Trump Campaign Co-Chair Has Radical Anti-Government Views
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The hire came after the Perry campaign couldn’t pay him, but his views are bizarre, even for Trump.
Trump’s latest senior-level hire for his campaign, however, aligns him with a right-wing faction of the Republican coalition that the billionaire land developer has thus far not made common cause with. Sam Clovis is a college professor, sometime radio host and former Republican candidate for the United States Senate (he lost the GOP primary to now-Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) in 2014). As of Tuesday, Clovis is Trump’s national campaign co-chair.
Clovis has also suggested that nearly everything that the federal government does toaid the poor, the sick or the elderly is unconstitutional…
During his unsuccessful Senate race, Clovis told radio host Jan Mickelson that “there’s nothing in Article I, Section 8 [of the Constitution] that authorizes subsidies of any kind.” He also agreed with Mickelson that three particular types of federal spending — “crop insurance,” “foreign aid” and “funding education” — are all unconstitutional.
Yet Clovis’s statement that the Constitution does not permit federal “subsidies of any kind” stretches far beyond these three programs, if taken to be a serious statement of how he views the nation’s founding document. Social Security, after all, is a subsidy for retirement. Medicare, Medicaid and similar programs are subsidies for health care. Even the U.S. military could arguably be described as a subsidy for national defense (although it is unlikely that Clovis, who is a former Air Force officer, would go quite so far as to declare his own career in the military unconstitutional).
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