“Democrats need to have more respect for Trump’s Republican voters. By calling them MAGA people and ascribing to them the same personality, the character of Trump, they risk jeopardizing Biden's re-election. Let's face it, sometimes the former president did the right things: on the economy, NATO, immigration, China. The corporate tax reform worked. This is why many people vote for him.
From the snow of Davos, where he is attending the World Economic Forum, the words of JPMorgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon hit the Democratic presidential campaign like a cannon shot. Because the warning is aimed precisely at the president who, faced with the ineffectiveness of his slogans about the success of Bidenomics, has changed course by focusing his fight on the defense of democracy, by describing Trump and the Republicans as MAGA (those who… identify with his famous) defines the slogan “Make America Great Again”) as an existential threat to the future of democratic America.
And because Dimon is not only the most powerful and longest-serving banker in the United States (he has headed the largest credit institution for 19 years), but also a Democratic sympathizer who seemed for a moment to run against Trump in 2018 (He said publicly: ” “I can beat him, I'm better than him,” but after a few hours he took this sentence back) and who has often financed left-wing candidates. He has been critical of Trump and just a month ago had invited Republican donors and even Democrats, including liberals, to support Nikki Haley, whom he publicly described as a better choice than Trump.
Why this abrupt change of course? While right-wing commentators are happy, left-wing commentators are divided. Some agree: They share the fear that Biden will make the same mistake that Hillary Clinton made in 2016, when she defined Trump's voters as a “basket of deplorables,” translatable as “a mass of wretches.” That was probably the moment she lost the presidential election, condensing and expanding Trump's electorate, angry at being described in contemptuous terms.
For others, however, Dimon is simply a filthy rich banker (even a billionaire) and opportunist who has felt the wind: he understands that Trump no longer has rivals on the right, he sees Biden's weaknesses and is preparing to work with one before new Republican presidency.
There is some truth in both theses: Dimon, head of a financial institution whose customers are most likely predominantly conservative, has to be pragmatic and he said so explicitly in Davos: to those who asked him which president was better for him in business terms, he answered that he is preparing to work with both candidates. Specifically, to the point of ruthlessness: a mentality that may be due to his genetic heritage as an immigrant. His grandfather, a banker in Smyrna and Athens, emigrated to the United States when his business was doing poorly, where he changed his surname Papademetriou to Dimon because Americans were suspicious of Greek immigration (but there is another version with a sentimental one Background: She fell in love with a French woman and chose a last name that sounded good in that language).
Leaving aside the businessman's pragmatism (and here it is worth noting that when Dimon had to criticize Trump's foreign policy, he blamed Mexico for his harshness and does not promote his attitude towards Putin and Ukraine and even their conflictual relationship with NATO), what remains What's left of it His message is a call to stop attaching simplistic and misleading labels such as the nation of “Bible, beer and guns” to conservative America that lives outside of big cities.