Much has already been written about the changes under way in the United States since Donald Trump was re-elected, the pace and scope of which are dizzying. Many of the new administration’s actions (or threats in many cases) have already been reported by the media, but here is a quick review : nationwide raids to round up illegal aliens, given that migrant encounters at the Mexican border have dwindled (32,800 apprehension in less than two months, but with few deportations so far since most of those apprehended were legal and not wanted by the justice system) ; militarization of a large part of that border, making it possible to circumvent the law prohibiting the use of the army for civil law enforcement ; withdrawal of funding from USAID (contested by the courts, but already quite deadly) ; layoffs or unfair and arbitrary dismissal of more than 121,000 federal employees (as of March 28, 2025 according to CNN) ; proposed annexation of Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal ; proposal to empty Gaza of its population to make it “the Riviera of the Middle East” ; challenge to birthright citizenship (guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution in 1868) ; presidential pardon granted to all those convicted for the assault on the Capitol ; the arrest and deportation to a Salvadoran maximum security prison, without even a semblance of due process, of about 300 foreigners accused of belonging to a gang ; revocation of visas of at least 500 foreign students ; arrest without warrants of foreign students who had taken a stance against Israeli policy, with a view to their expulsion, and so on. As for how to interpret those developments, references to concepts from the past are currently in abundant supply, often stemming more from conditioned reflexes than from thoughtful analysis : return of fascism, isolationism, democracy in peril, oligarchic regime. Since it would be impossible to address all aspects of the problem here, we will limit ourselves to discussing the most salient from our point of view, mentioning only in passing the impact of this new presidency on the international scene, a vast issue that deserves separate treatment.

1) We are confronted with an essentially political (rather than social or economic) revolution of great magnitude, certainly the most significant that the United States has experienced since at least the New Deal. The American regime was already highly presidential, but the current concentration of power in the hands of the executive, with the added feature of systematic appointment of unconditional Trump loyalists to all key positions,¹ tends to reduce other instances—Congress, the courts, even the Supreme Court—to an essentially token role.

2) The famous system of checks and balances that Americans take such pride in has not been dismantled, but is operating at a snail’s pace. There are a few legal proceedings under way that have allowed for short-term stays on certain employee dismissals and other measures, but their influence should not be overestimated. As for Congress, although Republican-controlled, its members should in theory be defending their considerable prerogatives (for example, the authority to determine the existence, purpose, and composition of federal government departments), except that they have proven to be passive, or even supportive of presidential policy. Furthermore, contrary to what is routinely contended, the Founding Fathers did not set up such a system of multiple, dispersed instances of power to protect the rights of citizens ; they did so to shield the fledgling republic’s institutions from popular revolt.²

3) The marriage between a fringe of the tech sector and the MAGA (Make America Great Again) right may seem odd, but it isn’t. To start with, in terms of fundraising, which is essential to campaign financing, the Democrats have outpaced the Republicans in the presidential elections of recent years (although the existence of “dark money” prevents any precise accounting). Rarely reported by the left-wing media, this fact undermines the thesis of an oligarchy that suddenly took power under Trump. The reason is that the most powerful and, above all, the most dynamic segments of American capital, along with the wealthier strata of the population, generally prefer reasonable and predictable elected officials. However, a whole series of non-fundamental yet annoying problems for companies (regulation of the tech sector, of expression on social networks, the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI) gave Trump and his team the means to woo a portion of the tech sector previously loyal to the “progressive” camp. The techno-libertarian Peter Thiel, “godfather” of Vice President J. D. Vance and founder of PayPal, has been the pivotal figure in this rapprochement. It was mainly unlisted entities financed by private equity that supported the Republican candidate, rather than the Big Six that figured so prominently at the inauguration ceremony : Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), Microsoft and Nvidia.

Furthermore, tech isn’t a sector in crisis or losing momentum ; quite the contrary. Unlike those who financed Hitler in Germany, the prime movers here are the big winners of the transformations of recent decades. This also highlights the limitations of comparisons with the advent of Nazism. However, the backdrop that shouldn’t be underestimated is rivalry with China, which all the big names in American tech have firmly in mind.

At the heart of that rivalry is artificial intelligence (AI), whose implementation requires colossal electricity consumption (even if the Chinese firm DeepSeek claims to achieve this more economically, a promise that nevertheless awaits verification on a larger scale in practice). And despite certain advances in “clean” energy under Biden, a safer bet would be to stick with the tried-and-tested energy mix that has ensured the economic power of the United States for a century. This is precisely the new administration’s agenda. It also offers the upside of making it easy for web companies to ally with the “carbon coalition,” which has retained its preponderance within American capital and enjoys MAGA rank-and-file support. All this takes place, of course, against the backdrop of what Temps Critiques refers to as “the revolution of capital,” which entails among other things a process of totalization : not the kind of dominance by finance capital theorized in the past and still often denounced today, but the mobilization of finance in diverse and sometimes more flexible forms such as venture capital. As a result, we are witnessing a new dynamic between industry and finance, between large, established corporations and innovative startups, between tangible and intangible activities.

Finally, Silicon Valley firms, oil and gas companies, and many others share an intense hostility toward regulation in general, and here, concern for environmental and social issues (the so-called ESG criteria) is certainly more a thorn in their side than incentives to hire women, Black people, homosexuals, or to use the politically correct pronoun to address an employee. And the Biden years happened to be a period of increased economic regulation and energy transition policy.

4) This brings us to Elon Musk, who donated nearly $290 million ahead of the election, which largely explains the red-carpet treatment he’s gotten from Trump. Yet he is not typical of Silicon Valley’s top figures. He is, first and foremost, an engineer widely recognized by his peers, of rather humble origins (as is Jeff Bezos), focused on material production (the others being mostly “investors” aiming to establish monopolies), as well as a man with a fairly pathological personality. His approach, at least on the administrative level—first break things, then see what happens—derives from his experience as an engineer, as well as from his “anarcho-capitalist” ideology. And unlike the others, he is not primarily interested in money. He is more megalomaniacal than greedy.

