I have to admit to being alternately puzzled and depressed that I seemed to be the only libertarian with a major public platform to take a nuanced view of Donald Trump. After all, many of his foreign policy positions echo the libertarian critique of our interventionist foreign policy – and his enemies are, in large part, our enemies. However, with the publication of David Stockman's Trumped!: A Nation on the Brink of Ruin, and How to Bring It Back, I see that I am not alone.

Stockman's thesis is that Trump is essentially right about the decline of American greatness, that the system is rigged, and that a ruthlessly self-centered elite has prospered at the expense of the rest of us. The American economy, and indeed our society, has been hideously deformed by the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve and our spendthrift political class:

"This epic deformation has delivered historically unprecedented setbacks to the bottom 90% of American households. They have seen their real wealth and living standards steadily deteriorate for several decades now, even as vast financial windfalls have accrued to the elite at the very top."

"In fact, during the last 30 years, the real net worth of the bottom 90% has not increased at all. At the same time, the top 1% has experienced a 300% gain while the real wealth of the Forbes 400 has risen by 1000%.

"That's not old-fashioned capitalism at work; it's the fruit of a perverted regime of printing press money and debt-fueled faux prosperity that has been foisted on the nation by the bipartisan ruling elites."

Trump, says Stockman, is right about the symptoms, but he's wrong about the disease. It's not the monetary machinations of China, or "free trade" that's the root of the problem, it's "thirty years of madcap money-printing at the Fed" and "the $50 trillion of new public and private debt generated by that monetary eruption." Trade deals and immigration are just surface phenomena: the underlying cause is "bad money and towering debts."

And yet Trump's jeremiads aimed at the elites are right on target:

"That much, at least, Donald Trump has right. Throwing out the careerists, pettifoggers, hypocrites, ideologues, racketeers, power seekers and snobs who have brought about the current ruin is at least a start in the right direction."

And on the foreign front, too, in Stockman's view Trump, for all his demagoguery, is preferable to "the arrogant and insular group-think of the Imperial City." Yes, Trump is "often far too bellicose. But he has pinned the tail where it belongs. That is, on the imperial notion that America is the indispensable savior-nation and policeman of the world."