In 2024, Donald Trump based his reelection campaign’s rhetoric on deregulation and tax cuts to free the private sector from burdensome regulations and to stimulate economic activity. In practice, Trump 2.0’s economy has looked less like that small-C conservative ideal and more like the protectionist and mercantilist status quo of the early 20th century.
“This is the most interventionist government of my lifetime,” Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan, told the progressive news network MeidasTouch in an interview released Sunday. “It’s the least conservative government of my lifetime.”
Wolfers, who the IMF once named one of 25 young economists in the world “shaping the way we think about the global economy,” said that Trump’s undermining of federal institutions’ independence and propensity to insert himself in private sector decisions is reorienting the economy away from a productive and predictable path. The result, Wolfers warned, could be a generation of missed opportunities and lost growth.
Wolfers has previously compared Trump’s economy, particularly its tariff regime, to the U.K.’s departure from the European Union. “Brexit is a lovely case study for my friends over here in the United States,” he told CNN last year. Wolfers has criticized Brexit’s isolationist effect on the U.K. for years of stagnant growth and higher unemployment. “That’s pretty much the script America’s gonna have to follow as well,” he said, amid the U.S.’s escalating trade war rhetoric last spring towards the U.K. and Europe. (In fact, Wolfers has compared Trump’s election to Brexit since as long as 2016, although even then, he warned Trump’s election would likely be worse.)
