Trump Parrots Biden’s Class Analysis

Plus, racial realignment; Israel’s ammunition; financial crises; ”happiness studies”

President Trump did a phone interview with CNBC this morning and in the course of it uttered the phrase, “the middle class largely built our country.” That is line that Biden frequently uses on the campaign trail, as in this January 24, 2024 appearance with the United Auto Workers: “Wall Street didn't build America. The middle class built America, and unions built the middle class. That's a fact.”

The thing about America is that these classes are not static—they are dynamic, with people moving between income levels over the course of a single career or in a family over generations. The divisions aren’t even that important. We’re not Britain where some people are “upper class” and others are “lower class.” This idea that “the middle class” are the heroes and everyone else is part of the problem—whether poor or rich—runs counter to the American idea, which is that “all men are created equal.”

The notion of Joe Biden—who with his wife earned $1,689,651 in 2018 from higher education institutions, and who has a 6,850-square-foot lakefront residence in Delaware as well as a $2.7 million beach house, and who earlier in his career lived in a 10,000-square-foot former DuPont mansion—as the middle class’s champion is kind of comical in its own right. How constructive it would be if there were a political candidate who instead of buying into or echoing Biden’s class-division nonsense, challenged it as divisive and contrary to the idea that we’re all in this together.

Racial realignment: In the Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch has a humdinger of a column about how American politics is going through a racial realignment. “Many of America’s non-white voters have long held much more conservative views than their voting patterns would suggest. The migration we’re seeing today is not so much natural Democrats becoming disillusioned but natural Republicans realising they’ve been voting for the wrong party,” he writes.