5) Things aren’t as rosy as they initially seemed, however. Tesla is in trouble, partly because Musk’s political antics (a Nazi salute or a gesture widely interpreted as such, support for the AfD in Germany) have tarnished the company’s brand image, but more fundamentally because investors are finding it increasingly hard to believe in. Tesla’s share price, after peaking just after Trump’s election, is now plummeting as the company’s accounts show losses.³ At the same time, its Chinese competitor, BYD, has surpassed its 2024 sales forecast by nearly 20 percent. In addition, Musk, the self-proclaimed champion of rooting out federal government “waste, fraud and abuse,” was showered by the Biden administration with subsidies (in the name of the energy transition) which will likely be eliminated under the influence of the largely dominant current within the Republican Party, which knows no gods other than oil, natural gas, and coal. On the other hand, his SpaceX group, which includes its rocket launch business as well as Starlink, a network of 7,000 low-orbit satellites whose objective is to disrupt the global fiber optic Internet system, could not survive five minutes without the benevolence and active support of a powerful state. Under Biden, the FCC, the American media regulator, had put on hold an application designed to increase the number of those satellites to nearly 30,000. That makes Musk’s anti-regulation stance, as well as his generosity towards Trump, all the more understandable.

6) Republicans risk defeat in the midterm elections in November 2026, especially if the chaotic policy of layoffs and disorganization of federal services carried out by the DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), an entity with no legal status recognized by Congress, established by simple executive order and in effect led by Elon Musk, continues unhindered. In many districts, Republican senators and members of the House are already having to answer to angry citizens at town-hall meetings. Brave but not foolhardy, most of them have ended up taking the administration’s advice and avoiding such meetings, or limiting them to telephone exchanges. Trump has been remarkably successful in intimidating Republican elected officials and imposing a degree of party discipline unprecedented in American history. But are they all willing to sacrifice their seats in the name of ideological unity behind him ?

7) What about public reactions to this offensive ? There have been some, but they aren’t frankly impressive.* Unlike the 2016 election, which Trump won thanks to the archaic electoral college system but without a majority of the votes, and that of 2020, which he lost outright and which drove him to attempt a coup disguised as a popular rebellion, in 2024 he had an absolute majority of the votes. Given the colossal contributions raised by the Democratic Party, the multitude of legal proceedings against Trump, and the obsessive warnings against the fascist peril, his victory left the “progressive” camp speechless. Above all, he achieved rather respectable scores among the population groups that the Democrats claimed to protect against him, e.g., women, Blacks, and Latinos. Dedicated to defending the material interests and especially the cultural references of the upper-middle classes and the rising elements within the “ethnic minorities, the Democratic Party” had lulled itself into believing that the economic difficulties experienced by 80 percent of the country’s inhabitants during Biden’s term and their dislike for woke values and identity issues didn’t ultimately matter ; all it would take to ensure another Democratic victory would be an artful mix of celebrity endorsements, lavish funding, and demonization of Trump.⁴ In short, the equation : minorities + identity politics + higher education + a few unionized workers who haven’t lost their old reflexes yet = progressive left = electoral majority has no relevance in this context.

The recent protests are thus a far cry from the massive rallies that followed Trump’s first victory in 2016 (millions of protesters for the Women’s March in March 2017, after his inauguration), not to mention the movement against police violence following the death of George Floyd, or even Occupy Wall Street. As Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte regarding the French peasantry, we are dealing rather with an atomized society that resembles a sack of potatoes : no real links between the potatoes that compose it. Despite the classic mutual aid relationships between immigrants from the same country and the enduring sense of belonging to a separate group among Blacks, many observers have underscored the decline of traditional forms of sociability and civic engagement.⁵ That said, here is a partial list of actions :

• Early on, small groups of high school students in Los Angeles took to the streets for days in a row, followed by those in Dallas, Philadelphia, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, and elsewhere, to protest the roundups affecting thousands of immigrants in a matter of weeks with a view to their deportation.
• On February 19, a new union group, the Federal Unionists Network, organized small rallies in about thirty cities to “save our services” against DOGE.
• There are also gatherings in front of Tesla dealerships which are still ongoing, accompanied by a few acts of sabotage, as well as a rally of 500 medical researchers at the University of Washington.
• On March 1, thousands of people gathered in 145 national parks to protest layoffs, which in many cases resulted in the loss of housing ; among those laid off were firefighters, forest rangers, biologists, botanists, and skilled workers.
• The week before, at a rally outside the Montana State Capitol to defend public lands, a protester carried a sign that read : “Immigrants didn’t steal my job. The President did.”
• Rallies to defend freedom of scientific research (Stand Up for Science) took place on March 7.
• In late March, at an anti-DOGE rally in West Virginia, a sign featured a caricature of Musk with the phrase : “The only immigrant who took our jobs.”
• The Republican Party headquarters in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was damaged on March 30 by Molotov cocktails ; a piece of graffiti comparing the border control authority to the Ku Klux Klan was found at the site.
• The call by groups close to the Democratic Party for “Hands Off !” rallies was followed on April 5 in some 1,600 communities across all 50 states, with 100,000 protesters in Washington, tens of thousands in New York, 30,000 in Boston, large rallies in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, as well as 7,000 protesters in Des Moines, Iowa, where Trump won by 13.2 points in November, and rallies in a multitude of smaller communities where political demonstrations are otherwise rare.
• More generally, Vice President J. D. Vance has had trouble enjoying his leisure time ; he was greeted by protesters on a ski vacation in Vermont (“Go ski in Russia !”) and he and his wife were loudly booed at a concert at the Kennedy Center.

None of this is to be sneezed at, but in a country as vast, populous, and powerful as the U.S., there is clearly a need to move to a higher level. We will return later to the social and cultural climate that could partly explain the election result and the relatively anemic reactions so far.

8) There remains, however, a formidable counter-power : the financial markets. And they are both ruthless and unprejudiced, contrary to judges, elected officials, federal employees, and even union activists. If Trump persists in disorganizing federal government services such as the Federal Aviation Administration (with further accidents on the horizon), the weather service (in a country frequently plagued by hurricanes), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the anti-vax Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, recommends using cod-liver oil to treat measles, which is currently spreading in several states of the country, and advocates inaction in the face of avian flu) ; and if, moreover, he follows through with punitive import duties that fuel American inflation and lead to layoffs, God won’t punish him, nor will the revolutionary proletariat, but the financial markets will. Moreover, that punishment is already well under way. And finance, though routinely blamed for much of what goes wrong, is not divorced from other sectors of the economy,⁶ which are also experiencing and reacting to the new administration’s policies.

Charlatans in power ?

