Elections are won on the day of the vote, but the meaning of victories is established in the debates during the following weeks. American right-wingers have insisted that November 5 witnessed the triumph of a conservative multiracial working-class coalition, with Donald Trump as the tribune of the people having received a mandate to implement a far-right agenda.

Many observers have followed this ready-made framing, defaulting into an interpretation that has dominated on both sides of the Atlantic for a decade: Allegedly, this was yet another instance of the "populist revolt" against elites. The "populist wave" – the favorite image of pundits – we are told is gaining strength again. These reactions are not just lazy; they are empirically wrong, and, most important, they are politically pernicious.

Is Trump a populist to begin with? If one thinks that populism is all about anger at "the establishment" there is an obvious problem with the fact that Trump himself is part of a particular elite. But the crucial element of populism is not distrust of the powerful – that can be a democratic virtue. Rather, it is the populists’ claim that they and only they represent what they usually call "the real people" – the very phrase Trump employed when he addressed his followers on January 6, 2021.

Populism is about excluding others: Obviously this is happening at the level of party politics, where all other contenders for power are declared illegitimate and corrupt; but it also happens at the level of the people themselves, where anyone who does not fit into the symbolic construction of a supposedly "real people" is excluded from the body politic.

The exceptional role of oligarchs

Not every populist in this sense is a racist, but racism and populism can easily go together. Trump became increasingly uninhibited as the presidential campaign went on. To be sure, Republicans have been appealing to whites with racist rhetoric since the early 1960s, but never before has white supremacy featured so openly.

Trump also left no doubt that he viewed anyone opposing him not as a legitimate political adversary, but as an enemy – that is, by definition an enemy of the people, since only Trump represents the people.

Hence, what we witnessed was a victory for far-right populism. But it was not populism in the sense of "pro-workers," an understanding popular in the United States, and in some European academic discourses.

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