Heer: “Unlike Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Donald Trump will never be a traitor to his class. He is, in truth, an accurate embodiment of it.”

According to the BBC, American billionaires are “rallying behind Trump” in the wake of his felony conviction. Jeet Heer of The Nation has some thoughts on that.

A taste:

Trump’s wealthy supporters are not going to be convinced by the need to preserve democracy, since they are as inherently autocratic as Trump himself. Unlike Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Donald Trump will never be a traitor to his class. He is, in truth, an accurate embodiment of it…

Even the wealthy who aren’t authoritarian have ample reason to support Trump. The 2017 tax cuts he pushed through were an enormous boon to them, since they were skewed toward top incomes. But these tax cuts are set to expire in 2025, unless reauthorized by the president and Congress. As Ronald Brownstein reports in The Atlantic, one of the most consequential differences between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is over these tax cuts. Brownstein notes, “The best estimates are that the Trump cuts have already cost the federal government about $2 trillion, and extending them in full for another decade starting in 2026 would reduce federal revenue by an additional $3 trillion to $3.5 trillion.” If we include the proposed taxes that Biden wants to push through and that he could achieve if he wins again with a Democratic Congress, the difference is even more stark, amounting to many trillions in taxes on the rich.

Trump’s return to the White House would literally allow the wealthiest Americans to pocket trillions that would otherwise be used for public services. This simple material fact is enough to explain why the propertied class won’t listen to civic lessons about the toxicity of Trump. They are obscenely rich and Trump will help them stay that way. In fact, he’ll allow them to become even richer than they’d otherwise be…

But the sad truth is that Trump himself has the support of many real billionaires—and for good reason: He upholds their class interests. If the Democrats really want to rally popular support, they’d do well to mothball Bloomberg and run on good old-fashioned economic populism. Trump-loving plutocrats are a threat to democracy, and there is political capital to be reaped by highlighting that fact and promising to rein in their outsize economic power.

Read the entire piece here.