'Unconstrained executive power': George Will slams Trump as 'most statist' president in 'US history'

For many years, veteran Washington Post column George Will and the late National Review founder William F. Buckley were the most prominent conservative voices in the media. Will, during the 1980s, was polite to liberals, but he wasn't shy about arguing with them and explaining why he disagreed strongly with their criticisms of President Ronald Reagan's economic policies.

But 2016 was a turning point for Will, who expressed his vehement disdain for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement by leaving the Republican Party and becoming an independent. Will never looked back: Nine years later, the conservative columnist, now 84, remains a scathing Trump critic.

In a biting Post column published on July 18, Will attacks Trump's economic policies — including tariffs and protectionism — as contrary to the spirit of true capitalism.

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"After six months, with seven times that much time remaining, Trump 2.0 seems as transformative as the New Deal was, but different," Will argues. "Franklin D. Roosevelt's legacy was the institutional architecture of the welfare and regulatory state. Donald Trump's legacy will be a demonstration: How a purely transactional politician, untethered from any political philosophy and uninterested in norms of self-restraint — e.g., unforced respect for the separation of powers — can exploit this architecture for unconstrained executive power."

Will continues, "Trump's ever-shifting and contradictory rationales for tariffs — curing trade deficits, strengthening national security, punishing ingratitude, etc. — reveal that protectionism is not an economic policy, but a political strategy for aggrandizing personal power…. The most statist administration in U.S. history has replaced capitalism with what economists call 'economic repression': government supplanting the market by restraining or compelling economic activities for political objectives."

Trump's push to expand the federal government's executive branch, Will warns, goes hand-in-hand with the flawed economic policies of a "Putinesque presidency."

"Under the personalist rule by an unfettered executive," Will writes, "the process is the punishment: 'Sentence first — verdict afterwards,' said such an executive, the Queen of Hearts in 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'…. Today's administrative state, suffocating society with enveloping laws and regulations, can be wielded like a cudgel by a president enjoying seemingly limitless discretion as congressional majorities choose to be ciphers. A president without constitutional scruples is not limited by institutions that are theoretically, but not actually, rivalrous."

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George Will's full Washington Post column is available at this link (subscription required).