Are there any upsides to a second Trump presidency?: Ivo Vegter - Biznews

Ivo Vegter examines the potential impacts of a second Trump presidency, emphasizing its dangers to democracy and individual freedoms. Trump’s alignment with the Christian right could blur church-state boundaries, allowing fringe religious ideologies to influence policy. While he promises free speech, critics argue it’s selective, targeting dissenters. Economic policies and cronyism raise fears of inflation, inequality, and weakened global competitiveness. Radical measures, ostensibly to reduce bureaucracy, might harm essential protections, undermining justice and prosperity.

Ivo Vegter

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of Donald Trump, president-elect of the US, but could we expect some good things?

I’ve written at some length about why I believe Americans will rue a Trump presidency, and why South Africans, too, will rue a Trump presidency. 

I’m not backtracking on any of what I wrote. I think that many US voters based their choice on misinformation and misconceptions, and surveys very clearly support this view.

Now that four years of populist rule in the US by either Trump or his vice president-elect, JD Vance, is a certainty, let’s see if we can find any potential upsides.

Christian right
A Trump presidency will give the Christian right a great deal of power to impose their moral views upon everyone else. 

And by “Christian right”, I don’t mean the majority of Christians. I mean Catholic integralists, Christian Reconstructionists, Dominion Theologists, Christian Theonomists, and outright Christian Nationalists. All of them seek to tear down the separation of church and state, take over the government, write the law, and bring religion back into public life and government policy. They want to establish a Christian nation for Christian people who follow Christian law based upon Christian morals.

These are fringe movements, largely rejected by mainstream Christian believers and denominations, but they have a great deal of political influence. 

Barry Goldwater, Republican presidential candidate in 1964 and author of The Conscience of a Conservative, was surprisingly liberal, supporting environmental protection, homosexuals serving openly in the military, gay rights, abortion rights, adoption rights for same-sex couples, and the legalisation of medicinal marijuana.

His liberal social positions, combined with his conservative economic positions, made him an icon to libertarians; albeit an icon that lost by a landslide. Despite taking the Deep South from the Democrats over the Civil Rights Act, Goldwater lost to the promised “Great Society” of his opponent, Lyndon B. Johnson, winning only six states outright and claiming just 38% of the popular vote.

Though by no means non-religious – his book explicitly said there are “laws of God” and “truths of God” which inform his beliefs about conservatism and his vision of how the country should be run – Goldwater referred to the Christian right in scathing terms: “Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.” 

Trump has become their anointed, and will allow them wide latitude to implement Project 2025’s roll-backs on civil rights, including the equal rights hard-won by women and LGBTQ+ people.

Religious law is no more a recipe for freedom in America than it is in Iran or Afghanistan.

Freedom of speech
A possible upside of a Trump presidency is that he claims to believe in freedom of speech. In practice, however, that freedom will be limited. 

Books that do not conform to the conservative right’s moral worldview, such as those that normalise gay relationships, will be widely banned from schools and libraries.

Trump wants freedom of speech for himself and his supporters, but woe betide the teacher at a school, college or university who wants to discuss gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, diversity, or gender equality. Woe betide the doctor or nurse who wants to discuss abortion, reproductive health, or reproductive rights. 

Vance has said that government should seize the assets of political non-profits that express views which he finds disagreeable. Where is their freedom of speech?

Trump himself disagrees with Justice Antonin Scalia who held that burning the American flag is protected by the First Amendment.

Trump has not only used his bully pulpit to assault media organisations over what he considers to be “fake news”, but he has also suggested the government should yank their broadcast licences. 

Having a president or government agency decide what is and isn’t true or newsworthy, and then silencing those journalists that fall foul of the government’s “Overton window”, is the very antithesis of free speech.

He has also proposed to rewrite libel laws so that when a newspaper “writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace”, “we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected”. 

If a hit piece is false, newspapers are not protected at all, so the necessary implication is that truth will no longer be a defence against a defamation suit. Again, that is the antithesis of standing for free speech.

So yeah, maybe we’ll get more free speech, but clearly, we’ll get free speech for some, but not for others.

Trumponomics
Trump’s economic policies are also troubling. I’ve written about his gross misrepresentation of import tariffs as “a tax on another country”, and the unanimous view of economists that Trump’s proposed 10% to 20% blanket import tariff, and 60% tariff on Chinese imports in particular, will raise prices for working- and middle-class Americans. 

Combine this with the effect of deporting millions of workers who are in the US illegally, which will raise employment costs for companies, and you have a recipe for renewed inflation.

More generally, economists predict that Trump’s proposed policies will cause higher inflation, interest rates, budget deficits than those of the Kamala Harris campaign.

