Trump Is A Revolutionary Free-Marketeer, But Maybe Something Else as Well
By Daily Bell Staff
Andrew Napolitano: Trump has committed the most revolutionary act I’ve seen in 45 years… Within four hours of becoming president of the United States, Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to limit immediately the effects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) in ways that are revolutionary.
The biggest way that the executive order was revolutionary, according to Napolitano, had to do with part of the signing. When Trump signed the larger document meant to start the repeals process, he went after parts of the law that had been implemented via executive order rather than Congressional mandate.
More:
… He ordered a truly revolutionary act, the likes of which I have never seen in the 45 years I have studied and monitored the government’s laws and its administration of them. He ordered that when bureaucrats who are administering and enforcing the law have discretion with respect to the time, place, manner and severity of its enforcement, they should exercise that discretion in favor of individuals and against the government.
This is radical coming from any president in the modern era of government-can-do-no-wrong. It is far more Thomas Jefferson, the small-government champion with whom Trump has never been associated, than it is Theodore Roosevelt, the super-regulator whom Trump has stated he admires. It recognizes the primacy and dignity of the individual and the fallibility of the state. It acknowledges the likely demise of Obamacare. It is utterly without precedent since Jefferson’s presidency.
Napolitano’s statement is itself revolutionary in the sense that he says Trump has accomplished something in the modern era that he has never seen before. In fact, he has to go back to pre Civil War presidents like Thomas Jefferson to find a similar sort of perspective.
At nearly the same time that Trump was beginning to get rid of Obamacare, he was also contemplating the freeing of Chelsea Manning. This culminated in a recent tweet saying that Manning should never have been released from prison and that he should never have written a column criticizing the person who freed him, Barack Obama.
“Ungrateful TRAITOR Chelsea Manning, who should never have been released from prison, is now calling President Obama a weak leader. Terrible!”
These two statements illustrate the two sides of Donald Trump. On the one-hand, he is free-market oriented and wants to do away with rules and regulations that retard the ability of people to make a living. On the other hand, he apparently doesn’t like people criticizing the nation’s security apparatus (except when he does it.)
This doesn’t make much sense to us. The security apparatus is based around ISIS and Al Qaeda, both of which the US has had a hand in starting and still supports surreptitiously.
Trump must know this but has made a conscious decision not to pursue it. Even more importantly, he seems to support the security agencies as a matter of course. He support free markets when it comes to making a living but security agencies when it comes to keeping us safe. The only trouble is that security agencies do not keep us safe.
Security agencies currently manufacture a number of threats and even find the people to carry out attacks on society, from what we can tell. This is true both in Europe and America.
It was true many years ago as well with Operation Gladio that had the CIA inciting bloodshed that it then blamed on communists. Operation Gladio is just one operation that seen the CIA shed European blood to keep the world safe from communism. But in fact according to G. Edward Griffin, Wall Street was instrumental in setting up the Soviet Union to begin with.
So top elites have always wanted another entity to oppose America. This gives them more freedom to operate on both sides of the fence.
Conclusion: For one reason or another, Trump seems to agree with this point of view, though perhaps that is not the case. Where he comes down on these issues is not entirely clear yet. Time will tell.