Interview

Trump’s Motives Can Be Opaque. I Asked a Feminist Economist to Bare Them.

Trump’s policies cater to the 1 percent, but they don’t neatly align with capitalist interests in the traditional sense.

By C.J. Polychroniou , 

Truthou

August 2, 2025

U.S. President Donald Trump joined by women athletes signs an executive order discriminating against transgender athletes in the East Room at the White House on February 5, 2025 in Washington, D.C.Andrew Harnik / Getty Images

In the months since his return to the presidency, Donald Trump has implemented an aggressive and utterly reactionary social and economic agenda that seeks to turn back the clock of the nation’s progress on civil and human rights while further entrenching the power of plutocracy. Understanding what drives Trump’s actions is not an easy task. His approach to power stems from his greedy self-centeredness and self-serving purposes, but his actions also reveal a leader who has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions and the rule of law, one whose own political support stems from anti-immigrant hatred, racism, and sexism. In that sense, Trump’s actions and policies represent a specific ideological orientation that works hand-in-hand with the implementation of his economic agenda.

In this exclusive interview for Truthout, renowned feminist and socialist economist Nancy Folbre offers a unique and insightful way of looking at who benefits from Trump’s actions, and explaining why those actions are being pursued in the manner that they are. Folbre is professor emerita of economics and director of the Program on Gender and Care Work at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of several books, including, most recently The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: An Intersectional Political Economy.

C.J. Polychroniou: The first few months of the Trump administration have brought dramatic changes to government and society through the launching of the most systemic and aggressive assault on federal protections and civil rights, and the pursuit of an economic agenda that is thoroughly anti-environment and specifically designed to widen the gap between rich and poor in the United States. With this in mind, it has often been said that Trump does not have an ideology, yet his actions seem to suggest otherwise. So let’s start by discussing Trump and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). What’s behind the war on DEI programs?

Nancy Folbre: Underlying motives are never perfectly clear, even to those acting on them. Like most economists trying to explain behavior, I tend to first ask, “who benefits?” and it’s certainly clear that Trump’s recent policies delivered Big Beautiful Benefits to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, which include him and his family.

However, many of Trump’s policies — especially those related to his current tariff war — do not seem driven by capitalist interests in the traditional sense. They protect existing wealth and offer speculative opportunities in cybercurrencies but don’t promote the profitable investments that drive capital accumulation.

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Most people on both the left and the right cling to pretty simplistic class analysis — as in, here are the rich, here are the poor, and here are the people in between. In fact, many other forms of social division come into play, based not only on race, gender, and citizenship, but also on the types of wealth that people do or do not own.

Trump is basically a landlord with a particular fondness for land suited to golf, and a profound understanding of the human preoccupation with relative status exemplified by country clubs. Status can often be obtained simply through methods of exclusion that separate the “in-group” from the “out-group.” Status can often be conveyed by extreme self-confidence and willingness to bully others.

Trump obviously derives enormous personal satisfaction from presenting himself as the Biggest and Best Boss of All Time. This satisfaction depends heavily on the unusual political coalition he has created by directing voters’ attentions to possible gains derived by bullying those below them rather than challenging those above them. He has persuaded many white U.S.-born men (his most loyal constituency) that they can blame affirmative action and DEI for their economic woes.

Since I remain entirely unpersuaded of this point, I must explain why it has gained so much political traction. I believe a major factor is resentment of the economic and cultural privileges conferred by the type of wealth that economists refer to as “human capital,” the educational credentials that afford access to higher-paying jobs.

As Erik Olin Wright observed long ago, the “professional/managerial class” occupies a distinctive niche between those who own considerable financial wealth and no wealth at all. Members of this class (which includes college professors like myself) are not generally rich, but we exercise considerable authority based on a combination of expertise and bureaucratic position, often sanctioned by the state.

The Republican Party has always been strongly influenced by the interests of financial capital, and the Democratic party by the interests of human capital (sometimes described as “opportunity hoarding”).

In recent years, college-educated workers have fared much better economically than other workers and have also claimed more cultural respect. Indeed, the observation that someone failed to complete a college degree became a kind of justification for their economic insecurity.

The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion strategies identified with the Democratic party didn’t seriously threaten white men’s access to the professional/managerial class. However, they did heighten this group’s anxieties about the rocky path to upward mobility for anyone born to a family with little financial wealth.

