“Democrats need to have more respect for Trump’s Republican voters. By calling them Maga people and attributing to them the same personality, the character of Trump, they risk compromising Biden’s re-election. Let’s be honest, sometimes the former president also did the right things: on the economy, NATO, immigration, China. Business tax reform worked. Many people vote for him for this reason.”
Starting from the snows of Davos where he is participating in the World Economic Forum, the words of the head of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, fall like a cannon shot on the Democratic electoral campaign. Because the warning is aimed precisely at the president who, given the ineffectiveness of his slogans on the success of Bidenomics, has changed course by focusing his battle on the defense of democracy by defining Trump and the Republicans as Maga (those who identify with his famous slogan  «Make America Great Again») as an existential threat to the future of democratic America.
And because Dimon, in addition to being the most powerful and longest-serving banker in the United States (he has led the largest credit institution for 19 years) is also a Democratic sympathizer who in 2018 for a moment seemed to want to run against Trump (he said in public  “I can beat him, I’m better than him”, but after a few hours he took that sentence back) and who has often financed left-wing candidates. He has criticized Trump and, just a month ago, he invited Republican donors and even Democrats, including liberals, to support Nikki Haley, whom he publicly defined as a better choice than Trump.
Why this abrupt change of course? While right-wing commentators gloat, left-wing commentators are divided. Some agree with him: they share the fear that Biden will make the same mistake Hillary Clinton made in 2016 when she defined Trump’s voters as a “basket of deplorables”, translatable as “a mass of wretched”. That was probably the moment in which she lost the presidential elections by compacting and expanding Trump’s electorate, furious at having been described with contemptuous words.
For others, however, Dimon is simply a filthy rich banker (even a billionaire) and opportunist who has smelled the wind: he has understood that Trump now has no rivals on the right, he sees Biden’s weaknesses and is preparing to collaborate with a new Republican presidency.
There is some truth in both theses: Dimon, head of a financial institution whose customers, in all likelihood, are predominantly conservative, must be pragmatic and he said this explicitly in Davos: to those who asked him which president it would be better for his business, he replied that he is preparing to collaborate with both candidates. Concrete to the point of being unscrupulous: a mentality that perhaps comes from his immigrant genetic heritage. His grandfather, a banker in Smyrna and Athens, emigrated to the USA when his business went badly, where he changed his surname Papademetriou to Dimon, given that the Americans were wary of Greek immigration (but there is another version, with a sentimental background: it was fell in love with a French girl and chose a surname that sounded good in that language).
Beyond the businessman’s pragmatism (and here it is worth noting that, having to criticize Trump’s foreign policy, Dimon chose to blame his harshness on Mexico, not his attitude towards Putin and of Ukraine and even promotes its conflictual relationship with NATO), what remains of his message is the invitation not to attach to conservative America, the one that lives outside the big cities, simplistic and misleading labels such as the nation of “Bible, beer and guns”.