In any analysis of Trump it is important to recall how he actually made it into office. The biggest draw to him was that he wasn’t one of them – a career politician beholden to special interest money. That independence, along with his willingness to fight as dirty as his political rivals, were refreshing changes to the typical appeasement and punching-bag approach taken by most establishment Republicans.
Trump’s first campaign featured a specific agenda that was tangible – lower taxes, repeal and replace Obamacare, constitutionally conservative judges, new and improved trade deals, defeat ISIS, and stronger border and immigration controls – packaged in a spirited America First approach. Never did he advertise to be a fiscal or constitutional conservative, nor portray himself to be a statesman or diplomat – things we all prayed for him to evolve into.
Contrary to his compelling first campaign Trump’s disastrous second lacked any inkling of policy substance and instead focused on demeaning the socialist ideology – something children have been taught to curry favor to for decades, thanks largely to George W. Bush’s legislative action, No Child Left Behind – with broad stroke statements like, ‘socialism is bad, you don’t want that.’
While that statement is true indeed, Trump went wrong by not showing why his policies were superior, and as such, served as the beginning to his end.
The largest obstacle to Trump winning his second campaign was him – the fact that he was a man with no ideology and no platform agenda, a bombastic personality that many found off-putting, and grossly inadequate communication skills incapable of overcoming those deficiencies.
The way to win the argument against socialism is to demonstrate how it always mutates into communism, and therefore, less individual freedom, less opportunity, less money and wealth, and a lower quality of life and society. History is littered with real world examples like Venezuela.
Trump’s inability to make that case points to his greatest flaw – the fact he wasn’t a tried-and-true free-market capitalist, proved to be his ultimate undoing.
Free-market capitalists are pro-individual-freedom, pro-free-enterprise, and advocates of limited government. As a result, capitalist statesmen like Ronald Reagan know the United States Constitution gives the president no such power or authority to shut down the vast majority of the economy – let alone the command to place every American under house arrest and persistent lockdown – for a common occurrence such as a novel flu virus. Every capitalist knows shutdowns are suicide, and unconstitutional.
Heck, even socialists like Barak Obama and George W. Bush never seriously considered such radical measures when both had the opportunity to do so – Obama had two shots to shutdown with the Swine Flu (H1N1) and Ebola, and GW had his chance with SARS (a predecessor of Covid-19/SARS-CoV2). If Trump were made of capitalist fiber he would have resisted the urge to shut down and used prior presidential precedent as proviso. Instead Trump acted as an authoritarian dictator, shunned all constitutional restraint and historical standard and led the effort to shutdown the economy – all because he was in a nasty Trade War with China.
Recall that China was withholding medical supplies at the time of U.S. shutdown, a byproduct result from shutting down their economy and manufacturing facilities, which is an authoritarian action common in a communist society – where the rights of people never get in the way of state priorities like international trade negotiations.
And so the ignorant street fighter that Trump is responded in-kind to stiffen his trade war stance and quarantined demand, stripping every American from their God-given rights to move, earn, and spend freely – an unprecedented reduction of Liberty in a free-society and a bastardization of America’s Founding.—This from a president who often compared himself to the late great Ronald Reagan, whose firm free-market ideology and constitutional understanding would never allow him to take such foolish action.
To George W. Bush’s credit he never compared himself to Reagan. Ironically both Obama and Trump did, referring specifically to their tax policies. In 2016 Trump campaigned to reduce the highest tax rate to 25% – a level that would have outperformed Reagan’s mark. You may recall that over the course of his presidency Reagan reduced the highest tax rate from 70% to 28%. In the end Trump’s law took the highest rate from 39.6% to 37%.
Even when Trump did succeed, he underachieved.
Perhaps the most baffling thing about Trump’s second campaign was that he completely dropped every winning policy item on his first agenda that hadn’t yet been fully achieved. As mentioned, there was obviously more work to be done with taxes. Don’t Americans need more of the money they earn now more than ever? Trump lost a major opportunity to make the pitch for lower taxes across the board that would have contrasted nicely against Biden’s (and many state governments’) promise to raise them.
But no. Trump was mute on taxes.
One thing the Covid-19 experience demonstrated was how Obamacare (a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act, or ACA), and therefore big-government action, could be used to politicize health and care and weaponize the industry to affect the entire economy to achieve a political objective (to destroy the economy state-by-state to assist in Trump’s removal.)
That’s not the purpose of healthcare nor a mechanism to make it affordable.
