The forgotten book that foretold Trump’s power grab

In May 2015, prominent right-wing intellectual Charles Murray published a book calling on the superrich to fund an American rebellion against their government. Titled By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, the book argued that the growth of the regulatory state was worse than dangerous: It was an existential threat to the American way of life. For this reason, federal authority had become fundamentally illegitimate. The normal political process — most notably elections — was hopelessly compromised, to the point where no candidate promising to roll back the size of the state could hope to win. The best solution, in Murray’s eyes, was for wealthy donors to fund a legal defense designed to facilitate a mass campaign of civil disobedience against the regulatory state. This so-called Madison Fund would defend people accused of noncompliance in court and pay any assessed fines if they lose. With enough donations, the Madison Fund could ensure that nearly anyone could disobey regulations with impunity. By the People has largely been forgotten today. It was published one month before Donald Trump descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower, announcing a presidential bid that would alter the course of history. Trump’s rejection of old GOP orthodoxies, including its libertarian hostility to programs like Social Security, suggested that Murray’s anti-government radicalism might belong to an era of the past. But the events of the second Trump term, most notably DOGE’s lawless gutting of the federal government, suggest that the book deserves a second look. Its extreme hostility to the very idea of liberal governance, its skepticism of democracy, and its faith in the primacy of the wealthy over the law all prefigured the way that Trump and Elon Musk would assail key functions of government in 2025. Moreover, it helps us understand why mainstream conservatives — the sort who pledge unending fealty to the Constitution and the founders — have been so okay with all of this. It’s not only that people on the right fear crossing Trump; it’s also, in part, that they share his belief that the American government is no longer worthy of respect. For if the state has become too big to command legitimacy, to the point where ordinary citizens are justified in disobeying it, then why should anyone care if the duly elected government breaks laws in pursuit of shrinking itself? By the People, explained Charles Murray has been a leading intellectual figure on the right for a very long time. Generally speaking, his work has focused on class and race inequality in the United States — and, more specifically, with the idea that welfare programs either do little to fix these problems or actually make them worse. His most (in)famous book, 1994’s The Bell Curve, argues that much of America’s class and racial stratification can be explained by gaps in IQ — suggesting, in one of its most provocative chapters, that white people have higher IQs than Black people due to their superior genes. The book made theorizing about genetic differences between the races acceptable among certain corners of the mainstream right, paving the way for scientific racism’s resurgence in the Trump era. By the People is, in some ways, a more ambitious book than The Bell Curve. Moving away from social policy, Murray strays into the realm of political theory — arguing not just that liberal policies have bad consequences, but that that they are fundamentally illegitimate uses of state power. The concept of “legitimacy,” generally speaking, refers to the principle used to assess whether a particular government is morally justified in exercising political power. In Murray’s view, the key principle is government non-interference in personal affairs. The modern regulatory state, and its involvement in life ranging from setting education policy to licensing barber shops, has become so corrosive of American liberty that it cannot be seen as legitimate. “It is part of our national catechism that government is instituted to protect our unalienable rights, and that when it becomes destructive of those rights, the reason for our allegiance is gone,” he writes. “At that point, revolution is not treason, but the people’s right.” [Image: Charles Murray speaking at the 2013 FreedomFest in Las Vegas. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/05/9268174774_1100fee8ca_k.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] To support this claim, he quotes a list of luminaries — ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville to Grover Cleveland — to argue that Americans have almost always believed in a state whose legitimacy is grounded in self-limitation. “The federal government lost its legitimacy in theory during the constitutional revolution of 1937-1942, lost its legitimacy in practice during the 1960s, and it has been downhill ever since,” he writes. “It is by that historical understanding that many of us who are devoted to limited government have thought of ourselves as living in a post-American country, governed by people who mouth the clichés about America as the land of the free without understanding what freedom means.” It may occur to you, at this point, that Murray has a democracy problem. Very few Americans actually agree with this libertarian vision of the American state, and they express that disagreement by electing non-libertarian politicians. In a democracy, the key principle of legitimacy is not libertarian theories of rights but rather popular sovereignty. It is the people, collectively, who decide on the limits of power — under conditions of free debate and exercised within constitutional constraints. If the people think the regulatory state is legitimate, why should Charles Murray and his libertarian friends get to ignore the laws that everyone else voted for? By the People offers two contradictory answers to this question. The first is that the people really have turned on the government, a big claim Murray supports with data showing a consistent decline in trust in government over the years. But this is measuring something different than basic legitimacy. Moreover, Murray once again has a democracy problem. If voters really were so furious about big government that they believed the entire state was illegitimate, then why aren’t radical anti-government politicians winning in landslides? To this, we have Murray’s second answer: that the people are bought off. They have become so dependent on government goodies that there is no hope for a return to pre-New Deal America. “The proportion of Americans who depend on the federal government to put food on the table, whether through welfare, Social Security, a government paycheck, or a paycheck financed by a federal contract, will continue to increase, and it will push the Republican Party to the center in all presidential elections,” he