Is Trump economically closer to a pre-Adam Smith monarch than to any recognizable market ideology — left or right?
Chris Hayes describes Donald Trump as "the most antagonistic president to free markets" he has ever seen — fundamentally authoritarian, illiberal, and a believer in what Hayes calls "a personalist controlled economy." Rather than fitting any modern economic category, Hayes places Trump ideologically in the era before Adam Smith, likening him to a pre-market monarch who wields economic power as a tool of personal control rather than as a coherent policy framework.
Hayes draws a pointed historical parallel: Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, he notes, was itself "written as a polemic against tariffs and mercantilism" — which is precisely the economic worldview Trump embodies. In Hayes's framing, Trump does not occupy a position on the conventional left-right economic spectrum at all. He is simply in his own category, one that predates the very intellectual tradition that gave rise to both free-market conservatism and progressive economic thought.
Mercantilism is a pre-modern economic doctrine, dominant before Adam Smith's 18th-century critique, that holds national wealth is best secured through protectionist trade policies, tariffs, and state control over commerce — prioritizing exports and restricting imports. Hayes argues Trump's economic instincts align more closely with this pre-Enlightenment framework than with any contemporary ideology, left or right.
Hayes also issues a sharp strategic warning to Democrats tempted to label Trump a socialist. Doing so, he says, is "a boner killer for everybody" — a rhetorical misfired that alienates potential voters and muddles the actual critique. The more accurate and damaging charge, in Hayes's view, is not that Trump resembles the left, but that he resembles no recognizable modern economic actor at all. Calling him a socialist both flatters the coherence of his thinking and lets him off the hook for something far stranger. You can hear Hayes develop this argument in full on the episode, available on Listenly.
"There is no universe in which he would have emerged victorious two, four, six years ago. Like something is obviously happening among the Democratic primary electorate, which is a different electorate than the general electorate."
— Chris Hayes, Pod Save America
About Chris Hayes
Chris Hayes is a prominent anchor and host at MSNOW (MSNBC), brought onto this episode of Pod Save America to analyze the results of the Michigan Democratic Senate primary and to make sense of broader progressive trends within the Democratic Party. Host Alex Wagner introduces Hayes as someone "wise, but also just ballsy enough to say what they really think" — a characterization that captures why Hayes is a credible voice on precisely this kind of uncomfortable, ideologically charged question. His media platform gives him both the reach and the analytical distance to apply historical and economic framing — like the Adam Smith comparison — that cuts through partisan noise. On the question of Trump's economic identity, Hayes speaks not as a partisan but as a careful observer willing to reach for an unflattering and genuinely unconventional answer.
See also
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Hayes acknowledges a kernel of truth in Emanuel's concern — that a primary electorate can select candidates poorly optimized for a general election — but he stops well short of endorsing Emanuel's public offensive against the DSA as strategically sound or politically productive for the broader Democratic Party.
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