WSJ analysis proves it: MAGA is the party of socialism

On Friday, a new report by the Wall Street Journal revealed that the MAGA movement has embraced the very “socialist” policies for which President Donald Trump attacks his Democratic opponents. According to the Journal’s chief economic commentator, Greg Ip, MAGA’s “disdain for capitalism and centrism” has it looking more “socialist” by the day.

Ip raises the example of Vice President JD Vance, who dismissed Milton Friedman during an interview in June as irrelevant “in a world where globalized liberalism has become the sort of status quo of American elites." This sort of statement is a far cry from traditional free market Republican economics. According to Ip, such thinking tracks with the “Horseshoe theory,” in which “the similarities between communism and fascism” begin to overlap to the point where they are almost indistinguishable. Like the “communists” and Democratic socialists the president so often rants about, writes Ip, Trump, Vance, and other MAGA figures “disdain free markets and globalization while embracing big, coercive government" and "are obsessed with identity."

According to Ip, these ideas began to shape the Republican Party in 2016 “with Trump’s populist takeover of the Republican Party. ‘Trump has re-educated, or mis-educated a lot of Republican voters into thinking everything is rigged. It’s how Bernie Sanders thinks about the economy,’ said Andy Laperriere, policy analyst at Piper Sandler. ‘The foreigners, the big companies, the system, whatever, is ripping us off.’ Laperriere noted that many ideas that originated on the left now command considerable backing from Republicans. Limiting drug increases to the rate of inflation, banning large investors from buying single-family homes, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 and capping credit-card interest rates at 10 percent all command support of around 70 percent or more, according to polls.”

Ip argues that Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) – long the standard bearer for American socialist politics – “have a lot in common.” Ip writes that “Sanders wanted to nationalize oil companies in the 1970s and proposes 50 percent state ownership of AI companies now. Trump used to call for seizing Middle Eastern oil or being paid to defend it, and just grabbed control of a chunk of Venezuela’s reserves. He has taken stakes in numerous companies and discussed doing the same with AI.”

And when it comes to moving MAGA’s identity away from the broader tolerance typical of centrism, says Ip, “Vance has gone further than Trump in arguing that religion and national origin, not an idea, are the basis of American identity. ‘We cannot rebuild Western civilization, we cannot rebuild the United States of America or Europe, by letting millions and millions of unvetted illegal migrants come into our country,’ he told a conservative audience in early 2025. Vance has also led the charge against Republican economic orthodoxy.”

While MAGA may be increasingly socialist, Ip argues that it will never merge with Democratic socialists because “they may agree that identity matters, but disagree vehemently on why.” Most of the president’s policies simply don’t resonate beyond MAGA. As Ip notes, “Outside of his core base, support for Trump’s handling of the economy and immigration have plummeted.”