Larry Kudlow: President Trump has captured a new American zeitgeist

President Trump has captured a new American zeitgeist, and that’s the subject of the riff. 

President Trump celebrated his award of Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” by ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, still the font of American capitalism. You could hear the chants of “USA, USA” coming from the floor brokers.

Mr. Trump is the first president since Ronald Reagan to ring the bell at the opening. After four years of the absolute failure of Joe Biden’s big government socialism and Modern Monetary Theory, it’s no wonder those NYSE floor traders were cheering. Mr. Trump promised tax cuts and deregulation to promote economic growth of 3% or better. 

Of course, he himself understands business because he was an enormously successful businessman. Virtually no one in the Biden administration ever worked in business, except for a few who were in charge of DEI and ESG programs, which don’t count, and will be blown away by the president-elect.  

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Mr. Trump has already appointed the DOGE brothers, also known as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to dismantle the unelected bureaucracy called the regulatory state — itself the backbone of Joe Biden’s socialism. With over $2 trillion worth of regulations, most particularly the Biden war on fossil fuels, this modern brand of Marxism dumped sand into the gears of business and undermined the kind of entrepreneurial capitalism espoused by Mr. Reagan and Mr. Trump.  

Presumably, Mr. Trump will move rapidly to make good on his tax cut plans, including a 15% corporate tax for domestic producers, and include that along with his other key promise to end the crime-ridden wave of illegal immigration, putting all of that into a creatively outsized fiscal reconciliation bill — that would become the centerpiece of his first weeks in office. Already, American business and consumer confidence has soared in anticipation of Schumpeterian gales of creative destruction.  

The national mood is turning positive. Trump’s win is reviving America’s lost energy. Culturally, there is a collective sigh of relief that the yoke of the woke mind virus, to use Elon’s phrase, will be removed.  

Merit will replace DEI. Religion and faith will return, which brings us to an interesting moment in President Trump’s Time magazine interview. 

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Mr. Trump told them that the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania changed a lot of people. He said a lot of people became much more religious, including members of his own family, and he reiterated his thought, going all the way back to the RNC convention in Milwaukee, that he came to believe that God spared his life for a reason. 

It is as though Mr. Trump has captured a new American zeitgeist. Indeed, Mr. Trump himself may be that zeitgeist. That’s the riff. 

This article is adapted from Larry Kudlow’s opening commentary on the Dec. 12, 2024, edition of “Kudlow.”