The rightwing, anti-government forces which first took root in the Republican party more than 40 years ago are now in full bloom and Trump is their willing avatar
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Republican party leaders have long talked about slashing the size of government, reducing the social safety net, and privatizing whatever they can. Paul Ryan, the former House speaker, called social security a “Ponzi scheme”. It has long been the dream of movement conservatives to bring to the knees a federal government that grew dramatically in scope under the Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B Johnson’s anti-poverty programs.

While Trump appears incapable of reading a book, he has absorbed – through osmosis, as well as through cabinet members such as the vice-president, Mike Pence, and acting the chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, – the philosophies of hardline conservative economists, especially Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek and James Buchanan.

All three men were the godfathers of modern conservatism, which sought to purge the remnants of the Republican party’s liberalism and its taste for a certain element of noblesse oblige. The growing federal government, with its programs for the poor and its ossifying bureaucracy, was the true enemy of liberty in their eyes, and a total war must be waged against it. - The Guardian