The entire Right is being undermined by President Donald Trump. When the impact of his tariffs is felt, people won’t blame interventionism, protectionism, or economic nationalism. They will blame capitalism.
Voters are already clocking that Trumponomics doesn’t work. According to YouGov, 57% of people think Trump’s actions on the economy have hurt the country, while only 24% think they have helped. And that’s before the bills come in.
When the full costs become clear — I am still expecting a recession this year — people will see it, not as a failure of MAGA’s statist economics, but as a failure of the market.
In much the same way, there was justified fury about the bank bailouts after 2008. It was outrageous that people on low and medium incomes had to rescue wealthy bankers and bondholders from their mistakes. Who, though, got the blame?
Whatever else the bailouts were, they were not capitalism. In a capitalist system, insolvent banks would have been allowed to collapse, and any profitable operations would have been bought by rivals. Bondholders, shareholders, and possibly depositors would have taken the hit, not taxpayers.
What voters saw, though, was people who had benefited from the market system being rewarded at public expense. Bankers were the ultimate capitalists, right? So surely capitalism itself was being rescued.
I remember talking to Occupy protesters in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London at that time. I reminded them that the bailouts had been decreed by a Labour government and that the opposition had come from free-marketeers such as then-Rep. Ron Paul in the United States and me in the United Kingdom. They flatly refused to believe me. People such as me were capitalists, they said, and bankers were also capitalists, and we were all to blame.
“But surely you know that we capitalists are against subsidies? Surely you know that we’re against nationalizing things?”
No, they were having none of it. We were all on the Right, all part of some elitist conspiracy, all complicit in grinding down the little guy.
The backlash against Trumpery takes a similar form. I wrote here recently about how MAGA was destroying conservatism in other countries, especially those most affected by the tariffs, such as Mexico and Canada. In Britain, Nigel Farage, Trump’s most loyal supporter, is pointedly distancing himself from his erstwhile hero. In the U.S., if poll numbers on the economy are anything to go by, Republicans are heading for a hell of a beating in the midterm elections.
This matters for several reasons. The good things Trump has done rely on executive orders and could be reversed by a new administration. The proper enforcement of immigration controls; the end of affirmative action; the recognition of just two sexes; the elimination of wasteful spending; drill, baby drill; hell, even the shower heads: All these things could be repealed as easily as they were ordered — and will be if, as looks to be the case, Trump has holed his party before the waterline.
Indeed, it is worse than that, because Trump has deployed new weapons, those that the Left will find lying around when it takes possession of the battlefield. If he can strongarm universities, so can the Left. If he can abuse executive orders, so can the Left. If he can try to run for a third term, what constitutional vandalism might the Left not attempt?
The damage will be felt well beyond the U.S. Around the world, free marketeers will be tainted, however absurdly, by association with a man whose economic policies they abhor. Just as Pierre Poilievre, Canada’s patriotic and libertarian Conservative Party leader, has been ludicrously tarred as a Trumpian, so every conservative politician in the world will be associated with this most unconservative of presidents, every believer in limited government lumped in with the big-spending protectionist in the White House.
WAR IS COMING, AND WE ARE TOO COMPLACENT TO STOP IT
What a waste. After the engorgement of the state during lockdown and the massive overreach of the diversity fanatics, we were due a backlash. Across the developed world, rightist parties were winning on the back of promises to cut taxes and roll back identity politics. The 2024 presidential election was, in that sense, part of a wider global trend.
But the early decisions of the Trump presidency, the annexation threats against Denmark and Canada, and the obsequiousness toward Vladimir Putin, too, but mainly the tariffs, have moved the dial. Elections in Australia and Canada that had seemed certain to follow the global trend have now been thrown into doubt. In every country, conservative politicians are being howled down as Trumpists. And things look set to get worse. Thanks a bunch, Mr. President.
