INTERVIEW David Stockman: Trumps War on Capitalism
Summary
➡ The speaker criticizes the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that authoritarian measures similar to those seen in communist countries resulted in enormous harm to small businesses, particularly in the hospitality and leisure sector which saw a 58% drop in employment. The response to the crash, in terms of stimulus checks, is seen as non-sustainable and akin to universal basic income, which could lead to negative economic consequences in the long run.
➡ The massive growth in government transfer payments, which increased up to 33 times its normal rate and totaled around 4.9 trillion yearly, is seen to undermine the health of the economy. This was exacerbated by large fiscal decisions, such as Trump’s 6.2 trillion spending within a year, which significantly contributed to the inflation and fiscal instability that we are currently dealing with. Debate ensues about the widespread societal reliance on government aid and criticisms are made about lack of accountability and control over such spending. Lastly, the role of the Federal Reserve in facilitating massive spending without causing high interest rates was also analyzed, pointing out its contribution to unsustainable fiscal policies.
➡ The text criticizes the Federal Reserve for enabling excessive government spending and curbs on economic freedoms during the pandemic, leading to financial instability. The document also criticizes former President Donald Trump for promoting policies that expanded government size and interference while failing to uphold conservative principles. This critique extends to blaming Trump for encouraging blind support despite these actions.
Transcript
So joining us now is David Stockman. Thank you for joining us, sir. Glad to be with you. And we got a lot to talk about here on that topic. Yeah, we do. And the book that’s going to be coming out in January should say is Trump’s War on Capitalism. I have referred to precedent Trump, because he set so many precedents that were good precedents during his first term.
So take us down his precedents in terms of attacking capitalism. Yeah, well, the whole point of my book is that there are certain principles, fiscal rectitude, sound money, free markets, open international trade that really define what I think is the conservative position in today’s battle of governance in Washington. And when it comes to those core principles or items, trump came down time and time and time again on the wrong side.
He was a big spender. He was constantly harassing the Fed for easier and easier money when we already had interest rates that were barely above zero. He got taken to the cleaners by Fauci and that whole group of malpractic doctors around him when he was persuaded to lock down the economy and destroy the life work of millions of workers and small business people and so forth. So I think you have to say, with four years of that kind of record, why do we want it again? That is not going to solve the huge problems of debt, of weak economic growth, of inflation, of a Washington uniparty, as I call it, bipartisan consensus to bury us in debt, and endless government intervention and manipulation.
So those, I think, are the core issues. Trump is on the wrong side. And the idea that, well, maybe he went off base a few times with the $6 trillion worth of stimmies that he pushed through in less than a year, and he should be forgiven for this because there was a strong MAGA economy, so called. It’s not true. And I sort of lay out in my book on every measure that you could look at job creation, real economic growth, real GDP per capita.
That’s kind of a proxy for standard of living, savings rate, investment rate, productivity growth. All the items that comprise kind of the core metrics for the economy were actually worse under Trump’s four years than any president, going all the way back to Truman. Okay, so we’re talking about a period of time in which we had nine presidents, eleven different recessions and business cycles. If we average it all out, real economic growth during Trump’s term, four years was 1.
5%. During the prior 62 years, of all those presidents, republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservatives, reagan, Lyndon Johnson, and everybody in between, the growth rate averaged 3%. So it was less than half of what you might call the long term post war average. So you can’t say there was a magda economy that was so good that we can forgive all the deviations and all of the Trump policies that were inimical to everything conservatives, I always thought believed in, because the record isn’t there.
So why do we need a big spender? Why do we need another easy money man? Why do we need a guy who may go off half cocked in another direction if he gets bad advice from government bureaucrats? And I think at the end of the day and I heard you talking earlier about all the issues related to the COVID the lockdowns, the mandatory shots, all the rest of it, he was wrong on that.
