President Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, has said Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” is his favorite book. Mike Pompeo, head of the CIA, cited Rand as a major inspiration. Before he withdrew his nomination, Trump’s pick to head the Labor Department, Andrew Puzder, revealed that he devotes much free time to reading Rand.

Such is the case with many other Trump advisers and allies: The Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, famously made his staff members read Ayn Rand. Trump himself has said that he’s a “fan” of Rand and “identifies” with Howard Roark, the protagonist of Rand’s novel, “The Fountainhead,” “an architect who dynamites a housing project he designed because the builders did not precisely follow his blueprints.”

As a philosopher, I have often wondered at the remarkable endurance and popularity of Ayn Rand’s influence on American politics. Even by earlier standards, however, Rand’s dominance over the current administration looks especially strong.

What’s in common with Ayn Rand?

Recently, historian and Rand expert Jennifer Burns wrote how Rand’s sway over the Republican Party is diminishing. Burns says the promises of government largesse and economic nationalism under Trump would repel Rand.

That was before the president unveiled his proposed federal budget that greatly slashes nonmilitary government spending — and before Paul Ryan’s Obamacare reform, which promised to strip health coverage from 24 million low-income Americans and grant the rich a generous tax cut instead. Now, Trump looks to be zeroing in on a significant tax cut for the rich and corporations.

These all sound like measures Rand would enthusiastically support, in so far as they assist the capitalists and so-called job creators, instead of the poor.

Though the Trump administration looks quite steeped in Rand’s thought, there is one curious discrepancy. Ayn Rand exudes a robust elitism, unlike any I have observed elsewhere in the tomes of political philosophy. But this runs counter to the narrative of the Trump phenomenon: Central to the Trump’s ascendancy is a rejection of elites reigning from urban centers and the coasts, overrepresented at universities and in Hollywood, apparently.

Liberals despair over the fact that they are branded elitists, while, as former television host Jon Stewart put it, Republicans backed a man who takes every chance to tout his superiority, and lords over creation from a gilded penthouse apartment, in a skyscraper that bears his own name.

Clearly, liberals lost this rhetorical battle.

What is Ayn Rand’s philosophy?

How shall we make sense of the gross elitism at the heart of the Trump administration, embodied in its devotion to Ayn Rand — elitism that its supporters overlook or ignore, and happily ascribe to the left instead?

Ayn Rand’s philosophy is quite straightforward. Rand sees the world divided into “makers” and “takers.” But, in her view, the real makers are a select few – a real elite, on whom we would do well to rely, and for whom we should clear the way, by reducing or removing taxes and government regulations, among other things.

Rand’s thought is intellectually digestible, unnuanced, easily translated into policy approaches and statements.

Small government is in order because it lets the great people soar to great heights, and they will drag the rest with them. Rand says we must ensure that “the exceptional men, the innovators, the intellectual giants, are not held down by the majority. In fact, it is the members of this exceptional minority who lift the whole of a free society to the level of their own achievements, while rising further and ever further.”

Mitt Romney captured Rand’s philosophy well during the 2012 campaign when he spoke of the 47 percent of Americans who do not work, vote Democrat and are happy to be supported by hardworking, conservative Americans.

No sympathy for the poor

In laying out her dualistic vision of society, divided into good and evil, Rand’s language is often starker and harsher. In her 1957 novel, “Atlas Shrugged,” she says,

“The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains.”

Rand’s is the opposite of a charitable view of humankind, and can, in fact, be quite cruel. Consider her attack on Pope Paul VI, who, in his 1967 encyclical Progressio Populorum, argued that the West has a duty to help developing nations, and called for its sympathy for the global poor.