Populism and Popularism

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, June 25, 2026

 

“Popularism” is a clumsy bit of political jargon that caught on with Democratic wonks a few years ago to express an idea so intuitive as to be axiomatic. Namely, a party in a democracy will have more success if it focuses on stuff that voters, y’know, like.

 

Stick to policies that are popular and you’re more likely to win the popularity contest in November. Who knew?

 

Actually, a lot of people seem not to know. “Popularism” came into vogue among liberals as a rejoinder to progressives who believe “defund the police,” “borders are racist,” and “trans women are women” should be the ideological backbone of leftism. Voters won’t vote for policies they hate is not the sort of contentious claim that should spark fierce intraparty debate, one might think. And yet.

 

I’m skeptical of popularism. Only a little—as I say, it’s self-evidently true that popular agendas fare better at the polls. But it’s less compelling in an era of intense negative polarization, when tribal hatred of the other party tends to drive votes. And it isn’t absolute: Sometimes the party in power will deliberately pursue an agenda it knows isn’t popular because it believes fervently in the merits of that agenda.

 

Ask the scores of swing-district House Democrats who voted to enact Obamacare in 2010, fully aware that they were probably signing their political death warrants by doing so.

 

“Popularism” is distinct from populism, a program of redistributing wealth and political power from elites to average joes, but it’s probably the case that populists are more likely to be popularists than the standard-issue Beltway technocrat is. If your whole shtick is catering to the blue-collar majority, it figures that you’ll be keen to deliver what that majority actually desires. The swampy elites are out of touch; only tribunes of The People know, and care, what The People want.

 

That’s how the president got reelected in 2024. “I won on the border, and I won on groceries,” he said afterward, using the latter term as a byword for the cost of living. Per that year’s exit polling, he finished 9 points ahead of Kamala Harris on the issue of which candidate would better handle immigration and 7 points ahead on which would better handle the economy. Among Americans who said Biden-era inflation had caused them moderate hardship, Trump won by 6 points; among those who said it had caused them severe hardship, he won by … 53.

 

Cheaper goods, tighter borders, and a promised end to foolish Middle Eastern wars: That agenda was populist and popularist, and it prevailed. Which makes the spectacle that played out on Wednesday in Congress and the White House almost—almost—literally unbelievable.

 

A guy who got elected on populism and popularism has given up on both.

 

Housing crisis.

 

What happened yesterday shouldn’t have felt as surprising as it did. After all, the second Trump administration has been an extended exercise in betraying the two Ps.

 

It started with tariffs, the last thing a president bent on bringing down the cost of living for the working man should have pursued. Americans hated them. Last summer brought the One Big Beautiful Bill, which scaled back Medicaid for the poor while scaling annual deficits way, way up. Americans weren’t thrilled with that either. Then came Iran, one of those foolish Middle Eastern wars that Trump’s victory was supposed to prevent, and gas prices soared. Guess how Americans feel about that.

 

The only populist priority on which he has followed through is immigration enforcement. And thanks to the way immigration authorities have handled that, it no longer qualifies as popularist.

 

Yesterday was an easy opportunity for the president to get back onside with voters before November. The House and Senate just passed a housing reform bill by uncharacteristically lopsided margins, a testament to how broad the consensus is among voters that home-buying has grown too expensive. Congress’ compromise package aims to boost the supply of housing by, among other things, cutting red tape and barring institutional investors from buying single-family homes. Populist and popularist.

 

And a rare win for the majority party on affordability, an issue that threatens to crush it at the polls.

 

Trump was scheduled to sign the bill at noon on Wednesday in the Capitol. White House spokesmen hyped the achievement in the hours before the ceremony. Then, at around 10:30 a.m. ET, he posted this: “Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency.”

 

I don’t know where to begin.

 

Let’s start, I guess, with the fact that it’s been explained to the president many times by John Thune and others that Senate Republicans don’t have the votes to pass the SAVE America Act, an election reform bill. To do so, they’d need to eliminate the filibuster. They’re not going to eliminate the filibuster. As always, Trump has decided that the solution to a dilemma is to simply apply more coercive pressure to those defying him—even if, in this case, that means holding hostage the most commendable populist initiative of his second term.

 

Americans want cheaper housing, he wants the SAVE America Act. He didn’t debate for a second whose desire should take precedence, I’m sure.

 

Still, there might be more to his Trumper tantrum over the housing bill than rank spite at not getting his way on election reform. For all his pretensions to being an avatar of “the forgotten man,” the president remains a Manhattan real estate developer at heart. And real estate developers have been conditioned by their trade to want property to grow more expensive, not less.

 

Just ask him. “I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes,” Trump admitted in January. Later, in March, the Great Populist assured House Speaker Mike Johnson that “no one gives a s—t about housing,” according to four sources who spoke to Punchbowl News. Some of the president’s infamous quotes about the cost of living have been taken out of context to make him sound more callous (some, not all), but his attitude toward high housing prices is what it is. He doesn’t care. At best.

 

The potential electoral consequences for his party don’t seem to be keeping him up at night either. “Does the president care?” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman wondered yesterday about the GOP’s affordability problem after the housing bill went unsigned. “He’s not behaving like somebody who cares. Maybe he will start to at some point, but he is not right now.” I doubt it: An old guy who’s entered the “YOLO phase” of life is unlikely to revert to worrying about what other people—that is, 150 million American voters—think of him.

 

All told, in Trump we have a president who got elected on populism and popularism yet has functionally renounced both in less than two years in office. He plainly isn’t prioritizing the welfare of the working man and he also plainly no longer worries about making the average voter happy, at least when doing so would conflict with his own whims. Even his decision to strike a terrible deal with Iran for the sake of bringing down gas prices was framed less as a matter of helping Americans than of protecting his own legacy.