And he basically could have had good advice from a lot of people on the outside who were saying, no, this isn’t the black plague. This isn’t something that requires the Constitution to be set aside or the economy to be wrecked. He didn’t listen. He just plowed forward by the seat of his ample Britches, as I call you know. We ended up with a real mess that we’re still living with.
I mean, the period in which all this terrible inflation we’ve had under Biden, and I don’t give Biden any pass either, but the inflation was germinated. It was cooked up during the last year of Trump’s administration when he told the Fed to print money like there’s no tomorrow, and when the federal deficit soared to $3 trillion, more than $3 trillion, just an incredible surge in government borrowing and spending that turned the economy red hot, but unsustainably so.
And we ended up with the inflation that we’re struggling with at the present time. Yeah, those are some of the themes that we’re trying to discuss in the book that will be coming out shortly. Yeah. And you say the metrics, you look at the other metrics, and you talked about how it was half the economic growth that we’ve had post war with all the other presidents, and yet he would constantly go back.
He’d cherry pick his metric that he wanted to look at, which is going to be the stock market. Oh, look at the stock market is doing great or whatever. Forget about job creation. Talk a little bit about job creation. What happened to job creation under Trump? Well, I mean, if you really want the number, it’s pretty devastating. When Trump took office, there were 145. 4 million jobs in the US.
Economy. According to the BLS, the month he left, January 2021, there were 42. 4 million. In other words, 3 million jobs less at the end of his four years than when he started. And if you look back at the record, there is no other president going all the way back to Truman that ended up with fewer jobs at the end of his term than existed at the beginning.
Because capitalism works pretty well. The economy grows, jobs are created, and the number always goes up. It always goes up. Every president, whether they were good, bad or indifferent, whether they hurt our free market economy or not, jobs continued to grow, but not under Trump because of the lockdowns, because of the brutal government intervention in the normal course of daily commerce, which is what that was all about.
When you shut down and we have a lot of statistics in the book to show how bad it was in certain sectors, and we can talk about that, but when you do that, you end up at the end of a four year term with 3 million fewer jobs than when you start. Now, that’s the truth of the matter. Then Trump says, well, you know, the COVID it wasn’t my fault.
It came from China, or something like that. Well, there’s a whole debate about where it came from. The issue was the appropriate, constitutional, economically productive response. And the response was not to shut down the entire service sector of the economy, not to shut down all the restaurants and bars and gyms and movies and all the other places where people congregate. That was a hugely unwise, counterproductive, destructive policy.
He embraced it hook, line and sinker. He allowed the so called White House Task Force to be on the bully pulpit, as I call it, day after day, scaring the hell out of the public, encouraging people to hide under their pets and stay in their homes. And all of this badly disrupted the economy. Now he has to take accountability for that. And I have a little section in the book going back to Truman.
You may recall Truman famously had this sign on his desk that said, the buck stops here. In other words, I am the President. Ultimately. I’m not going to blame somebody else if things go good or bad. The buck stops here. Trump has never been willing to accept the fact that he shut down the economy unnecessarily. That impact is in the numbers, and it makes his tenure look extremely yeah, yeah, the buck stops with him.
And I’ve said many times, the buck actually started with him as well, because he financially incentivized these hospital protocols that were deadly. He incentivized the hospitals to do a clinical diagnosis and give them a 20% bonus and all these other things. So he was incentivizing that you mentioned earlier, the devastating loss to so many people who lost their businesses. And that was one of the things that really bothered me.
I come from a family where both my grandfathers were small businessmen and my father was a small businessman. I understand how people pour their life, their capital and their life’s work into that. And to be told that you’re nonessential and to shut down and destroy your business, as he did everywhere. And it wasn’t just that we saw this shock to the distribution system, such you had people destroying food on the farms while there was nothing on the shelves.
I spent time talking to people about I pencil. I said, do you understand how this works? We don’t need to have the government micromanaging everything. This guy is acting like some kind of Chinese dictator. And I said, that’s really what the real virus is. It’s this political virus, this approach that he’s taken. Talk a little bit about you cover that in your book, right? I’m assuming. Yeah, I do.
