A lot of folks around here feel like Donald Trump is on our side. He talks rough. He says he’s fighting for the forgotten man. He points at the folks in Washington and calls them all swamp creatures, and I know that feels good to hear. It feels like someone is finally saying what we have been feeling for a long, long time.

But my fellow working class people, we have to open our eyes and see the game. We have to be smarter than this. That man is not a savior. He is a salesman, and we are the marks. He is playing us for fools, and it is time we stopped applauding and started asking whose pockets are really getting lined.

Think about it. What has he actually done for us?

He talks a big game about bringing back our jobs. But where are they? The factories are still closed. The mills are still quiet. He gave a massive tax cut, but who did it really go to? It went to the giant corporations and the billionaires. It did not go to the waitress working a double shift to pay her electric bill. It did not go to the mechanic buried under medical debt. The rich got richer, and we got a few extra dollars in our paycheck that got eaten up by higher prices at the grocery store the very next week.

He stands up at those rallies and gets everybody fired up about problems he has no intention of fixing. He gets us shouting about the border, but who benefits from that? The big farms that hire undocumented workers to keep wages dirt cheap for everyone else. The factories that move overseas. He gets us angry at each other—black against white, native against newcomer—so we are not angry at him. So we do not see that he is having steak dinners with the CEOs who are shutting down our plants.

He is a showman. He gives us a performance. He gives us a villain to boo and hiss at, and while we are all looking at the stage, his rich friends are backstage picking our pockets clean. He is not a working man. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He has never worried about making rent. He has never had to choose between buying insulin and putting gas in the truck. He lives in a golden tower and flies around in a private jet, and he is selling us a story that he is just like us. It is the oldest trick in the book.

He is not draining the swamp. He is the biggest, loudest gator in the whole swamp. He is what the system produces when it needs a distraction. He makes a lot of noise and breaks a lot of things, but when the dust settles, the people who were on top are still on top, and we are still right here at the bottom, just with more broken pieces around us.

We cannot fall for a con man just because he uses the right words. Our pain is real. Our struggles are real. We need real solutions, not a reality TV show. We need to stop looking for a king to save us and start realizing that our power has always been in each other. It is in our unions, our communities, and our willingness to stand together and demand what is rightfully ours.

Do not let a smooth talker in a suit sell you right back into the same old trap. We are smarter than that. We deserve better than that. It is time we saw him for what he is.