The buffoon, the empire, and the crisis

Six months have passed since Trump first retook power in Washington. While there have been a lot of hopeful signs of resistance, it would not be inaccurate to describe these past six months as an onslaught.

It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the nature of Trumpism 2.0 now that we have six months of practical experience with it.

I take as a starting point the perspective that Trumpism is the American variant of the new authoritarianism that has come to play a defining role in world politics. I want to try to understand Trumpism both in terms of the international moment for capital, as well as the specific American context in which Trumpism is embedded. I want to understand Trumpism in its continuities and fissures with the previous period of neoliberal capitalism and to explore the relationship between what is essential and necessary to the administration in material terms, on the one hand, and where his policies result from a “romantic” ideological attachment to his base, on the other.

The long crisis, neoliberalism, and Trump

Essential to an understanding of Trumpism is a look at the long crisis of profitability of capital going back to the early 1970s.

Marx argued that the rate of profit tends to fall over time because competition pushes capitalists to adopt new technologies that reduce the need for human labor. This initially grants a competitive edge and a temporary boost in surplus value for the first adopters. But as these innovations spread across the industry, the advantage disappears, and the overall ratio of labor (the sole source of new value) to capital declines. As a result, the mass of profit extracted relative to total investment begins to shrink, driving the long-term tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

Keeping in mind this law of capitalist economics is essential to understanding why crises happen. As rates of profit fall, capitalists are pushed to produce more in order to offset the fall in profits, causing crises of overproduction. At the same time, the low rate of profit makes capitalists seek other avenues for their investments, often preferring risky speculation, creating bubbles that eventually burst, as they did in 2007 and 2008.

The years following the Second World War saw an unprecedented economic boom. Two world wars and the Great Depression had caused massive destruction, opening up new possibilities for capital, while large quantities of investment was wasted in arms expenditure, keeping the rate of profit high. This resulted in a boom that lasted until the early 1970s, when competition from Japan and Western Europe forced new investment into labor saving technologies and the rate of profit again began to fall.

The period of this boom was the only period in American history in which the “American dream” was available for broad sections of the population. The combination of class struggle in the 1930s, and needs of capital during that specific period, allowed for relatively high working-class incomes and stability, particularly, though not exclusively, for the white working class.

But as the boom came to an end in the late 1960s and early 1970s, capital needed a way to restore profitability. It could do this by using the state as an instrument of class warfare, to rearrange the conditions of labor such that working conditions and salaries would be worse, large sections of the population would be removed from stable employment, government programs would be cut, and capital could clean up the difference. This was the neoliberal revolution.

In short, neoliberalism was a violent narrowing of the circle of who had access to decent life. The postwar order survived the crisis of the 1970s through this narrowing. It then militarized the border around that shrinking circle, through stigmatization of those outside as lazy, undeserving, or dangerous, while it violently put down their aspirations for a better life. We saw this in Chile in 1973, the miners’ strike in the UK, the militarization of the southern border in the US, and the Clinton crime bill that shoveled huge sections of the newly superfluous Black working class youth into prisons.

In this article, I will refer to this narrowing militarized circle as the “circle of social welfare.” This is not welfare in the sense of the welfare state and its policies like Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and unemployment benefits (though it sometimes takes this form), but welfare in a more general sense of access to a decent, stable, and comfortable life.

During this period, the role of the state was not minimized. Rather, the role of the state changed. From public ownership and direct investment, the state took on the role of violently managing the implementation of austerity.

This militarization of the state deepened with the Patriot Act and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security following September 11, 2001,  the creation of ICE in 2003, the massive expansion of the deportation machine in the Obama era, and despite falling crime rates, the explosion of police budgets, from $10.5 billion nationally in 1975, to $233 billion in 2023. Adjusted for inflation, this is an increase of more than 400 percent over this period.

Neoliberalism finalized its hegemony by winning over the left-wing capitalist parties to its cause. Enter the “progressive neoliberalism” of Tony Blair, the Clintons, and Obama, who accepted the economic tenets of neoliberalism but sought to reconcile it with progressive social issues like LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and racial justice. Importantly, the question was not whether or not the narrowing of the circle of social welfare should be reversed. Rather, these administrations took the narrowing as a given while garnering progressive credibility by arguing for a more equitable racial and gender distribution inside of this circle.