Trump, it must be said, regularly shows a disarming incomprehension of financial and economic issues and, to make matters worse, he has taken care, for this second term, to surround himself with figures who dare not contradict him.⁷ While the good health of the stock market was one of his obsessions during his first term (in all his speeches, he even claimed credit for it), he initially displayed great indifference to the plummeting stock prices caused by his tariffs in early April 2025. In addition, his vision of the authority vested in him by the voters last November, meaning carte blanche, including to act against their interests and to govern by executive order (the resemblance to a certain French president is obvious), gives him a sense of impunity. And it must be said that opinion polls do not yet show a clear turnaround in the MAGA base.

Another of his obsessions is the trade deficit, which he blames entirely on the overvaluation of the dollar and the allegedly dishonest practices of other countries (among which he includes the VAT applied in Europe).⁸ That’s why he and his team (Peter Navarro, Scott Bessent, Stephen Miran) are banking so much on tariffs, and more specifically on “Bretton Woods realignments” that would compel countries running large trade surpluses with the United States to accept a higher exchange rate for their currencies against the dollar. Those unwilling to do so would cease to be considered allies and would have to face high tariffs and lesser military security guarantees. Ideally, this would lead to a “Mar-a-Lago Accord” according to Stephen Miran (parodying, with unintentional humor, the Plaza Accords signed under Ronald Reagan in 1985 to lower an overvalued dollar) that would force foreign states and investors to swap the U.S. Treasury bonds they currently hold for 100-year bonds which, moreover, would not be saleable on the markets, but exchangeable only for other U.S. Treasury securities. The goal is for the U.S. to have its cake and eat it too : perpetuate the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency, but with the exchange rate remaining low enough not to hamper American exporters.

Such keen observers as financial journalists Federico Fubini (Corriere della Sera), Gillian Tett (Financial Times), or Yanis Varoufakis (a former Greek Finance Minister) have made much of this project, and it would indeed be tempting to view it as the “plan of capital” that certain revolutionary currents have long been on the lookout for. The problem is that, in the opinion of many economists and asset managers, either this project will never see the light of day (apart from Japan and other neighbors of China perhaps, most of Washington’s important trading partners would not be intimidated, starting with the most important, China), or it would lead to a resounding failure for the United States and its preeminent position in the international financial system.⁹ Not to mention that the rating agencies could very well equate this sleight-of-hand with a disguised restructuring of U.S. sovereign debt and downgrade its rating accordingly, which would push investors to demand a risk premium (i.e., a higher interest rate) before buying new U.S. securities.

Economic crisis or political, social, and cultural crisis ?

But let’s not get bogged down in speculation about the chances of success of this nebulous project, because the most important issues lie elsewhere. For behind the Trump administration’s concerns about U.S. decline, real or imagined, there are at least three fundamental problems.

• The United States is the undisputed center of a global empire of capital while remaining a nation-state.
• The U.S. trade deficit tells us nothing about the true power of American capital today.
• The country’s political, social and cultural crisis, however substantial, should not be confused with an economic crisis.

For years now, Temps Critiques has conceived capitalist domination as operating on three interconnected levels : a summit, or level I, bringing together the most powerful states, large multinational companies, international organizations, etc., where the phenomena commonly associated with globalization take place ; level II which is that of national (or regional) specificity, where social relations must be reproduced and managed, however conflictual they may be ; and finally a level III where the gray areas of employment predominate, as well as the informal or subsistence economy in poor countries. This analysis gives us a good starting-point for understanding the rapidly changing reality of the United States.

As the initiator and still the core country in the transnational empire, the United States continues to boast a large portion of the world’s most influential companies. The Soviet challenge of yesteryear is long forgotten, but the same can be said of the Japanese and German challenges of the 1970s and 1980s ; the rise of China and, to a lesser extent, India has since eclipsed those two former competitors. Yet at the same time, the share of American multinational companies in total global corporate profits has remained relatively constant for years, according to Canadian economist Sean Starrs. He considers that a much more telling indicator than GDP or national accounting, especially in the case of a country whose companies derive an increasingly large share of their profits from operations abroad. Based on the Forbes Global 2000 ranking, Starrs looked at 25 broad sectors. In 2024, American transnational corporations (TNCs) still dominate 13 of them and lead in 19. Their lead over the number two is generally overwhelming, more than double Taiwan’s in electronics and more than 13 times China’s in computer hardware and software. Moreover, the distribution of power has not changed much since 2005 (the year he began his research). China leads in four sectors (banking, construction, forestry-metals-mining, telecommunications), while Japan leads in two others (auto-truck- parts, trading companies). The biggest change is the relative decline of Japan and Europe and the rise of China, but the persistence of American power underscores the absurdity, as in the 1980s, of talking about American decline.¹⁰

But there’s just one problem. The growing international reach of American capital since World War II, a source of immense profits and therefore of economic, political, military and ultimately cultural supremacy (cinema, pop music, fashion, and ultimately even eating habits), has spawned considerable tension within the country, providing a textbook illustration of the contradictions between levels I and II of domination. Consider the national currency’s role as global reserve currency and the imbalances that this causes ; the relative importance of military spending and armed interventions (which lower-ranking countries can to a large extent avoid), as required by the U.S.’s status as global policeman ;¹¹ the need for appropriate financial and monetary policy to attract capital from around the world to finance the whole arrangement, as well as the need for others to invest and sell their products in the United States in order to obtain dollars, which undercuts the competitive strength of domestic production ; the possibility of recruiting qualified manpower from other countries, which allows the U.S. to ignore the health and education of its own population ; and so on.

