IRVINE, CA—December 20, 2016—The Washington Post recently stated that several of Donald Trump’s appointees are fans of Ayn Rand, the novelist-philosopher most famous for her 1957 best-seller Atlas Shrugged.

“It’s a testament to Ayn Rand’s impact that a president can’t fill a cabinet with successful business leaders without including people who’ve been inspired and influenced by Rand’s heroic depiction of entrepreneurs and innovators,” says Ayn Rand Institute senior fellow Onkar Ghate, author of the essay “One Small Step for Dictatorship: The Significance of Donald Trump’s Election.”

Ghate goes on to note that it’s important to keep in mind that none of Trump’s picks claim to be adherents of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. “Rand called herself a radical for capitalism. A cabinet filled with appointees who embraced her worldview would have a very different agenda than this administration is likely to have.”

What would an Ayn Rand agenda look like? According to Ghate: “One thing you can be sure of: it wouldn’t focus merely on rolling back some of the controls and redistribution programs of the Obama era. It would focus on liberating us from the regulatory-welfare state and moving America forward—toward a government devoted to safeguarding individual rights.”

About ARI
The Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), headquartered in Irvine, Calif., is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that works to introduce the world to Ayn Rand’s novels, to support scholarship and research based on her ideas and to promote the principles of reason, rational self-interest, individual rights and laissez-faire capitalism. The Institute is named for novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand (1905–1982), who is best known for her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.