If neoliberalism was a temporary solution to the crisis of the early 1970s, then the economic collapse of 2007-2008 marked what one book from the Spanish state has called “the crisis of the solution to the crisis.” Although neoliberalism’s assault on the working class had temporarily restored profitability to the system, the economy declined steadily until capital sought profitability in the most risky sort of speculation, creating the bubble that eventually burst.

Since 2008, the role of the state has been transformed yet again. State intervention after the crisis saved the economy. What had previously restored profitability prior to the second half of the 20th century was the mass destruction of unprofitable capital. Yet capital had accumulated to such an extent that the state had no other choice but to intervene if it did not want to risk the total collapse of the system. This was the phenomenon of “Too Big to Fail”. Since there was no way out of the crisis, the state had to assume an ever greater role in order to manage it.

The result has been the very weak recovery since 2008, as the state has been forced to intervene with increasing frequency and intensity in order to prop up unprofitable capital to stave off collapse. U.S. debt has ballooned as a result, more than doubling from $13.64 trillion in 2007, to $35.64 trillion in 2024. In the rest of the developed world, state debt is higher than it has been at any point since the Napoleonic wars. The fight over what bits of profitability remain since 2008 has led to increasing inter-imperialist tension that has frequently broken out into proxy wars, with the constant threat of direct engagement always looming.

This period has been one of enormous social instability, as the weak recovery and the critical damage done to ruling class hegemony opened the door for alternatives, both left and right. Occupy, the Tea Party, Black Lives Matter and more, were all expressions of declining ruling class hegemony in the US.

Enter Trump, eight years into a crisis without resolution, eight years into a crisis that likely does not have a solution. Enter Trump into a situation in which the only question is how to manage a system that is increasingly out of control, in which faith in the system has collapsed, and the economy can only be temporarily propped up through the further dispossession of an already exhausted working class and a qualitative deepening of state violence. While Trump’s first term was limited by his incomplete control over his party, the breakdown of internal resistance and the radicalizing impact of events like the “Beer Gut Putsch” of Jan 6, 2021, have meant that in his second term, Trumpism has been given free rein.

The One Big Beautiful Bill is a perfect example of the authoritarian neoliberalism of Trumpian politics. It represents both sides of the neoliberal equation: austerity and state violence. It is the largest transfer of wealth from the very poorest to the very richest in the country’s history, while at the same time it allocates $75 billion to ICE, in effect massively expanding what has effectively become a state gestapo.

Trump’s second term has marked a distinct before and after in neoliberal governance, where gradual trends finally birthed something entirely new, and the nature of state management took new form in an economy in decline and a society out of control. The problems of economic crisis and a lack of faith in the system are solved with state violence. Trump represented a new kind of politics for a system that required a qualitatively higher level of militarization of the border around the circle of social welfare, that could no longer depend upon ideological coercion to maintain stability, and militarized one section of the population against the other in order to fight for their place within that shrinking circle. “Build the Wall” was only the most overt expression of this new politics.

Trump was able to pose himself as an alternative by attacking the progressive neoliberalism that had coupled progressive social issues with austerity politics. This is the source of the strength of his crusade against “wokism,” which turns sections of the population either outside or on the periphery of the circle against populations that are supposedly given an advantage that they do not merit due to their demographic background.

The grotesque romance of Trump

These positions demonstrate what Trumpism is doing for capital at this moment. However, it does not explain the grotesque and delusional aspects of Trump’s ideology and practice. How do we make sense of the aspects of Trumpism that seem unglued from reality–the tariffs, the antagonizing of the U.S.’s closest allies, the threatening of Greenland with invasion, the explosion of the state debt through the OBBB, and the kidnapping of essential immigrant agricultural workers?