And Trump on this issue was an authoritarian. He had the wrong diagnosis. It came from Fauci. It said, the government needs to step in massively with its huge boot heel and regiment the behavior of the public and thereby control a virus that was not a fatal threat to 98% of the population. But Trump signed on. And once he decided that was the mission of government, then there’s no holds barred.
I mean, Trump doesn’t have any principles about limited government, about observing the Constitution, about the need to preserve free markets and therefore encourage entrepreneurship and small businesses to create the economic prosperity and jobs that they create. But I was going to say on your point about especially small businesses and that massive harm and damage that was done probably ground zero of the lockdowns is what the BLS calls the leisure and hospitality sector.
And that covers bars and restaurants and movie theaters and sports arenas and the whole range of things where people gather in small or large groups. Now, if you look at that sector in the single month, and this is a startling figure, I have a chart on it in my book, and I think people aren’t going to believe it, which is big. There’s 17, 18 million people employed in that sector, dropped by 58% in one month.
58%. Now, this is hours work. So if people were part timers, instead of 12 hours a week, they got two or none. Now, how do we describe this? That 58% crash plunge eliminated all the gain and hours worked since April 1978. Wow. If you can imagine that. In other words, in one fell swoop, trump gets up to the White House microphone, looks over at Fauci, agrees to a question that all these sectors should be shut down for several weeks.
And the consequence of that was to wipe out 42 years worth of growth in one of the largest sectors of the economy, where most of our small businesses and entrepreneurs thrive and get their start. I mean, if you look at that sector, it’s not like big tech where there’s a couple firms in Silicon Valley or it’s not like Steel or Autos where there’s two or three or four competitors.
It is populated with millions of small businesses. And Trump came in and wiped them out. And that’s reflected in that number that I just gave you. During the second quarter, real GDP as a result of the lockdowns and what I call the Trump U case mandate, dropped at an annual rate of 33%. Now, the viewer might say, well, 33%, how big is that? Well, we know that the Great Recession was pretty bad.
Remember back in 208 two nine, they’re saying this is the worst recession since the 1930s. Well, in that downturn, which was pretty traumatic, real GDP sank in the worst quarter by 8%. So in the second quarter, the lockdown quarter, the Trumpian mandated standstill of the economy, we had a four time larger collapse of GDP than occurred during the Great Recession. We’re still recovering from that because it messed up everything in the economy.
People soon became so fearful about going to public venues, or they weren’t allowed to because the restaurants were closed, the bars were closed, and the gyms. Can you imagine this? There are so many thousands of small time entrepreneurs in localities all over the country who have three or four gyms or maybe one. They’ve put their heart and soul in it, their sweat equity. They build up their business over years, and they were catering to the single most healthy, strongest part of the population, basically young people that go to the gyms.
And these fools came in and shut down all the gyms, destroyed the sweat equity of literally thousands of small business people. And Trump let them do oh, yeah, and encourage them to do you can’t overlook these things. This is what I’m saying. I know there’s a lot of conservatives who say that Biden’s bad. Of course he is bad. But we’re never going to make any headway if we keep electing people on the Republican ticket who implement big government, big spending, big borrowing, money printing policies.
And it might be better that even if the election is lost, as I look at it, to go another four years with the status quo than to put another Trump, put Trump back into the White House to even further undermine the cause of conservative economics. Well, I agree. Yeah, the Constitution didn’t matter. Conservative economics didn’t matter. He just did whatever he wished. And I thought it was interesting that he was doing essentially the same thing that all these politicians doing in every single country.
As we saw their propaganda turned our country into a nation that had OCD. Everybody had this obsessive compulsive disorder. They were wiping everything down and running around wearing masks and afraid to engage with other people. But let me ask you about this. I remember looking at this and you talked about how it dropped 58% for the service sector and hours worked and that type of thing. I was looking at the stuff and said, wow, this is way worse than the Great Recession.
