Donald Trump fear-mongered about "socialist" dictators. Now he's becoming one.
The president is taking over the American economy. But his effort to control the money-printing powers of government is what could send us over the edge.
Donald Trump ran for re-election promising to protect America from socialism. Back in office, he’s perfecting a distinctly authoritarian version of it. Last night’s warning from the Federal Reserve chairman made clear that Trump is ready to move to the next phase: taking over the money-printing powers of government.
On a Sunday evening, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell disclosed that the Trump administration has placed him under federal criminal investigation, ostensibly over past testimony related to renovations of the Federal Reserve building. The allegation, on its face, is bureaucratic and trivial. But Powell explained what’s really happening:
This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings…The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates…rather than following the preferences of the President. This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions — or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.
Anyone who still believes in fixing market capitalism and striving for economic stability should be spooked. (If you don’t believe in those things, I urge you to move to Cuba and decide how you like the opposite style of economic management from a regime that spent decades lying about its brand of socialism and instead enforcing autocracy. Once you’re on a weeks-long waiting list for milk and cooking oil, you’ll probably come home.)
Independent central banks — like the Fed — are among the most important guardrails in modern democracies. They prevent elected leaders from manipulating money for short-term political gain. When wannabe dictators seize control of the treasury, they start printing money like wild. Why? Because in the short-term, it makes the people feel richer and creates fake economic booms. But in the medium and long term, it creates chaos. Prices go up, inflation soars, investors pull out, and the economy collapses.
Read a little 20th Century history. This pattern has happened again and again and again. Monetary populism is like the fool’s gold of dictators and of socialists. They herald the shiny object until everyone realizes (when it’s too late) that it has no value.
Which bring me to the peculiar truth of Trump’s second term. He rode to power railing against socialism, but he’s governing like the very thing he claims to despise. The man isn’t quite a democratic socialist — with theories and programs and moral philosophy — but in the older, darker tradition of authoritarian state control dressed up as nationalism.
If you don’t believe me, I’ll take you on a brief tour of the recent socialist takeover of the United States. For example…
The federal government has begun acquiring ownership stakes in major U.S. companies, such as Intel, effectively nationalizing portions of American industry…
Trump personally secured a “golden share” in U.S. Steel, giving himself veto power over corporate decisions in what is functionally a controlling interest…
His administration has imposed export controls and then demanded revenue shares from private companies as a condition for doing business, a move conservative economists have accurately described as extortion…
He has openly directed private companies how to price their products, including telling credit card firms this week what interest rates he expects them to charge in future years, as if that’s something a president usually does…
Tariffs are imposed and withdrawn on a whim, not as policy tools but as instruments of personal leverage, effectively redistributing wealth at the president’s discretion…
CEOs are publicly humiliated, pressured to resign, or threatened when they fail to display sufficient obedience…
Independent officials are fired when economic data contradict political narratives, and statistical agencies are treated as enemies… and so on.
To put it another way, in one year the White House has taken major leaps toward deciding what products are on your store shelves, how they’re priced, who runs those companies, and what you’re told about all of it. Whatever Econ class you took, it shouldn’t matter. You should know this ain’t what capitalism looks like.
In fact, the Wall Street Journal has charitably called Trump’s approach “state capitalism,” describing it as a hybrid system in which nominally private enterprises operate at the pleasure of political power. I think the conservative Cato Institute characterized it a little more accurately when it warned that Trump is imitating the Chinese Communist Party by extending political control ever deeper into the economy, creating what Friedrich Hayek described as the “road to serfdom” and what Ludwig von Mises called “socialism by installments.”
Donald Trump’s government doesn’t need to own every factory to control production and to run the economy from the White House. It only needs selective enforcement, regulatory intimidation, and the constant threat of retaliation against anyone who disobeys. Isn’t that what you see on the news every week?
Trump, tellingly, has no coherent economic philosophy guiding these actions. As I’ve said many times, the president is an idiot. I wish there were a more complex or intellectually astute diagnosis of the man, but there is not. He has no theory, doctrine, or long-term plan — other than self-interest and a compulsive need for power. And it just so happens that those are the two ingredients that have led many strongmen to bear-hug socialism on their way to the top.
Then come the monuments.
