Source: Persuasion
by Sam Kahn
“Recently, like some sort of half-drunk, half-mad amnesiac historian, I’ve taken to asking any interlocutor I can find — family, colleagues, whomever — if they can think of any historical parallels to what the two-man wrecking crew of Trump and Musk is doing. The usual answer is that nobody can come up with anything. … A few weeks ago, I argued that Trump is Warren Harding, reversing the New Deal, dismantling the Rooseveltian administrative state, and returning to the combination of laissez-faire domestic economics and trade protectionism of the Republican Party of the 1920s. While I stand by that, it now occurs to me that I wasn’t being nearly obscure enough and the real framing for how to understand Trump/Musk lies 400-odd years before that, in the (rather delicate) establishment of the nation state.” (03/10/25)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/trump-is-privatizing-america