This is looking like the unemployment numbers that we’re seeing here instantaneously were the kind of thing that we saw with the Great Depression after kind of rolled along for two or three years and got to its peak. But this happened as a spike, very damaging. And then the response that Trump put out there in terms of stimulus checks and of this, this massive three plus trillion dollars that he put out there, the only person in Congress who opposed him on that was Thomas Massey.
I remember how angry he got about that, but I wanted to talk about the stimulus check, and I look at this and it seems to me like preparation for universal basic income. What do you think about that? And you think that is something that is going to be we haven’t really had any of the candidates opposing that or really even focusing on universal basic income. As an economist, is that something that you see being pushed and perhaps coming to us regardless of whether it is a Republican or a Democrat, since everybody else seemed to kind of go along with it except for Thomas Massey? Are they going to use this as conditioning for universal basic you know, I don’t know that there are that many people, even in the Uni party in Washington, explicitly advocating universal income, but they’re stumbling into it through the back door, because that’s what these stimmy checks were about.
Any household with up to $150,000 worth of income, which is 90% of households were eligible for the checks, both for each husband and each spouse, and half that amount for the kids over that period. The total number of stimmy checks, and remember, we had them in March 2020, then they renewed them in December 2020. Trump signed the bill. It became effective in January, but he had advocated during the campaign another $2,000 check for every adult American and another $1,000 for every child, and they got half of it in his Christmas Eve bill in 2020, and Biden put in the rest.
Okay, but effectively, the Biden American Rescue Act, so called, was simply funding the tail end of the Trump program that he campaigned on in November 2020. He advocated another 2000 per person on top of what had already been done in the March period earlier. Now, the problem with this is not only the massive amount of money that was pumped into the economy, not just through the stimmy checks, but also the unemployment toppers.
Just take this one. None of this was considered. They passed this in eleven days. If you can remember, the press conference happened, I think, on March 16, and that was where we got the two weeks to flatten the curve and all that. Within eleven days, they passed the Cares Act, so called, which was the first 2. 2 trillion. And in that without any hearings, without any analysis, they said, anybody who’s getting federal unemployment, federal state unemployment, or getting the new emergency benefits under this act will get an additional $600 on top of their regular check.
Now, the average unemployment check at that point in time under the normal system was about $380 a week. They put 600 on top of that. All of a sudden, each unemployed person in a household was eligible for $1,000 a week. Now, if you go through all the math and you add in the tax credits, you add in the stimulus checks that occurred three times, it’s possible that a family of five, three kids, two working spouses, could have collected somewhere between 30 and $40,000 over that one year period.
So it is no wonder that suddenly the labor supply dried up, people had an alternative, and it’s no wonder that the red ink just exploded when you start to pass out money in that magnitude. I’ll give you one number that I think is just startling, but the federal statistical bureaus put out all kinds of data, obviously, but one has to do with the run rate of transfer payments by all levels of government, federal, state, local.
By transfer payments we mean, obviously, welfare, food stamps, but also Medicare, Medicaid, housing assistance, all the rest of it. The normal growth year to year of transfer payments was about 150,000,000,000. That was growing. And we’ve been talking about this for a long time, and conservatives have been warning that transfer payments are undermining the health of the economy and so forth. But that was about 150,000,000,000, 180,000,000,000 a year during the peak of the Trump stimmy Baconalia, as I call it, the rate of transfer payments increased, surged to 4.
9 trillion at an annual rate. In other words, the growth that’s the growth that wasn’t the level that’s the growth. The growth was 4. 9 trillion compared to normally 150 on an annual basis. So the growth rate of spending that was being pumped into the pockets of everybody employed, unemployed, high income, middle income, low income, everybody was getting it. State and local governments were getting it. Indian tribes were getting it.
