The Great Illusion of the Working Class

How Trump sold a dream, and why Americans keep voting against their own interests

The Salesman of 2016

Back in 2016, when Trump was running for president, I had a conversation with a Canadian friend who’s a hardcore liberal. She told me there was no way Trump would ever win. She said he was a liar, a clown, a fraud. The usual lines from liberals back then.

I told her, “Don’t be so sure.” Because what she didn’t see, what a lot of people didn’t see, was that Trump was a master marketer. He wasn’t running a campaign. He was selling a product.

And that product was himself. The outsider. The fighter. The man who claimed to stand for the forgotten working class. Farmers, factory workers, small business owners. The people who felt left behind by the Democrats during the Obama years. Trump saw that pain, saw that niche, and sold directly into it.

He found his market and dominated it. That’s why he won.

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The Working Class Mirage

But that’s where the problem begins. The whole idea that working-class Americans think Trump represents them is completely false. He sold them a dream, not a plan.

They thought they were voting for one of their own, but they were voting for a billionaire who never worked a day in their world. Look at what happened after he got in. The tariffs he pushed didn’t help the farmers. They hurt them. The “big, beautiful Bill” didn’t lift the working class. They made the rich richer.

Even during his presidency, his family made billions through business deals, political leverage, and shady crypto projects. That’s not populism. That’s exploitation.

The deeper issue is class education. Americans lack class-conscious education. They don’t see politics through class. They see it through personality. They think a rich man in a red tie understands their pain better than a union worker. That’s delusion.

In China, even in high school, we learned the basics of class and power. It wasn’t deep Marxist theory, but it gave us a framework. Here, that framework doesn’t exist.

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Why Class Consciousness Matters

And this is why I’m here. I’m tired of seeing working-class people being lied to. Tired of seeing them vote against their own interests. Every election, the same story repeats. They keep choosing the wrong guy because they don’t see the class line.

They don’t understand who benefits from their vote. This isn’t only about education. It’s about awareness. Without class consciousness, people mistake their oppressor for their savior.

That’s why I keep talking about class struggle. Because the bourgeoisie will never work for the working class, their interests don’t align. The working class wants fair wages and dignity. The bourgeoisie wants profit and control. That’s the conflict at the heart of every political system.

But in America, people are scared to talk about class. The moment they hear “class struggle,” they think communism. And yes, class education is part of communist theory. But the logic behind it is simple. Class exists because of exploitation. If you ever want to end exploitation, you must first understand class.

That’s all I’m saying. These are things I learned in high school in China. Nothing extreme. The difference is, I also understand how the American and Canadian systems work. I see the same patterns repeating, and I talk to people across different levels of society.

That’s why I’m doing this. To open this conversation. To make people think about class again.

This article applies to all countries, not just the United States.

Thank you for listening.