Trump’s War on Capitalism review: a Reaganite and RFK Jr walk into a bar…

With a foreword from Robert F Kennedy Jr, David Stockman, once Ronald Reagan’s budget director, delivers an unsparing attack on Donald Trump. The former president’s stances on trade, social security, spending and Covid all receive a beatdown. Stockman was somewhat sympathetic to Trump when he rose to power eight years ago but has since grown hostile, posing as a keeper of the flame of Reaganism, defender of free markets and opponent of statist encroachment.

Stockman’s plug from RFK Jr, a former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination now running as an independent, is noteworthy. After reminding the reader of past antipathy toward Stockman over cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency budget four decades ago, Kennedy lauds him for criticizing Trump on Covid.

“He’s truth-teller,” Kennedy declares. “He tells the truth in these pages – by the numbers.”

In 2007, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil fraud charges against Stockman, together with officers and employees of Collins & Aikman, an auto-parts supplier that went bankrupt in 2005.

“Between 2001 and 2005, C&A and several of its former officers and employees, including its chief executive officer, Stockman, engaged in pervasive accounting fraud,” the commission alleged. The case was settled in 2010, after Stockman agreed to pay $7.2m, without admission of wrongdoing.

As for Kennedy, he has problems of his own.

“Covid-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted,” he said in Manhattan last year. “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

For the record, Borough Park and Midwood in New York, home to large Jewish populations, had among the highest Covid death