What about Trump’s ruthless immigration crackdown? Aren’t those actions of his administration fueled purely by racism with the intent to promote white nationhood?

Anti-immigrant racism is the proximate cause, but more important, in my opinion, is Trump’s recognition that these false flags help divide and conquer his political opposition. Whether or not he loves white nationhood, he grabs it as a sales pitch. Among many voters, the fear of losing even small privileges may outweigh the hope of much bigger gains from a different form of solidarity. An even bigger factor was probably the sense of lost control, exacerbated by the enormous complexity of policies regarding refugee status, and a judicial system bogged down in delays.

The Democratic Party seems better at defending principles than accomplishing change. Tragically, this weakened the principles themselves, opening the door to the horrific abuses we see Immigration and Customs Enforcement committing today. The good news is that public opinion is now shifting.

Would you say that Trump’s ideology and policies also help to reinforce the power of patriarchy?

I would go further. Patriarchal backlash is a primordial source of energy behind Trump’s political coalition. Trump both celebrates and invokes masculine power as the path to success. He’s a bully who loves other bullies. He only admires women who dedicate themselves to serving him.

Women have proved more successful than men at acquiring the higher education credentials that are the gateway to professional/managerial status. They have also gained more control over their reproductive lives in ways that enhance their bargaining power in the home and in the polity.

The effort to reverse these gains is apparent not only in coercive restrictions on abortion in many states, but also in continuing efforts to defund Planned Parenthood.

These efforts, however, are much more likely to harm low-income women and their families than the women gearing up to compete for professional/managerial jobs. More harmful for higher-educated women are new restrictions on a valuable amenity for them — the opportunity to engage in employment-related work from home, which affords more flexibility for family care. President Trump issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to discontinue remote work arrangements and require employees to return to in-person employment.

Many private employers are also mandating “RTO” or “return to the office,” despite considerable resistance from employees and job applicants. As one business professor conducting research on this issue explains: “We found return-to-office mandates are more likely in firms with male and powerful CEOs. They are used to working in the office for five days a week. And they feel that they are losing control over their employees who are working from home.”

In today’s economy, control over women is an important component of control over employees.

Trump has also launched a war on higher education and on cultural institutions such as The Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center, PBS, and NPR. To what end?

The take-down of cultural elites provides a shock-and-awe display of his personal power. It also allows Trump to redirect anger from major wealth-holders like himself to the professionals and managers who represent, for many people, the face of daily authority over their work lives.

It is now widely believed that the relative economic return to a college education will decline in the future, partly as a result of increased supply and partly as a result of the growing costs of college (and reduced financial aid). Republicans are particularly likely to hold this view — which corroborates my description above of the biggest difference between the two parties.

Large employers have little to worry about in the labor market. The potential to electronically outsource some technical tasks to relatively low-wage countries has reduced reliance on the home-grown educated work force. Also, the advent of Large Language Models, sometimes referred to as artificial intelligence or AI, has both disrupted education and threatened to displace many “knowledge workers.”

It is entirely possible that the demand for professional/managerial workers will decline, reducing their relative bargaining power. One consequence of such a shift could be a realignment of perceived class interests.

In sum, how should we understand the ideological underpinnings of Trump regime, and is there room for optimism?

The Trump regime is “reactionary” in every sense of the word. Anxieties concerning the future tend to evoke nostalgia for the past. As the folk saying goes, “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” Conservatives are contradicting their own name by denying any concern about conserving our natural environment and climate. They cling to the outdated notion that economic growth can solve all our problems, and that they can deliver that growth by pursuing their own economic self-interest.

I believe they are in for some big surprises. In the meantime, we need to better explain how current economic policies will harm the majority of Americans. More importantly, we need to devise new policies to protect the common good.

I was heartened recently by psychologist Jean Twenge’s take on Generation Z (13-29 year olds), who are often described as conservative because they have lost faith in the Democratic party. She offers a different description: because they are more pessimistic about the future than their forerunners, they long for radical change — anything but the status quo.

According to one voter survey she cites, nearly 2 out of 3 in this age group disagreed that “America is a fair society where everyone can get ahead.” Nor are they romantic about the past. Four out of ten agreed that the founders of the U.S. are “better described as villains” than as heroes.

I, too, suffer from occasional bouts of pessimism and disenchantment. But I’m pretty sure that we can all learn from our mistakes. This is what science, including social science, is all about.