"America cannot endure another four years of Donald Trump." [updated]

 

"Trump is an all-around big-government statist," David Stockman says in his new book, "and that's what Republicans are supposed to be against." 

Stockman, former Budget Director in the Reagan White House, says, 

America cannot endure another four years of Donald Trump. Nor, can it tolerate another election where a woebegone Democrat wins by default owing to the simple fact that they are not Donald Trump. [My book] 'Trump’s War on Capitalism' exposes his miserable record as a big spender, easy moneyman, hard-core protectionist, immigrant-basher, militarist, and all-around Big Government statist—all reason enough to lock Trump out of the 2024 election. 

He expands on that in his interview here ...

My biggest point [he says] is Donald Trump is in no way, shape or form an economic conservative. He's barely a Republican when it comes to free markets, free trade, minimal government ... personal liberty, private property, markets. ... [W]e will go into some of it in terms of the massive stimulus spending that occurred, the crazy money printing generated by the fed after march 2020. All of this paved the way for the inflationary surge we've been struggling with and set the economy back years and years and created a fiscal mess that is truly dangerous as we move into the future. 

I wanted to remind Republicans that Donald Trump may have the right enemies, and I agree with that, to the extent that his enemies are the New York times, CNN, the mainstream media and the Washington establishment. That is fine and good. The problem is he had the right enemies but the wrong policies -- every one of the key policies in the economic realm were wrong. ...

I profoundly believe he doesn't deserve a second chance.... [L]et's not Trumpify the Republican party and turn it into this grotesque spending and easy-money and interventionist neocon-driven operation it is today.

Q: Early in the book you call Trump "an all-around big-government statist." What do you mean by that phrase?  

By “big-government statist” ... I mean he inherited a public debt that way too big: $20 trillion. By the time he left it was $28 trillion -- just in four years. That's a big number! You put it in perspective and ask the question: 'How long did it take us to get the first $8 trillion of the public debt (the same number he generated during his term)? The answer is 216 years!

The first 43 presidents to 2005 created 8 trillion dollars in debt -- he did it in four years!

The deficit averaged 9% of GDP during his four years compared to 2.5% average among all presidents since 1950. It was even dramatically bigger than Obama, who of course republicans spent eight years criticising for being a big spender and running up the national debt. 

The reason I think he is a statist is when it comes to foreign trade, he basically decided i'm going to levy a huge tariff on imports coming in from China. The average is about 20% on $360 billion worth of imports -- that's $75 billion or so year of taxes on consumers. 

It's a lot worse than that because in the categories that bear the Trump tariffs, there's about $1.2 trillion of imports and China accounts for about 30%. So when you raise the landed price by 20% of everything coming out of china in those categories, competitors raise their prices as well. So I compute it is something like $150 billion a year was put on the economy, adding to the inflationary pressure as a result of a protectionist trade policy that is about as statist as you can get. 

I think the same thing is true with his wall in Mexico. Yes, we have huge disorder at the border but the issue isn't closed or open or building a wall, the issue is these people are coming here because they want jobs and a better life. If we had an organised guest-worker programme in a country that is seriously suffering from a labour shortage, and a native workforce that is actually shrinking, the right thing to do is not build a wall, the right thing to do was to set up a guest-worker programme and welcome new workers into our economy. 

You can go across a lot of issues. They add up to the idea that the strong man sitting in the White House can make everything better by manipulating the fiscal, the monetary, the regulatory tools of the state to improve on economic and social life. That's statism, and that's basically what Republicans should be against -- that's what Democrats are supposed to advocate. And Trump basically did the same thing.

Another interview here, with Tom Woods:

UPDATE: Thanks to a suggestion from commenter And/orsum, for those still confused, here's a comparison between Trump and "that Argentinian bloke":