DEAR EDITOR:

Donald Trump’s economic vision echoes that of Cosimo de’ Medici, the 15th-century Florentine banker who used wealth and commerce not just to build an empire, but to stabilize and empower the middle class.

Like Cosimo, Trump promotes a policy of national mercantilism — favoring domestic industry, strategic protectionism, and capital reinvestment over the diffuse power structures favored by globalist elites.

Under Trump, America first meant manufacturing first.

This mirrors Cosimo’s model of using state-influenced capital to fuel internal economic development, ensuring the prosperity of local citizens rather than enriching foreign oligarchies or abstract global institutions.

Trump’s tariffs, tax reforms, and energy independence policies all sought to bring capital and labor back within the national domain — an echo of the Medici belief in economic autonomy as a path to political power and cultural revival.

In contrast, the globalist and Democratic economic model increasingly resembles modern feudalism — centralized in bureaucracy, beholden to multinational interests, and dependent on the technological aristocracy of Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

Just as feudalism bound peasants to the land and lord, today’s economic progressives promote a system that fosters dependency — on government programs, student debt, corporate monopolies, and overseas supply chains.

Trump’s mercantile strategy challenges this hierarchy. By incentivizing trade deals that favor American workers and building economic infrastructure from the bottom up, Trump reasserts sovereignty — not only political, but economic.

Like Cosimo, who used his banking dynasty to assert Florentine independence from foreign powers, Trump uses tariffs and deregulation to protect the American marketplace from global manipulation.

Critics may dismiss Trump’s policies as simplistic or isolationist.

But to many Americans, especially working-class voters long ignored by both parties, it represents a return to dignity — a system that values work, ownership, and national identity.

Where the globalist model sees citizens as data points in a borderless economy, Trump’s approach treats them as stakeholders in a shared destiny.

Just as Cosimo de’ Medici revived the Florentine republic by empowering its merchants and craftsmen, Donald Trump’s economic legacy is rooted in the belief that a strong nation is built on productive citizens — not bureaucratic overlords or global cartels.

LARRY YORK

Warren