Joe Conason - 'Populist' Trump Punks His Credulous Fans (Again)

There was never any reason to think that Donald Trump’s stump-speech assaults on Wall Street banks and hedge funds were even momentarily sincere — but millions of working and middle-class voters loved his ‘populist’ rhetoric.

Emerging from that gold-plated jet, Trump would roar about cracking down on the financial vultures who had fattened while everyone else suffered, as his fans cheered.

He wouldn’t let those paper-shuffling crooks escape their share of taxes any more. He was paying for the campaign from his own massive fortune, so he would owe allegiance to nobody but the American people. He excoriated Hillary Clinton, who had accepted tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, warning that the Democrat would dance to Wall Street’s tune. He even aired a television commercial, late in the campaign, that vowed to free the country from the “globalist” designs of Goldman chair Lloyd Blankfein and investor George Soros.

Voters enchanted by Trump’s promises may not have known that he owed his wealth and the continued existence of his business — despite multiple bankruptcies — to bankers at places like Goldman Sachs, UBS, and Deutsche Bank (and still owed them hundreds of millions of dollars). They probably didn’t know how quickly he abandoned his bogus promise to fund his own campaign, turning to Steven Mnuchin, a Goldman Sachs veteran and predatory mortgage lender, to raise millions.

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