President Donald Trump's economic philosophy, what could be dubbed "Trumpism," is built on the unquestioned premises that tariffs and tax cuts for the rich create jobs.
Unfortunately, the tax cuts for the rich — when combined with America's ongoing habit of starting wars — have caused rapid inflation and ballooning deficits (under Trump it reached a record $40 trillion). The tariffs, like the Iran war, have also caused prices to spike; similarly, like the literal war, Trump's various trade wars have undermined global confidence in America's reliability as an ally.
Flash forward halfway into his second term and the verdict is in: Americans rejected Trumpism during the 2026 midterm elections by picking Democrats over Republicans in almost every single swing race. Yet despite this rebuke, for ordinary Americans, the policies known as Trumpism mean will exist at least until Trump leaves office in January 2029, and as such they will continue to struggle to afford basic goods and services, creating a so-called "affordability crisis" that Trump dismisses as a "hoax."
Or will they?
One of Trump's predecessors — former President Bill Clinton — actually did preside over low prices, a balanced budget (including four surpluses) and the most jobs created before or since (nearly 23 million). Arguably of greater importance, Clinton achieved these things during a time of peace, as he governed between the Cold War and the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks.
In retrospect, because the ideology that one might refer to as Clintonism can be linked to the most recent period in American history that can economically be regarded as a golden age, the question obviously arises: What can Democrats living in the Trump era learn from the Clinton era?
For answers, AlterNet turned to one of the architects of Clintonomics, Dr. Robert J. Shapiro. After crafting Clinton's economic policies during the 1992 presidential election — the one in which campaign strategist James Carville reminded voters "It's the economy, stupid" — Shapiro served as one of the handful of top economists to craft Clinton's economic policies. The Under Secretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs thus recommended Clinton increase taxes for wealthy people, raise the corporate tax rate, hike Medicare taxes for wealthy people and boost the federal gasoline tax. (He also did not get America into any major wars.)
The result? Low prices, the most jobs created by any president before or since (almost 23 million) and balanced budgets that yielded four surpluses. Enough for any Democrat to want to learn from — and they should want to because, as expert pollster Kyle Kondik from Sabato's Crystal Ball told AlterNet, "the giant wave only makes the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination more worth having, because Trump is weak and may never truly bounce back in approval. So Trump may drag down whoever the Republican nominee is. I think the fight for the Democratic nomination is wide open."
Trump does not agree with the Clinton-Shapiro philosophy on economics. When AlterNet reached out to them, they argued that the current soaring prices and dismal job market don't exist.
“Putting a stop to American workers, farmers, and businesses being ripped off by lopsided trade agreements has been a key foundation of President Trump’s Make America Great Again movement since he first came down the escalator," White House spokesman Matthew Middleton told AlterNet. "President Trump will never waver from putting Americans and America First, whether in trade negotiations or through an economic agenda of tax cuts and deregulation. This administration has already secured almost 20 fair trade deals and trillions in manufacturing investments, and will continue to push for deals that deliver even more job growth, wage increases, and opportunities for hardworking Americans."
With all of this in mind, AlterNet spoke with Shapiro for an exclusive interview about how Trumpism hurt Trump during the 2026 midterms — and what Democrats can learn from Clintonism.
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity, context and length.
How Trump's tariffs helped Democrats during the midterms.
Rozsa: Now I want to talk about another issue where you, as one of the architects of Clintonomics, differ profoundly from Trump, and that is trade. Clinton, through NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Clinton signed in 1993] and other initiatives, supported free trade. Trump is clearly a protectionist. Do you think Democrats have an opportunity to revive the arguments for free trade now that Trump has shown the catastrophic consequences of abusing tariff powers?
Shapiro: Well, I think they already have. The party has shifted fundamentally on tariffs, and they're doing so because of the effects of the tariffs and because the tariffs are a signature Trump policy. Look, the most direct and easy-to-understand step the Democrats can take to address prices is to repeal all the tariffs in the first week. All the Trump tariffs, just repeal them. You pass a law, let him veto it, and then let's see whether you can get enough Republicans in the Senate to support it.
Rozsa: Are you envisioning a situation in which Democrats vote as a bloc to repeal Trump's tariffs, Trump vetoes the repeal, and then if enough Republicans join the Democrats in overriding his veto, the tariffs will be effectively repealed, prices will go down, and Democrats will get the bulk of the credit for having accomplished this? Is that what you're saying?
Shapiro: Absolutely. That's exactly what I'm saying. Usually there's no direct way to bring down prices. Tariffs are the exception.
Rozsa: Why have Hakeem Jeffries [House Democratic leader, D-NY] and Chuck Schumer [Senate Democratic leader, D-NY] not had this conversation with you? Frankly, I think you should be discussing this with them, not me.
Shapiro: Well, I know that they're reading the polls. They know how unpopular the tariffs are. Look, there was always a part of the Democratic Party that liked tariffs, in particular some of the big industrial unions. But given the current political environment, the Democratic leadership knows that they would be subject to blistering criticism if they fail to repeal the tariffs.
