Don’t Fall for Astroturfed Left-Wing Populism
Don’t Fall for Astroturfed Left-Wing Populism
Real populism targets costs and protects workers; its imitators defend entrenched interests and attack anyone who exposes how markets actually lower drug prices.
Donald Trump is pushing hard to lower prescription drug costs. As part of that effort, he’s appointed an economist named Casey Mulligan to oversee regulatory issues at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Cue the moaning from left-wing “populists.”
Leading the charge against Mulligan has been the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), which is upset because he published research defending the entities that challenge Big Pharma in the US healthcare system.
Mullen found that groups known as pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), which employers voluntarily hire to negotiate lower costs with the drug companies on their behalf, provide $148 billion in cost savings annually.
Unfortunately, challenging the interests of major drug companies is considered a sin to many special interest groups in today’s political climate, including, apparently, for the AELP. He swam against the narrative, and so he has to go.
The crusade against Mulligan is part of a larger campaign by the AELP. They claim to fight corporate interests on behalf of American workers, but they’re really just a well-funded Washington interest group that spends most of its time attacking the Trump administration.
The AELP represents something both old and new on the American Left. Old because leftists have long presented themselves as economic populists—Bernie Sanders comes to mind—thumping the table and demanding the wealthy be held accountable while cruising at altitude in their private jets.
What’s different about the AELP is that they’re deliberately trying to co-opt the Trumpian moment. They want to seize the populist energy that Trump brought to the table and reroute it into the usual, warmed-over socialist policies.
Take Trump’s recent suggestion that Spirit Airlines might be bailed out. Spirit’s struggles are the direct fault of the Biden administration, which blocked JetBlue from purchasing Spirit in 2024. Not only would that deal have saved Spirit, but it would also have allowed JetBlue to compete with the likes of Delta and Southwest, giving fliers more choices.
Yet rather than point the finger at Biden’s anti-business ideology, the AELP instead blamed . . . deregulation!
It’s always those darn Republicans. If only it were 1938; none of this would have ever happened.
Or take a Biden-era rule that banned noncompete contracts. There are valid criticisms of noncompetes, but the Biden initiative would have voided 30 million contracts that are intended to protect companies’ intellectual property without so much as a debate in Congress. As The Wall Street Journal put it, “It threatens employees’ ability to launch and sustain careers because the ban makes it riskier for companies to invest in the development of employees, who can now easily move to competitors.”
The Trump administration thankfully axed the rule during its first year in office, but guess who tried to stop them?
Then, of course, there was the HPE-Juniper telecommunications merger that the Trump administration greenlit after the US intelligence community told it that the merger would help America better compete with Huawei, which dominates the global telecommunications marketplace and that the Department of Defense calls a Chinese military company and a national security threat. That was too much for AELP too, which called the administration corrupt for approving it.
The AELP seems to think true populism means an unelected bureaucrat disrupting the livelihoods of tens of millions of workers with the stroke of a pen.
What the AELP and their left-wing allies really support isn’t populism but power. They claim to oppose monopolies, but they adore the most powerful monopoly of all: the federal government.
The group is staffed largely by former Biden hands—like its former executive director, Sarah Miller, who served as a senior adviser to Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chief, Lina Khan. Khan was arguably the most anti-business figure in the administration, filing countless wasteful lawsuits against companies.
This is why the AELP hates Donald Trump and reflexively attacks him at every opportunity. Trump is dismantling the Biden agenda, which began when he forced out Khan. That makes him a threat to everything the AELP is determined to protect.
The political Right has taken a populist turn of late, determined to hold not just big government but sometimes big business accountable. This sea change began at the top with a president who is far from your standard-issue pro-corporate Republican.
But conservatives can’t let their movement be hijacked by posers. The AELP doesn’t care about helping workers or making groceries affordable or ending toxic DEI practices—they care about maintaining their ideology.
It’s curious that their latest target is Casey Mulligan for attacking one of the few actors in our healthcare system, trying to bring down drug prices.
This is how fake populists are exposed: they inevitably land on the same side as the elites. Conservatives should embrace true economic populism and reject its astroturfed left-wing imposter.
Ken Blackwell is a chair at the American First Policy Institute, a Board of Directors member for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, and a Senior Fellow for Human Rights and Constitutional Governance at the Family Research Council.
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