Trump 2.0: A doomed strategy to reboot capitalism through bluster and bullying
There is an adage making the rounds about how to understand Donald Trump’s presidency. It goes: “Don’t take Trump literally, but do take him seriously.”
That reads like good advice. The US president’s infantile personality, egomaniacal boasting, and scattergun insults are not the place to start, however headline-grabbing they might be; looking there would be to take Trump literally, but not seriously.
It’s tempting to think, conventionally, that policy might be where we’d look to take Trump seriously. But that, too, would be a mistake.
Trump doesn’t do conventional political policy. Neocon hawk John Bolton, a first-term Trump appointee and now disgruntled reject from the Trump camp, explained this to Channel 4 News, arguing that Trump’s thought process is not a continuous landmass of connected policy, but an island chain of proximate but not logically consecutive opinions - a series of disconnected dots, liable to change as the moment requires.
There is an irrationalist element to Trump, a feature of far-right leaders before him. But irrationalist political figures can be understood rationally, if you look in the right places.
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One aspect of this is to look at the nature of Trumpism as a movement, rather than at the man. By this, I do not just mean at what the widest layers of Trump voters think, although that has its own importance. There, we find a mixture of reactionary political ideas about issues such as migration, and demands that, if the left were larger and more coherent, it would be able to champion - for instance, distrust of government and anti-corporate sentiment.
But more precisely, we need to look at the makeup of the leadership of Trumpism in its second incarnation. This is very different from the first-term edition, as a result of the accumulated experiences of Trumpism.
Second-term zealots
After his first presidency, Trump experienced defeat in 2020, followed by the failed Capitol Hill coup. In the ensuing years, the liberal establishment attempted to legalistically assassinate him, and during the 2024 campaign, he was the subject of an actual near-miss assassination attempt.
He has a battle-hardened inner circle supplemented with far-right true believers, of whom Elon Musk is the richest and most high-profile.
In his first administration, Trump appointed Washington insiders and quickly lost ideological supporters, such as Steve Bannon. But his second-term appointees are zealots to a far greater degree - and this reinforces the Blitzkrieg approach that Trump has adopted during his first weeks in office, immediately moving to eradicate Biden-era policies and to implement some (though not all) of his most extreme campaign promises.
Trump's isolationism is designed to reassert US power by forcing enemies and, especially, allies into footing the bill and doing the heavy lifting
What stands behind this - and here, we approach a fundamental understanding of Trumpism - is the necessity of reconfiguring the US government and American capitalism to deal with a multipolar world.
It’s not so long ago that the academic and political boosters of globalisation were telling us that there could never be a war between two countries that had McDonald’s branches. And yet, Israel has been at war with Lebanon, and Ukraine is at war with Russia, despite the fact that the golden arches shine brightly in all those countries (except, even more interestingly, McDonald’s closed its operations in Russia in 2022 as a result of the war, just the opposite of the globalisers’ predictions).
The more fundamental point is that the period of renewed US ascendancy that followed the end of the Cold War is clearly long over. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars were themselves a product of the “Project for the New American Century” ideologues attempting to turn the post-Cold War ascendency into actual military victories. They ended up doing the opposite, ushering in a new era of global rivalries.
China’s economic growth powered it into the first rank of challengers to the US, while Russia’s nationalistic attempts to rebuild its influence after the loss of Eastern Europe have created another irresolvable problem for the US. This has now been exacerbated by the Ukraine war.
Shifting the burden
What Trumpism represents is a reaction to declining US hegemony. That’s why the defensive, hurt-victim tone is its characteristic call sign. This is the bully that can’t believe it no longer commands automatic obedience; it is quick to anger, and easily offended.
This decline is not immediately about economic growth. Indeed, the US economy is growing faster than China at the moment. But it is uneven growth: tech industries are growing, while manufacturing is not. And this growth is fuelling social and economic divisions, not overcoming them.
So in domestic politics, Trumpism can play to an electorate more divided by wealth than ever before, the majority of whom are finding working life harder and less well-rewarded than ever before. They have been badly disillusioned by the Democrats’ devotion to neoliberal economics, especially since the liberal centre has adapted to every lurch rightwards in establishment politics since Ronald Reagan was president.
In foreign affairs - and foreign affairs are always domestic politics in the largest imperial power in the world - Trumpism is a reaction to US military and economic failures, from Iraq onwards. The fragmentation of US influence, and the emergence of China and Russia as rivals, is the crisis to which Trump claims to have new answers.
In the US, there is a deep sense of hurt caused by US military failures abroad, magnified by Hollywood war films that amplify the message that the politicians have let down the soldiers who fought their wars.
Trump’s protectionism and isolationism tap into all of this, but not in order to develop a “peaceful” US foreign policy, as Trump claimed at his inauguration, and as the more gullible leftist commentators sometimes feign to believe.
Trump’s protectionism aims to reboot US capitalism, and to shift the burden of doing so onto enemies and friends alike. Similarly, Trump’s isolationism is designed to reassert US power by forcing enemies and, especially, allies into footing the bill and doing the heavy lifting - hence the immediate threats issued to Panama, Greenland and Canada. Hence the demand that Europe increase its defence spending to five percent of GDP, when US spending is only 3.5 percent. Hence the demand that Europe just suck up any downside to peace with Russia in Ukraine.
This represents a huge shift in ruling-class politics, as big as the shift from the welfare state consensus of the postwar boom to the neoliberalism and militarism of the Reagan-Thatcher era.
The Trumpists, and their international correlates, are in one sense the descendants of the Reagan-Thatcher era. But they are the inheritors of the failure of that project, economically, socially, and internationally in the post-Cold War era of increased global market competition.
Like the aging inheritors of an English aristocratic mansion, they are nostalgic for lost greatness and embittered at the nouveau riche. They are determined to regain former glory by making servants and peasants work harder, and through land grabs, bluster and bullying to humiliate their neighbours and defeat their rivals.
Down below, the pitchforks must be made ready.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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