Rozsa: Yes, but there is a difference between them opposing the tariffs and doing something bold like what you suggested.
Shapiro: Right. Well, we'll see. They should understand that the Democrats didn't win this enormous victory because they're Democrats. They won this victory because we have a two-party system, the party in power had failed, and the public was saying, "We're going to give the other party the power to turn things around for us." I think they understand that. I am hoping that the really extraordinary breadth of the victory, which I think is just beginning to sink in — it's not just that we carried these Senate seats in what have been ruby-red states —
Rozsa: Mississippi [where the race between Democrat Scott Colom and Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith remained too close to call as of Nov. 5], South Carolina, Iowa, Kansas.
Shapiro: Right, and Mississippi is the one exception. In all the others, the elections weren't close. These were wins of 5 to 12 percent. Talarico [James Talarico, Texas state representative, who defeated Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton] won by 12 percent.
Rozsa: Jon Ossoff in Georgia [the Democratic incumbent, re-elected over Republican Rep. Mike Collins] won by 18. Talarico was in Texas.
Shapiro: Right. And Annie Andrews in South Carolina [a pediatrician who defeated Republican Sen. Darline Graham, appointed to the seat after the death of her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham, in July 2026] won by five. That was not a close race. And Hamilton [Adam Hamilton, a Methodist megachurch pastor who defeated Republican Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas] won by seven, I think.
Rozsa: He is the first Democratic senator to represent Kansas in almost a century. [Kansas had not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932.]
Shapiro: Right. I think it's also the case that, on balance, the moderate wing of the party has been strengthened, particularly in the House, and also in the Senate, actually. But look, the main thing is the Democrats have found themselves with a very big-tent party that reaches from Elizabeth Warren [Democratic senator from Massachusetts] and AOC [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York] and El-Sayed [Abdul El-Sayed, progressive physician elected to the Senate from Michigan] to Talarico and Hamilton.
Rozsa: And Andrews.
Shapiro: Yes, and Turek [Josh Turek, Iowa state representative and Paralympic gold medalist, who defeated Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson for Iowa's open Senate seat]
A drama in his own head.
Rozsa: If I may interject again, to bring this back to the Clinton era for a moment: Clinton was able to balance the budget, create these surpluses and pass these free trade policies. Even though there were factions in the Democratic Party that opposed individual aspects of his overall program, when it led to the most job creation any president has seen before or since, and when it led to the surpluses and the beginning of paying down our debt, people saw that it worked. Thirty years later, why don't Democrats point out that this program worked and urge their big tent to make small sacrifices in the name of the greater good that we know can be achieved based on precedent?
Shapiro: Well, I do think this is the kind of program that can be carried out most effectively by a trifecta, with a president leading the way. Look, there are a lot of people who are going to run for president on the Democratic side in '28. It looks like the environment will favor the Democrats nationally, because it's not like Trumpism is going to get more popular. He is likely to be increasingly acting out a drama in his own head rather than what the country wants, and focused on his monumental constructions [including the ballroom being built on the site of the demolished White House East Wing]. And look, his go-to position is fighting and dividing. In that sense, the Democratic Congress becomes an environment in which he will, in his own terms, thrive. I do not think he's going to be conciliatory. I think it's going to be the opposite. So we're going to have a big debate in '27 and '28 over precisely this issue.
Rozsa: Tariffs and budgets.
Shapiro: Yes. Over budgets, and over center-left versus left politics. I think the country always moves between center left and center right. And Trumpism has failed because it was neither. It attacked the center right and went far right.
Rozsa: When you say there will be the left versus the center left in the Democratic Party, I think of how I reached out to the White House back in March with quotes from both a left-wing economist, Richard Wolff [economist and professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst], and two center-left economists, yourself and Ed Gresser [former U.S. trade official, now at the centrist Progressive Policy Institute]. And Kush Desai, the White House deputy press secretary, said, quote, "Those economists are idiots," and he put "economists" in air quotes.
Shapiro: Right.
Rozsa: I want your thoughts on Trump's economic advisers, the people who tell Trump how to manage the economy, people like Peter Navarro [White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing] and Scott Bessent [Treasury secretary]. How are they going to help or hurt Americans as they continue to struggle with high prices, low wages and reduced economic opportunity?
Shapiro: The Trump administration has two problems with economists. One is that they've been unable to get any economists of stature to come into the administration. That's in sharp contrast to Democratic administrations, and in contrast to George W. Bush's administration as well. And all economists or people who are trying to advise Trump on economics suffer from the same thing, and that is he doesn't want advice. He has certain notions about how the economy runs and about what he wants out of economic policy. The main thing that Donald Trump wants out of economic policy is to make himself and his family richer. That's how they run economic policy.
He's had one economic piece of legislation, and that was the big bill [the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the tax-and-spending law Trump signed in July 2025]. It was notable for reducing taxes not only on high-income people and profitable corporations, but in particular on real estate development. What else does he focus on? He focuses on not regulating crypto when he's making literally $1.5 billion off crypto schemes. He spends his time trading stocks. He had more stock trades last year than every member of Congress combined [a Bloomberg analysis found nearly 28,700 trades in Trump's accounts from January 2025 through June 2026, compared with about 22,200 for all members of Congress]. And his stock trades seem to track government contracting decisions. He's running economic policy for the country in order to make himself and his children richer, and his friends who are along for the ride.
