Trump Economics: No Principles—Just Hits and Misses

People keep asking if Trump’s economic policy rests on any clear principle. It does not. It is a series of impulses. Some enhance free markets through tax and regulatory relief. Some impose new costs on consumers. Some direct capital by government decree. Some make the state a part-owner of private firms. Here are the pros and cons of Trump’s actions.

The Good

• Historic tax reform under the One Big Beautiful Bill that reduced taxes, though it added some unnecessary complexities and self-serving political components.

• Ongoing historic regulatory reform aimed at unleashing markets, including substantially reduced new regulations and eliminating old ones.

• Executive Order 14192 (“Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation”) set a one-in, ten-out rule. Agencies must identify at least ten existing regulations for repeal for every new one.

• Formal notice-and-comment rulemaking has hit record lows. The Federal Register is on pace for fewer than 3,000 final rules in 2026—a level reached only under Trump before.

• Significant rules skew heavily deregulatory: more than twice as many deregulatory as regulatory overall this year, and roughly 4.5-to-1 in the July–September quarter. This is determined federal restraint—the strongest avoidance of new commandments since Reagan.

The Bad

• Heavy-handed tariffs act as taxes on American importers and consumers. They restrain markets, often outside normal rulemaking and without clear new congressional authorization.

• Industrial policy directs capital and favors chosen sectors through subsidies and directives instead of market signals.

• Antitrust activism and price interventions interfere with voluntary exchange.

• The government now takes equity stakes—or equivalent interests such as golden shares, warrants, or profit participations—in private firms. These are horrible government actions for two major reasons. First, it is a socialist, government-controlled policy. When governments own things, they make decisions based on their own internal political motives and not what the free market would do. Second, having government involved in private companies makes their competitors less able to compete on an even playing field, knowing that the government could use its power to interfere, making it much less likely that those competitors would make significant new investments in their industry.
  The Cato Institute (Cato) tracker by Tad DeHaven and Chad Smitson shows 34 such arrangements as of the latest September announcements—nearly triple the start-of-year total. Two more deals landed in September alone. Examples include the U.S. Steel golden share giving federal veto power over major decisions, conversion of CHIPS Act funding into a roughly 10 percent stake in Intel, and Defense Department Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment or Economic Defense Unit equity investments in firms such as Elmet Group and Hertha Metals. These turn government into a partner or partial owner.

• Agitation for more government giveaways, including the nonsense $5,000 dividend to every adult U.S. citizen that Trump proposed. This would be incredibly inflationary, has no source of funding other than adding to the already catastrophic $2 trillion annual deficit, and is pure political folly.

Markets thrive on clear rules that protect property and leave people free to trade. Mixing genuine deregulation with tariffs, industrial favoritism, and government ownership produces no coherent principle—only the familiar political stew of solid gains and self-inflicted wounds.