I explained that the economy is doing quite well under the Democrats, giving the lie to the notion that the US is over-regulated, over-taxed, or otherwise in grave trouble.

Despite this, I believe any of the world’s liberal democracies can use a figure like Argentina’s Javier Milei, dramatically cutting back the size and scope of government and freeing the economy to deliver greater prosperity for all.

The problem is that Trump is no Milei. Milei is a dinkum economist. He has two master’s degrees, and was a professor of macroeconomics, economics of growth, microeconomics, and mathematics for economists. 

Trump is a dodgy real estate guy. A rich one, perhaps, and one with a bachelor’s degree in economics, but not one that, like Milei, has read Austrian School economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. If he has, he certainly does not heed them to any noticeable degree.

No Milei
Kevin Beebe, a certified public accountant from Michigan, makes a pretty well-worded argument for why Trump’s tariff proposals are “5D Chess”. 

The idea is to replace income taxes with import tariffs. This will, he says, boost the “take-home pay” of middle- and lower-income Americans, turn them towards domestic alternatives for imports, which would boost domestic industry, resulting in more jobs and higher wages, and an opportunity for American companies “(FINALLY) to compete with foreign manufacturers”. 

“More competition at home should, over time, help keep prices down and improve the quality and variety of products available domestically,” he says.

The problem is that most of this is fantasy. It won’t actually happen. 

Tariffs are regressive taxes. Lower-income people spend most of their money on consumption, so they will spend a larger share of their income on tariffs. Their take-home pay might be reduced by abolishing income tax – which Trump has not promised to do, by the way – but tariffs will increase price levels, likely leaving them worse off than before.

Prices won’t be lowered by domestic competition, either. Raising the prices of imports reduces price competition and reduces quality and variety. The pricing of domestic manufacturers always rises to approach the tariffed import pricing of products against which they compete.

Because local industries are now protected from cheaper or better imports, they don’t need to be as efficient, so they become less, not more, competitive in the global market.

In fact, let’s let Milei himself explain why the protectionist view of tariffs is totally wrong, and ends up costing consumers and weakening the economy. Watch this short video.

Trump is no Milei.

Cronyism
Trump is a businessman, though ‘dishonest grifter’ might describe him better. His politics are transactional. This is evident in his embrace of Elon Musk as a political benefactor.

BM (Before Musk), Trump hated electric cars. He wanted to tariff electric car imports to death, said electric vehicle supporters should “rot in hell”, and called government subsidies for the industry “lunacy”.

AM (After Musk), Trump said: “I’m for electric cars, I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly.”

You couldn’t script a more blatant case of cronyism. Trump admitted that he can be, and has been, bought. 

In a single day on Wednesday 6 November, the day after the US election, Musk’s net worth increased by $21 billion, as shares in his companies – all heavily dependent on government subsidies, regulations and contracts – skyrocketed.

He’s not the only billionaire to have gained billions. 

Bernard Arnault, the French founder, chairman and CEO of LVMH, the world’s largest luxury goods company, topped the Forbes Rich List in 2023 and 2024 with an estimated net worth of $233 billion, about $38 billion ahead of Musk on $195 billion.

Now, after the election, Forbes’s Real Time Billionaires List has Musk leading the pack with $305 billion. Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta/Facebook fame, have all leapfrogged Arnault.

I’m not a billionaire basher by any means, and I’m a techno-optimist to boot, but the notion that these people have the interests of middle-class Americans at heart is patently ludicrous.

Baby, bathwater
Trump has promised Elon Musk a meme-worthy job as head of a prospective Department of Government Efficiency. The acronym, DOGE, refers to a meme-coin (dogecoin) that Musk has, with dubious legality, manipulated for years. (It has gained 70% since the election.)

This sounds great in principle, if you share my libertarian bent, but Musk is no Milei, either. 

Musk does not attribute his success to having read Mises, Hayek or Rothbard. 

He attributes his success (and saviour complex) to having read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Douglas Adams’sHitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. He calls Douglas Adams his “favourite philosopher”.

It’s one thing to point at bureaucracies and yell, “Afuera!” (Out!), as Milei did in a famous pre-election video. It is quite another to do this when you think bureaucrats are Vogons.

I’m as anti-bureaucracy as the next guy, but there’s a very serious risk that Musk won’t give a moment’s thought about the purpose of a given bureaucracy is or what it achieves, and that he will throw the baby out with the bathwater.

“Go wild”
Trump has also promised infamous hoax-swallower and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy a quid pro quo. 

In return for ending his independent run for president and endorsing Trump instead of Harris, even though Kennedy – like his family – has always supported the Democratic Party, he promised Kennedy control over all the public health agencies as well as the Department of Agriculture.

