The end of Donald Trumps reign of (Twitter) terror ends, predicitbly, with a review of his legacy. As one Facebook friend of mine said, “He did everything he said he was going to do.” That’s certainly not true, but one thing he did do was oversee the passage of a tax cut. He ran, curiously, on a populist platform, but how populist were the cuts, and what is their legacy?

Tax cuts are like pay cuts for the government. Tax is revenue; cutting them reduces revenue. Columbia’s Joseph Stiglitz, writing for the New York Times, notes that Trump’s tax cut led, or will lead, to deficits beyond a trillion dollars.

On the populist note, what’s maddening is the degree to which it’s a ruse. Trump’s not really a populist. He’s a rich guy who cares about himself. And his tax cut contains a swipe at those he pretended to be looking out for:

By 2027, when the law’s provisions are set to be fully enacted, with the stealth tax increases complete, the country will be neatly divided into two groups: Those making over $100,000 will on average get a tax cut. Those earning under $100,000 — an income bracket encompassing three-quarters of taxpayers — will not.

At the same time, Trump has given his peers, people with annual incomes in excess of $1 million dollars, or the top 0.3 percent in the country, a huge gift: The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the average tax rate in 2019 for this group to be 2.3 percentage points lower than before the tax cut, saving the average taxpayer in this group over $64,000 — more than the average American family makes in a year.

The party has long been about the opposite of what it purports to stand for, and Trump’s populism was only a ruse to get himself elected.