Former US President Donald Trump has said America lost its way and pointed to incumbent President Joe Biden’s policies as the reason.
“We are a nation that has quite simply lost its way. But we are not going to allow this horror to continue,” Trump said at a rally of supporters in Nevada.
He also said the Biden administration is “destroying our country.” The former president called Biden a threat to democracy and incompetent.
Trump earlier accused the Biden administration of hating its own country.
The men responsible for how America lost its way
So, who are these evil geniuses of Andersen’s title? At no point does he list the names, but they emerge clearly enough along the way as he tells the profoundly sad story of the price American society has paid for their folly. These are the principal architects of the winner-take-all economy that gave rise to today’s extreme economic inequality and the madness that placed Donald Trump in the Oval Office:
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006), who led the way toward shareholder primacy that has so tragically distorted the conduct of business in the United States
Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. (1907-98), author of the now-famous thirty-four-page memo to the U. S. Chamber of Commerce that set off the rush by the ultrarich and Big Business to destroy the labor movement and seize the reins of government
Charles Koch (1935-), David Koch (1940-2019), and their billionaire brethren, Richard Mellon Scaife (1932-2014) and John M. Olin (1892-1982), whose “philanthropy” funded the right-wing infrastructure of think tanks and “conservative” university institutes that moved public opinion and the nation’s courts sharply to the right over the past half-century
Federal judge Robert Bork (1927-2012), who put originalism on the map in legal circles, imposing sophistry on the deliberations of thousands of federal jurists
Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes (1940-2017), whose unabashed Republican editorializing on-air fostered and sustains today’s sharply polarized political climate
Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich (1943-), the take-no-prisoners leader of the Republican Right whose legacy is the ongoing partisan dogfight in Washington
Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist (1956-), whose single-minded, decades-long campaign against raising any taxes is expressed in the Taxpayer Protection Pledge that virtually all Republicans running for federal office are forced to sign
Ronald Reagan, the 40th President, whose easygoing manner persuaded millions of Americans to accept economic policies that were demonstrably harmful to all but the rich
Former President Bill Clinton (1946-), a “New Democrat” whose administration enacted neoliberal economic and criminal justice policies virtually indistinguishable from those of the Radical Right Obviously, America didn’t lose its way through the efforts of a few men alone. None of these individuals operated in a vacuum. Most exercised their influence through a raft of Right-Wing institutions that proliferated beginning in the late 1960s. In fact, they themselves created many of these entities. Among them were, most notably, the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Business Roundtable, Federalist Society, Club for Growth, Fox News, George Mason University, and ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) as well as older, established groups including the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, American Enterprise Institute, and the Wall Street Journal.