Jeremy Warner, assistant editor of Britain’s The Daily Telegraph, wrote a piece which caught the eye titled: “Trump is becoming one of America’s most Left-wing presidents ever.”

The initial and natural reaction to such a headline is Mr. Warner is merely employing a rather elastic degree of journalistic license in formulating such a headline, but he makes some rather good points.

The MAGA movement, as President Donald Trump’s brand has come to be known, is an intrinsically populist one. It borrows from some conservative tenets, to be sure, especially on some of the attention-getting issues in the social and cultural realm but cannot be confused as conservative. That explains some of the more, well, unorthodox positions adopted by President Trump and his supporters in Congress.

On free trade and foreign policy in particular, traditional conservatives have watched with bewilderment and dismay MAGA’s embrace of appeasement abroad and economic dirigisme at home — positions one is generally more accustomed to associating with the likes of Teddy Kennedy or Bernie Sanders. Indeed, Red Ted’s nephew, RFK Jr., along with the other ostentatiously leftist cabinet picks like Tulsi Gabbard and the tendentiously pro-union Labor Secretary Lori Michelle Chavez-DeRemer, appear cozily at home in this administration.

The list of issues on which traditional delineations have been blurred is a growing one. The latest affronts to good sense coming from the administration are calls for raising marginal tax rates on the top earners (“taxing the rich”) and price controls, two of the most mischievous nostrums in the Modern Dictionary of Economic Superstitions.

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The proposal for an increase in the top marginal income-tax rate was blessedly stricken from the House Ways and Means tax bill by cooler heads, but on Monday, President Trump signed a sweeping executive order to impose price controls on prescription drugs. The order applies “Most Favored Nation” pricing on drug manufacturers, meaning they would have to sell their wares in the U.S. at the lowest price charged by any other developed country. The concept was initially to have applied only to Medicaid, but per the Monday order is now to be levied throughout the market, no longer limited to government programs. The administrator of this scheme, of course, will be Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is positively cock-a-hoop over the idea.

Now, drug prices are indeed generally much higher in the U.S. than in other developed nations, predominantly owing to those nation’s own domestic price controls — price controls which American consumers, in effect, have been subsidizing. But price controls — here or elsewhere — do not actually lower the cost; someone has to pay for making, testing and distributing the stuff. Drug makers will now be faced with two choices: a) curtail research and development to be able to absorb the artificially low prices, or b) simply stop selling overseas, and keep the prices at the same rate as they have been for the American market.

None of which is to say Americans’ shouldering the costs for other countries economic solipsism is a just or sustainable model; but rather than compound the problem one would hope instead President Trump might exercise his vaunted powers of negotiation to force some concessions by the malefactors. Isn’t that what his brief but damaging trade war was supposed to accomplish?

Neither should opposition to the scheme translate into undue sympathy for the pharmaceutical industry, which time and again has been more than willing to embrace the instrumentality of government in pursuit of its own mercantilist interests. But economic judgement is impartial, and the fact is price controls – whether on rent, or energy, or prescription drugs — are counter-productive.

A conservative would inherently understand this, and resist the popular temptation to abandon proven principle for temporary and superficial satisfaction. But again, Trump is a populist, not a conservative; and populist impulses, left or right, exist exclusively to satisfy the Jacobinical lust for popular approval — “political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth”, as William F. Buckley once put it.

But that popular approval erodes rapidly once the policies clamored for on the streets fail under the weight of reality. We are already seeing some hopeful signs — Trump’s retreat on the tariffs, for instance, to which the markets have responded accordingly. Even some gestures of acceptance of the realization Vladimir Putin may not be engaging in good faith concerning Ukraine — gestures which evoke the ire of the likes of Georgia U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, who grows apoplectically aghast any time the administration hints at a tack to the recognition that anything may happen more than 10 feet off America’s coast that might ever require the nation to cock it’s martial fist; a view traditionally shared by, incidentally, Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and the ghost of Ted Kennedy.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.