If populist voters despise wealth, then why did they back Trump, the wealthiest man ever to become president, who paid for much of his own campaign and bragged on the trail about using bankruptcy and tax laws to his advantage?

The mark of a populist isn’t his net worth but his relationship to the establishment, his rejection of the ideologies, fashions, clichés, and manners of the political and social and cultural elite, his attitude toward the capacities of ordinary people to manage their daily affairs. Rich as he might be, Donald Trump’s candidacy was an exercise in populist confrontation and polarization. He ran against the eastern establishment of both parties with his opposition to comprehensive immigration reform, criticism of global trade, and repudiation of the foreign policies of the last two presidents. His blunt, uncouth, dramatic, untutored, brash, politically incorrect manner was about as far as one can get from elite habits of deference and groupthink. For decades, the nation’s cultural and political elites treated him with disdain, disgust, or ironic fascination. Trump was the original deplorable. That’s how he forged a gut connection with his base of white voters without college degrees.

Only a liberal could believe that Trump’s pledge to drain the swamp was an attack on the wealthy or on market economics. While he and Bernie Sanders struck similar notes on trade, Trump happily attacked the Vermont senator as a socialist nut. The swamp to which Trump and his audiences refer isn’t Wall Street per se but an interlocking system of major financial institutions and multinational corporations, lobbyists, academics, media, and, most importantly, the consultants and rent-seekers in Washington, D.C., that get rich despite failure after failure in economic, foreign, and domestic policy.