no president has ever tried to take them on until now.  The odds are corporate America will prevail, but Trump shows no sign he cares what, or who, he will destroy and ruin in the process. Recall the white supremacist vigilantes from January 6, their destruction at the U.S. Capital, and their Confederate flag on the floor of U. S. Congress, it’s the perfect image of what is coming.