Critics cackle as Trump lackey attempts to compare president to a founding father

One of President Donald Trump’s top economic advisers, Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent, recently compared the Republican leader to an American founding father — and experts cannot stop laughing at the comparison.

“Economic security begins with national capacity,” Bessent wrote for The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. “We have rediscovered at great cost what Alexander Hamilton taught us: that every nation ‘ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply.’ Our strength is derived from what we can build, for the nation that can’t produce what it needs isn’t truly secure. The nation that depends on its adversaries for critical inputs isn’t truly sovereign. And the nation that reduces its economics to consumption isn’t truly prosperous.”

Bessent added, “As Hamilton put it, we must enlarge ‘the sphere of our domestic commerce.’ Economic security begins with the capacity to build, invent, finance and scale the industries that will define the next century, among them semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, shipbuilding, critical minerals and pharmaceuticals. More than economic sectors, these are sources of national power. The U.S. must lead in all of them.”

Hamilton is best known for co-authoring The Federalist Papers, which helped convince the American states to ratify the Constitution, and for serving as America’s first Secretary of Treasury under President George Washington. Under Washington, Hamilton laid the foundations for America’s capitalist economic system, and is widely regarded as one of the seminal thinkers in economics and political science in modern history.

Scholars have noticed the discrepancy between Bessent’s glowing praise of Trump and the reality of a Trump-Hamilton analogy.

“The most glaring historical issue is that while Hamilton’s goal as a statesman was to build a new national marketplace and a federal government to govern that market and the nation,” Gautham Rao, a historian at American University and Editor-in-Chief of Law & History Review, told AlterNet. “Trump’s central goal is to enrich himself by extracting wealth from the nation—the people—while using privileged access to the state to leverage the market for further self-enrichment.”

And Rao was not the only expert who scoffed at the analogy.

“I can't think of a favorable comparison between Trump and Hamilton,” Karl Widerquist, a philosophy professor at Georgetown University-Qatar who specializes in economics, told AlterNet. “Hamilton was an intellectual who co-wrote the Federalist Papers, who really thought about how to design good institutions. Whether you agree with them or not, he was a thoughtful person who was thinking about, ‘How do we make these institutions work for a republic?’” Even though Hamilton had his bias toward “a republic of upper-class white men,” he still wanted to create a working republic. Just as importantly, Widerquist asserted, Hamilton was an expert on finance and banking systems, while “Trump is just a bully who's trying to get money out of people.”

Widerquist conceded that Bessent has a case in terms of Trump’s "argument for self-sufficiency," but qualified that concession by pointing out a glaring difference between Trump’s approach and Hamilton’s philosophy.

“It's framed wrong,” Widerquist said about Bessent. “He says the United States must lead in all of these things. That's not how cooperation among nations works. No one can lead in everything. And being prepared against getting cut off from another country doesn't require you to lead in everything — it just requires you to have a decent amount of everything.”

He concluded, “I do think we should have some shipbuilding, and we should have some semiconductor manufacturing here, and other things. But the kind of ad hoc tariffs that Trump has been putting on and taking off and putting on and taking off are not likely to lead to this.”

In general scholars tend to scoff at the notion that Trump is anything like America’s founding fathers. Speaking to The New York Times in May, University of Virginia law professor Saikrishna Prakash said they would have been deeply disturbed by Trump’s expansion of executive power.

"I think they'd be astonished, not merely by Trump, but by the breadth of the executive power in the modern era…. They expected that impeachment would deal with scoundrels,” Prakash said.

He added, regarding Congress, "They have a lot of authority. It's just that, in the modern era, it’s very hard for them to flex it, because half the Congress is in the president's pocket and the president has a veto."

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