Is Trump America’s Most Progressive President?

Having spent nearly 12 weeks raising taxes, the cost of living, and doubts about his mastery of macroeconomics, the president, undeterred by unenthralled stock and bond markets, vowed, as Ronald Reagan did 43 years ago, to “stay the course.” There are, however, differences.Reagan urged accepting short-term pain — 20 percent interest rates to suppress inflation that had approached 14 percent — for the long-term gain of robust growth. For decades, President Trump has said taxation via tariffs (Japan was his original terror) should be a permanent instrument of economic management by which the federal government would rearrange and direct the economy.Trump might be the most progressive president since, early in the 20th century, progressivism defined itself with three core tenets:First, only an energetic executive can make modern government “wieldy” — Woodrow Wilson’s word. (“The president,” said Wilson, “is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can.”) Second, the separation of powers is a premodern mistake that permits Congress to meddle in government and allows the judiciary to inhibit the executive.Third, conservatives see modern society’s complexities as reasons to avoid attempting dramatic social engineering, lest unintended consequences overwhelm intended ones. Progressives think conservatives are worrywarts too timid about wielding government.In June, the future Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, gave a speech decrying the Biden administration’s “discredited economic philosophy of central planning” — its attempted “social and political engineering” with an economy “managed” by “subsidizing supply in favored industries and restricting it in disfavored ones.” Such government intervention in the economy, Mr. Bessent warned, “breeds favoritism for market incumbents,” reduces economic dynamism and raises prices.Today, Mr. Bessent serves a Trump administration agenda of progressive audacity. It aims to discombobulate global commerce and supply chains to transform the American economy with a government-planned revival of manufacturing, which the administration mistakenly thinks is anemic.Mr. Trump’s protectionism might yet be the largest peacetime government intervention in the economy — more comprehensive, ambitious and futile than Richard M. Nixon’s wage and price controls. Let’s stroll down memory lane:They were imposed in August 1971, when the consumer price index was rising at a rate of roughly 3 percent a year. In 1973, the CPI rose 8 percent. In early 1974, when the “controls” ended after 32 months, the inflation rate measured by the CPI was 15 percent.On last week’s “Liberation Day,” Mr. Trump sounded forth a trumpet that, he said, shall never call retreat. Retreat from protectionism targeting even uninhabited islands. Seven days later, the stock and bond markets having spoken, came the retreat.Mr. Trump’s minions presented his 180-degree pivot as proof of his preternatural sophistication, cunning and farsightedness. People who are not his employees cited First Corinthians: “For if the trumpet gives an indistinct sound, who will prepare for battle?”Today, after the week between the trumpet first sounding “Charge!” and then sounding “Oh, never mind,” a lesson has been taught but probably not learned. It concerns the perils of 10-thumbed government novices, overflowing with misplaced confidence in their ability to manipulate the world, fumbling with vast interlocking and overlapping economic processes.Five weeks into Mr. Trump’s first term, as congressional Republicans wrestled with the excruciating task of turning their rhetoric about replacing the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, into policy, the scales fell from Mr. Trump’s eyes. “Nobody,” he said, “knew that health care could be so complicated.” Nobody except everybody who had thought about it.It is axiomatic that there is no education in the second kick of a mule. Speaking of redundant kicks:In Mr. Trump’s first term, when Communist China canceled purchases of almost 500,000 metric tons of American soybeans during a trade spat, the Trump administration spent billions on relief for injured farmers. Today, exports generate more than 20 percent of farm income, China has announced a 34 percent retaliatory tariff on American imports, and the Trump administration is contemplating financial relief for farmers injured by the global protectionism the administration has provoked because Mr. Trump believes that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.”After the just-begun 90-day pause in his tariff chaos, Mr. Trump will still be himself, the splenetic and frantic protector of American greatness from diminishment by Canada, Mexico, Denmark, Vietnam, and every other country. Readers of Charles Dickens’s “Our Mutual Friend” might recognize a resemblance to John Podsnap:“Mr. Podsnap’s world was not a very large world, morally; no, nor even geographically: seeing that although his business was sustained upon commerce with other countries, he considered other countries, with that important reservation, a mistake.”The Washington Post

Is Trump America’s Most Progressive President?

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