Posted on July 31, 2025
Orange Man Red
The socialist policies of Donald J.
Trump
by
Daniel Clark
Democrats
are in a panic over the rise of stridently socialist mayoral candidates in New
York and Minneapolis, but theirs is not the only party that ought to be
concerned. The Republicans may not have
the same public relations problem as the unapologetic pinkos
across the aisle, but they, too, have been infected with a strain of socialism,
personified by President Donald Trump.
For all of his rhetorical railing
against socialism, Trump has pursued policies that are often unfriendly to free
enterprise, while involving the federal government in areas of American life
upon which it should never encroach. For
example, he negotiated for himself and future presidents a "golden share" of
U.S. Steel as a condition of allowing Nippon Steel to purchase it. The golden share is a special share of stock
that carries with it a majority of the voting rights among the
stockholders. Thus, the Nippon deal has essentially
ceded to the president veto power over such basic corporate decisions as
changes in salary structure, the closing and moving of plants, and the sourcing
of raw materials. That's every bit as
un-American as it sounds. The golden
share model is used most commonly by countries that want to privatize the ownership
of businesses without giving up governmental control, the most recognizable
example being Volkswagen in postwar Germany.
If liberals who like to call Trump a fascist had any idea what the word
meant, they would apply it here.
Another
peculiar Trump administration business arrangement is that the Defense
Department has bought $400 million worth of shares in MP Materials, a Las
Vegas-based company that produces rare earth metals. Of course, our military needs rare earths,
but why not simply sign an agreement to purchase the materials, instead of
taking a 15 percent stake in the company?
Is the Pentagon trying to beat the Red Chinese at their own game?
When the
Trump administration is not taking partial ownership of private companies, it
nonetheless has a penchant for dictating to them how they must conduct their
businesses. When President Barack Obama
sent his wife around to bully food producers into reducing their use of sodium,
Republicans understood that to be a heavy-handed power grab, because when the
government negotiates with private citizens about how they may do business, the
resulting agreement is never voluntary.
Three presidential terms later, many of them are cheering on HHS
Secretary RFK Jr., as he demands that the makers of candies and breakfast
cereals remove the artificial coloring from their products. During the Trump administration, it is now the
GOP that decries "big food" profiteers, and argues that we need the kind of
supposedly benevolent government intervention that they have in Europe and
Canada.
This past
May, the CEO of Mattel criticized Trump's tariffs and said that they would
result in higher toy prices. Trump
responded by threatening to ensure that Mattel "won't sell one toy in the
United States," by imposing a 100 percent tariff specifically on merchandise
from that company. It should go without
saying that there is no constitutional provision that allows the president to
arbitrarily inflict punitive taxation on the prospective customers of a
businessman who offends him, but if the Republican majority in Congress cared
about that, it would have taken away his unconstitutional power to levy tariffs
months ago.
After the chief financial officer
of Walmart explained the need to pass the cost of the tariffs along to its
customers, Trump fired off a social media post demanding that the retail chain
"'EAT THE TARIFFS,' and not charge valued customers ANYTHING," before adding
ominously, "I'll be watching." In what
kind of a country does the president dictate what a store may charge for its
wares? Furthermore, the belief that
Walmart can indefinitely absorb the cost of the tariffs is rooted in a
left-wing anti-capitalist caricature, which assumes that businesses are
hoarding huge reserves of wealth that they don't really need for anything. Indeed, it seems cruel of the retailers to
charge their customers more for their merchandise if one believes they keep
gigantic bags of money in the back room, just for rolling around in while laughing
diabolically, as they are presumably wont to do.
Though he
continues to insist that American consumers don't pay his tariffs, Trump
recently floated the idea of tariff rebate checks. How can there be a rebate if there has been
no bate? Republican senator Josh Hawley
of Missouri didn't ask before obediently introducing a bill to send out tariff
rebate checks of $600 per family member.
The distribution of tariff payments, on the other hand, is not so
unform, with purchasers of new houses, new cars and other big-ticket items
paying a disproportionate percentage.
The rebates, then, would be a redistributionist program, taking large
sums of money from upper income earners, and dispersing them more equitably.
If that
sounds uncharacteristic of the Trump administration, it shouldn't. Embedded in his "Big, Byoo-dee-full
Bill" is a new entitlement he has wittily named Trump Accounts, which are
government-administered savings accounts for newborns. When each account is created, it will receive
$1,000 in seed money from the already empty federal coffers. That's an abomination in itself, but we can
already guess that both the amount and frequency of the taxpayer contributions,
as well as the pool of eligible recipients, will only expand over time. It's not hard to imagine this program being
morphed one day into a mechanism for providing a universal basic income.
The aim of
the Trump Accounts is to encourage Americans to have larger families, but what
kind of government sees such a thing as its responsibility? The same kind that presumes a mandate to Make
America Healthy Again, that's what. It's
the kind that sees its citizens as its own managerial problems, rather than as
free individuals to whom the government is theoretically subordinate.
As the
Democrats have moved farther to the left, Trump has led the Republicans to
occupy the spot they have vacated.
Whereas a prominent Democrat wants to create government-owned grocery
stores, our Republican president only wants to tell store owners what prices
they may charge, and food producers what ingredients they must use in their
products. It will probably be at least another
decade before his party has gone as far down the road to tyranny as the opposition
is right now.
That's a
heck of a campaign theme to have to run on.
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press