 

Which brings us back to the SAVE America Act.

 

Democracy, postliberal-style.

 

The fascinating thing about yesterday’s episode was what it revealed about Trump’s view of democracy.

 

According to popularism, the very best thing you can do for yourself and your party in a democracy is to sign crowd-pleasing legislation. Presidents don’t often get the chance anymore; modern America is typically too embittered by partisanship to create consensus around a major bill. For the governing majority to get a splashy victory on an issue as salient as housing is the political equivalent of hitting a jackpot.

 

Seizing the opportunity with both hands would be a no-brainer to any popularist. If the name of the game is winning elections and wielding power, that’s how you win.

 

To which the Trumpist might casually reply: A surer way to win is to restrict who gets to vote.

 

Popularism is hard work. The filibuster makes passing legislation difficult; rigid ideological dogmatism within one’s base limits party leaders’ ability to pander to a national majority; even if they make a determined effort, it’s anyone’s guess whether swing voters will notice, let alone care. Trump is obviously wrong when he claims that “no one gives a s—t” about housing, but if he means that voters won’t care enough about it in November to overlook their many other complaints with his administration, he might be right. Doing popular stuff here and there while in office is no guarantee of electoral success.

 

So if the name of the game is winning elections, why not address the problem more directly via the SAVE America Act? Bar states from using mail-in ballots, knowing how Democratic voters tend to favor them. Create a new procedural hurdle to vote by requiring proof of U.S. citizenship, no doubt expecting that the extra paperwork burden will discourage downscale voters who are angry about inflation from casting a ballot.

 

A wise man once said that “liberalism cares about process, postliberalism cares only about results.” Popularists are liberals. They believe in democracy, so they seek to maximize their chances of winning according to democratic rules and norms. Postliberals aren’t so constrained. If they can maximize their chances by changing or challenging those rules to arrive at their desired outcome, as Trump attempted to do in 2020 and will soon do again, they’ll happily proceed.

 

Blocking a bill that would make housing cheaper to create leverage for a bill that would make voting harder is Trumpism in its purest state. Given a choice between marginally improving its electoral chances by doing something good for the “forgotten man” and maximizing its chances by screwing him over, it will prioritize its autocratic power lust every time.

 

Yesterday wasn’t the only recent illustration either. The White House’s latest bright idea to meddle in this fall’s elections is to withhold 20 percent of Homeland Security funding from states that refuse to implement certain voting reforms that the president is demanding. (Once again, “more coercion” is always Trump’s answer.) Those funds help pay for things like counterterrorism and disaster preparedness. If he has to boost your risk of dying in some calamity to feed his “rigged election” fantasies, that’s a sacrifice he’s willing to make.

 

No authoritarian movement can be truly populist or popularist. Yet, in a strange way, Trump’s obsession with the integrity of the midterms does reflect a sort of popularism.

 

Popularism without democracy.

 

He’s done lots of popular stuff in his first 16 months in office to improve the GOP’s chances of winning, he’d tell you, never mind what the “fake news” polls say about public opinion. Yet the cheating Democrats are going to bring 50 million illegal immigrants out to vote to beat him.

 

Popularism doesn’t work unless elections are fair, right? Well, all he’s doing is making sure that they are. Unrig the midterms and you’ll see how wildly popular his policies are.

 

This is a paradox in Trump’s character. On the one hand, the postliberal strongman in him cares nothing about public approval relative to his own selfish interests. On the other hand, the narcissist in him desperately needs to believe he’s popular. Democracy matters to him not a bit but he yearns for evidence that everyone thinks he’s the greatest.

 

This is why it’s always been hard to tell (and is getting harder in his senescence) whether his paranoia about elections is a knowing lie told by a dissembling megalomaniac to discredit a threat to his power or a sincerely held delusion by a fragile egomaniac to reassure himself that the people love him. If you see him mostly as a strongman, you think it’s the first. If you see him mostly as a narcissist, you think it’s the second.

 

The paradox isn’t limited to elections. Yesterday the president informed reporters that he’s planning to investigate oil companies because gas prices remain elevated despite his big, beautiful capitulation to get Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. “We should be, in my opinion, at $2.25 right now at the pump,” he mused. Later, in a Truth Social post, he flatly accused the companies of gouging.

 

There are many explanations besides gouging for why oil hasn’t returned to its prewar prices, beginning with the risk premium created by the possibility of hostilities resuming with Iran. If you told me that Trump knows that and dishonestly stooped to Elizabeth Warren-esque demagoguery about corporate greed to shift blame for high gas prices away from himself, I would believe it.

 

But if you told me that he’d earnestly convinced himself that the liberal cabal that runs Exxon is trying to screw him in November by artificially inflating prices, I’d believe that too. “The wish is father to the thought”: There’s probably never been a purer exemplar of that adage in American public life than Donald J. Trump.

 

It’s no coincidence that someone who yearns to be loved by millions yet feels unbound by accountability to them would behave more like a king than a public servant. It’s also no coincidence that someone who perceives no special legitimacy in democracy and who craves adulation to a degree unusual even for politicians would be more willing to tamper with election rules to produce a result that proves how adored he is.

 

And it’s no coincidence that popularism and populism would both fall out of favor with that someone once he was foolishly elevated to the presidency. The incentive mechanism on which popularism depends—leaders who do popular things get rewarded with votes—doesn’t work with a leader who can’t cope psychologically with the reality that the things he does aren’t popular. And the ideological assumption on which populism depends—that the average joe has particular wants and needs that aren’t being met—doesn’t work with a leader who assumes their wants and needs are defined by him.

 

Enjoy “Stop the Steal 2.0” this fall, American voters. You earned it.