“Milton Friedman was the best,” Elon Musk recently tweeted, sharing the video of the Nobel Laureate listing the many federal agencies he believed should be dismantled. Musk often praises the late Friedman, champion of the classical liberalism conservatives adopted to displace the failures of the Old Right and Rockefeller Republicans.

Another Musk favorite has been Thomas Sowell. In his proclamation for Black History Month, President Donald Trump included Sowell with honorees such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, and rightly so. Sowell, who grew up in abject poverty, has produced a mind-boggling and wide-ranging body of popular intellectual work.

Both economists possess an uncanny ability to synthesize abstract ideas and transform them into accessible, articulate, and logical philosophical arguments. The book “Free to Choose,” written by Friedman with his wife Rose, was turned into a highly influential television series and changed the way many Americans thought about trade and society. Sowell’s “Basic Economics,” surely unread by most politicians, is one of the best books on the topic ever written.

Now, there’s no doubt that the president has moved the Republican Party to the left. And though Musk might occasionally overpromise, he often sounds like a Cato Institute functionary. If someone had told me 20 years ago that one day, a tech billionaire would be appointed by the president to audit the administrative state, cut spending, tear down agencies, and expose fraud, I’d have thought a great miracle had occurred, and the libertarians had finally won an election.

And many of Trump’s most popular accomplishments to this point — tax relief, deregulation, loosening restrictions on energy production, exerting American strength to create peace, nominating originalist justices, rolling back leftist cultural quackery, backing Israel, and now, exposing some of the egregious waste and corruption of spending agencies — are well in line with Reagan conservatism.

This isn’t to contend that Friedman would be a big Donald Trump fan. Hardly. Trump, if we’re forced to define his politics, would probably be best described as a centrist Democrat populist in a world where the Democratic Party has fallen off a liberal cliff, which is why many normies and centrist types were comfortable moving to the GOP.

Even that’s stretching it. Truth is, MAGA is ideological anarchy, which allows all kinds of factions to claim the mantle. Most voters, though, do not agonize over the philosophical underpinnings or consistency or purity of policy. Trump is very much like them.

And Trumpism is whatever Trump says it is at any given moment — and it can change quickly. One day, Trump is (correctly) accusing RFK Jr. of being an unhinged socialist, and the next day, after RFK Jr. says nice things about Donald Trump, the entire Republican Party embraces MAHA as if it were a central and indispensable plank of the movement.

If Bernie Sanders had endorsed Trump, he’d probably be vice president right now.

Even protectionism, perhaps the only stance Trump has earnestly and consistently embraced since the 1980s, is difficult to defend. Whenever the president enacts a new tax on imports, MAGA pundits sprint to their social media accounts and cable TV to defend tariffs on their own merits as a vital means of protecting workers, fixing the trade deficit, and increasing manufacturing. When Trump pulls the rug on them because he often uses the threat of tariffs to leverage for some other need, his fans immediately change course and tell us it was obviously a ruse. But it wasn’t Sowell who said that the United States should “work together toward zero tariffs, zero non-tariff barriers, and zero subsidies” on most goods; it was Donald Trump, the same man who argues we should do away with the income tax and fund government exclusively by “tariff,” a more beautiful word than “love.”

You can defend all that because you think it works. But don’t tell me it makes sense.

Indeed, there is a paradox at the heart of MAGA. Trump has thrust us into the most horseshoe-y political environment in a century. The “populist” intellectual movement, consisting of GOP converts, disaffected, un-woke refugees from the Left, and uglier elements of authoritarian alt-rightism, are constantly flailing to backfill populism and define it with coherent ideas. And on economics and foreign policy, many populist intellectuals are often indistinguishable from progressive ones. More Gore Vidal than William Buckley. More Thomas Piketty than Thomas Sowell.  

The other day, Sohrab Ahmari, who’s had the decency to admit he’s basically a New Dealer, argues that Musk is a danger to “Trumpism.” For him, Musk’s attack on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an unaccountable regulatory agency hatched from the mind of Elizabeth Warren, and the National Labor Relations Board, an agency that props up unions that workers have no interest in joining, portents a “naked oligarchy.” Trumpism, in Ahmari’s conception, doesn’t work without a nomenklatura. To the populists on the Left, the state is a font of decency. He’s not alone.

Every Musk tweet praising Friedman is a small disaster for “new right” technocrats like Oren Cass, who, unsurprisingly, have been propped up by liberal billionaires and left-wing publications. No doubt these progressives are fans of Trump’s Labor Secretary pick, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, bankrolled by leftists and a champion of laws that would compel people to join dying unions. But will she have a bigger effect on the minds of voters than Musk?

One wonders how Josh Hawley, whose economics owe more to Marx than Friedman, feels about Elon’s championing libertarian economist. The Yale Law grad leans hard into the class-envy pandering, most recently teaming up with Bernie Sanders to write a bill that would institute price controls on credit cards, ensuring that working people won’t be able to build credit or access the money they need. It’s a shame he doesn’t read Sowell.

Or take JD Vance, another socially conservative economic leftist, who told Ross Douthat the “people on the left, I would say, whose politics I’m open to — it’s the Bernie Bros.” And to be fair, Vance throws around class war bromides like a 1970s teamster organizer. This is the kind of rhetoric that intellectual populists on the Left like to pretend is fresh.

Though Trump, who rarely engages in that kind of rhetoric himself, would not name Vance his successor the other day, considering the feckless, weak, and radical state of the modern Democratic Party, he could well become the next president.

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Friedman argued that there were four limiting principles to state power. Preserve the peace. Defend the country. Provide citizens with a way to fairly adjudicate disputes. Protect individuals from coercion. Many Trump voters seem to like those limitations. At the same time, many of them also seem to like protectionist policies and class warfare and coercion and big government. Because Trumpism makes no sense.

A pro-liberty, small-government conservative fan of Milton Friedman might take some solace in the fact that centuries of evidence show us that statist economics makes us poorer. And sooner or later, people will catch on again. But you wonder which “Trumpism,” the one championed by economic leftists in the GOP or the one championed by Elon Musk, will outlast its namesake.