For all of his obvious weaknesses, Trump was occasionally praised by serious commentators for his view that America was more than the sum of its over 300 million individual parts. In other words, he was allegedly a communitarian, not a libertarian. Is there any merit to this?
No, for two reasons. First, Trump’s taxing and spending policies were all standard GOP fare—catnip for PBPs and CLs, not CDs and Reactionaries. Second, the only kind of community that Reactionaries support is one in which they have complete economic and social control over everyone else. You can hardly expect the identity left to buy into a vision of a single, unified America in which they are only given a subordinate part.