How Trump Sold Fake Populism, with Charles Derber

Everyone calls Trump a populist. Sociologist Charles Derber thinks that's exactly the con. Nick sits down with Derber — professor at Boston College and author of Fighting Oligarchy: How Positive Populism Can Reclaim America — for a conversation that lays out something most people never hear said clearly: there are two kinds of populism, and they're opposites. One points people's anger at the billionaires and corporations running the show. The other keeps all the anger but redirects it — at immigrants, at "the deep state," at cultural elites — so the billionaires walk free. Trump ran the second kind. And it worked because the Democrats abandoned the first. They get into how a billionaire convinced working people he was their champion, why the old robber barons at least built libraries while the new ones just want to leave for Mars, and the question Nick keeps pressing: are these really "hard times"? America is historically rich — so is the anger about real hardship, or about precarity and the sheer visible gap between ordinary people and a trillionaire class? Plus: why so many Americans now say they're done with big corporations, what a "positive populism" would actually look like, and whether the wave of insurgent candidates Nick's been interviewing all month is the real thing finally arriving. Charlie's book Fighting Oligarchy is out now.