So if Scott Bessent tries to give him economic advice, he's really not interested. When it was 100 percent clear that the economic conditions of the country were eroding support for him personally and for the Republican Party, he made no effort to course correct in order to respond to that. He doesn't care. He really doesn't. He believes that he has a following that is following him as a person, not his policies. And the Supreme Court gave him a legal path to use the powers of the presidency directly to enrich himself [a reference to Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court's 2024 ruling granting presidents broad immunity from prosecution for official acts]. The most obvious being the pay-for-play pardons.
Rozsa: Like the pay-to-play pardons, or his crypto scams.
Shapiro: Right, and the crypto scams. A lot of the crypto stuff had to do with pardons. You buy $75 million worth of his worthless meme coin and you get a pardon, right?
Rozsa: That does seem to be the government we're in. I remember when people got mad at Clinton for the Lincoln Bedroom scandal [the 1996-97 controversy over Clinton inviting major Democratic donors to stay overnight at the White House].
Shapiro: Right. Yes, that certainly seems quaint now.
Rozsa: It seems quite quaint. At least Clinton didn't plow down the Lincoln Bedroom to build a ballroom.
Shapiro: Right.
The future of the Democratic Party.
Rozsa: My final question, and I do unfortunately need to wrap this up, is this: How can Democrats from all over the ideological spectrum come together to effectively address tariffs and the budget? How do they convince certain groups in their coalition to make sacrifices in the name of the greater good, while simultaneously standing strong behind larger strategic goals like repealing the tariffs, and larger moral imperatives like holding corrupt officials accountable?
Shapiro: That's the test of leadership. And the leadership is not limited to Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. There is political room right now for public officials who would like to be national leaders to try to exercise leadership on these issues. It could come from people in the Senate who are thinking of running for president. It could come from Josh Shapiro [Democratic governor of Pennsylvania] or Andy Beshear [Democratic governor of Kentucky] or Jon Ossoff. Jeffries and Schumer have more leverage, because as leaders, they control things that members want.
But I do want to make one point, and it's something you haven't raised: We really need to think very, very seriously about all these issues, because the next administration is going to have to bail out Social Security. That's a huge issue. It's going to require new revenues for both Social Security and Medicare, and certainly for the expansion of federal support for healthcare, whether it's Medicare for All or access for non-federal workers to the federal healthcare system, whatever approach they take.
Rozsa: May I interject? I know I said I had a final question, but you raised a new point about an issue I'm very passionate about as a disability rights advocate and a disabled person: Social Security. I recently interviewed former Social Security Commissioner Martin O'Malley [former Democratic governor of Maryland, who led the Social Security Administration under President Biden]. O'Malley is very adamant that if we simply raise the cap from $184,500 [the 2026 maximum amount of earnings subject to the Social Security payroll tax] to make sure that all of the rich pay their fair share in Social Security taxes, that in itself can solve the solvency problem.
Shapiro: Raising the cap, or in the extreme eliminating the cap, yes, that generates the revenues. In itself, it's not enough, because you also have to change the benefit formula. If not, someone who is paying Social Security taxes on, say, a million dollars is going to end up with a huge Social Security pension, because the formula is based in part on what you paid in. There's a base, but high-income people get much bigger Social Security checks than average-income people. So it's not simply raising the cap. You also have to reform the benefit formula, so it becomes more complicated. But that's certainly one way to do it. One way to do it would be to raise the cap to, say, $500,000, reform the benefit formula, and include in the $500,000 not just labor income but capital income.
But we're going to have to address not only Social Security, but Medicare, and that will not help you with Medicare. My own view is to preserve the current Social Security taxes with a higher cap, but I think we need to create a new revenue stream for Medicare and Social Security. The obvious one would be some small, broad-based VAT [value-added tax], because Social Security is the smaller part of the problem. Medicare is the bigger part of the problem, particularly if we're going to expand federal support for healthcare.
Rozsa: I actually agree with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed about Medicare for All.
Shapiro: Well, it depends what that means. We don't really know what that means. If it operates like current Medicare, where people choose their own doctors and you can choose supplemental insurance to take care of deductibles and copays, I think it could work. That would make it very similar to the French healthcare system, which is essentially government support for catastrophic care, and then doctor bills, et cetera, being supported in large part by private insurance. I think that could probably work. It effectively moves us toward price controls across healthcare, because Medicare sets the rate of reimbursement, and in that sense it's a very large change. But I think that could work.
If those who think Medicare for All should be a version of the British national healthcare system, which does not have private insurance and in which all medical personnel work for the government — I don't think that'll work. It just hasn't been very successful in England. Whereas the WHO [World Health Organization] says France has the best healthcare system in the world. [The WHO ranked France first in its 2000 World Health Report.] So we've got to define what Medicare for All is. I certainly agree that the government needs to guarantee that everyone gets the healthcare they need. How we go about it is a very complicated set of issues.