The 2020 coronavirus also provided America with her first experience with rationed care and mandated behavior in the cause of “community wellness”, as the ACA provided government to either pay or subsidize losses incurred by healthcare providers to comply with government mandate. This type of government intrusion and control over an industry’s behavior is a communist tenet – and perhaps the greatest argument Republicans ever had to defeat the terribly unconstitutional law Obamacare is.
But no, Trump completely dropped the issue and never highlighted how the law was being abused during the pandemic to re-galvanize his repeal and replace effort – which was to halt the socialist law Obamacare is from metamorphosing into a communist takeover of the entire healthcare system.
Trump missed every opportunity.
Can you imagine Ronald Reagan running against Trump and looking directly into the camera during his opening statement in their first debate and saying, Let me ask – Are you more free today than you were four years ago?
Trump deserved to lose on so many fronts it’s embarrassing to recount, and the most disturbing part of it was that freedom, free-markets, and smaller government were his greatest arguments and he never made the case.
- Prolonged mask mandates are unconstitutional and have proven ineffective – take ‘em off!—Americans face adversity, not hide from it!
- Stop wasteful government spending and free the economy! Governments print money and debt. Free-markets create wealth and equity.
- Taxes are governments’ ownership of your earnings.—Let’s reduce it!
- Time to remove government and politics from healthcare – patients and doctors make better decisions than central government bureaucrats who politicize both the disease and the remedy!
As a sitting president Trump should have been actively championing the cause of Liberty by filing legal action against the states for their unconstitutional and prolonged lockdowns, mandates, and the rationing of what state government’s defined as “non-essential” care. In a free society “essential” is determined by doctor and patient, with government and politics having absolutely no say in the matter. But because the government essentially took control of the healthcare system via Obama’s ACA, it gave them some sort of standing to make such a power grab. The only thing standing in big government’s way was Trump, and he quietly stepped aside.
The fact of the matter is Trump never put forth the policy objectives or winning argument needed to win a fair and square election. That said, I don’t believe Biden received 81 million votes just as I don’t believe Trump earned 74 million. And that’s the reason the fraud claims never went anywhere. There was simply too much of it to take any action. So none was.
Nevertheless, it was Trump’s actions that led to his election loss and thereby put a nail in the coffin to his trade war with China, placed the American economy in ruin, and inflicted a staggering blow to the American ideal by minimizing the individual, emasculating the free-market and emboldening a tyrannical government takeover of it.
It is important to appreciate the inverse relationship between government authority and free-market activity, as one grows the other dwindles. Freedom shrinks during times of crisis, whether or not it returns partially is always uncertain, but it is certain that it never returns entirely. Think September 11th.
Below is a chart with four lines that represent total U.S. government debt (red), total economic spending (a.k.a. Nominal GDP in green), which is essentially the sum of the other two lines: free-market spending (blue) and government spending (pink). Notice how much debt (red) was added while the economy (green) shrank only marginally. See below.
Waste and corruption are two reasons for the alarming spread between economic loss and new debt, along with the fact that hundreds of billions of that newly borrowed pandemic money landed in overseas economies.
That’s your government working for other countries and charging you for it.
Lockdowns are an abuse of government authority that have no choice but to shrink free-market activity. And the biggest mistake to rectify those conditions are more government intervention – which is exactly what Trump prescribed.
Like his two-predecessors Trump raced to solve the societal crisis he elevated by stripping away freedoms and spending trillions of dollars his government didn’t have, thereby adding to a national debt crisis that has ballooned way out of control, all the while blaming something else (Covid-19) instead of his misguided policies. Once again, Covid-19 did not steal freedom and prosperity from the American market – governments’ response to it did.
This case in point can be seen by the level of government growth compared to free-market shrinkage during the one-term Trump era, which pales in comparison to the two prior crises (September 11, 2001 and the financial crisis of 2008). Below is an illustration showing the spending spreads in percentage form in a dual sided graph.
Central government is taking over the American economy while a corrupt Federal Reserve is facilitating it by destroying the monetary base and no one is talking about it – especially now that censorship is rapidly escalating in the very anti-social Covid-1984 world that Trump helped create.
It is to our collective detriment, at a cost that is incalculable.
The only way to begin reversing that course is to demand our personal freedoms to return along with an insistence on mutual respect for every American.
Throwing away the masks and supporting each other’s right to do so – regardless of what the state demands – is a great way to start.
United We Stand.
Stay tuned…
PS: Market activity during the Trump era is shown below.
[…] needs a course correction – End QE and Repeal Obamacare – and a recession in both the size and scope of government, and their according […]