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Is MAGA Going Marxist and Maoist? Trump's Assault on Free Market Capitalism


fortune.com/2025/08/12/maga-ma…


The Political Economy of Incompetence


open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug…

But it turns out that it was all in Hannah Arendt. In her classic book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” she explained why totalitarians — I know, Trump isn’t a full-on dictator, yet, but he’s clearly a wannabe — promote the incompetent:

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

Arendt also explained, in advance, the Trump administration’s extraordinary hostility to research, the extraordinary speed with which it is destroying America’s scientific base:

“ The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life.”