“We’re gonna let him go wild for a little while,” said Trump, “then I’m gonna have to maybe rein him back, because he’s got some pretty wild ideas, but most of them are really good.”

They’re not “wild ideas”, and many of them are not “really good”. Many of Kennedy’s ideas are mad, contradicted by the available scientific evidence. 

Doctors in the US are terrified of what he’ll do. “From a health perspective this would be nothing short of chaos,” said Robert Murphy, a professor of infectious disease, to The Hill. “He’s proven himself to be a dangerous fanatic who doesn’t have a science background and who doesn’t believe in science. We’re in a lot of trouble if he has any role, any leadership position related to many things, but health in particular.”

Said Kennedy: “The Food and Drug Administration’s war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxy-chloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma. If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.”

Believe me, there is a lot for one can criticise the FDA. Its regulations are often too strict (denying terminal patients experimental drugs that it considers “unsafe”), sometimes too lax (letting harmful drugs through).  Its approval processes are cumbersome, expensive and time-consuming (while people die awaiting new medicines).

Kennedy, however, is an attorney. His rank ignorance of anything related to medicine is evident in his promotion of unpasteurised milk (a “natural living” fad that can cause infection with salmonella, E.coli, listeria, and other food-borne pathogens), chelation therapy (a real treatment that has become a pseudoscientific fad), ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine (unproven treatments for Covid-19), and neutraceuticals (an ill-defined term that subsumes a world of commercial charlatanry).

Kennedy is clearly not au fait with evidence-based medicine, given his continued belief that vaccines cause autism, wi-fi causes “leaky brain”, anti-depressants cause school shootings, chemicals in drinking water are turning children transgender, and HIV does not cause AIDS.

Putting such a person in charge of the food, drug and health bureaucracies is like giving a psychopath a meat cleaver. What is required is surgery, not butchery. 

Upsides
Elon Musk appears to be quite aware of the consequences of radically hacking away at the US civil service bureaucracies. 

During a virtual town hall-style meeting he hosted on X (of which the first 44 minutes are hold music), Musk said that Americans would have to suffer “temporary hardship” in order to realise “long-term prosperity”.

He agreed with this post on X: “If Trump succeeds in forcing through mass deportations, combined with Elon hacking away at the government, firing people and reducing the deficit – there will be an initial severe overreaction in the economy – this economy propped up with debt (generating asset bubbles) and artificially suppressed wages (as a result of illegal immigration). Markets will tumble. But when the storm passes and everyone realizes we are on sounder footing, there will be a rapid recovery to a healthier, sustainable economy. History could be made in the coming two years.”

Given that Americans are already prosperous, with better economic indicators across the board compared to other rich countries, and that presidents only have limited control over economic recovery from a catastrophic shock, one questions the necessity or wisdom of the kind of drastic measures Trump, Musk and Kennedy are proposing.

The downsides of such radical interventions are immediately obvious, and the upsides will come largely by accident. 

Perhaps drugs might get approved more quickly with Kennedy at the helm, but that will come at the cost of riskier drugs with dangerous side-effects slipping through the cracks, and outright quackery being incorporated into mainstream healthcare.

Red tape for businesses will get cut – after all, that is the quid pro quo Musk is counting on for his own companies – but at the cost of less protection for workers and consumers and far greater scope for financial and other malfeasance.

Tax cuts will get extended, and perhaps even deepened, but without a commensurate restraint in spending. American industry will get supported, but at the cost of a competitive, open economy that relies upon global free trade for its prosperity.

Loyalists
I’m all for hacking away at useless bureaucracy that throttles growth and threatens freedoms, but I’m not for doing so indiscriminately.

The incoming Trump administration will be staffed by people who are loyal to him personally, instead of to the people, the law, or the constitution. Trump has promised to replace thousands of civil servants with loyalists, too.

His government will be one of loyalty and patronage, not unlike that of the ANC, really. 

That creates a recipe for arbitrary exercise of power, often designed to benefit vested interests (like Trump’s own businesses, which have profited handsomely from his first presidency, and like those of Musk and other technology moguls). 

It creates the prospect of dispensing with the bureaucracy that Trump, his wealthy benefactors or his support base feel restrains them, which invites unintended consequences and undermines the rule of law.

It is reasonable to want a smaller government; even a much smaller government. It is not reasonable to simply let a coterie of ultra-rich malcontents blow it up. 

Sure, there will be upsides, in the same sense as weeding the garden with a flamethrower will get rid of the weeds.

Ivo Vegter  is a freelance journalist, columnist and speaker