30.01.2025

Taking Trump seriously

How easy will the new US president find it to carry out his agenda? Paul Demarty sees few real limits to Donald Trump’s power

In September 2016, grappling with then-candidate Donald Trump’s habit of making wildly exaggerated and provably untrue statements, an interviewer in The Atlantic expressed despair at how little the exposure of such falsehoods seemed to matter: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”¹

The formulation was nicely observed, and rapidly became a cliché. Peter Thiel recycled it in a defence of Trump in The New York Times; before long, per Jon Allsop in a retrospective article on the Columbia Journalism Review website, “the literally/seriously motif … echoed, Zelig-like, through the press”.²

With Trump back in the White House again - at least until the weather improves enough for golf - it is worth excavating the kernel of truth from this old formulation. It turns out, to some extent, that you could take him at his word. He promised an orgy of executive activity on assuming office - to be a dictator for a day, no less - and promptly signed dozens of executive orders (EOs), live on stage. Some are more obviously consequential than others, but the overall package has clear and menacing ambitions. His fixation with Greenland, which I discussed a couple of weeks ago, has not cooled, and he continues to browbeat the Danish government into making a sale.³

Home front

So let us take him literally and seriously, at least in terms of his programme, if not his factual claims. For example: he proposes a stiff tariff against China on the pretext that it is funnelling fentanyl into the United States - a claim that is at least exaggerated, although there seems to be some export of precursor chemicals that may be used to manufacture fentanyl in the Americas. The factual claim is intriguing, but ultimately off the point - tariffs are plainly not actually directed at suppressing the trade in synthetic opioids, but at great-power competition.

The question of how seriously we should take him devolves, at this point, to a matter of how seriously we rate his success in implementing his programme. That poses two questions: on the ‘internal’ constraints, posed by US domestic politics, and the ‘external’ constraints, posed by the overall geopolitical balance of power.

What trouble could he run into domestically? Branko Marcetic laid out some kind of case for Jacobin.⁴ He notes, first of all, that “cracks are already starting to show in Trump’s coalition”, citing the dust-up between the tech right and anti-migrant maximalists over H-1B visas over what Americans call the ‘holiday season’. He notes that Trump is almost inevitably going to come to blows with Elon Musk, since neither man likes to share the limelight.

There are, secondly, the “crises” he must manage - the fallout from a series of natural disasters, most recently the wildfires in southern California; the tentative peace in Gaza, which could collapse rapidly, sucking him into an unpopular foreign quagmire of the sort he is keen to avoid; and, in the same way, the delicacy of negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. There are, finally, the contradictions in his economic programme: promising to end Biden-era inflation, for example, while simultaneously pursuing policies like tariffs that, prima facie, are likely to make it worse. A late-entry executive order on January 27 suspending federal financing for welfare programmes like food stamps is unlikely to help.

We will leave the international matters cited by Marcetic for later. On the economic front, there are undoubtedly problems stored up. Yet the political economy of a global hegemon is a strange beast. Uncertainty in the global economy drives money into US treasuries; this is also a contradiction, since it will tend to appreciate the dollar, when the ostensible goal of reindustrialisation would tend to favour a weaker currency, but gives him a chart to point at with the line going up and to the right. Trump may well be able to selectively apply tariffs in a way that lets him showboat and has some protectionist effects without causing huge price increases for US consumers. We wait and see.

As for Trump’s ‘coalition’, it is barely worth bringing up. The coalition got him into power - he has no need of it now. He happily sided with the tech barons over H-1Bs, calculating - no doubt correctly - that enough misery inflicted on south and central American migrants will suffice for the average Trump-voting Joe. To get his agenda through, Trump needs not that coalition, but the support of the wider institutions of government, and for the time being he has a super-trifecta - him in the White House, Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, and effective control of the Supreme Court. America is at his mercy. Much of his domestic agenda is at the mercy of the states themselves, of course. At the federal level, however, he has a freer hand than any president has enjoyed for some time. If some in his ‘coalition’ do not like what he does with it, they are free, as are all in that great land of liberty, to go fuck themselves.

World stage

Internationally, Trump inherits an empire clearly in relative decline, facing off against its first real peer rival since the USSR fell. He inherits, likewise, a global strategy of shoring up dominance by economically and militarily encircling China, for which strategy he is a loud and loathsome mouthpiece.

This ‘Pivot to Asia’ has frustrated his predecessors, as indeed it frustrated him first time out. Disentangling the US from the mess it made in the Middle East has proven difficult; much delicate diplomatic work lies ahead repairing the arrangements between Israel and the Gulf monarchies made by Trump and Joe Biden after the calamity of the Gaza genocide. Having forced a ceasefire on the Israelis, Trump now talks about clearing Gaza out for good. The first foreign leader to be invited to the White House is - surprise! - one Benjamin Netanyahu. At the same time, there are signs of reluctance, when it comes to being sucked into war with Iran, with the first rank of deranged Iran hawks largely excluded from the administration. His room for manoeuvre here looks limited.

