Trump Needs a Social and Family Policy

He has never had one. The Swamp will not be drained until he does.

Donald Trump has never developed a plan for addressing social and family issues or for reforming the wasteful and counterproductive government machinery. Yet it is arguably the most pressing overall crisis in America, since the ongoing destruction of the family — foremost by the very government agencies that claim to serve their welfare — underlies and exacerbates all the others.

His first administration made no effort to reform social and family policy, and so the family policy apparat remained and remains a bastion of the radical left. In fact, they used it as a base from which to launch attacks that helped defeat his re-election in 2020. (And thinktanks and “NGOs” that advocate for “the family” are mostly a bastion of neocons that collude with the Left.)¹ Not so long ago, family policy and welfare reform were the main priority of the Republican Party. But since it became dominated by radical feminists, who terrify conservative men and reduce them to simpering sissies, the Republicans cannot seem to run away from it fast enough.

The government’s family policy bureaucracy is by far the most intrusive into private life. In many ways it was where “the Swamp” began (as I demonstrate in my new book, Who Lost America? ). The welfare state was the original “Deep State” that first brought the power of the state into private life and then brought the Left to power.

I have also demonstrated this in several Substacks:

• “The Origins of the Deep State” (June 2023)

• ”The Origins of the Deep State (cont'd.)” (June 2023)

• ”How They Invented the Deep State While No One Was Looking” (Sept. 2024)

Twice in major publications, I have proposed specific, practical measures for the Trump administration to adopt that will stop state functionaries from destroying families. I see no need to update them now, because nothing has changed or diminished the urgency since those pieces were published:

• "Draining the Swamp Must Include Social Policy and Welfare" (Epoch Times, 2022)

• "A Social Policy for Donald Trump" (Daily Caller, 2016)

(You may wish to comment on these articles here below, and of course “like” and repost this message.)

Without the courage to grasp this nettle, the Trump administration will go on fighting symptoms, not underlying causes. They will spend 4 years cutting off Hydra heads or, in today’s metaphor, engaged in a pointless and never-ending game of Whac-a-Mole with their leftist and neocon adversaries.

---

If you want to read more analysis that will push you to think “outside the box,” you will find it in my new book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went "Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw.  His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.

1. A little known fact that I describe in the book (p. 135): ‘Neoconservatism’ today mostly refers to the aggressive American foreign policy, especially since the Cold War.  But when the term originated in the 1970s, the other preoccupation which defined it was welfare policy.  Early neocons produced some cogent critiques of welfare, but they lost their nerve in the 1990s, when feminists took advantage of the Republicans’ failure to reform it by politicizing it and making criticism hazardous.