In an interview with Fox News last month, President Trump and his billionaire “efficiency”, Elon Musk, framing a new tariff for foreign trade partners as a simple justice.
“This is what we will do: the mutual. Whatever charges, I am charged with fees. “I do it with every country.”
“It seems from justice,” said Musk.
Trump laughed. “This is doing,” he said.
Musk, the richest person in the world, said: “It is like, he is fair.”
The moment was one of the many in the recent months in which Trump and his allies frame his political agenda on the concept of fairness – which experts say is a strong political message at a time when many Americans feel frustrated by inflation, high housing costs and other systematic barriers to move forward.
“” Trump has a good feeling of what it will echo with people, and I believe that we all have a deep sense of morals – so we all realize the importance of fairness, “said Court Gray, Professor of Psychology at North Carolina University in Chapel Hill and author of” The Amazing: Why We Fight about Ethics and Politics and how to find a common ground.
“At the end of the day, we are always worried about not getting what we deserve,” Gray said.
In addition to his “fair and mutual plan” for definitions, Trump cited fairness in his decisions to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, and the transgender athletes prohibited competition in sports, the expansion of American aid to Ukraine and an amnesty for his supporters who stormed the American Capitol on January 6.
Trump evoked fairness in meetings with a group of world leaders, including Japanese Prime Minister Shigro Ishiba and British Prime Minister Kiir Starmer. It has suggested that his Crusader campaign to end the programs of “diversity, fairness and integration” revolve around fairness, external aid and aid to illegal immigrants as unfair to the American taxpayers who attacked the Ministry of Justice, the media and federal judges who ruled against his administration as an inappropriate bias against him.
Trump and Musk-through a “government ministry”, which is not an American agency-organized a comprehensive attack on the federal workforce largely by framing it as a liberal “deep state” that operates in unfair ways against the best interests of conservative Americans, or not working at all for unanimated work allowances.
“This is not fair to millions of people in the United States who are working hard from work sites and not from their home,” Trump said.
In the speech of the Ministry of Justice this month, Trump has repeatedly complained that the courts that dealt with him and his allies are unfair, and they repeated baseless allegations that the last elections were also unfair to him.
“We want fairness in the courts,” Trump said. “The elections, which were completely forged, are a great factor,” Trump said. “We have to face honest elections. We must have limits and we must have just courts and law, or we will not have a country.”
Before a meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Roti this month, Trump-not for the first time-for the first time-for European countries that did not pay its “fair share” to defend Ukraine against the Russian aggression, and the United States pay a lot.
“We have treated very unfairly, as we are always in every country,” Trump said.
Almost exclusively, Trump’s calls for fairness, and his supporters or the United States as victims, critics and political opponents as engineers of architects and defenders of the current unfair situation that continued for generations. He has repeatedly used this framework to justify the measures he says aims to demolish this current situation – even if it means breaching the criteria or violating the law.
Trump has suggested that the unfair media coverage of it is not fair and therefore “illegal”, and that the judges who are judging against him are unfair liberal activists who must be isolated.
I heard the feeling policy
Of course, the grievance policy is not new – nor the importance of “fairness” in democratic rule. In 2006, the late Harvard researcher for political behavior Sydney Viba Books for fairness Being important in various political systems, but “in particular is centralized in democracy.”
Verba notes that fairness comes in various forms – including equality in rights under the law, the equal sound in the political field, and the policies that lead to equal results for people. But the perception of fairness in a political system, as he wrote, often related to whether people feel they hear.
“Democrats are safe when some people do not depend on the fact that they are invisible to those who make decisions,” Verba wrote. “The equal treatment may not be achieved, but equality is considered a goal worth seeking for it.”
According to many experts, Trump’s attractiveness is partially dependent on his ability to make ordinary people feel that they hear, regardless of whether his policies are actually speaking to their needs.
Gray said that there is “fair distribution”, which she asks, “Do you get what she deserves?” And “procedural fairness”, who asks, “Are things determined in a fair way? Have you got a sound? Have you got inputs?”
Gray said that one of Trump’s skills is the use of people’s inherent sensation that there is a lack of distribution fairness in the country to justify policies that have nothing to do with such unends, and to undermine existing operations to ensure procedural fairness, such as judicial review, but it does not lead to the production of the bodies he desires personally.
“What Trump is doing is a good job in it is the lack of clarity in the separation line between the rules that you can follow or should not follow,” he said. “When he opposes the rules and is called, he goes,” well, these moral rules are unfair. “
Gray said that the people who voted in favor of Trump and have legitimate feelings that things are unfair and then give him the benefit of doubt, because it seems that he speaks their language – and is on their behalf.
“He not only says he is. He says he is on behalf of the people he represents, and the people who represent them think things are unfair,” Gray said. “They do not get enough in their lives, and they do not get their entitlement.”
Trump said that Lawrence Rosental, head of the Center for right -wing studies at the University of California at Berkeley and author of the book “The Empire of Resentment: The Pars of Power of Nationality”, said that his supporters were built as a leader “interested in reforming the injustice of the working class.”
But this idea is based on another idea, and even more important for Trump’s personality, that there are “enemies” there – democrats, coastal elites, immigrants – who are the cause of this injustice, Rosental said.
“He calls the enemies, and it is very good in that-as is the case with all right-wing tyranny,” said Rosental.
Rosental said that such a policy depends on a concept known as “the theory of replacement”, which tells people to fear others because there are many resources that must be wandered only. The theory is often compatible with the argument that Trump often offers, that immigrants who are not documented who receive jobs or benefits represent an inherent threat to the Maga base.
“The feeling of boredom is very essential and it was for some time,” said Rosental.
John T. said. And the co-director of the US Presidency at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Trump has a “noticeable ability to build the world in a way that you prefer”-even if this is the victim-and it seems “super” among the presidents in terms of focusing on political justice.
“Certainly from his first term with the dismissal,” Russia’s trick “,” non -honorable media “, and” fake news “and then” weapons “for justice – he built a kind of victim’s personality, in a battle with the deep state, which is now essential in his interaction with the Maga Basic Circle.
An idea for Democrats
By communicating with Trump’s victory in November, the Democrats increased in his ability to speak to Americans who feel the dispute-and began to capture fairness as their own pride, partly by chest in Mega-Billionaire Musk.
in Interview with NPR Last month, MP Alexandria Okasio Cortez (DN.Y.) sparked the idea of injustice in the system by saying that the American government is working for the wealthy like musk, but not for everyone. She said, “Everything feels increasingly fraud.”
She and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have begun since then on the “Oligarra” tour of the country, as they bombed the role of musk in the government and asked how his actions, or Trump’s actions, ordinary American at the lowest level.
“At the end of the day, the top 1 % may have a wealth and tremendous power, but it is only 1 %,” Sanders Friday wrote on x. “When 99 % stand together, we can transform our country.”