Despite the endless rumours of his closeness to Vladimir Putin, Trump’s last administration played a crucial role in provoking the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 by appearing to ‘Nato-ise’ Ukraine by stealth. His promise to resolve the latter conflict within 24 hours has unsurprisingly come to nothing: after all, Putin is very slowly winning, and has no reason to be modest in his demands, when it comes to a ceasefire. Capitulation to Russia on the part of Volodymyr Zelensky could very plausibly mean his death at the hands of one or another far-right militia or army regiment. It is a sticky wicket. Between these two ongoing emergencies, it seems difficult to fully refocus on the Chinese; but he must.

Perhaps all these problems are part of the reason for Trump’s enormous belligerence in his near abroad - renewed attempts to secure Greenland, the humiliation of Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, and so forth. After all, if he wants to forcibly seize Greenland, assuming he has the men and materiel to do so, who will stop him? The mighty army of Denmark? 55,000 Inuit civilians? Can Panama defend its famous canal from the US army? It is a much more pleasant proposition than a shooting war with Iran, never mind Russia or China. Historian Samuel Moyn is right to note that

Trump’s declaration that he is now out to reverse [US decline] helps identify the most plausible risks. After all, imperial decline and the fruitless zeal to undo it account for a lot of the damage done in world history. The Roman empire in its last centuries affords the classic examples of exasperated leaders of a once-mighty power fallen in relation to its former glory, and lashing out in the ruins.⁵

Moyn, in his usual caustic manner, gives short shrift to any attempt to reverse this decline. Yet it is important not to overstate America’s weakness, which he comes close to doing. The dollar remains the reserve currency, and so Trump’s use of tariffs as a bludgeon is no impotent display. The US military budget dwarfs those of its nearest rivals, China included. The reach of its intelligence agencies and soft power, and their capacity to make mayhem, is likewise unparalleled. Rome is perhaps a more instructive predecessor than Moyn intends: the decline of the empire must be taken at the very least to encompass the four centuries from the crisis of the third century to the Arab conquests, which reduced the Eastern Empire to a smallish rump state in Asia minor and the Balkans - an epoch which included many substantial periods of imperial recrudescence. Writing off Trump’s expansionism as a matter of “fantasy”, as Moyn does, is surely overconfident.

Resistance?

There is, finally, the question of opposition to the new regime. His unilateral move against birthright citizenship is already being contested legally by 20 states, and will end up shortly before the Supreme Court.

Beyond that, it is widely noted that things seem awfully quiet. The opening phases of his first presidency were not: from the women’s march - at that time the largest street demonstration in American history - to the series of allegations of foreign interference that became ‘Russiagate’. Official liberal society spent those years in a state of relentless tension - the so-called ‘#Resistance’.

Clearly exhaustion and despair have some role to play here: after all, the liberals are all too aware of how badly their tactics failed, and indeed how badly their various would-be saviours failed them. Eight years of endless lawfare against Trump have not only failed to get rid of him: they have strengthened him. You would not think he could get away with nixing birthright citizenship, but then he had previously got away with a coup attempt.

Yet there are more ominous dynamics here. The ‘#Resistance’ media outlets have retreated, most notably Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, which declined to endorse Kamala Harris last year in what was clearly a charm offensive from the Amazon oligarch directed at Trump. The relentless hysteria of the last Trump presidency was fed by endless leaks and interventions from parts of the security state. These are now absent, suggesting that these people have come to terms with the president.

Perhaps it is not all bad. It will, after all, be harder for the left to convince itself of the utility of an alliance with the liberals against ‘fascism’ if the liberals are so routed as to give up and turn off the MSNBC news channel for good. We have seen where it leads, after all: vote Hillary Clinton, get Trump; vote Joe Biden, get Biden, get a genocide, and then get Trump again.

The alternative to Trump’s fake class politics and fake populism is not some half-baked popular front, but an unsparing fight for independent working class politics, against the kleptocratic antics of Trump’s billionaire friends, and against the slaveholder’s constitution that allows him to act with impunity. There will be no miraculous overnight success, to be sure, but we cannot limp into the next election in the same sorry state of dependence and expect different results.

www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trump-makes-his-case-in-pittsburgh/501335.↩︎
www.cjr.org/the_media_today/trump_election_delayed_seriously_not_literally.php.↩︎
‘Rise of lifeboat imperialism’ Weekly Worker January 16: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1521/rise-of-lifeboat-imperialism.↩︎
jacobin.com/2025/01/trump-coalition-vulnerabilities-popularity-biden.↩︎
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/27/trump-wants-to-reverse-americas-decline-good-luck.↩︎