The Defense Department was getting it. Everybody was getting it. But when you look at the transfer payment element alone, the growth in transfer payments was 33 times higher than the normal year to year gain, 33 times higher. So now do we wonder why the economy got totally disheveled, got knocked out of kilter so bad? Why the inflation, which allegedly had been too low? I don’t buy that. But that’s what the Fed was saying in the pre pandemic suddenly soared to seven, eight, 9%, or even more if you measure it correctly.
Well, of course it happened right then and there when all this money was randomly, willy nilly pumped into the economy through legislation that was sight unseen. Let me give another illustration of how crazy this was. As I said in the three bills, march 2020, then December 2020, and then biden’s stimulus as soon as he got in the front door of the White House, March 2021. So that’s twelve months with 6.
2 trillion of new money pushed out through every kind of program imaginable. No standards, no controls, no accountability. And we could talk about some of these too, but just take this number. 6. 2 trillion pushed out within a twelve month period in which there was practically no hearings, no analysis, no diagnosis of where this might lead. The entire budget of the federal government going into the pandemic, let’s say fiscal 2019 was 4.
2 trillion. So in that twelve months now when I say 4. 2 trillion, that’s the entire Defense Department, that’s all of Social Security, all of Medicare, all of Medicaid, all of food stamps, all of farm subsidies, all of education, the whole ball of wax was 4. 2 trillion. It was already by our lights, out of control. Yet in twelve months, Trump sponsored effectively 6. 2 trillion of new spending on top of that, or 150% more.
Now how in the world can any government responsibly or even rationally spend that much money on a relative basis in such a concentrated short period of time? It can’t. And so this really became the greatest fiscal calamity ever recorded in our history and we’re still living with it. And that alone disqualifies Trump from ever, in my view, ever being within a country mile of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He had his shot, he blew it and he blew it badly.
And the Republicans got to find someone else. Yeah, I agree with you. I like your term bacchanalia. It really and what it did was it got people you talk about easy know, economists always talk about, well the Fed’s going to lower interest rates and they’re going to do quantitative easing and they’re going to print money and all the rest of mean this was way beyond that and everybody participated directly in it.
This is not something’s flowing through Wall Street or the banks. Everybody participated directly in that. And I think down the know we’ve already had Andrew Yang based his little candidacy on it, universal basic income. We had Michael Bloomberg talking about how he’s going to pacify people once he took their jobs. Well, Trump took their jobs and gave them a taste of this stuff and there’s going to be this memory in the population.
It’s like, yeah, I remember when that happened back in 2020 and that was really a good time. As you pointed, we didn’t have to work and the money was still there. Yeah, I’m all for universal basic income and that is a path to slavery just like all these welfare programs. It’s a path to dependency. When you look at the medical martial law that was there and we haven’t even talked about what’s going to happen with commercial real estate.
They set this time bomb up, locking everything down, closing businesses. Now the small mom and pop businesses are not there and people not going back to work. This commercial real estate issue is going to unwind through the banking sector as well, isn’t it? Yeah. And I like your term. I actually use it in my book, medical martial law. Good. That’s what it was. Okay, I got called out by the Daily Beast for that in April, 1 week of April.
They said, look at this conspiracy theorist out here. He’s calling this medical martial law. We’ve got to lock down. Everybody’s going to die. But it was going back to my number. When you shrink the GDP by a third overnight, when you wipe out 42 years worth of growth in one of the biggest job sectors in the economy, if that isn’t martial law, I don’t know what and also, you know, martial law has a connotation that it’s arbitrary, that know, dictatorial, authoritarian, without rhyme or reason.
And that’s exactly what happened during the Trump lockdowns. Half of these sectors that were being locked down, like nightclubs and gyms, well, those were elderly people, okay? Those were young people. And they were told, you can’t engage in commerce because some older morbid person might be impacted. Now, that gets into the whole other part of this, the medical freedom part. And Trump would like to say, and I have a quote in the book, by the way, from him.
