Corruption of the political process is ultimately economic.

"Following Emmanuel Macron's election as President of France in 2017, global elites breathed a sigh of relief. The populist wave, they assured themselves, had crested," wrote Prof B Eichengreen. One view is that populism is a reaction to economic problems as in Italy, which has been suffering low productivity for more than two decades, or Brazil which saw a massive recession in 2015-16. But the US was growing for 6 years by the time Donald Trump was elected president, so economic problems are not to blame. Americans were angry at the transfer of jobs overseas due to outsourcing of production to countries with low labor costs. Those who are anti-Trump glibly blame the loss of jobs to automation. If factories in the US are twice as efficient and are manufacturing more because of automation, prices would fall, reducing imports. Instead US trade deficit with China is $375 billion, creating jobs in China at the cost of American workers. Analysis of numbers by some economists now suggests that the US government greatly overestimates productivity gains due to automation and the US has really lost jobs to China. It is not economics but, "What unites the supporters of these upstart politicians, therefore, must be something else. In fact, the main ingredient is revulsion against the political process," thinks Eichengreen. Perhaps, he has forgotten the devastating effects of the subprime crisis, following which corrupt bankers were bailed out while people lost their homes to foreclosure. The government distributed $439.6 billion to banks, auto companies and the insurance company AIG, to prevent them from collapsing. The government made a profit of $66.2 billion on the bailout but it did little to help homeowners despite Obama's rhetoric. Only a fraction of homeowners was helped to reduce their mortgage bill and one-third defaulted again. After her loss to Trump, Hillary Clinton said, "I win the coast. I win, you know, places like Illinois and Minnesota - places like that. What the map doesn't show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America's gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward." That is precisely why she lost. The financial centers on the east and west coasts are making money while the heartland of the US has seen a loss in living standards. "When a local factory closes because a firm has decided to outsource to a supplier across the border, more is lost than the hundreds (or thousands) of jobs that moved abroad," wrote Prof D Rodrik. "Anomie, family breakdown, opioid addiction, and other social ills often follow." This is something that both Eichengreen and Clinton have to understand. Till then they will have to tolerate the Donald's cherubic face.