President Trump sent a video message to the 10-year anniversary celebration of Unleash Prosperity, a pro-growth group that focuses on economic policy. It was a warm greeting, paying tribute to the group’s founders, who Trump called "four of the all time greats"—"my friend Steve Moore," Arthur Laffer, Steve Forbes, and Larry Kudlow. Yet it also included a friendly jibe. Trump said about Moore, the group’s chairman: "I wish he believed a little more strongly on the word tariff."
The brief Trump video, shown on large screens at a Wednesday October 28 celebration event, encapsulated the complicated relationship between Trump and what is sometimes called the supply-side economics or economic freedom wing of the Republican coalition. Sometimes they seem totally in sync with each other. And other times they are at odds.
You can make a case for either of three stories.
By one account, this supply-side wing is a bunch of has-beens, aging relics of the Reagan past. Laffer is 86, Forbes and Kudlow are 79. The competition is younger. Oren Cass, who runs American Compass, a rival, more left-wing but still ostensibly Republican-tilted economic policy shop, is 43; Vice President Vance spoke last year at the American Compass fifth anniversary gala.
Look at it another way, and the Unleash Prosperity crowd has been actually far more influential in Trump economic policy than has been widely understood or appreciated. Kudlow was director of the National Economic Council in the first Trump administration. The group helped shape the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and helped shape and pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025. "We have adopted the pro-growth economic policy that those four men believe in so strongly," is the way President Trump put in the video, talking about unleashing energy exploration and production and reducing regulation.
A third way to look at it is that the pro-growth, free market approach has room to run in a post-Trump Republican Party. Of the key agenda items enumerated at the gala—school choice, a Steve Forbes flat tax, technology dominance, and Social Security reform with private accounts—there is plenty left to cover in the future. Trump should get some credit for creating a version of the "private accounts"—the Trump Accounts—via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and also for including in the same legislation a scholarship tax credit that may have significant effects in states that opt to participate.
Forbes, who ran for president in 1996 and in 2000, sketched the current version of his flat tax—the first $55,000 in income for a family of four would be income-tax free, with a tax of 17 cents on every dollar above that. He urged an emphasis on "the moral basis of free markets," talking about "people cooperating" and "unleashing human creativity." Laffer recalled Reagan reducing the complexity of the tax code, collapsing 14 brackets down to two and lowering the top marginal rate to 28 percent from 70 percent.
A possible 2028 presidential candidate, the former governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, mentioned the work remaining at the state and local levels, warning that if Virginia implements a proposed 10 percent tax rate on millionaires, it risks following New York, Chicago, and California on the list of "death spiral" states where people are fleeing. Democrats in the Virginia legislature have been pushing a bill to raise the state’s income tax rate, which now tops out at 5.75 percent, to 8 percent on income above $600,000 a year and 10 percent on income above $1 million a year. Youngkin, 59, talked about the need to "reinstill hope," especially among younger Americans who might be tempted by socialism or by politicians like the socialist mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani.
Youngkin and Laffer also noted that the Republicans aren’t the only variable. Laffer described Bill Clinton as "a great president" who worked with House Speaker Newt Gingrich to cut the capital gains tax and link welfare to work. "There is no such thing as a moderate Democrat today," Youngkin said, though someone mentioned the senator from Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, as a possible exception.
Amid the fears of rising socialism and concern about whether failing government-run public schools would be adequate to educate children against it, Laffer offered a characteristically positive view of progress. Even on the environmental front: "the bald eagle flies like never before ... The Hudson River is clean." Thirty-eight states have abolished their death taxes.
The next morning, a Commerce Department advanced estimate on the third quarter real GDP growth rate came in at an annual rate of 3.4 percent. That is not the 4 percent or 5 percent or more that the pro-growth crowd believes based on experience is possible—without inflationary pressure. But it is a step in a better direction. Whether Trump can keep it going, and growing, may depend on how closely he and his team—and Congress—heed the counsel of the four all-time greats. Otherwise 5 percent growth may have to wait for some future administration.