This was two days after the March 16, two weeks to flatten the curve. He said, many of you are going to lose your jobs. You’re going to be laid off, but don’t worry, help is on the way. Washington will be sending you. He actually he actually tweeted that. And see, this is a big kind of additional point in my book, and that is totalitarian or authoritarian intervention against the constitution in harm of free markets, in harm of personal liberty, is very hard to do in a democratic society where people can react and they react badly when they’re told how to live their daily life.
But if you try to pay them off, if you try to buy them off with huge amounts of goodies from the federal treasury, at least you can damp down the political reaction and get away with it for a while. And that’s what was really wrong with the 6 trillion of stimulus money. It was not only a waste, it was not only creating future inflationary conditions. It was not only massive add on to the public debt, but also it was used to remove the inherent political competition opposition that would have risen up in opposition to the lockdowns.
I think the lockdowns wouldn’t have lasted through June or May even of 2020 had not all this money been pumped out to the public to keep them quiet. And that’s a big lesson for the future. Yes. And what that means, though, is now how did Congress get away with passing these bills? Sight on site, trillions of dollars. We’ve talked about all this without any kind of check coming from the financial system.
I mean, any kind of opposition. The answer is the Fed monetized it all. If you tried to spend that much money that fast, four and a half trillion dollars with a transfer payment increase overnight, you would have blown interest rates sky high if the debt to fund that had been financed honestly in the bond pits. But instead Trump told the Fed and they were happy to oblige, go out and buy in debt hand over fist that’s called monetization and thereby prevent the natural supply demand balance in the bond pits in the financial markets to drive interest rates high.
Now, back in my day when I was Budget director, the one thing that politicians feared was that big deficits would lead to crowding out of private borrowers homeowners that wanted to mortgage small businesses that needed to fund working capital or growth because Uncle Sam’s sharp elbows would force interest rates higher and higher. That was the old crowding out theory and it was at least one check in balance on the propensity of politicians to spend and borrow.
But once we got into the Greenspan era where the Fed short circuited that mechanism by continuously stepping in and buying billions and tens of billions and hundreds of billions worth of bonds, the crowding out thing didn’t happen. The bond vigilantes stayed dormant and as a result, the politicians got no signal that you’re creating a huge problem here, a huge financial bind. And so therefore, at the end of the day, the problem goes back to the Fed.
The Fed is really the culprit here. The Fed has enabled all of this spending and all of this stimulus spending enabled all of this lockdown and curtailment of normal economic activity, normal economic freedoms. And it actually was a form of taking of property without compensation, without any kind of process due process. So you see how it’s all tied together. If we want to lose our democratic constitutional system, the best way to do it is to keep the Fed in business the way it is today.
Because in other words, it prints enough money to allow the Congress to borrow enough money to basically buy off the public and create the Acquiescence that we saw to these terrible lockdowns. Now, I agree, finally we’re coming out from under that. But as you know, next thing you know they’re going to say the climate crisis, which is totally phony, is so severe that we’ve got to go into lockdowns so we don’t emit CO2.
It’ll just be another COVID by a different name. I think we’re at a point in time where the lessons are pretty clear and we can’t allow this ever to happen again. I think you nailed it when you said that it was the Fed that enabled all this. We could think of it as really driving the getaway car for this massive bank robbery where the banks rob us. Yeah, so they do the getaway car, but they weren’t driving merely the getaway car, they were driving the getaway train.
They loaded so much pork, so. Much spending onto those vehicles that it’s really kind of startling. I know people can hear a number this big, 6 trillion. It sounds pretty massive, but I did have the experience of being a congressman and then a budget director for a half decade, and I could tell people $6 trillion almost in one setting. That was all passed within twelve months is an astounding amount of money and it is certain to have every kind of adverse impact down the line over time imaginable.
And we’re just beginning probably to reap some of the harvest from all of that folly. At the know, you mentioned the fact that Trump came on and said, I know it’s difficult, but don’t worry, help is on the way, right in the form. And everybody on the Internet yesterday blew up because we had the Secretary of Education cardona say even Reagan said the government is here, we’re here to help you.
