No, Donald Trump isn't an economic populist

Trump may be flouting conservative orthodoxy, but debates in the GOP are mainly between the rich and the super-rich

Donald Trump
(Image credit: Getty Images)

Donald Trump appears to have graduated from a flash-in-the-pan infatuation to a genuine existential threat to the GOP as we know it.

He's bucked the Republican establishment's preference for immigration reform, coming down hard against undocumented immigration, and even for lowering documented immigration. He's sanguine about hiking taxes on the very wealthy, and he's promised to defend Medicare and Social Security from cuts.

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Jeff Spross

Jeff Spross was the economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He was previously a reporter at ThinkProgress.