Trump's sends a big, bold message of revenge of the common man and contempt for the pretensions of the elites.
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| Reuters: Click Here |
The Trump tax plan proposes a 1.4% per year annual tax on the endowment funds of large universities.
Big message: Your enemies are his enemies. He is on your side.
There is a rising and bipartisan tide of populism in America. Bernie Sanders targeted the billionaires made rich by the economic system. He focused on economic elites. That attracted support from the left.
Donald Trump targets cultural elites, and this gets him support from the right.
Trump condemns the coastal elites in academia, in media, in diplomacy, in government generally. He targets the tastes and sensibilities of America's costal elites, those educated, urban, diversity-accepting, secular, culturally modern people. He condemns their snootiness, their condescension to "flyover country." He says the experts were liars or fools. The pollsters were wrong. The professors and economists who supported the bipartisan consensus on free trade were wrong. The persnickety environmentalists were wrong. The multicultural diversity crowd was wrong. Immigrants aren't good and safe, they are foreign and dangerous.
In the populism of the right, problem is not billionaires or wealth generally. Everyone wants to be rich, and wealth is the solution, not the problem. In cultural populism Trump voices the resentment people feel against experts, that whole class of people with different, urban, urbane, globalist, inclusive values, who are so insulated from the damage their values create that they actually welcome Muslims, tolerate athletes taking a knee at the National Anthem, and publish fake news, fake opinions, fake everything.
A great many voters responded favorably to cultural populism, and still do.
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| Harvard still in, Ozark out |
The GOP tax plan proposes to tax large university endowments. It is targeted. When first announced it would include about 150 colleges, ones whose endowments equalled $100,000 per current student. This standard would include too many schools that don't project "elitism", e.g. College of the Ozarks. The GOP has tightened the requirement to target only schools with $250,000 in endowment per student: about 65 schools.
This puts the focus on Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Williams, Amherst, Princeton: clearer representatives of elitism, located mostly in blue states.
Trump voters do not demand that he win his battles. They want to see that their enemies are his enemies and that he will flail away at them. The proposal to confiscate a significant portion of the annual earnings of nonprofit colleges need not remain in the bill for Trump to "win." It may be a point of negotiation. It will force Democrats to use political capital to protect higher education. It will force Democrats to take a stand in favor of protecting billion dollar elite members of their team.
I do not expect Trump to win this fight by having succeeded in collecting money from college endowments.
He will have won this fight by having waged it.
1 comment:
A lot to consider here, with some interesting ramifications.
It should not be forgotten that Trump is a cult leader, and one aspect of cultism is that the leader is the protector of the cult. They need to believe the leader is righting wrongs and fighting the injustices they are suffering.
By the way, he hasn't had a MAGA rally in some time. I wonder if it's because there has been a drop off in attendance, and if he will do one immediately after coming back. The Cult/Con depends on continued allegiance and enthusiasm and it may be weakening.
The colleges can handle the tax, most likely by bumping up admission to bowl games, but it may be a mistake in the long run as they will be able to claim less inclusion for disadvantaged students providing an issue for Progressives.
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