https://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2019/02/trumps-shaky-capitalist-support.html?fbclid=IwAR0ewIcvpmZzFnaf1K_WCCFkZ68DJrLLcmi0IF-bU8umoPAycHirLdVLEhw
A detailed study of 2016 campaign contributions confirms that a
majority of the ruling class opposed Donald Trump’s candidacy and that
he was backed by an unstable coalition of competing capitalist
interests.
Keith Preston:
As I would have suspected, Trumpism was an unwelcome insurgency that
was initially opposed by the overwhelming majority of the capitalist
class. When other options became less viable, many of the conventional
sectors of the traditional right-wing of the ruling class started moving
toward Trump, while most of the capitalist class remained in the
Clinton camp.As I was saying at the time of the election, of the two
candidates it was Trump who was the more "left-wing" of the two, e.g.
espousing populist economic views and anti-interventionist foreign
policy views (however sporadically, ineptly and inconsistently). Trump
is also much more of a social and cultural liberal than the normal
Republicans as demonstrated by his multiple marriages, his current
marriage to a former Playboy model, his fondness of porn stars, his
involvement in vice-related industries, his support for marijuana
legalization, gay marriage, and prison reform, his lack of religiosity,
and other characteristics that would have barred him from the Republican
nomination until very recently.
"The other broad issue that set
2016 apart from most modern presidential elections is that capitalists
sided heavily with the Democrats. Unlike 2012, the Democratic nominee
received much more campaign spending overall than the Republican: $1.4
billion for Clinton compared with $861 million for Trump. The chronology
of Trump’s fundraising is significant. During the primaries, his
campaign relied mainly on small contributions and his own money. As
Ferguson et al. comment, “His money gave him both the means and the
confidence to break the donors’ cartel that until then had eliminated
all GOP candidates who didn’t begin by saluting the Bush family for
starting the Iraq War, incessantly demanding cuts in Social Security and
Medicare, and managing the economy into total collapse via financial
deregulation.... He could say whatever he wanted” (38). Only in the
summer, as the convention approached, did the Trump campaign begin to
bring in significant money from major donors, ranging from coal mining
companies to big banks to Silicon Valley firms such as Facebook. And
capitalist donations to Trump didn’t kick into high gear until after
billionaire Rebekah Mercer persuaded Trump to put Steve Bannon and
Kellyanne Conway in charge of the campaign, with a strategy to target
white working-class voters in key swing states."
Despite
Clinton’s stronger business support overall, Trump did get majority
backing from several industries, including mining (especially coal
mining), casinos, agribusiness, rubber, steel, and gun and ammunition
manufacturers. He also received a large proportion of support from food,
chemicals, oil (especially big oil companies), transportation, and
certain financial services sectors, especially private equity firms
(“the part of Wall Street which had long championed hostile takeovers as
a way of disciplining what they mocked as bloated and inefficient ‘big
business’” [45]). As the “Hunger Games” authors argue, Trump’s call for
deregulation and climate change denial appealed to firms in many of
these industries, while a few industries, notably steel and rubber,
liked his economic protectionism. The gun industry was predictably
hostile to Democrats.
To sum up: Neoliberalism (and the related
internationalist/interventionist foreign policy stance) still enjoys
majority support within the U.S. ruling class and among political elites
in both major parties, but its ability to rally popular support is in
crisis (as it also is, for example, in many European countries).
Rightwing nationalist populism has a large popular constituency, but it
lacks a coherent, independent organizational infrastructure and its
capitalist support is relatively weak. These factors enabled Donald
Trump in 2016 to defeat establishment candidates in both the Republican
primaries and the general election, but he attracted a relatively small
and internally divided array of business supporters. As president,
despite his strong personal inclinations toward nationalist populism,
Trump has been forced to bring many establishment figures into his
administration, and to implement elements of both neoliberalism and
nationalist populism, or at least oscillate between them.
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