{"id":2147,"date":"2026-06-24T06:37:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T06:37:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=2147"},"modified":"2026-06-24T06:37:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T06:37:10","slug":"critics-cackle-as-trump-lackey-attempts-to-compare-president-to-a-founding-father","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=2147","title":{"rendered":"Critics cackle as Trump lackey attempts to compare president to a founding father"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

One of President Donald Trump\u2019s top economic advisers, Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent, recently compared the Republican leader to an American founding father \u2014 and experts cannot stop laughing at the comparison.<\/p>\n

Read more New book exposes JD Vance as a fraud<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cEconomic security begins with national capacity,\u201d Bessent wrote for The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. \u201cWe have rediscovered at great cost what Alexander Hamilton taught us: that every nation \u2018ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply.\u2019 Our strength is derived from what we can build, for the nation that can\u2019t produce what it needs isn\u2019t truly secure. The nation that depends on its adversaries for critical inputs isn\u2019t truly sovereign. And the nation that reduces its economics to consumption isn\u2019t truly prosperous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bessent added, \u201cAs Hamilton put it, we must enlarge \u2018the sphere of our domestic commerce.\u2019 Economic security begins with the capacity to build, invent, finance and scale the industries that will define the next century, among them semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, shipbuilding, critical minerals and pharmaceuticals. More than economic sectors, these are sources of national power. The U.S. must lead in all of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hamilton is best known for co-authoring The Federalist Papers, which helped convince the American states to ratify the Constitution, and for serving as America\u2019s first Secretary of Treasury under President George Washington. Under Washington, Hamilton laid the foundations for America\u2019s capitalist economic system, and is widely regarded as one of the seminal thinkers in economics and political science in modern history.<\/p>\n

Scholars have noticed the discrepancy between Bessent\u2019s glowing praise of Trump and the reality of a Trump-Hamilton analogy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe most glaring historical issue is that while Hamilton\u2019s goal as a statesman was to build a new national marketplace and a federal government to govern that market and the nation,\u201d Gautham Rao, a historian at American University and Editor-in-Chief of Law & History Review, told AlterNet. \u201cTrump\u2019s central goal is to enrich himself by extracting wealth from the nation\u2014the people\u2014while using privileged access to the state to leverage the market for further self-enrichment.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Rao was not the only expert who scoffed at the analogy.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can’t think of a favorable comparison between Trump and Hamilton,\u201d Karl Widerquist, a philosophy professor at Georgetown University-Qatar who specializes in economics, told AlterNet. \u201cHamilton was an intellectual who co-wrote the Federalist Papers, who really thought about how to design good institutions. Whether you agree with them or not, he was a thoughtful person who was thinking about, \u2018How do we make these institutions work for a republic?\u2019\u201d Even though Hamilton had his bias toward \u201ca republic of upper-class white men,\u201d he still wanted to create a working republic. Just as importantly, Widerquist asserted, Hamilton was an expert on finance and banking systems, while \u201cTrump is just a bully who’s trying to get money out of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more MAGA tears apart Tucker Carlson at Pennsylvania Trump rally<\/a><\/p>\n

Widerquist conceded that Bessent has a case in terms of Trump\u2019s “argument for self-sufficiency,” but qualified that concession by pointing out a glaring difference between Trump\u2019s approach and Hamilton\u2019s philosophy.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s framed wrong,\u201d Widerquist said about Bessent. \u201cHe says the United States must lead in all of these things. That’s not how cooperation among nations works. No one can lead in everything. And being prepared against getting cut off from another country doesn’t require you to lead in everything \u2014 it just requires you to have a decent amount of everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

He concluded, \u201cI do think we should have some shipbuilding, and we should have some semiconductor manufacturing here, and other things. But the kind of ad hoc tariffs that Trump has been putting on and taking off and putting on and taking off are not likely to lead to this.\u201d<\/p>\n

In general scholars tend to scoff at the notion that Trump is anything like America\u2019s founding fathers. Speaking to The New York Times in May, University of Virginia law professor Saikrishna Prakash said they would have been deeply disturbed by Trump\u2019s expansion of executive power.<\/p>\n

“I think they’d be astonished, not merely by Trump, but by the breadth of the executive power in the modern era\u2026. They expected that impeachment would deal with scoundrels,\u201d Prakash said.<\/p>\n

He added, regarding Congress, “They have a lot of authority. It’s just that, in the modern era, it\u2019s very hard for them to flex it, because half the Congress is in the president’s pocket and the president has a veto.”<\/p>\n

Read more Gen Z fury boils over as Trump\u2019s economy destroys summer jobs<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of President Donald Trump\u2019s top economic advisers, Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent, recently compared the Republican leader to an American founding father \u2014 and experts cannot stop laughing at the comparison.\u201cEconomic security begins with national capacity,\u201d Bessent wrote for The Wall Street…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1602,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nCritics cackle as Trump lackey attempts to compare president to a founding father - Next Address America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=2147\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Critics cackle as Trump lackey attempts to compare president to a founding father - 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