And of Know, as you know, he said, I know, I mean, I’ve heard that story many. Yeah, he said, what are the most dangerous words in English language? And the answer, of course, is I’m from the government and I’m here to help you. And that’s where Trump is and that’s where the Democrat Secretary of Education is. And so they’re all the same page and they’ve got to tell people.
Yet, you know, that’s the key. Know, when people keep looking at this, trump opposes in principle everything that conservatives say they believe about economics, everything they think they believe about the Constitution. We didn’t even get into gun control issues and things like that, that he kicked off setting a precedent, doing that by executive order. So there’s all these things that are conflicts and yet they continue to give him a pass.
So I really do hope that your book, which comes out January the 9th, trump’s war on capitalism. I hope that can wake some people up. Because I’ll just say one last thing before we finish here, and that is when you said that by financing this, if they come out with an order, a mandate that’s going to be hard for them to enforce, but if they give it to you with a lot of cash served and I said that about the 2020 election, I said, I’m not voting for this guy.
Look what he’s done to us for the last nine months. And he’s turned us over to the bureaucracy to be ruled. What do we even have an election for? And of course they played with the election as well. But when you look at that and I said to people, they said, well, you better vote for Trump because Biden’s going to put mandates out there. And he did put out mandates, but I said, what Trump is going to do is he’s going to incentivize it.
And I said, that’s going to be even more dangerous than the mandates because people look at the mandates and they’ll push back against that. And so I guess that’s really where we are when we look at this. There are other ways to push back against government tyranny instead of who we elect. As know, if whatever happens with the Trump thing, I still think that the most dangerous option is going to be Trump because people will blindly follow him without questioning anything that does.
They will question anybody else, any other Republican, and certainly the Democrats they will question, but they won’t question Trump. And so that’s really you know, if I could just one final point on that. I opened the book by saying the one admirable quality of Donald Trump is that he had all the right enemies. The Washington Post, CNN, The New York Times, the bipartisan establishment in Washington. The problem was he had all the wrong policies.
He did have the right enemies. He did stir up the establishment to worry about their rule, but he didn’t help resolve that. He actually made it worse by implementing all these policies. Now, the thing is, at the peak of government, there are two dangerous things. One is an excessively egomaniacal person in the Oval Office, and the other thing is a person utterly so. You know, you could say Lyndon Johnson was utterly unprincipled and there have been any number of egomaniacal presence.
But when you put the two together, which is what Trump’s problem is, he’s an ego maniacal blowhard who is unprincipled and is likely to dash off in any unpredicted direction, expanding government, expanding borrowing and spending and the size of the state for no justifiable reason. That’s the danger. You don’t know where he’ll go next. But he proved in March 2020 he’s totally unreliable as a guardian of all the things that conservatives believe in.
Oh, I agree. And in terms of competency, he can’t even run a casino without going bankrupt, which is the biggest sucker scambit in the history of business. If you can’t run a casino at a profit and fail, how are you going to run anything else? The book is Trump’s War on Capitalism, and it’s going to be released on January the 9th. And so take a look at it.
It might have some ways for you to convince people to actually hold him to his record and to get them to take him responsibly, be responsible for what he actually did. And that’s going to be a task. It’s a difficult thing. Nobody wants to oppose Trump. That’s what’s so amazing. It’s like an echo chamber in the press. Everybody is afraid to criticize him. They want to tailor the news now to a particular demographic rather than to what is actually happening.
Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for taking on the headwind of the massive Trump movement and trying to poke some holes in this sale with the truth of what he actually did during his four years as president. Thank you so much. David Stockman, happy to be with you. Great. Thank you. Thank you. All right, again, that book is January the 9th, 2024. We’re going to take a quick break and we will be right back.
Stay with us. You know that we know me. I know it’s all. They I know it. Is all alone. You’re listening to the David Knight show. .