The writer Ayn Rand, another person long-adored by conservatives, warned 63 years ago what would happen if someone like Donald Trump came along. One of her famous essays, called “The Monument Builders,” spelled out what people should be looking for if they feared socialism. In her view, the most glaring hallmark of such a dictator was someone who builds monuments to himself.
Sound familiar?
Throughout history, socialist rulers have shared a tell. Despite their people-loving populist rhetoric, their urge to immortalize themselves in stone becomes insatiable. Roman emperors built coliseums in their own names. Louis XIV created Versailles. Soviet leaders constructed marble palaces, monuments meant not to serve the public but to awe it into groveling submission. Think of all the statues of dictators pulled down after countries are toppled. Why were statues built to honor living leaders in the first place? Because those leaders demanded it.
Donald Trump is doing the same, from a Trump-branded Kennedy Center and a ballooning $400 million Trump Ballroom at the White House — to a “Triumphal” Trump Arch planned near the Lincoln Memorial. His team has reportedly looked into minting U.S. currency with his face on it. And watch out, Mount Rushmore; Trump wants his face up there, too. No American president has ever done anything like this. Ever.
In fact, to say this is a break with “tradition” would be an understatement. As Rand wrote:
The great distinction of the United States of America…was the modesty of its public monuments. Such monuments as did exist were genuine: they were not erected for “prestige,” but were functional structures that had house events of great historical importance. If you have seen the austere simplicity of Independence Hall, you have seen the difference between authentic grandeur and the pyramids of “public-spirited” prestige seekers.
Rand continued, warning that a nation might be trending toward socialism when it starts building monuments to its current office-holders —
…not for “the good of mankind” nor for any “noble ideal,” but for the festering vanity of some scared brute or some pretentious mediocrity who craved a mantle of unearned “greatness” … with the figure of the ruler posturing on top, beating his chest and screaming his plea for “prestige” to the starless void above him.
I can assure you that Trump has never read the book that contains that essay. Even more likely, he’s never finished an adult book at all. As I’ve noted many times, I could hardly get him to read a one-page memo in his first term, let alone something with chapters. And yet he’s reenacting Ayn Rand’s warning with uncanny fidelity, as if guided by invisible marionette strings, making him dance the same authoritarian dance that has animated every socialist strongman before him.
When I worked in the House Republican Majority during the Obama years, any single one of these acts would have triggered a political emergency. Republicans would have declared a socialist occupation of the White House and gone to figurative (or maybe literal) war if Obama built monuments to himself. Calls for impeachment would have come daily. Yet today, those so-called conservatives say nothing. They merely shrug as their would-be ruler shops for marble and meets with architects, confident that silence will protect them from scrutiny.
Well, it won’t. I would remind these GOP supplicants that every authoritarian project leaves behind two records: the monuments the ruler himself demanded be erected in his honor, and a tidy little ledger of cowardice listing all of those who enabled the rise of the despot. History is unsparing to both. But I hope my former Republican colleagues will at least enjoy having their names recorded by history.
Here’s the fine point of it. Donald Trump is not protecting anyone from socialism, as he promised. He’s giving the ideology new life, wrapped in the sweatshop fabric of a cheap, Trump-branded suit. His efforts to concentrate economic power solely in his hands is a society-wrecking quest. No matter how Trump gussies it up, central planning always leads to corruption, coercion, and decay.
The question now is whether those businessmen who once claimed to believe in free markets and liberty are willing to admit what they’re watching. Jerome Powell’s warning about a possible takeover of the Federal Reserve will hopefully show Wall Street they were fools for seeking Trump’s return to office — and will be even greater fools for ignoring the consequences. Alas, if they do, well, I hope they’ll at least get a ticket to visit the White House ballroom someday to celebrate the end of America.
Your friend, in defiance,
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To be clear, our current form of capitalism is deeply imperfect. Don't get me started. My point isn't a debate about capitalism vs its alternatives... it's that Trump is mimicking the dark versions of socialism (that led to Stalin, Mao, etc.) that he once decried. Economic power in the hands of ONE man is unacceptable, no matter what your economic views. If it is acceptable, well, you're probably in the wrong country.
Thanks for bringing up Ayn Rand warning about the monument builders. In the meantime, as I write I read Trump is declaring himself as President of Venezuela? (He also thinks Little Marco should be President of Cuba) Isn't that just one of many counts of TREASON committed by DJT? If I were in the military I would refuse unlawful orders from a traitor.