American society is therefore under severe strain, as shown by indicators like declining life expectancy and high infant mortality,¹² the poor health and economic precarity of a significant part of the population, endemic violence, and a barely imaginable incarceration rate (5 percent of the world’s population, but 20 percent of the planet’s prisoners). It is in part this state of affairs that has riled up right-wing nationalists like Steve Bannon,¹³ or even Trump (who presumably believes that the purchase of French wines by Americans is the result of a vast scam). On both the left and the right, moreover, nostalgia for the halcyon days (more or less from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s) when people thought they lived in a prosperous, highly industrialized, relatively homogeneous country, populated by well-paid workers proud to belong to a vague middle class, remains quite perceptible. All this is part of an atmosphere marked by a diffuse feeling of American decline in all areas : economic, political, military, social, cultural. According to some, the “declinist” mood, which may have roots in the country’s puritan background, goes back at least to the Sputnik launch by the Soviet Union in 1957 and is periodically rekindled with every new challenge. Today, in any case, it is fueled by a feeling of relative powerlessness in the face of China’s rise and the economic insecurity experienced by so many Americans. But unlike during the Cold War, when rivalry with the U.S.S.R. prompted the United States to reform itself (civil rights and social welfare legislation) so as to stand out as an exemplary country, today there is neither optimism nor a desire for sweeping change. And the climate of growing enmity in recent decades, both domestically and internationally, with the increase in military interventions, can only have prepared the ground for someone like Trump, who prides himself on acting without restraint.¹⁴

We are dealing, then, with social crisis and cultural disorientation. But is American capital (or capital as a whole) in crisis ? This is, of course, the favorite thesis of traditional Marxists like the Socialist Equality Party (Trotskyist). Others from the revolutionary camp, or even from outside it, like the economist Branko Milanović, see in Trump’s election the “symbolic end of the neoliberal era.”¹⁵ But as Sean Starrs’s previously discussed analysis suggests, the power of American capital shows no signs of ebbing, despite China’s rise to prominence and a very turbulent international situation. All in all, we prefer the point of view of Emmanuel Todd, who emphasizes the loss of bearings caused by the gradual waning of Protestantism, which he identifies as one of the keys to the historical rise of the United States, Northwestern Europe, and more broadly the West and which, in a diluted form, has long continued to fuel currents working for the common good (socialism, trade unionism, patriotism, civic spirit, etc.).¹⁶ He highlights the “nihilistic” character of American politics today, something that has been the case since well before Trump’s current term, but Trump embodies it in a particularly crude way, with his obsession with displaying an image of force or even violence in all circumstances, often in total disregard for any strategic considerations.¹⁷

As for the political dimension of this crisis, we have already seen that the Republican Party, although traditionally tied to the business community, is finding it increasingly difficult to outdo the Democrats in raising funds from large corporations and the wealthiest donors. That, along with the impossibility of shouting from the rooftops its intention to “rob from the poor to give to the rich,” explains its exploitation, over the years, of often disparate societal themes in order to mobilize in turn anti-abortionists (including Christian fundamentalists), gun enthusiasts, white supremacists and far-right militias, non-mixed groups proudly asserting their masculinity, COVID-19 skeptics and anti-vaxxers, etc. In the economic sphere, at least one observer considers the Republicans to be the “party of plutocrats” who fight above all to ensure their influence in the various states, where the non-unitary structure of the country allows them to push through more advantageous laws than at the federal level. This is an admissible thesis (despite the anachronistic and nebulous side of the term used), provided that the “plutocrats” in question are not equated with the truly dominant segments of capital, which manage to free themselves to a large extent from the local and national framework. This was already the case under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, a precursor in many respects of Trump in economic terms, when medium-sized oil companies were able, along with other rising firms, to reshuffle the economic and political balance of power in the United States.¹⁸

Yet this party, which has done so much to redistribute wealth upwards, has also managed to attract working-class voters through its appeal, relayed by Fox News and partisan social networks, to hatred of the federal government, held responsible for everyone’s woes, and of the “elites,” essentially equated with university graduates accused of looking down on others. The anti-Washington mentality has a long history in the United States and is easy to reactivate.¹⁹ What seems more striking to us is that popular anger nevertheless seems to largely spare the business world, which is closely identified in the collective American perception with “the pursuit of happiness” stated as one of the inalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence. To be sure, the U.S. has known socialist and anarchist currents, as well as movements of revolt that have at times given the ruling classes cold sweats. But the country’s liberal-democratic culture has deep roots that go back to the colonial era. People may grumble about banks bailed out by the government or the growing influence of billionaires (even mentioned by Joe Biden in his last speech as president), but everyone dreams of succeeding one day in business, or at least considers that to be an entirely legitimate dream. As one unjustly underestimated historian of the old school wrote : “It is to be ‘American’ to be involved with the success-failure syndrome.”²⁰ As for the image of educated, wealthy, contemptuous elites, concentrated mainly on the two coasts, it fairly well reflects reality. It is underpinned to begin with by educational stratification, a phenomenon that started earlier in the United States than elsewhere, but above all by a well-documented increase in inequality and a socio-economic polarization that is much more pronounced than in Western Europe. It is true, as Thomas Piketty and other researchers have pointed out, that the redistribution of recent decades has mainly benefited the very top sliver of the top 1 percent of earners. But it’s pointless to reduce American society, as Occupy Wall Street did, to a tiny oligarchy crushing more than 99 percent of the population, because the rest of the population is by no means homogeneous : neither economically, nor culturally, nor in terms of life expectancy. And most of the country’s inhabitants get that.

The movements of the 1960s (for civil rights and against racism, against the Vietnam War, in the workplace) disintegrated for reasons too complicated to explain here. To sum things up, the Democratic Party was in power as U.S. military intervention in Indochina escalated and was strongly and sometimes even violently contested, as at its 1968 Chicago Convention, but gradually succeeded in absorbing or neutralizing most of the previously active currents. This was especially striking among Black people. Some suffered death or imprisonment against a backdrop of clashes with police and counterintelligence forces ; others, workplace militants, suffered another type of repression in the form of dismissals following wildcat strikes or downsizing (a prelude to the deindustrialization that was soon to unfold) ; still others were able to populate the political and social bureaucracies at the municipal, federal, and state levels, thus becoming a key component of the motley coalition formed by the Democrats. And meanwhile, the bulk of the largely ghettoized urban Black population experienced a situation of severe social decomposition from the 1980s onwards : mass unemployment, increasing homelessness, drug addiction and large-scale trafficking, systematic arrest-incarceration policies, and the elimination by Bill Clinton in 1997 of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a vital assistance program for residents of deprived areas. As for affirmative action measures, their impact was far from negligible, but only a minority of this “minority” was able to benefit from them.

