Speaking in the Oval Office this week, President Trump once again claimed he wanted to give $5,000 to every adult in the U.S. — but only if Republicans win the House and Senate in November. It's an idea he first proposed at the Republican midterm convention earlier this month. And from the moment he proposed it, even some of his allies were skeptical.
Broadcasting from the convention, Michael Duncan — one host of the conservative Ruthless podcast — said while the proposal might be politically smart, the better policy might be to instead "just cut taxes by $5,000." "We don't need helicopter money," he added. His co-host Josh Holmes agreed: "Maybe we don't have a bureaucrat who shuffles paper from the left side of his desk to the right and then sends you a check for your time." The right-leaning satire site the Babylon Bee was more pointed: "Trump Pledges That If Voters Defeat Socialism In November, They Will Each Get An Equal Redistribution Of Wealth From The Government," read one of its headlines. This is the contradiction that keeps arising in Trump's second term, as the leader of the party that has often claimed to support free markets repeatedly tries to bend the economy to his will.
But it's especially striking as Trump continues to try to label Democrats as "communists." "We will defeat the communists, and that's what they are. They're not socialists, they're not democrats, they're communists," Trump said at the Republicans' midterm convention. And millions heard the message in a TV ad that aired last week: "Together we will defeat communism, socialism, and Marxism in America," says Trump in the ad, which states at the end that it was funded by the federal government.
An ethics group has filed a lawsuit against taxpayer money being used for the overtly political advertisement. The Trump administration has announced equity stakes in more than 30 private companies, imposed dozens of tariffs, and taken the unusual step of trying to lower interest rates via the Treasury Department. These big, unorthodox policy moves are certainly not communism, but they're also not typical Republican free-market capitalism.
So what could you call it? "I would say transactional interventionism," says Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute. To him, Trump has no set economic philosophy.
Rather, many of Trump's policy moves are aimed at achieving a specific outcome — like using a tariff to boost a particular industry or punish a foreign country … or suggesting a $5,000 check to reward votes. "He is very transactional," says Lincicome. "He thinks of all of these issues in a silo and he does whatever, you know, whatever he wants in terms of the direction.
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