What in the name of boot licking populist totalitarianism is that?

Sorry - going back and re-reading it, that's more of a word salad than an effective way of communicating.

What I was trying to say is that a huge part of the modern GOP does not care one patoot about keeping the government out of the free market. The business/libertarian wing of the GOP argues that market forces should be left to themselves to sort out things like whether the local manufacturing plant shuts down and the jobs move to Mexico. The right-wing populist base doesn't care about that - they want the federal government to do something to bring back manufacturing jobs or make Wall Street stop following ESG principles.

Trump was bad at presidenting, so he didn't actually do anything to bring back manufacturing jobs. But he didn't engage in the rhetoric about government not putting their thumb on the scale or not picking winners and losers, either. He saw that using the power of the federal government to strong-arm companies to do things was really popular, so he did it. Not effectively, of course, but he was no Milton Friedman libertarian about it.

Albaby