At the same time, left-wing intellectuals, now bereft of the major issues around which they had once mobilized, mostly retreated into the comfort of in-group relations. This has made it easy for them to cultivate enlightened mores (feminism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, a welcoming attitude towards homosexuality, and subsequently transsexuality), while equipping themselves with a theoretical framework imported from old Europe (“French theory”) whose vocabulary alone (often the result of reverently literal translations) guarantees incommunicability with an American people written off in advance as philistine and reactionary, a condemnation which in turn gives the assurance of moral and class superiority. That, in short, is the source and the recipe for the infamous wokism. And since all this is happening in a country historically marked by puritanism, witch hunts are never far away, on both ends of the political spectrum. Some ban books or movies that they consider contrary to traditional values ; others prevent conferences by speakers denounced as politically threatening (or supposed to offend the sensibilities of this or that “minority” or “victim”). Or within the confines of the university, they initiate witch trials worthy of the U.S.S.R. under Stalin (e.g., without confrontation between alleged suspect and victim, nor presumption of innocence, nor sometimes even disclosure of the accuser’s identity) against professors, who sometimes risk losing their jobs.²¹ The main point is to create a climate of widespread intimidation.

The trouble is that it’s ultimately the strongest player who wins that kind of game, as the broadly defined American left is currently discovering in dismay. Trump and his crew may be amateurs on economic issues, but when it comes to blackmail and racketeering, they know the ropes, and they are determined to wage the “culture war” with no holds barred. It’s astonishing to see how swiftly companies, administrations and universities have been shedding their prior commitments to DEI principles since last November. But those who have worked so hard in the past to silence others (in the name of political correctness) are in no position to express outrage about censorship today.²²

We have already mentioned the left’s stupor at this second Trump victory. Just days before, a number of commentators were still highlighting the robust health of the economy, the promising side of the measures introduced by Biden in terms of growth and the green transition, including investments expressly targeting areas that vote Republican. Hence the subsequent awkward silence, denial, or search for scapegoats on the part of “progressives.” In reality, and however ambitious they were, the laws passed under Biden (Infrastructure Act, Inflation Reduction Act, Chips Act) had created few jobs in the short term, while inflation remained high and the share of wages in GDP had continued to fall.²³ Moreover, and despite the racism that is still very much a reality in the United States, a sizable number of Latinos and even Blacks voted for Trump, on the one hand because they remembered the substantial aid he distributed during the pandemic and on the other hand, in the case of Latinos, because they probably don’t identify with Democratic Party propaganda. It depicts them as excluded and oppressed, rather than as a group which, despite the stress, difficulties, and hostility of the native-born (a questionable term in a country formed to such an extent by successive waves of migration) that define the immigrant experience, will end up like all previous immigrations by melting into the American melting pot.²⁴ And most of its members don’t aspire to anything else.

Elements of historical continuity…

At the outset, we noted the radical nature of the changes under way. But before going any further, it would be useful to recall the continuities between the Trump regime and the recent and distant past. As Adam Tooze and others point out, American unilateralism is more the rule than the exception in history, including in periods that some tend to idealize retrospectively (i.e., well before the much-maligned so-called neoliberal shift) : refusal to ratify the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and to join the League of Nations, extraordinarily high tariffs until the New Deal, diplomacy consisting of leaving England and France contend on their own with Mussolini and Hitler, Nixon’s overthrow of the Bretton Woods system, the second Iraq War, etc. The same goes for the brutality displayed by Trump and Vance : is it worse than Bush Jr.’s War on Terror ? The bombing of Cambodia and Laos ? The countless coups d’état organized by Washington during the Cold War ? Moreover, on a whole series of issues, Trump’s predecessor pursued a policy that was both confused and harmful : “Joe Biden,” Tooze explains, “oversaw a profoundly untimely revival of American claims to global leadership. The result was an administration that committed the US to the defence of Ukraine, backed Israeli escalation in the Middle East and engaged in brinkmanship with China.”²⁵

Susan Watkins, the editor of New Left Review, rightly asserts that the only real break made by Trump seems to be with the demonization of Putin, probably due to his team’s decision to focus on China, and therefore to seek to reestablish good relations with Russia, or even with Iran, in order to avoid becoming dispersed and to be able to better isolate Beijing.²⁶ In this context, Watkins stresses the continuity in the anti-Chinese agenda of the successive Obama, Trump I, and Biden administrations—as well as in American immigration policy since Ronald Reagan’s second term in the 1980s, when that well-known friend of California’s citrus growers signed a law legalizing nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants. It was under Obama, a Democrat and symbol of “diversity,” that the highest deportation numbers were recorded to date. Trump vowed in 2016 to build a wall along the Mexican border, but in four years he only managed to add 50 miles of fencing. And despite his incendiary speeches against immigrants, he deported fewer than Obama and far fewer than Biden. He’s now at it again (fighting the “invasion” was one of his top campaign promises), but he only has 6,000 authorized ICE agents at his disposal to “crack down” on nearly 3.8 million square miles of territory.²⁷ That explains his recourse to showy but low-impact actions, such as arresting 238 undocumented immigrants suspected of being part of a Venezuelan gang and sending them, without due process, to a prison-torture center in El Salvador on March 16, in defiance of a contrary injunction from a federal judge and invoking the president’s “war powers” (the crossing of the American border by illegal immigrants from a “hostile” country like Venezuela being equated with a foreign invasion).

… but also elements of rupture

It’s time to say a few more words about this huckster. As a real-estate developer, Trump was distinguished less by success than by dishonesty (notably refusals to pay his suppliers), and it was likely from that experience that he derived his zero-sum philosophy of economics and politics (a property is either yours or mine). His early mentor was Roy Cohn, a lawyer who had made a name for himself persecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, then as an assistant to the notorious Joseph McCarthy, and later as legal counsel for the Gambino and Genovese mob families. His advice to his young disciple was this : “Attack, counterattack, and never apologize !” It was only in reality TV that Trump really came into his own, which perhaps explains his obsession with public image and his total disregard for the distinction between fact and fiction. Vain and spiteful, he devotes a lot of energy to revenge and has managed, this time, to build a team of 100-percent loyal fans, since he can’t take criticism (the corollary being his unhealthy thirst for praise). He deliberately acts in unpredictable ways to destabilize his opponents (and it’s often effective). His vision of foreign competition probably dates back to his youth, when the most naïve Americans feared being overwhelmed by Japan.²⁸ And like many of his compatriots, he sincerely believes that soft power like development assistance (USAID) boils down to gifts offered to lazy, ungrateful people, instead of being a vehicle for selling American products, making dependency relationships more palatable, or even establishing additional antennas in remote areas where the CIA has no presence.

