It’s Official: Trump Is a Leftist

In the wee hours of the morning on Thursday, September 10, a 20 year old conservative political commentator and author named Brilyn Hollyhand published an op-ed on FoxNews.com. Its title was “Calling Democrats ‘communists’ won’t win Gen Z — Republicans need a better offer.”

Penned from the GOP’s Dallas convention, Hollyhand’s essay frames the Democratic strategy as giving away free stuff, and the ill-conceived but popular Republican strategy at present as little more than name-calling:

Just calling Democrats communists is not a strategy. Yes, they are. The agenda is collectivist. The instincts are coercive. The destination is bigger government, weaker families and a generation trained to look to the state for everything.

Hollyhand argues that Republicans need to do more than namecalling; they need to offer a positive vision of smaller government and more prosperity to compete with the left. This piece was apparently emailed to his editor at Fox right before Trump announced his own positive vision to beat the left: $5,000 checks—but only if Republicans win the mid-terms.

There are obvious problems with this proposal. The first problem is practical: will he actually do it? Trump has made many empty promises, including some involving free money. First there was the DOGE dividend, then a promise of checks redistributed to American consumers from Trump’s failed (and unconstitutional) unilateral tariffs. Thus, even Americans who like the idea of redistribution should doubt whether Trump will actually pay off his voters.

The second problem is moral. In a western rule-of-law democracy like ours is alleged to be, doesn’t this promise rise above tacky and into the territory of moral transgression? Vote buying (also known as patronage politics) may be the norm in third world kleptocracies, but it’s technically illegal in the United States.

…Well, sort of. One could argue that democracy is really just vote buying on a massive scale. What Trump is trying to do right now may be more uncouth and less polished than what Mayor Zoran Mamdani offered voters in New York City, but aren’t they both engaging in promising to redistribute taxpayer money in order to gain political power?

The Austrian economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe addressed this tendency of democracies in his book Democracy: The God That Failed. In it, while advocating for a free society, Hoppe mused that democracy may actually be the third worst system, after libertarianism and monarchy. How so? Because in monarchy (privately-owned government) resources will tend to be carefully guarded and dispensed with. But in democracies (publicly-owned governments), political leaders are not owners but merely managers of public resources who are elected by short-sighted voters to get free stuff. This means that politicians will be incentivized to promise benefits to supporters beyond what the system can truly bear—to manage resources poorly.

While this phenomenon is particularly visible on the left, we’ve also seen it in action on the right. For instance, though Ronald Reagan talked like Milton Friedman, he had more willpower to cut taxes than he did spending, with the result that the Reagan government increased the deficit by 1.86 trillion dollars. Even before Trump’s massive populist spending policies, it was not uncommon for voters to receive political mailers from Republican politicians promising to oppose socialized medicine while solemnly swearing to protect the sanctity of elderly voters’ Medicare benefits. The result of politicians being beholden to their voters has been predictable—super-deficits which have placed the United States right on the edge of a fiscal cliff (perhaps even over the cliff, holding a sign that says “yikes” à la Wile E. Coyote).

This leads us to our third problem—is this kind of redistributive scheme a good idea? Those whose knowledge of monetary policy only extends as far as “money printer go brrrr” might think so, but those who paid attention in high school economics class understand that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The out of control inflation that has been hurting working families since the COVID era are the direct result of presidents Trump and Biden’s COVID spending policies. Lest you doubt Trump’s role in our economic tailspin, the Orange Man himself insisted that his name be added (and thus his responsibility assigned) to one of the COVID stimulus checks you received.

This is the libertarian conundrum about Trump. In a number of ways, Trump is far less libertarian than previous politicians who were at least committed (in a broad sense) to the classical liberal tradition. But in other ways (and at sundry times), Trump’s policies can look better than the pre-Trump bipartisan status quo. Trump’s foreign policy in his first term certainly looked more libertarian than his two predecessors, even if his second term military adventurism has been unconstitutional, ill-conceived, and largely disastrous. Even when Trump’s policies are better or the same as those who came before, his vulgar, used car salesman-like ways still elicit reflexive responses of disgust from respectability-first libertarians. In regard to his latest bribes, are they really any more disgusting because he’s honest about them?

Perhaps not. There’s more than one way to skin a cat (or in this case, ruin an economy), but the end result is the same. However, there can be no doubt for anyone with even the slightest intellectual and moral integrity: Trump is officially a leftist.