Midway between the November election and January’s inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump is already signaling that, under his watch, the country is going to be open for business — and in a big way.
In a post on the social media platform Truth Social on Tuesday, Trump announced that any entity investing $1 billion or more in a project in the U.S. will be able expect favorable treatment from the federal government under his administration.
“GET READY TO ROCK!!!” Trump declared.
“Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals,” Trump wrote.
The goal of the announcement is clear: assure investors that a Trump administration is intent on opening doors to the kind of investment that brings jobs to the country while hyper charging the U.S. economy.
Elon Musk, the mega-billionaire owner of SpaceX, Tesla and the social media platform X — as well as an emerging player in the incoming administration’s efforts to reform the government’s administrative state — applauded the idea right out of the gate.
This is awesome https://t.co/v7CgpLcaLr
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 10, 2024
“This is awesome,” Musk wrote.
The obvious audience for Trump’s announcement is the energy sector — a business that both requires huge amounts of capital investment and faces some of the greatest risk of death by government regulation.
(The tortured history of the Keystone XL pipeline is one of the most glaring examples. Approved by Trump in 2017, it was destroyed by Biden in 2021. Now, according to Politico, Trump is trying to revive it.)
The American political left has devoted itself to destroying the country’s energy production in pursuit of its obsession with “green” energy.
The energy independence the country achieved during the first Trump administration was frittered away fast by President Joe Biden and his band of eco-fanatics.
Trump’s election already changed that dynamic. His announcement on Tuesday made it official.
And the wailing among progressives has already started.
The New Republic, for instance, is a leftist publication that has festered like a sore on the body politic since the administration of Woodrow Wilson (an openly racist autocrat The New Republic still reveres).
It’s already furious at Trump’s ambitions to spur the economy, even as it admits it has no idea how it will actually work.
An article about Trump’s post was headlined “Trump’s Latest Ridiculous Proposal Is a Huge Gift to Billionaires.”
That’s pretty scathing, and journalistic standards — not to mention common decency — would require some kind of argument backing it up.
But instead, the article is filled with unknowns, such as “what kinds of companies or individuals would be eligible for this offer, or what kinds of projects they would produce,” how it would affect existing programs, or even whether “Trump has the authority to make the offer in the first place.”
Still leftists hate it, with the same kind of reflex that makes Trump supporters — and probably even non-Trump supporters who are sane — love it.
Will this Trump plan create more jobs than Joe Biden’s entire administration created?
It’s because they know what it means — and what it signifies for at least the next four years.
Outside the fever swamps of progressive leftists, Americans understand that they’re living in a country that is being crippled by its own overreaching government — which is demanding a greater role in the lives of everyday people (very much including parents raising their children).
What Trump represents is a commitment to undoing the overregulation of the administrative state.
His announcement Tuesday was a public commitment that the federal government’s goal is not to cripple the kind of business development that produces jobs, contributes to the general welfare, and makes the U.S. economy the most powerful in the world.
And by the time all is said and done, Trump might have gotten rid of more regulations than any president in U.S. history.
In 2017, as Politico reported at the time, Trump signed an executive order to reduce government regulation by requiring that two regulations be eliminated before a new one could be added.
That war against the administrative state and its stifling of American businesses subsided during the Biden administration, of course. The only businesses Democrats are interested in helping are those of their political supporters.
But with Trump returning to office, that war is back with a vengeance.
And Trump is ready to rock.
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