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"As we know, Trump supporters tend to be white, tend to be older, tend to be male, tend to live in households with slightly higher income, and tend to have less education. Interestingly, his base is also significantly more likely to be self-employed overall, among other whites, and among other Republicans. In key respects, Trump represents the revenge of Joe the Plumber — and indeed Joe supports him. Many feel more comfortable casting his bid as some abhorrent anomaly. But Trumpism is no oddity. Instead it’s the expression of the anxieties of the petit bourgeoisie and a result of a break between two wings of the capitalist class in the Republican Party that began with the emergence of the Tea Party." The Revenge of Joe the Plumber
"Before Donald Trump was elected, stock markets went down every time he improved in the public opinion polls.  Finance capital did not want him to win.  But since his surprise election, stock markets have not slumped.  On the contrary, they have risen substantially along with a strengthening dollar.  It seems that ‘the Donald’ could be a good thing for Capital after all." Testing Trumponomics
" Trump and Berlusconi are both men who came to power from business rather than politics, and both have presented their inexperience with the political establishment as a mark of purity. They have both insisted on their entrepreneurial success as the most evident proof of their qualification to rule the country. Like Plato’s tyrant, they both exhibit an ethos based on a dream of continuous and unlimited jouissance and an aggressive and hubristic eros (though Berlusconi prefers to think of himself as an irresistible seducer rather than a rapist). They both indulge in gross misogynistic and racist jokes and have reshaped public language by legitimizing insult and political incorrectness as acceptable forms of political communication and by embodying an exhilarating return of the repressed. They both revel in kitschy aesthetics and don the orange hue of artificial tanning. And they both allied with the far right in order to advance a political project of authoritarian neoliberal