Trump should nonetheless be given credit for managing to assemble an unprecedented coalition that has once again brought him to the White House. Right-wing nationalists like Steve Bannon, a self-proclaimed spokesperson for the common people who are victims of globalization ; techno-libertarians like Peter Thiel (flanked by young entrepreneurs or engineers hostile to affirmative action who have in common the fact that they have made it on their own and, in several cases, are of foreign origin) ; the accelerationist current²⁹ around the anarcho-capitalist Curtis Yarvin (apparently the “brain” behind the suggestion to fire all federal government employees adopted by Elon Musk) ; conventional Republicans, often from the Tea Party, who have been dreaming for years of all-out deregulation-privatization and overturning the New Deal ; Christian fundamentalists (although less and less vocal lately) ; Cold War nostalgics who are spoiling for a fight with China : it’s unclear that such a motley crew can hold together for long.³⁰

In any case, the important thing to bear in mind, especially regarding accelerationists or libertarians, is that there are times in history when all the initiative shifts to the opposing camp. And even if we consider the left-right distinction to be largely obsolete today, those in the United States who claimed to embody solidarity, the hope for a better life, even radical transformation—in short, the left—eventually came across as defenders and beneficiaries of the establishment, as the party of immobility (apart from their enthusiasm for novelties like “gender fluidity”), and above all as people extremely attached to restrictive norms (the complete opposite of the desire for emancipation that characterized the 1960s upsurge). This made it a cinch for those on the other side like Joe Rogan, a martial arts specialist turned comedian and subsequently popular podcaster, to pose as rebels who say “Up yours !” to the moralizers eager to control everything, and to position themselves as the party of movement. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a young social democratic New York congresswoman close to Bernie Sanders, thus found out on the ground that many of her loyal supporters had nonetheless voted for Trump in November because of his “contrarian” style. It is significant in this regard that so far, the reactions against the most drastic measures introduced by Trump and Musk have mainly involved defending laws and institutions under attack.

We have seen that the new administration is bedeviled by inconsistencies and the whims of its supreme leader, to such an extent that it often resembles a drunken boat. Is this attributable to a lack of program ? Certainly not, given that the 2025 Project, written in 2023 by the far-right Heritage Foundation to prepare for Trump’s return to power, had already sketched out the broad outlines of what is currently taking place : concentration of power in the president’s hands, appointment of loyalists to all key positions, dismantling of the civil service, eliminating, downsizing, or disciplining many institutions (including the Justice Department, the courts, and the FBI), lowering the already low taxes on corporations, gutting and privatizing Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security (which provides retirement and disability pensions), use of the armed forces to deal with civil disturbances, and so on.³¹ Added to this is a significant aspect already mentioned, namely the desire of Trump and his inner circle to settle scores with their adversaries.

But if the regime comes across as so chaotic in its day-to-day functioning, it isn’t only because of the roughshod methods employed by Musk and the young computer scientists he recruited, who are unfamiliar with how a public administration works.³² It’s also because the program, which is above all political and ideological, has a destructive, nihilistic undertone that reflects the troubled nature of American society. Reindustrialization is admittedly a problematic undertaking, but one that might make sense. The same goes for working to reduce the budget deficit. But that isn’t what this is about. No serious economist outside the government believes that tariffs are an effective tool for encouraging manufacturers to relocate to the United States (Biden’s policies were probably more conducive to that goal) or a sufficient source of revenue to pay down the enormous budget deficit. They therefore serve to show the whole world who is in charge ; we are dealing with a politics of tribute and predation. This provides further insight into the admiration and friendship that Trump expresses for Putin and other authoritarian leaders, especially since he must be green with envy at the stranglehold they have on their country’s institutions. It also makes it easier to grasp the hostility displayed by his vice president toward Europe, guilty, in the eyes of such political circles, of an outmoded attachment to social welfare (all the more galling given that Europeans, long perceived as beggars in rags desperate to settle in the New World, now live longer, in better health, and in greater security than Americans) and to the universalism inherited from the Enlightenment, values on which the United States seems to have turned its back. “Progress” would now appear to be limited to endless technological change and, possibly, to the mirage of enrichment for the smart guys via Internet and cryptocurrency investments, or to that of surpassing the human condition promised by transhumanism.

Not that there are no economic interests at stake ; far from it. At the beginning of this text, we highlighted the importance of rivalry with China and therefore of Washington’s mobilization of the tech sector to confront it. The threat of a return to old-style territorial colonialism (Greenland, the Panama Canal, Canada) as well as the plan to revive large-scale construction of merchant ships should be viewed against that background.³³ But we also stressed that the United States remains the center of the empire of capital and as such has formidable means available to it. Although that empire may be profoundly unbalanced, chaotic and a source of suffering, American economic power is not really threatened. In fact, you can’t help wondering whether it isn’t precisely their confidence in that supremacy that favors the profoundly reckless behavior currently displayed by the country’s ruling strata.³⁴ You can almost sense a detachment from reality that the generation of Americans confronted with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan would never have indulged in.

The return of politics and blind rationality

In this case, we are witnessing something that Marxist, anarchist and other theorists had not quite foreseen : a disruption in the political order that that can’t be traced immediately back to an economic crisis, an outbreak of or stalemate in social struggles, or a major international conflict.³⁵ What is happening is instead that the political sphere has become partially autonomous, though there are still secondary yet important roles for its business wing (there’s even a wrestling boss as Secretary of Education), its technology wing, and its various ideological wings. Is it because state control has become more crucial than ever in today’s capitalism ? That is a hypothesis worth exploring, especially since Silicon Valley companies, which once believed they had no need to lobby, given how indispensable they were, have ended up doing so massively. For example, Palantir, a young data analytics company that does a lot of work for the Pentagon, declared lobbying expenses of $5.8 million in 2024 (a lot, but still far behind Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman) and has managed to establish a system of bridges between its leaders and senior officials in Washington (and Westminster) that has given rise to an extraordinary network of influence. This clearly shows that even in the context of a seemingly unbridled government, there can be “rational” actors according to the criteria of neoclassical economists.

