‘Trump Is a Socialist’: Conservative Writer Goes There in Scathing Column That Asks ‘Any Guess Who the Serfs Are Going to Be?’
AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein
The Dispatch’s Kevin Williamson deemed President Donald Trump a socialist in a scathing new column that asked its readers “who the serfs are going to be when we get to the end of this road?”
After defining socialism as “a centrally planned economy, one that is dominated by state action irrespective of whether it is dominated by formal state enterprises” and observing that Vladimir Lenin ” described his ideal society as one managed as though it were ‘one big factory,'” Williamson took aim at the president, writing:
Donald Trump does not know the first thing about how a factory operates, of course, and neither do most of the private-equity dorks and middling media figures with which he has stocked his administration, a veritable museum of minor Fox News figures. But he has been inside Macy’s, and even had a product-licensing deal with the department store once upon a time—ghastly shirts and ties with a predictable Gordon Gekko meets Liberace aesthetic.
And so Trump’s version of quasi-monarchical Leninism is no surprise. It’s not one big factory: It’s one big Macy’s, with him leading the parade.
“Donald Trump’s vision of the economy is classic socialism,” he continued. “Trump’s view of a man at a desk moving pieces of the economy around like rooks and pawns on a chessboard is what socialism is all about—though the old tyrants in Moscow at least had the humility to assume that a committee of experts would be necessary to manage the economy according to ‘scientific’ principles or at least the guile to pretend that they believed it, whereas Trump apparently has swallowed his own silly god-man horsepucky, being, as he is, an ass of exceptional asininity.”
“He is economically more in Lenin’s camp than in Adam Smith’s and Milton Friedman’s and Ronald Reagan’s,” concluded Williamson. “He already imagines himself as a kind of royal figure—any guess who the serfs are going to be when we get to the end of this road?”
Trump’s tariff-heavy trade policy has drawn criticism from a wide variety of conservative voices.
In an editorial published on Tuesday, National Review torched the president over his “anti-abundance agenda,” slamming him for “yammering about American children being spoiled” without ever having had “to make do with less.”
