NATIONALISM + SOCIALISM:

[A]ccording to the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, two of whose staffers actually served on Trump's transition team, Trump has since reversed course. Its 2020 annual compendium of regulations, Ten Thousand Commandments, lamented: "Trump cuts, but Trump also adds."

The report based its conclusion on "Trump's proclivity to trade restrictions" and his "ad hoc zeal" for antitrust action against Big Tech. On the trade front, "the tariff man," as Trump proudly refers to himself, has demanded that America's trading partners pledge reciprocity in purchasing American goods as part of any trade agreement. That severely crimps the scope of these deals. Worse, in his MAGA (Make America Great Again) zeal, he issued twin executive orders last year mandating the use of American products in federal contracting and infrastructure -- apparently unperturbed that the resulting cost hikes in government projects are essentially a tax on Americans.

Meanwhile, using antitrust laws to challenge the alleged monopoly power of giant corporations was the province of Democrats. But thanks to Trump's personal animus toward Big Tech, CEI notes, he has "casually invoked antitrust action" against tech and telecom companies such as Amazon (whose founder publishes The Washington Post), Google, Time Warner, Facebook, and others. He created a technology task force last year with the express purpose of policing Big Tech. Even though few of its investigations have yielded fruit, the barely-veiled politicization of executive agencies has set a terrible precedent.

And then there's the president's record on immigration. Trump has used the regulatory state for aggressive labor market interventionism to advance his MAGA agenda. He has not spared the hitherto sacrosanct H-1B visa program for foreign professionals that even restrictionist conservative pundits believe is good for America. Even before COVID-19 hit, he had wrapped this visa in so much red tape as to make it virtually unusable. Now, he has just shut down the program along with virtually all immigration until the end of the year. Moreover, he has done so not to protect Americans from the pandemic, but from foreign competition. But there is no need for such affirmative action for natives, because immigrants often occupy sectors where Americans are either unwilling or unavailable to do the jobs.

By contrast, unlike Trump, Biden's rhetoric depicts immigrants not as an economic liability but as an asset.

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