But what about anarcho-capitalists or libertarians, including those of the first generation in Southern California, who spent their free time denouncing the state and the rest of their time working for it, in the arms industry ?³⁶ Explanations like “It’s all about big money” clearly don’t explain much. What seems to make anti-statists and techno-libertarians run is a kind of blind rationality. Living mainly in a fraternal environment populated by men (the “tech bro’s”), big fans of video games, often giving their company a name lifted from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, they largely operate in a parallel universe made of encoding, skillful fundraising, and almost miraculous enrichment. The consequences of their actions for human beings are not part of their thinking. Even Musk, despite being an engineer and industrialist, fits this model, as he demonstrates daily. At the intersection of new technology, finance and science fiction, this current is driven by the rage to turn everything upside down. This implicitly raises major issues from the standpoint of any emancipation project worthy of the name, because such a project would require not only change, but also conservation : of external nature as well as of our internal nature to begin with, in the face of such anti-humanist tendencies.

In any case, techno-libertarians and certain tech bosses with a more classical outlook seem to feel at home—at least for the time being—with the desire to reshape the state, liquidate the entire mental and institutional universe associated with the “left” or even the New Deal, including public spending for purposes other than capitalization and armaments, and overturn standards (union, environmental, anti-discrimination) that drives Trump and his cronies, especially since they have the impression that their Chinese competitors, although exposed to the arbitrary power of the Communist Party, do not ultimately have to endure as much harassment as they do and can therefore move forward more quickly. True or false, it must be emphasized that it isn’t the people who have nothing to lose who are acting today, for example, the victims of deindustrialization, the opioid epidemic, or the stagnation of the ghettos ; it’s rather those who cockily assume that whatever they do, they will always wind up on their feet. Like the new rulers, they are intoxicated by the image of themselves as nonconformists who challenge established powers and patterns and who are well on their way to sweeping away all obstacles—be they technological, institutional, geopolitical, or human—that stand in their way.

However, the thorniest question is still : what for ? American capital, we have said, had no need for such a reversal and the actors of that reversal are not economically threatened. But that isn’t true of the American nation, which corresponds to what we have identified as level II of capitalist domination. Deindustrialization, deregulation, and the elimination of much of social welfare—particularly under Democratic President Bill Clinton—have had devastating effects, and the post-2008 bank bailouts have only reinforced an already palpable sense of injustice and powerlessness. Compounding that is the domestic fallout from a series of rather unsuccessful wars that, unlike World War II, have not allowed veterans or those close to them to construct positive narratives.³⁷ Some look for scapegoats (foreigners), but an even more common reaction is self-destruction.

Such a disorganized society, which no longer believes in anything but individual success, but which puts it out of reach for the majority of its members, is easy prey for the cynics at Fox News and the demagogues who promise to restore America to its former greatness. It must be said that Trumpism represents a kind of recognition of the obvious point that globalization hasn’t been all upside for everyone. But beyond the money to be made by manipulating public opinion, what we are dealing with is a form of disorder rooted in politics, and the nihilistic nature of the recent climate highlighted by Emmanuel Todd seems convincing to us. As long as there are elections with two rival parties, they will have to be won, and the methods used to achieve that have become increasingly crude over the years. The omnipresence of campaign financing, both overt and covert, is well known. Furthermore, the Republicans won two presidential elections without an absolute majority of the vote thanks to the Electoral College system, one of the many characteristics that place the United States among the least “democratic” of all countries claiming that title. It is also well known that Trump, who organized a mini-insurrection in January 2021 to try to forcibly overturn his defeat at the polls in November 2020, managed to escape prosecution and pardoned all those convicted of the Capitol assault upon his inauguration in January 2025. What is less well known is that one election earlier, the Democrats had done their best to discredit Trump with Russiagate, simply because they were loath to accept their 2016 defeat. But the case file turned out to be largely empty.

A democratic order worth saving ?

Today, Trump and his associates are openly attacking the country’s fundamental constitutional norms, that is, the separation and independence of powers, and are violating not only the laws passed by Congress, but the text of the Constitution, a document considered almost sacred in the United States. At the same time, they more or less refuse to comply with judges’ rulings, so much so that many commentators are currently speaking of a constitutional crisis. But as critical voices like Aziz Rana or Daniel Lazare point out, it makes no sense to call, as so many Americans do, for respect for a document that has played such a reactionary role for most of its history, that unabashedly asserts the opposite of the Declaration of Independence (all men are created equal, except that some are slaves to others), that is almost impossible to amend, and that created an institution, the Senate, whose main role is to deprive the majority of the population of power.³⁸ It was in fact largely the constitutional order that paved the way for Trump, Musk, and Project 2025.

Fascism on the march ? That was one of the tricks Kamala Harris saw fit to pull out of her bag during her election campaign to galvanize the troops—not exactly a big success. Even in Europe, this term is generally inappropriate to characterize current right-wing movements, but to apply it to the United States is to blind ourselves completely to the deep, native roots of the Trump phenomenon, as Daniel Bessner clearly demonstrates.³⁹ In fact, everything the current administration is doing has antecedents in the country’s history. Far from being a foreign import, Trumpism represents the intensification of profoundly American tendencies, because Trump and his accomplices are using the normal instruments of the existing political system to dismantle institutions. There is little to be gained from trotting out the word fascism or digging up similarities with Hitler and Mussolini (or even Putin and Orbán) as journalists tend to do.

Since the founding of the American Republic, the presidency has gradually been strengthened at the expense of Congress, which is supposed to represent the will of the people, but has abdicated its responsibilities. For example, Congress alone has the authority to declare war, and has done so eleven times in all, the last of which was in 1942. But the country, Bessner argues, has been in a state of almost permanent war (or rather, in our view, a state of fairly regular intervention abroad) ever since : “Put another way, there has been an ongoing, if usually ignored, constitutional crisis since at least the 1940s.” As for “the theory of the unitary executive,” which grants the president the same authority as the courts to interpret laws relating to the executive branch and which underlies Trump’s actions, not only is it not new, but the right-wing legal scholars who defend it do not refer to fascist or Nazi law ; they base themselves on American jurisprudence. Finally, Elon Musk is far from being the first figure appointed by a president to an influential position without being confirmed by the Senate, since the function of national security advisor (W. Rostow, H. Kissinger, Z. Brzeziński, C. Rice, J. Bolton, etc.) is exempt from that obligation.

