In a carefully coordinated publicity stunt last week, Donald Trump received a McDonald’s takeaway order from delivery driver Sharon Simmons, a 58-year-old grandmother of 10 from Arkansas. Simmons, a Trump supporter and advocate of his “no tax on tips” policy, testified before Congress last year that she began working as a delivery driver for the takeout app DoorDash in order to help cover the cost of her husband’s cancer treatment.

The photo opp should have been a slam dunk for Trump: a simple way to promote one of his policies in the company of a sympathetic advocate and beneficiary. But Trump, in characteristic fashion, could not resist the urge to insert a non sequitur about one of his own grievances: trans women athletes. “Do you think men should play in women’s sports?” Trump asked Simmons. “I really don’t have an opinion on that,” she replied, showing considerably more message discipline than the president. “I’m here about ‘no tax on tips’.”

It was a small but revealing moment. Trump’s approval rating is plummeting to new lows, and his working-class support is crumbling. He won a second term on the back of ordinary Americans’ widespread anger at inequality and dissatisfaction with their economic prospects, and yet his return to office has been marked instead with a fixation on culture-war grievances that many of those supporters find alienating.

Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election was once seen as a definitive cultural shift, proof that his aggressive, domineering style of rightwing populism had found permanent purchase in US politics. Pundits hailed the triumph of........

© The Guardian