Trump 2.0: A new stage of imperialism

Now that Donald Trump has been in office for a few weeks, the consequences of his electoral victory are clear. He wants to strip down the US state to save money and ensure US firms are at the forefront of reconstructing Ukraine and Gaza. We face a new era of heightened US nationalism and imperialist bullying.

Parallel to this, a new phase of oligarchic rule is being installed, including in the means of ideological production. There are new regimes at Facebook and X, which are designed to facilitate posts of the reactionary right, and a new regime in the opinion columns of the Washington Post, where owner Jeff Bezos has told staff to block anything too critical or liberal.

With a secure majority in Congress and the Supreme Court, Trump has used hundreds of executive orders to unleash a new era of “presidentialism” — direct rule by diktat.

Bonapartism

Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky called this kind of government Bonapartism, a reference to Karl Marx’s analysis of the 1852 seizure of power in France by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the great military and political leader Napoleon Bonaparte. Italian Communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci referred to it as Caesarism. The essence of Bonapartism is presidential rule by a dictator who tries to balance between the different classes and sections of the capitalist state. In his landmark writings on this question, Trotsky pointed out that Bonapartism can be the “antechamber” of fascism.

An example was Italy under Benito Mussolini. He came to power after the “March on Rome” in 1922. But he did not close down parliament or ban the Communist Party and imprison its leaders until 1926. During this interim period, fascist blackshirt gangs rampaged against the workers movement, even attacking left-wing deputies as they entered parliament. The Nazis in Germany referred to the post-1933 period as one of gleichschaltung — where legal and extra-legal methods are deployed to bring all wings of the state under their control. The occupation of all government posts by Nazi supporters was crucial.

In the contemporary world, it might be argued that Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has many parallels with pre-fascist Bonapartism, one of the many types of creeping fascism worldwide. Erdoğan can be seen balancing between his populist base in the Islamist mass party, the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) and the super-rich Turkish capitalist class. 

To achieve this, he used the state of emergency after the 2016 attempted coup d’etat to sack hundreds of judges, more than 100,000 teachers and lecturers, plus hundreds of police officers. Dozens of newspapers, magazines and TV channels were closed or taken over by AKP members, and many hundreds of military personnel and supporters of the Kurdish-led leftist coalition, the Peoples’ Democratic Party, were imprisoned.

All this was possible because of the AKP’s mass base, its big majority in parliament and the many capitalists who have become fabulously rich under Erdoğan’s rule. With the army, judiciary, parliament and all government departments now led by his supporters, oppositionists jailed with very long sentences, and his AKP totally loyal, Erdoğan was able to secure the deference of the capitalist class through a combination of economic policies that serve their interests while maintaining his mass base among the poor through the AKP’s welfare and religious work.

Oligarchy

In his departing speech, former US president Joe Biden warned of the formation of an “oligarchy,” a dictatorship of a super-rich elite around a super-rich president. This warning came very late — since the 2007-8 financial crash, the US capitalist class, in alliance with the transnational capitalist class in general, have transcended neoliberalism 1.0, to a deeper phase of monopoly capitalism characterised by the centralised control of financial investments in “asset management” companies. 

These groups and the giant digital, electronics and defence industries in which they are working, have shown their willingness to operate in lockstep with the Trump government. This involves a doubling down of reactionary media. The promotion of Elon Musk is like a bizarre update of the character Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s reactionary novel The Fountainhead, the genius capitalist who is the source of all wealth.

In Trump’s first weeks in office, he and his team have already made the the new US government’s orientation very clear. Key measures include:

• The ramping up of direct, military-based imperialism, with the aim of seizing half of Ukraine’s mineral wealth.
• Giving the OK for a further onslaught against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. Leaked figures show the US has delivered 14,000 200-pound bombs and several thousand Hellfire missiles. No wonder Gaza seems like the site of a nuclear explosion. Given the biggest British nuclear warhead delivers just 10,000 tons of explosive destruction, the bombs given to Israel are equivalent to many nuclear bombs.
• Trump’s plan to take over and rebuild Gaza as a luxury holiday resort is grotesque — and depends on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. It is now obvious that the joint US-Israel plan is to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank, the final realisation of the Zionist project. British Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his foreign minister David Lammy are playing a cynical game, trying to hide their complicity with the massacre of the Palestinians behind the pretence of wanting a Palestinian state.
• Withdrawal, for the second time, from the Paris climate change process, meaning the abandonment of federal climate change targets to limit temperature rises to 1.5% above pre-industrial levels. The “window of opportunity” to 1.5% may already have closed. Although the 2015 Paris agreement, signed by more than 200 countries, is weak, it nonetheless set tangible goals. The US’ withdrawal has already affected the political atmosphere, with global oil giants BP and Shell both severely cutting back on their renewable investment because key investors such as Elliot Asset Management complained that short-term profits might fall. The consequences of climate failure are well known: floods, wildfires, drought and millions of climate refugees kept out of more climatically-stable countries in the Global North by force. Paramilitary persecution of refugees on the border will become even more commonplace.
• The US has signalled its intention to support the radical right internationally, shown by JD Vance’s private meeting with representatives of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party on the eve of the German general election.1
• Musk’s elevation to the position of federal government cuts supremo could leave hundreds of thousands of civil servants sacked.
• The cancellation of US funding programs that promote equality and inclusion.
• The freeing of far-right thugs who stormed the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, a move that gives a green light to attacks on pro-Palestinian and other radical political actions.
• The start of the program to deport many thousands of undocumented workers and use of military forces to help seal the Mexico and Canada borders.
• A new stage of US imperialism involving a reordering of NATO to get European powers to pay for the US-dominated military alliance; threats to seize the Panama canal; a solution to the Ukraine war that involves seizing a major share of Ukraine’s mineral wealth, so far unmined; and the introduction of major tariffs against goods from abroad.
• A tariff regime that starts with a universal 10%, but zooms upwards on steel, electric cars and anything imported from China.

These measures include an attempt to address the critical problem of US government debt, currently standing at a jaw-dropping $33 trillion. Trump’s Republican critics, such as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, say that under the previous Trump administration the national debt went up by $8 trillion. Why does this matter?

Threat of global financial crisis

The 2007-08 financial crash was never resolved — giving trillions of dollars to the banks just moved the problem to some point in the future. The US has financed its bank bailouts and social security, health and military expenditures since by issuing government bonds. The interest on 5-year, 10-year, and short term bonds is about 4.5%: low by the standards, but secure and paid every six months.

But if the level of US debt gets too high, investors might conclude that the government may struggle to pay the interest. If that happens the US dollar will crash and there will be a financial crisis worldwide, with banks unable to repay investors their deposits on high street accounts. What would follow would be a sort of “global Argentina” — a phrase that refers to the collapse of the Argentine economy in 2000-02 and its consequent financial ruin of millions of working class and middle-class people.

Of course, the US dollar is in effect the world currency, so the US could just print dollars to finance its operations. But this runs the risk of generating huge inflation, raising prices worldwide in a devastating way.

Putting Musk in charge of “government efficiency” means huge job cuts and the seizure by Musk’s companies of huge amounts of government data on every US citizen. This can be used to target “illegals” (even if they have lived in the US for 30 years). Vast quantities of data of different kinds could be used to enable new waves of artificial intelligence to track the movement of individuals and their political and trade union activities. A new stage in the establishment of a new Orwellian state is upon us.

Ten years ago three big tech titans — Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Jeff Bezos of Amazon — were all thought to be Democrats. Now they want to get close to Trump, especially as they want to secure concessions from him on tariffs and support for their intransigent opposition to unions.

Alliance with far right

Trump has sent clear signals about his alliances with the far right in the US and internationally. Domestically, the release of the leaders of the fascist Proud Boys and Oath Keepers has renewed their alliance with Trump. It is no wonder that British far-right activist Tommy Robinson said he turned cartwheels when he heard Trump had been elected. Vance’s secret meeting with AfD leaders broke with hypocritical niceties that falsely claim countries do not interfere in the internal affairs of allies.

Trump’s second term means that environmentalists and pro-Palestinian activists today face huge tasks; so too campaigners for women’s and immigrant rights. But as the surge for the AfD shows, the Trump 2.0 project includes an attempt to use US power to boost reactionary nationalist and dictatorial power worldwide. Campaigning on progressive issues has to go side-by-side with building a broad left counter-force against far right electoral surges.

Britain is not exempt from this task. Starmer’s huge parliamentary majority is brittle, with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and Kemi Badenoch’s ever more right-wing Tories waiting in the wings. It is an open question whether Starmer’s government will survive until 2029, given the evident failure of his project of awaiting the magic bullet of “growth” that never arrives. A broad left party is still an urgent necessity.

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  In the German election the AfD was the biggest party among 18-24 men. Among women in the same age  group, Die Linke (The Left) was the biggest party.