writes. Here Murray betrays himself: admitting, implicitly, that he does not really care about popular sovereignty. He admits that people routinely choose, in democratic elections, to authorize and reauthorize an expansive state — but dismisses their right to make a choice he personally finds antithetical to liberty. He is certain his libertarian view of legitimacy is true, regardless of what the people think, and thus is convinced that people like him are justified in ignoring the law. But how could anyone ever hope to win a fight against the federal leviathan when the people have been bought off by Social Security? This is where his “Madison Fund” financing civil disobedience comes in: Murray believes that successfully defending people who ignore regulations will help others realize that a better future without government interference could actually be possible. And it all starts, in his mind, with one good billionaire. “The Madison Fund could get started,” he writes, “if just one wealthy American cared enough to contribute, say, a few hundred million dollars.” By the People as Trumpist urtext Murray’s specific vision for a “Madison Fund” was certainly idiosyncratic. But his broader argument about legitimacy was widely shared on the 2010s right, heard often among the Tea Party types who dominated conservative politics for most of the Obama presidency. Indeed, By the People was received warmly among traditional conservatives, some of whom described its wild arguments as helpfully restrained. “If you want a book that will crisply outline what has happened to Madisonian America since the Great Depression, without scaring the neighbors, it’s your lucky day,” Charles C.W. Cooke writes in National Review. Some even suggested it didn’t go far enough. Writing in Law and Liberty, Lenore Ealy argued that Murray gave short shrift to the concerns of social conservatives. And that liberal America “created for itself a soft despotism” where people from various “identity groups” wield power to silence “men and women unwilling to subsume their identity in the will of the State.” Rolling back the state is not far enough, Ealy says — there needs to be a revolution in “cultural mores” that beats back identity liberalism. It is striking that, even before Trump, the idea that the modern American state was fundamentally illegitimate was such a prevalent view among conservative activists and intellectuals. The question was not whether the right must always defer to the democratic process, but how far it might have to go to get around it. In Trump’s second term, we are seeing the fruits of this vision. In many ways, you can draw a straight line between the basic premises of By the People and Trump’s assault on the federal government. The mechanisms are very different, but the ends are strikingly similar. During the 2024 election, Elon Musk became the billionaire anti-government donor Murray dreamed of, contributing “a few hundred million dollars” to the Trump campaign. His alignment with Trump got him appointed the head of a government-slashing committee that we now know as DOGE; once in power, he and his allies attempted to gut the functioning of various different federal agencies (to various degrees of success). [Image: Elon Musk at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2025 in Maryland. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/05/gettyimages-2200918595.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] DOGE was not an effective cost-cutting mechanism. Nor has it turned up significant evidence of fraud. What it has accomplished, rather, is make federal agencies less capable of implementing duly authorized regulations. Effectively, it’s done what Murray wanted from the opposite end: decreasing the scope of the regulatory state not by resistance from the bottom, but a top-down effort to strip its capabilities. (Nor is Musk alone in this; look at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s firing of large chunks of America’s public health officials). The legal authority for all of this is dubious at best. Trump and DOGE have simply asserted the power to mass-fire employees and redirect congressionally appropriated funds, even though there are good reasons to believe that they do not have the legal authority to do either. Like Murray, they do not see the law as morally binding. These aren’t just simple parallels. The influence of ideas like By the People’s helps us understand why a conservative movement that once claimed to stand for the constitutional order has become comfortable with Trump wrecking it. The essential idea of Murray’s book, and much of pre-Trump conservatism, was that the federal government had become hostile to founding American ideals: that the administrative state represents an unconstitutional cancerous growth on a brilliant governing framework. “We have overseen and sanctioned the growth of an administrative system that concentrates the power to make laws and the power to enforce them in the hands of a vast and unaccountable administrative apparatus that finds no comfortable home in our constitutional structure,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a 2015 concurrence. “The end result may be trains that run on time (although I doubt it), but the cost is to our Constitution and the individual liberty it protects.” If you take this position, thinly veiled comparisons to fascism and all, then the fact that Trump and Musk have frequently exceeded legal boundaries starts to look a lot less problematic. Through this lens, the administration is trying to rescue the Constitution’s original design from a liberalism that has corrupted it. Any legal violations along the way are offenses against a political order that at present does not deserve citizens’ allegiance. In February, the news outlet NOTUS asked Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) about the lawfulness of the Trump/Musk agenda. Tillis conceded that it “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” However, he added, “nobody should bellyache about that” — because “it’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending.” Thom Tillis is not a firebreather: He’s a purple state senator widely seen as a moderate. That he would take such a permissive position on what even he admits is lawbreaking shows the corrosive influence of Murray-style thinking on the right today. By the People, on its own, may be a mostly forgotten book. But it remains useful as an unusually clear explanation of how widely shared premises on the establishment right led the country to Trumpist perdition. This story was adapted for the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here. Correction, May 21, 9:20 am ET: A previous version of this story misdescribed Trump’s 2015 descent down the golden escalator at Trump Tower.

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The forgotten book that foretold Trump’s power grab