Mass politics that have the petty bourgeoisie at their base, such as Trumpism and fascism, are always in actual practice the result of an uneasy synthesis between the needs of at least a section of the capitalist class and the petty bourgeois ideology of its base. This ideology, trying to solve the crisis without questioning capitalism, is to one extent or another necessarily unglued from reality. In short, it always has one foot in reality and one foot out.

The one foot that sits outside of reality has a romantic quality. Going back to its artistic inception in the late 19th century, romanticism has always been the artistic movement of the alienated petty bourgeoisie, seeking a solution to the grim realities of the capitalist present in an idealized idea of a national past. In a certain sense Hitler and Mussolini were the romantic ideal of the petty bourgeoisie in their respective countries, and in a similar way, there is almost a grotesque romantic quality to Trump’s figure, expressed, of course, in the most American way. He is in many ways the romantic ideal of the American petty bourgeoisie. Coarse, willing to do anything to get ahead, unafraid to “say it as it is,” seemingly successful in business, and ruthlessly egoistic in the most coarse way, all masking a repressed awareness of one’s own mediocrity. He is completely defined by that self-refential romance that is megalomania. It is a type of megalomania that sees in the global dominance of the US its own personal merit, and an inalienable birthright.

It is precisely these qualities that gave Trump the mass base that launched him into power since the American petty bourgeoisie recognize themselves in him and see him as their champion. These qualities also provide an explanation for how his policies become completely unhinged from reality, stemming from a romantic belief in the limitlessness of both his own abilities and US power while serving no narrow economic self-interest.

Yet there is a key difference between traditional fascism and Trumpism here. Under fascism’s merger of state and corporate power, a new boom and stability were possible for a time. The difference today is that no possible resolution exists for capital, thereby allowing the romantic elements of Trumpism to escape the discipline of necessity and enjoy a larger degree of independent existence. What remains is a combination of brutal authority and an orgy of theft and violence as Trump’s lumpen capitalist, semi-criminal origins find expression at the head of the state.

Possible futures

Unsolvable economic crisis plus Trump’s rogue politics make Trumpism an extremely unstable system. In addition to managing the discontent within the general population, Trump also has to manage the unstable coalition he sits at the head of, made up of sections of capital like big tech and the Project 2025 group, as well as the MAGA movement, kept at an arms length from power, but crucial to his coalition nonetheless. The divorce with Musk and the split within MAGA over the Epstein files, are evidence of this instability.

What can be said for certain about these politics is their features that are unglued from reality tend to drive them toward self-destruction. The question is what form that self-destruction will take, and what kind of casualties there will be in the fallout.

A first possible form of self-destruction would be, as a result of the pain from Trump’s policies, that Democratic party centrism enjoys a restoration after the 2026 midterms and the 2028 general elections. This assumes that free and fair elections still exist of course, which is unfortunately not a given. Given his age, this might be the end of Trump personally, but since the crisis will continue and the Democrats will be as incapable as ever of offering a real solution, the threat of the far-right, manifesting in a new, perhaps more radical and coherent form, will remain.

A frightening possibility given this scenario is that, in a similar way that the Labour Party in the UK and the Democratic Party in the US adapted to neoliberal policy after the initial vanguard neoliberalism of Thatcher and Reagan, these parties may adopt large sections of Trump’s authoritarianism and austerity in the future. We are already seeing some evidence of this with Keir Starmer’s Labour party implementing brutal austerity while legally classifying the members of a Palestine solidarity organization, Palestine Action, as terrorists.

Another possibility is self-destruction through war. Trump has not shown himself to shy away from military action, and as imperial tensions increase with China and Russia, Trump’s megalomania may cause him to engage in a direct military conflict with enormous human consequences.

The narrow possibility of Trumpism stabilizing as a system rests on the erosion of democratic rights to the point where it is able to maintain itself in power through violence and force. This is a real possibility. Of course, the complete unmasking of the nature of state power in such a context would likely in one way or another result in social instability, which could only be put down with yet more force

What is most important to remember is that the future is unwritten. The deciding factor in history remains, as ever, what ordinary people do, however bleak the picture may seem. The trainwreck of Trumpism can be stopped if, to borrow from Walter Benjamin, the global working class can find a way to pull the emergency brake.