Obama and Trump seem like cosmic opposites: the tasteful and the vulgar; the respecter of norms and the smasher of precedent; the reluctant president and the would-be tyrant who will stop at nothing.

But there is a common thread if we look closer. Both men are celebrities who headed up popular movements that turned out, when challenged, to be as thin as a coating of ice on a windshield. They are both men of image, and in both cases the image is a sort of phony populism. Obama’s salutes to “ordinary people” were not much more sincere than Trump’s shout-outs to the “forgotten man.” 

These mighty men and their plutocratic populism: it is their world now, not ours, and sometimes it feels as though all that is really left to us ordinary people are futile gestures.

All The Change In The World, by Thomas Frank