The Neoliberals Are Losing Patience with Trump

Introducing So You Don’t Have to: a regular series in which I read and analyse the gumpf neoliberal intellectuals and culture warriors publish. Today: neoliberal podcasters take the measure of the second Trump administration’s first 100 days in office.

As I explore in a recent review essay for Modern Intellectual History, the neoliberal movement appears to be divided on its analysis of and support for Trumpism. Some neoliberal think tankers, like the Hoover Institution’s Victor Davis Hanson, have fully embraced the Trump project. Others, meanwhile, are concerned that Trump has wrecked many of the shibboleths of neoliberal reason, most notable being received wisdoms about global free trade and a fierce aversion to tariffs and protectionism.

This internal debate is ongoing. The neoliberals remain divided on how to assess Trumpism and to what degree it rhymes with their own policy preferences or offends their first principles.

This week, the neoliberals offered a strikingly clear insight into their views on this question. Two leading neoliberal think tanks, the Hoover Institution and the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), dedicated their weekly podcast shows to a discussion of Trump’s first 100 days in office. I listened to them, so you don’t have to.

The Neoliberals Grade Trump

The Hoover Institution’s weekly podcast is called Goodfellows. It features three of the Institution’s senior fellows: historian (now Sir) Niall Ferguson, retired army official and foreign policy expert H.R. McMaster, and economist John Cochrane. The show is hosted by a fourth Hoover fellow, Bill Whelan, whose role is to pitch questions at the other three.

When Trump was re-elected in November, the Goodfellows were nothing short of elated. They saw the Trump revival as part of a global ‘vibe shift’ (Ferguson’s term) that rejects progressive policymaking, overregulation, and, most of all, the ‘woke’ agenda—all things they welcomed. They were especially excited about the prospect of an Elon Musk-fronted Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which they believed could make great gains cutting government waste—an enduring neoliberal dream. And they thought Trump would restore confidence in the free-market system, thus prompting economic growth after a lengthy slump under president Biden.

The Goodfellows remained broadly optimistic about the second Trump administration right up until ‘liberation day’ saw Trump announce blanket tariffs and trigger a global trade war. Tariffs are, of course, anathema to neoliberal economics, which preaches free trade and rejects protectionism on principle. It’s unsurprising, then, that the Goodfellows were none too pleased with Trump’s tariffs and the economic damage they’ll almost certainly wreak.

This is the sentiment that pervades the most recent episode. It features a lengthy segment on Trump’s first 100 days in office in which Whelan asks his colleagues to ‘grade’ Trump administration officials as if they were college kids. The responses are mixed, but the key takeaway is that their initial enthusiasm for Trump 2.0 has dampened significantly.

Cochrane in particular scolds Trump for his tariff policy, calling it a “face plant” that risks undoing all the positive gains the administration made in the early days. Says Cochrane: “We needed Trump to succeed politically so that these things became permanent. And, of course, now they won’t.”

Nevertheless, the Goodfellows see some silver linings. Trump’s unwavering support for Israel has been positive, McMaster says, giving the president a B on his foreign policy, while Ferguson opines that Trump deserves an A for his sweeping gains on cultural issues (including higher education). In the end, the Goodfellows remain hopeful that the tariffs blunder can be righted fast enough to limit the political fallout.

Later the same week, the IEA released its own podcast assessing Trump’s first 100 days. The London neoliberals, however, come at this theme from a different place. Their reading of Trump’s re-election was always more muted than that of their Hoover colleagues. Shortly after the election, in November 2024, they worried Trump might embrace protectionism and introduce tariffs. They also expressed discomfort with his endorsement of the January 6 coup and, on balance, felt he shouldn’t have been able to run for re-election in the first place. Even so, the IEA neoliberals were cautiously optimistic for the second Trump administration, singling out DOGE as a promising step towards the taming of the administrative state.

This muted enthusiasm has largely cooled in the interim, however. Now, the London neoliberals are mostly scathing in their judgement of Trump 2.0. Like the Goodfellows, the IEA crew interprets Trump’s tariffs as a frontal assault on free trade that will harm global growth prospects and stain his administration’s record.

They also train their guns on DOGE. If they were cautiously optimistic at first, welcoming the prospect of Musk taking a chainsaw to the state, DOGE’s actual record has left them frustrated. As one of them puts it, it’s been “tech bro amateur hour trying to change government by app.” The complaint is that Musk and his crew don’t have the patience, expertise, or theoretical understanding needed to downsize the state efficiently and with lasting effect. What the Trump administration should’ve done is recruit a component person to head this effort (such a neoliberal think tanker, perhaps?) rather than a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. A much better example, in their eyes, has been set by the Milei government in Argentina, which has followed a much more traditionally neoliberal line in its approach to downsizing the state.

A Question of Priorities

On the whole, then, the neoliberals have lost much of their patience with Trump. If the Hoover neoliberals expressly celebrated his re-election, the London neoliberals gave him the benefit of the doubt. If he’d stuck to received neoliberal nostrums on free trade, tax cuts, and small government he could likely have counted on their continued support. But he squandered their blessing within months, especially by rolling out tariffs.

It's too soon to tell whether the neoliberals will remain angry with Trump. It’s conceivable that if he squeezes a handful of trade deals out of it his transgression of free-trade nostrums will in time be forgotten. But it’s nevertheless clear that there’s been a mood shift within the neoliberal movement, which may widen into a fracture if it persists.

What I find most striking about this mood shift is just how sharply it’s brought the real priorities of today’s neoliberals into focus. In the end, it was economic protectionism and its failure to properly slash the welfare state that wrecked their enthusiasm for Trumpism and not, say, Trump’s assault on abortion rights, his plans to complete a third term, his authoritarian crackdown on free speech, his flagrant corruption and insider trading, his reckless defunding of science and education, his consistent imperilling of public health, his aggressive militarisation of ICE and the police, or his wanton violation of the rights and safety of people like Mahmoud Khalil. These topics don’t even register in their assessment; they literally don’t get a mention.

This tells us a whole lot about contemporary neoliberalism. While they remain attached to their cherished fantasy of the free market, as we’ve come to expect of them, neoliberalism’s latter-day champions appear silently to have jettisoned many other ideas that were foundational to the early neoliberalism of a Friedrich Hayek or a James M. Buchanan. To any neutral observer, the way Trump has weaponised the executive branch to crack down on free speech, science, civil rights, and democratic norms, all without going through Congress, is the clearest imaginable case of governmental overreach and undue interventionism, supposedly the things neoliberal reason exists to combat.

Perhaps appeals to constitutional order were always empty nonsense providing cover for neoliberalism’s real purpose, ideological class warfare. Perhaps we’re seeing the movement’s longstanding support for authoritarian regimes coming home to roost. And perhaps the present generation of neoliberals has simply lost the plot and abandoned the teachings of its elders. There is probably some truth to each of these intuitions. The deeper question, though, is why these shifts are playing out the way they are. What is it about neoliberal ideology that means its latter-day apostles can abandon support for the rule of law, acquiesce to the demolition of science, and accept the erosion of civil rights without viewing themselves as betraying their own tradition?

The answer, I think, isn’t that today’s neoliberals have simply broken with earlier neoliberalism, much less that neoliberalism no longer meaningfully exists. Rather, the ideology itself has morphed, as ideologies always do, adjusting itself to the shifting material, historical, and social conditions of the last decades. The challenge is as much to identify and map these shifts as to identify the logics propelling them.