'We Have to Protect Our Geniuses': Reflections on President Trump's 2024 Victory Speech

Over the course of the past decades, Democrats have become increasingly vocal in demanding that rich people (be forced to) redistribute their wealth. According to them, millionaires and billionaires have the duty to help the poor by ‘paying their fair share.’ In a 2019 interview, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, claimed that “people are going to have to start paying their fair share in taxes.”¹ According to her Green New Deal proposals, anyone who has a net worth of at least US$10 million should be taxed at an extraordinarily high rate. As Ocasio-Cortez explains in the same interview, “Once you get to the tippie-tops, on your $10 millionth dollar, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60% or 70%. That doesn’t mean all $10 million dollars are taxed at an extremely high rate. But it means that as you climb up this ladder, you should be contributing more.”² In a tweet, Bernie Sanders, in turn, asserted that many millionaires and billionaires illegally avoid paying their tax liabilities. Consequently, the State should, he continued, forcefully redistribute US$150 billion from rich people to make up for tax evasion and provide ‘free’ education for US students by means of this extorted money. In his words, “If millionaires and billionaires paid the taxes that they legally owe, we could raise $150B more in revenue each year. That’s more than enough to provide tuition-free college to all Americans. Maybe instead of cutting IRS funding, we should make the wealthy pay their fair share.”³ Last but not least, only two months before the 2024 United States presidential election, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris announced, “I support a billionaire minimum tax and will ensure corporations pay their fair share.”⁴

At a superficial glance, it might seem as if Democrats are concerned with supporting the poor. Yet is this really their motive? Or might there be another reason for their demand that the rich redistribute their wealth to the poor?

First and foremost, it might be noted that the Democrats evade the question of how rich people have actually acquired their wealth. What millionaires and billionaires have in common is, obviously, that they have a lot of money. Yet the Democrats are not interested in differentiating between those who have become wealthy by trading their products on the free market and those who have obtained their wealth by force. To them, an industrialist who has become rich by inventing and selling a product which people want and need and a criminal who has become rich by defrauding and robbing others are two sides of the same coin. Given their rhetoric, the Democrats clearly imply that anyone who is rich is to be damned evil because he has acquired his wealth dishonestly. Consequently, it is his duty to now make up for the crime of being wealthy. As American philosopher Ayn Rand notes, “To a concrete-bound, range-of-the-moment, primitive socialist mentality—a mentality that clamors for a ‘redistribution of wealth’ without any concern for the origin of wealth—the enemy is all those who are rich, regardless of the source of their riches.”⁵

The central reason for the Democrats’ demand for higher taxation and wealth redistribution is not their concern for the poor. After all, if the Democrats were really concerned with helping the poor, they would advocate for the free market and production rather than for a controlled economy and redistribution. Over the course of the past centuries, capitalist policies have lifted uncountable people out of poverty all over the globe. Socialism, in marked contrast, has by now been tried on every continent except for Antarctica. Yet wherever it was tried, it resulted in poverty, disintegration, and collapse. “If concern with poverty and human suffering were the collectivists’ motive,” Rand points out, “they would have become champions of capitalism long ago; they would have discovered that it is the only political system capable of producing abundance.”⁶

Rather than lifting the poor out of poverty, the Democrats’ secret wish and real motive is to destroy the rich. Their rhetoric gives clear indications for this interpretation. After all, their alleged desire to help the poor is, if mentioned at all, consistently voiced as a secondary afterthought. The primary message of their speeches, however, is that the rich have made their fortunes unjustly and that, consequently, their property should be expropriated.

It cannot be stressed often enough that politics is not a productive enterprise. It is businessmen and entrepreneurs in the private sector who come up with ideas and inventions. They create new products and exchange them on the free market by voluntarily exchange to mutual profit. Politicians, in marked contrast, are concerned not with the production of wealth but merely with its redistribution. With notable exceptions, they enter the political arena because they know that they have no values to offer and could not survive on the free market. Their desire, thus, becomes to be admired not for their achievements but for their ‘social conscience.’ Experiencing envy and hatred for those who can actually create values, they intend to fill the nagging emptiness they feel inside by attempting to destroy any successful person. Rand describes the mindset of such people as follows:

They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself. …

[T]hey are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.⁷

Democrats who clamor for wealth redistribution do so not because of their concern for the poor but because of their hatred of the rich. Anyone who is rich, they claim, has not acquired his wealth justly and needs to be punished for it now by ‘paying his fair share.’ Entrepreneurs and businessmen are depicted as robber barons who have made their fortunes by exploiting the poor.

Given that the Democrats have by now convinced many Americans of this fairytale, it would be refreshing to witness a person challenging this myth by celebrating, rather than denouncing, creative entrepreneurs for their achievements. Luckily, President Trump did so in his victory speech after winning the 2024 presidential election. Delivering a four-minute laudatio on Elon Musk, Trump concluded, “[H]e’s a character, he’s a special guy, he’s a super genius. We have to protect our geniuses. We don’t have that many of them. We have to protect our super geniuses.”⁸

The Democrats denounce entrepreneurs for having allegedly made their fortune by exploiting others and they claim that businessmen would serve society best by redistributing their wealth. Trump, in marked contrast, highlighted that people like Elon Musk have greatly benefited their fellow men and he stressed that they can only continue doing so if they are not deprived of their wealth. Trump exemplified this point most dramatically when discussing Hurricane Helene. He said:

The people from North Carolina came to me and they said, ‘Would it be possible … for you to speak to Elon Musk? We need Starlink. … It’s a form of communication.’ … [I]t was very dangerous. People would die. They had no communication. All the wires were down. I called Elon Musk. I said, ‘Elon, you have something called Starlink, is that right?’ ‘Yes, I do. … It’s a communication system that’s very good.’ I said, ‘Elon, they need it really, really badly in North Carolina. Can you get it?’ He had it there so fast, it was incredible … It saved a lot of lives. He saved a lot of lives.⁹

Qua businessman, Trump clearly understands the pivotal role the entrepreneur plays in the economy. Unlike the Democrats, Trump is fully aware of the life-affirming impact which people like Elon Musk have. They come up with new ideas and inventions and produce new products and technologies. The reason why uncountable North Carolinians did not lose their lives in the hurricane was, Trump highlighted, not government interventions but entrepreneurial inventions.

In contrast to the Democrats who denounce all rich people, Trump stressed the beneficial impact of one particular rich person who acquired his wealth not by exploitation but by production. It is brilliant individuals like Elon Musk who contribute to our well-being by their ingenuity, creativity, and productivity, he announced to the world. Such individuals, he explained, should not be denounced but celebrated for they make all of our lives better. Yet if we want to keep profiting from their achievements, these geniuses, Trump concluded, must not be sacrificed. They, their property, and their resources have to be protected from the mob and the government.

Trump’s passionate defense of wealthy individuals who have justly made their fortunes on the free market was a defining moment in modern American history. Resoundingly rejecting the robber baron myth, Trump celebrated successful entrepreneurs by highlighting their beneficial impact on society. Unlike the Democrats who long to shackle the rich, Trump made it clear that we need to keep these people free if we want to profit from them.

Yet his defense was more than merely a defense of property rights and wealth. More fundamentally, it was a defense of the human mind. Revealing the crucial role the mind plays in the process of property and wealth creation, Rand states, “All property and all forms of wealth are produced by man’s mind and labor. As you cannot have effects without causes, so you cannot have wealth without its source: without intelligence.”¹⁰

Trump is undoubtedly right in stressing the beneficial impact which brilliant entrepreneurs like Elon Musk have on our lives. And he certainly deserves greatest praise for his public, proud, and unapologetic encomion. Yet, unfortunately, Trump’s defense of entrepreneurs was a purely practical and altruistic one.

While celebrating the entrepreneurs, Trump justified their existence by stressing their beneficial impact. They should be protected from government interference, he argued, because they contribute to the well-being of others. Many North Carolinians, he exemplified, would have died had it not been for Elon Musk.

Yet what about the rights and the well-being of the entrepreneur? Is Elon Musk only to be protected if he helps others? Should he lose his property rights if he were to no longer create products and innovations which contribute to the well-being of others? Given his record, it is hard to believe that President Trump thinks so. However, his purely practical and altruistic defense of entrepreneurs at least implies that businessmen only have a right to their own lives as long as they can prove that they have actively contributed to the public welfare. 

While Trump should certainly be lauded for the fact that he passionately celebrated entrepreneurial activity, businessmen should not merely be defended for their beneficial impact. There is, certainly, nothing wrong with highlighting the entrepreneur’s beneficial impact. What is much more desperately needed to ‘protect our geniuses’ in the long run, though, is a moral defense. Such a defense would primarily focus on the individual’s right to his own life and property. It would highlight that no one has the ‘right’ to initiate force against others. To educate the public why it is morally wrong to forcefully redistribute wealth, nothing less than a moral defense will do.

President Trump’s celebration of entrepreneurial activity was one of his finest moments. Yet one can only wonder how much nobler, and how much more convincing, he would sound if he were to defend businessmen for moral rather than for practical reasons. Hopefully, one day, we will hear him, or another president, publicly present such a moral defense. Until then, we can at least imagine how such a speech would look like when reading Ayn Rand:

No human rights can exist without property rights. Since material goods are produced by the mind and effort of individual men, and are needed to sustain their lives, if the producer does not own the result of his effort, he does not own his life. To deny property rights means to turn men into property owned by the state. Whoever claims the ‘right’ to ‘redistribute’ the wealth produced by others is claiming the ‘right’ to treat human beings as chattel.¹¹

1. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quoted in Veronica Stracqualursi, “Ocasio-Cortez Suggests 70% Tax for Wealthy to Fund Climate Change Plan,” CNN: Jan 4 2019.

2. Ocasio-Cortez quoted in Stracqualursi.

3. @BernieSanders, X.com, Feb 24 2024.

4. @KamalaHarris, X.com, 6 Sep 2024.

5. Ayn Rand, “The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 2nd ed (New York: Signet, [1966] 1967), 244.

6. Ayn Rand, “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, edited by Peter Schwartz (New York: Meridian, [1971] 1999), 281.

7. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (London: Penguin, [1957] 2007), 1046-1047 [emphasis in the original].

8. The Telegraph, “In Full: Donald Trump Declares Victory in 2024 US Presidential Election,” YouTube.com, Nov 6 2024, 15:37-15:46.

9. The Telegraph, “In Full: Donald Trump Declares Victory in 2024 US Presidential Election,” 14:54-15:37.

10. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1062.

11. Ayn Rand, “The Monument Builders,” The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (New York: Signet, [1964] 2014), 107.