How will ‘Trumpismo’ work out?

Some 18 months ago, Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, was sneering at the very type of federal interventions he is now pushing, Quartz’s Washington correspondent recently pointed out.

True.

In June 2024, Mr Bessent delivered a speech at the Manhattan Institute, in which he castigated the Biden administration’s predilection for “central planning”, federal subsidies and overreach of the law.

He branded it “Bidenitis”, “Bidenism” and, most damningly of all, “Bidenismo”. The comparison was to “Chavismo”, the socialist policies pursued by the late Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Eighteen months on, Mr Bessent seems all in on Trumpismo.

Mr Bessent was very clear that expansion of state control predictably breeds favoritism for market incumbents and creates significant barriers to entry for new firms”. Arguing strongly for “rule of law”, Mr Bessent decried the “[Biden] administration’s overreach in pushing its central planning agenda”. And he lamented that “even where the courts have ruled that the Biden administration has exceeded its legal authority, it has persisted in finding extralegal mechanisms to pursue its goals”. Such behaviour “risks sparking significant backlash against reasonable long-term goals”, he warned.

What a difference a year and an election can make.

Now, Mr Bessent is a fervent supporter of the Trump administration’s plans to take more government stakes in private companies in strategic sectors.

He seems to see little peril in the US government trying to replicate, in minor key, China’s command-and-control economy.

Trumpismo, to coin a term, doesn’t seem to trouble Mr Bessent at all. Should it?

For starters, Trump’s America is not Xi’s China. Americans won’t put up with being put down all the time and that too without getting any of “the good stuff”. Those are the words Dan Wang, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, recently used to describe all the things China’s system provides to its people in exchange for curtailing some of their freedoms.

Mr Wang, author of Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future’, wrote in The Economist (paywall), “There are plenty of useful things that Mr Trump could have picked up from China. Part of the Communist Party’s political resilience stems from its ability to deliver goods that people need. Over the past four decades the Chinese people have enjoyed a staggering increase in material benefits, even if the methods of producing them have often been brutish”.

Instead, the Trump administration’s policies are likely to stoke inflation, he said, without delivering material improvements such as  homes and better mass transit.

In the end, he said, “what we get out of his flirtation with authoritarianism are gilded ballrooms, detention centres and profound stress on the foundations of American institutions”.