Former President Donald Trump always knew he was “fighting for the little guy,” a former top economic adviser says.
In an interview with Epoch Times’ TV program Crossroads, Kevin Hassett, who headed the Council of Economic Advisers from 2017 through 2019, said Trump pressed policies that countered a drift into socialism — and as a result, was an “absolute success story for the little guy.”
Trump “absolutely understood that he was fighting a very big, powerful historical force … and he also knew 100 percent that he was fighting for the little guy,” Hassett told Crossroads.
The Trump administration prioritized policies that cut taxes and regulations that fueled a boom economy, Hassett told Crossroads, adding that during the years he served, “income inequality dropped sharply for the first time since World War II, wages grew faster for people in the bottom 10 percent of the wage distribution than for people at the top, as did wealth.”
“The homeownership grew startlingly for people at the bottom 10 percent, seven million people went off food stamps, [and] three million people went out of poverty,” Hassett told Crossroads. “It was an absolute success story for the little guy. And yet, the more the good news came, the angrier and angrier the left wing got.”
Despite the economic successes, Hassett lamented that some Republicans — including former President George W. Bush and his supporters — weren’t on board.
“All these people that became never-Trumpers, that distanced themselves from Trump, [it was] because they were afraid of losing their own respectability,” Hassett told Crossroads, saying those included “Bush Republicans [who] never came to the defense of Donald Trump’s people even when they were fighting for the right policies.”
According to Hassett, the left uses the “respectability” created by left-leaning universities and media.
“Because the left would control…the universities and … media, they act as that is if they could actually give people or take away their respectability,” he told Crossroads.
“These [leftist] folks don’t want Trump to succeed, because in the end, they don’t maybe necessarily care about income inequality. It’s just a political device for them to get the political power, they need to seize control of the society, and to take the power for themselves and really take totalitarian power.”
Hassett said his new book, “The Drift: Stopping America’s Slide to Socialism,” takes aim at those that are against the idea of capitalism and free markets, and “how organized [these forces] are, where they are, what their tactics are, and what we can do to stand up to them.”
“You need to learn what socialism is, you need to spot it in their policies,” he told Crossroads, adding central planning is “everywhere” in the agenda of the Democrats.
“Before you know it, the government basically controls the means of production, and distributes the goods, without regard to the price mechanism or productivity,” he told Crossroads. “And we could go on and on, but that’s the Democrats’ agenda.”
Hassett asserted President Joe Biden’s policies are “proposing a socialist takeover of the means of production.”
“If you see a country where policies like that survive, that it has to be that they created a government that can disregard the will of the people … if you look at the sort of ruthlessness with which the Democrats have been using the government to indict everybody, and so on, they really are trying to intimidate their way into having control over the economy,” Hassett told Crossroads. “And, you know, it’s up to us to stand up against them.”
Fran Beyer ✉
Fran Beyer is a writer with Newsmax and covers national politics.
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