Former President Donald Trump's campaign has been stripped of the key thing that actually attracted some moderate voters to it in the first place, conservative economist Oren Cass wrote in a thread on X Friday afternoon.
The big problem for him, he wrote, is that once upon a time, Trump had at least some degree of ability to reach out to workers on economic issues — but now, he's just going through the motions and only engaging with such policy in the most superficial way possible.
"No one ever accused Donald Trump of excessive message discipline. And still... something has gone terribly wrong in his campaign," wrote Cass. "As I write in Understanding America this week, it's best understood as the gulf between 'Make America Great Again' and 'MAGA.'"
"People forget, but in 2016 Trump focused intensively on the economic problems of working Americans," wrote Cass — specifically talking about the decline of manufacturing and renegotiating "unfair trade deals." Even socialist outfits like Jacobin have pointed out that in the past, "Trump used pro-worker rhetoric nearly three times as often as he brought up controversial social issues."
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And this is how, paradoxically, many voters came to see a billionaire real estate tycoon with a long history of working with the mob and cheating his workers was able to paint himself, with a straight face, as a candidate of the working class.
Now, though, he just can't do that, wrote Cass, because he's taken that campaign messaging and commercialized it to the point of cynicism.
"'Make America Great Again' managed in four words to assert that America had been great, that it no longer was, and that he would do something about it. But that cry has devolved into the personal brand of 'MAGA,' and these are not the same thing at all," wrote Cass. "A coterie of Old Right consultants and donors who wanted nothing to do with Trump in 2016 — leaving him to his much better instincts — has taken the reins and seems determined to steer the campaign into a ditch," and now he's stuck doing "crass promotion of niche issues like cryptocurrency, and pandering to the donor class on tax cuts and temporary labor."
This doesn't sell like the old Trump did, Cass argued — and it's why he's just not landing like he used to.
