Trump’s core message was ersatz economic populism and anti-war rhetoric

Evidence

In fact he usually didn’t spend much time on those themes. […] [T]he heart of his message was something different, an ersatz economic populism, which has been noted far and wide, but also a strong, usually overlooked, anti-war message. Both spoke to legitimate working class concerns. […] Trump took the Bernie-style populism, emptied it of real class politics, reduced it to a jumble of affective associations, and used it to beat-up the smug liberals of the professional managerial class. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2039

Contrary to how he was portrayed in the mainstream media Trump did not talk only of walls, immigration bans, and deportations. In fact he usually didn’t spend much time on those themes. […] [T]he heart of his message was something different, an ersatz economic populism, which has been noted far and wide, but also a strong, usually overlooked, anti-war message. Both spoke to legitimate working class concerns. […] Trump took the Bernie-style populism, emptied it of real class politics, reduced it to a jumble of affective associations, and used it to beat-up the smug liberals of the professional managerial class. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2039

Categorization

• XREF: The PMC as opponent echoes ch87/ch116 discussions of the liberal-professional class. — connects to: Trump’s blue-collar appeal rested on four identifiable mechanisms, not mere economic convergence
• SEED: The claim that Trump ran a genuine anti-war message that working-class voters rewarded is a contrarian angle worth unpacking in an essay on populism’s media logic.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2039