In an interview sitting with Fox News last month, President Trump and his “efficiency” multimillionaire advisor Elon Musk frame new tariffs on foreign commercial partners as a simple matter of equity.
“I said: 'This is what we are going to do: reciprocal. Whatever they charge, I am accusing,” Trump said about a conversation he had had with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “I'm doing that with each country.”
“It seems fair,” Musk said.
Trump laughed. “He does,” he said.
“It's like, it's fair,” Musk said, the richest person in the world.
The moment was one of the last months in which Trump and his allies have framed their political agenda around the concept of equity, which experts say it is a powerful political message at a time when many Americans feel frustrated by inflation, high housing costs and other systemic barriers to advance.
“Trump makes a good sense of what he will resonate with people, and I think we all have a deep sense of morality, so we all recognize the importance of equity,” said Kurt Gray, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and author of the book “Outgaged: why we fight for morality and politics and how to find common terrain.”
“At the end of the day,” Gray said, “we are always worried about not getting what we deserve.”
In addition to its “fair and reciprocal plan” for tariffs, Trump has cited equity in its decisions to withdraw from Paris Climate Agreement, prohibit transgender athletes from competing in sports, climbing US help to Ukraine and forgive their followers who assaulted the United States capitol on January 6, 2021.
Trump has invoked justice at meetings with a large number of world leaders, including Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ihiba and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He has suggested that his crusade to end the programs of “diversity, equity and inclusion” This is equity, foreign aid and assistance to undocumented immigrants as unfair for US taxpayers and attacked the Department of Justice, the media and federal judges who have governed against their administration as they host unfair against him.
Trump and Musk, through its “government efficiency department”, which is not an American agency, have orchestrated a radical attack against the federal workforce to a large extent by framing it as a liberal “deep state” that works unfairly against the best interests of conservative Americans, or does not work at all to work assignments at home.
“It is unfair to the millions of people in the United States who, in fact, are working hard on work sites and not from home,” Trump said.
In a speech from the Department of Justice this month, Trump repeatedly complained that the courts unfairly treated him already his allies, and reiterated statements without foundation that recent elections have also been unfair to him.
“We want justice in court. The courts are an important factor. The elections, which were totally manipulated, are an important factor,” Trump said. “We have to have honest elections. We have to have borders and we have to have fair courts and laws, or we will not have a country.”
Before a meeting with NATO general secretary, Mark Rutte, this month, Trump complained, not for the first time, for European countries that do not pay their “fair participation” to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression, and the United States paid too much.
“They treated us very unfairly, as we are always for all countries,” Trump said.
Almost exclusively, Trump's invocations of justice threw him, his supporters or the United States as victims, and his critics and political opponents as architects and defenders of a decidedly unfair status quo who has persisted for generations. And he has repeatedly used this framework to justify the actions that, according to him, are aimed at demolishing that status quo, even if that means violating the norms or stirring the law.
Trump has suggested that his unfavorable media coverage is unfair and, therefore, “illegal”, and that judges who govern against him are unfair liberal activists that should be accused.
The policy of feeling heard
Of course, complaints is not new, nor the importance of “justice” in democratic governance. In 2006, the deceased political behavior of Harvard Sidney Verba wrote about the equity that was important in several political regimes, but “especially in democracy.”
Verba said that justice comes in different ways, including equal rights under the law, the same voice in the political sphere and policies that result in equal results for people. But the perception of justice in a political system, wrote, is often reduced to whether people feel heard.
“Democracies are simpler when the reason why some lose does not rest on the fact that they are invisible to those who make decisions,” Verba wrote. “The equal treatment can be unattainable, but the same consideration is an objective that is worth fighting.”
According to several experts, Trump's appeal is based partly on his ability to make average people heard, regardless of whether their policies really talk about their needs.
Gray said there is “distributive equity”, who asks: “Are you getting everything you deserve?” And “procedural justice”, who asks: “Are things deciding fairly? Did you receive voice? Did you receive contributions?”
One of Trump's skills, said Gray, is to use the inherent meaning of people that there is a lack of distributive equity in the country to justify the policies that have little to do with such inequalities and to undermine the processes that exist to guarantee procedural justice, such as judicial review, but that do not produce the results personally desires.
“What Trump does a good job is to blur the line between the rules that he can follow or that he should not follow,” he said. “When it disobeys the rules and is called,” well, those moral rules are unfair. “
The people who voted for Trump and have legitimate feelings that things are unfair and then give them the benefit of the doubt, Gray said, because they seem to be speaking their language and in their name.
“Not only does he say he is saying that he is in the name of the people he represents, and the people who represent think things are unfair,” Gray said. “They are not getting enough in their lives, and they are not obtaining their due.”
Lawrence Rosenthal, president of the Right -Right Studies Center in UC Berkeley and author of “resentment empire: the toxic hug of populism of nationalism,” Trump said and his supporters have built him as a leader “interested in fixing the injustice for the working class.”
But that idea is based on another notion, even more central in Trump's personality, that there are “enemies” out there: Democrats, coastal elites, immigrants, which are the cause of that injustice, Rosenthal said.
“He names the enemies, and is very good in that, as are all the authoritarian of the right,” Rosenthal said.
This policy is based on a concept known as “replacement theory”, which tells people who fear others because there are only many resources for all, Rosenthal said. The theory fits with the argument that Trump often does, that undocumented immigrants who receive jobs or benefits is an inherent threat to their magician base.
“The feeling of dispossession is absolutely fundamental and has been for some time,” Rosenthal said.
John T. Woolley, co -director of the American Presidency project at UC Santa Barbara, said Trump has “a remarkable ability to build the world in a way that favors it”, even if that is the victim, and seems to be an “atypical” among the presidents in terms of the frequency with which it focuses on equity as a political motive.
“Certainly since his first term with dismissal, 'Russia's deception', 'dishonest media', 'false news' and then 'armament' of justice, has built a kind of victim personality, in battle with the deep state, which is now really basic for its interaction with its main magic constituence,” Woolley said.
An idea for Democrats
Upon reaching an agreement with Trump's victory in November, the Democrats have increasingly recognized their ability to speak with the Americans who feel behind, and began to capture equity as their own motive, partly by concentrating on mega billionaire of musk.
In an interview with NPR last month, the representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (DN.Y.) evoked the idea of injustice in the system in saying that the US government is working for rich people such as Musk, but not for all others. “Everything feels more and more like a scam,” he said.
She and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT.) Have embarked on a national “oligarchy” tour, where they have developed the role of Musk in the government and questioned how their actions, or those of Trump, have helped the average Americans in the least.
“At the end of the day, the upper 1% can have a huge wealth and power, but they are only 1%,” Sanders wrote on Friday in X. “When 99% joins, we can transform our country.”
