Donald Trump began his second presidential term with a barrage of activity that seems designed to sow confusion.
President Trump has issued some two dozen executive orders that may or may not survive legal challenges. He has threatened tariffs on imports but held off imposing them. His deportation sweep has generated headlines but have been modest so far. Some analysts think Trump is deliberately trying to shock the political establishment, with actual policy results TBD.
But an important theme is emerging from Trump’s actions and the legislative plans of Republicans who control Congress. Trump and his allies want to shrink the federal bureaucracy and establish the sort of libertarian government that Trump backer Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor, seems to favor.
The result would be a more self-reliant electorate enjoying the freedom of a federal government nowhere to be found.
Trump routinely evokes William McKinley, the 25th US president, who oversaw a laissez-faire economy with no income tax and little regulation. In practical terms, Trump and his allies are trying to institutionalize libertarianism by rolling back consumer protections, giving businesses a freer hand, trimming Medicaid and other benefits that accrue to millions, curtailing federal health guidance, and giving investors more leeway to experiment. Trump even talks about replacing the individual income tax with tariff income, which would be a radical reversion to the McKinley norms of the late 1890s.
Critics charge Trump with coddling billionaires while seeking to shred the social safety net.
Yet it may be an apt time to test how much government Americans really want. Trump ran on disrupting the status quo and steamrolling a system many voters feel is failing them, even as the government spends record amounts on retiree pensions, healthcare, and other benefits. Trump won a decisive electoral college victory and 49.9% of the popular vote, with many voters signaling that an economy that looks good on paper is leaving them behind.
Some anti-Trumpers snicker at working-class voters who seem to be voting for higher tariffs, benefit cutbacks, and other changes that could leave them worse off. That might be oversimplified. “Most people [do] not want to be passive recipients of government benefits,” economist J. Bradford DeLong wrote in 2023. “Rather, they want the social power to earn (and hence to deserve) their slice of the growing pie.”
Medicaid, the federal health program for the poor, could be a key test of whether Americans really are asking for less government and more self-sufficiency. Medicaid is a joint federal-state program that provides health coverage for about 72 million Americans, including at least 20 million adults who became eligible because of changes in the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
Republicans have been trying to chip away at Medicaid for years, and there’s a good chance they’ll finally manage to do it in 2025. One of Trump’s top priorities is extending a huge set of tax cuts that expire at the end of the year, and to do that, Congress will have to come up with offsetting cuts elsewhere in the federal budget. Medicaid is one of the top targets, and Republicans have the congressional majorities to get it done.
Medicaid covers a lot of inner-city residents of Democratic cities — but also a lot of rural Americans in Trump Country. If Congress were to repeal the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, for instance, it would bounce about 14 million people from the program in states that voted Democratic in the 2024 election, but also more than 7 million in states that went for Trump.
Would Trump voters who lost Medicaid coverage suddenly feel duped? Maybe not. “When people in states like West Virginia and Tennessee vote in a way that suggests they do not want to be Medicaid recipients, they should be taken seriously,” Adam Tooze wrote recently in Foreign Policy. “They instead want a strong economy in which they can earn what they deserve and so be able to stand on their feet and buy health insurance.”
Trump claims his policies will do just that, creating a new “golden age” that will lift most boats and more than make up for what people might lose in government largesse. Low taxes will trigger blowout growth; tariffs on imports will bring back millions of good-paying manufacturing jobs; unshackled workers aided by artificial intelligence will become more productive than ever.
It had better work, because if it doesn’t, other Trump policies could be setting vulnerable Americans up for startling setbacks.
Trump’s nominee to be the top federal health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a vaccine skeptic likely to talk people out of immunizations and expose whole families to heartbreaking illness. Trump is already dismantling many government safeguards meant to protect ordinary investors from highly volatile cryptocurrencies that could wipe out portfolios if the bubble bursts, as many investing pros expect.
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Trump is also dialing back worker protections while freeing businesses to worry less about hiring practices and environmental protection. His threatened tariffs, if they ever go into effect, would raise the cost of imported goods like clothing, appliances, medicine, and toys, hitting family budgets already tight from inflation of the last three years.
Trump already tried to halt federal funding for some 2,600 programs involving grants, loans, and federal assistance. He ended the halt after two days of controversy, but the effort alone signals Trump’s intent to slash spending wherever he can. The new Dept. of Government Efficiency, headed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, will recommend a variety of ways to cut government spending by 5% to 10%, leaving it to Congress to pass such cuts through legislation.
As a rule, lower-income Americans rely more on the government than higher-income people with more resources. And Trump won more lower-income voters than his opponent Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. So Trump’s own supporters will be key test subjects in his effort to supplant Big Government with Empowered Individuals.
McKinley offers other lessons. He presided over the end of the “robber baron” era, a time when rich industrialists exerted extraordinary control over the US economy through monopolies and other extortive practices. That led to Teddy Roosevelt’s trustbusting efforts, the imposition of the modern income tax, and the establishment of the Federal Reserve.
Voters back then decided they wanted more government, not less. Surely it couldn’t happen again.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Bluesky and X: @rickjnewman.
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