Trump certainly appears to be hitting new lows with his brutality toward immigrants and arrests for deportation of foreign students critical of Israeli policies. And yet there were more than 550 immigrants expelled for “radicalism” in 1919-1920 (including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman) ; 500,000 Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who were “repatriated” between 1929 and 1939, at least 60 percent of whom had American citizenship ; 120,000 Japanese-Americans (two-thirds of whom were American citizens) interned in concentration camps during World War II ; the list could go on. In addition, there is the well-known history of wars of repression-extermination of the country’s indigenous population and that of slavery, followed for a long time by a reign of terror against Black people, especially in the South. Another area where America’s famous exceptionalism is glaringly obvious also deserves to be highlighted : anti-worker repression. “Where seven workers were killed in labor disputes in Britain between 1872 and 1914, sixteen were killed in Germany, and thirty-five were killed in France, the same period saw at least 500 to 800 deaths in the United States. Only Czarist Russia had a bloodier record.”⁴⁰ The reform-oriented period running from Roosevelt’s New Deal to the landmark civil rights and social welfare legislation passed under Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, and finally to the Equal Rights Amendment and a variety of environmental protection acts was ultimately to last only about forty years.

So much for the historical trajectory of “actually existing democracy” in America, which many today believe is in danger. And it is in a way, but should we fight to save it ? Revolutionary currents, Marxist, anarchist, or otherwise, have developed various critiques of democracy, whether denouncing it as a fraud as long as the ruling classes and the state retained their power, or objecting that it should give way to direct workers’ democracy, or rejecting its very principle as a mystification that hinders the communist movement. It’s not our intention to revisit those debates, but to point out that democracy as it functions in countries where it has a long history has been experiencing unquestionable degeneration for years and has ceased to enjoy the wholehearted support of the population or the elites. To put it another way, it has ceased to be an issue. Emmanuel Todd rightly insists on literacy as a traditional source of belief in the equality of society’s members, subsequently reinforced by a second educational revolution—the rise of secondary education—which began much earlier in the United States than elsewhere.⁴¹ But then a third revolution got under way : “The development of higher education re-stratifies the population ; it causes the egalitarian ethos that mass literacy had spread to die out, and, beyond that, any feeling of belonging to a community.”⁴² This phenomenon is, of course, observable in all developed countries, but it has taken on an exacerbated form in the United States due to the concomitant rise in inequality, the sharp decline in social protection, and a more marked breakdown in upward mobility than elsewhere.⁴³ Furthermore, American universities are ranked on an extremely hierarchical scale that is reflected in substantially differing tuition fees and career prospects—a situation that appears to be widely accepted by the population as normal or at least inevitable. In any event, it provides additional insight into the cultural and political polarization of recent years, with a sterile opposition between populism and elitism, as well as into the pervasive mood of atomization, emptiness, and “pulverization of identities” described by Todd.

Prospects

This brings us back to Trump, with his excessive repoliticization of everything. He even named himself chairman of the board of trustees at the Kennedy Center, Washington’s leading performing arts venue, presumably in order to purge high culture of woke influence. That purge extends into the school system and especially into universities, which are now required to submit to an improbable list of conditions and ultimatums, or else to forfeit all federal government funding (the standard pretext being the antisemitic climate supposedly holding sway on campuses). Even the dismissals of scientific researchers employed by the federal government reflect this urge to control everything and, of course, to root out disciplines deemed harmful, such as climate research. Ironically, Americans, who are usually so distrustful of central government and so quick to proclaim their attachment to freedom, have just elected someone who is carrying out an unprecedented authoritarian centralization of power. As in 2016, Trump promises to save them, through sheer political will, from globalization, the evils of capitalist market relations, bureaucratic red tape, mass immigration, and feminist and LGBT+ demands. It all sounds a lot like a back-to-the-1950s program ; even McCarthyism has been thrown in for good measure.

And even if this turns out to be completely unworkable, he figures he can always shift the blame or divert attention with military action, spectacular arrests or deportations, etc. After all, his supporters didn’t hold it against him that he failed to deliver on most of what he promised in 2016. On the contrary, some even accepted, at his instigation, to stage an insurrection and continued to back him during his desert crossing. This is clearly a cultural, ideological, and psychological phenomenon that owes little to the kind of rational calculation so fondly cited by economists, who insist on reminding Trump voters that free trade enables them to buy clothes, toys, and DIY tools imported from other countries for next to nothing.⁴⁴

We’ve already discussed the risk of failure facing the Trump administration’s economic agenda, not to mention the mayhem caused by DOGE. We also said at the beginning, half tongue-in-cheek, that the stock market and, ultimately, capital as a whole could show even less pity than protesters toward the government. So just how do things stand today ? In any event, U.S. financial markets were, and still are, overvalued after successive waves of government liquidity injections (following the 2008 crisis, then to deal with the pandemic, and finally as part of Biden’s public spending plans). A correction was therefore in the cards. But the tariffs imposed, and especially their fluctuating, unpredictable nature, will almost certainly hasten that correction and make it that much more anarchic. For example, Texas shale producers, who contributed heavily to Trump’s election campaign, are now complaining bitterly about his policies, which combine a bid to lower the price of crude oil, so as to reduce inflation, with a tariff agenda that will raise the cost of imported steel and aluminum, which they require to operate. But alienating the U.S. energy sector is playing with fire. The same goes for the auto industry. According to a specialist research firm, the sector is expected to turn out 20,000 fewer vehicles per day by mid-April.⁴⁵ It’s hard to imagine that the multiple segments of capital affected by the new trade war will take such mismanagement lying down. It also bears stressing that leading figures in finance—the key symbol just a short time ago of everything that was wrong with “neoliberal” capitalism—and tech—the supreme embodiment of the “oligarchy”⁴⁶ supposedly coming to power with Trump—have spoken out against the current tariff policy.

Trump and the people in his orbit, as we have seen, are only incidentally interested in economic efficiency ; their project is primarily political and ideological, focused on power, domination, national greatness, gaining the upper hand. Perhaps they believe they will always have the option to reverse course in the event of a stock-market crash, a recession, or a series of bankruptcies. But whether they’d actually be capable of doing so is by no means a foregone conclusion. Would they be prepared to give up on high tariffs or the tax cuts promised to the wealthy, which can only be financed by slashing the Medicaid budget on which 75 million people depend, including tens of millions in solidly Republican States ? That would be tantamount to admitting that they had gotten everything wrong from the start. At the time of writing (mid-April 2025), the government was forced to back down by an incipient bond-market rout, without, of course, openly acknowledging as much. The current succession of twists and turns suggests that we are dealing with improvisers who are out of their depth. This highlights, by the way, an intrinsic weakness in any regime with authoritarian tendencies, or at any rate in any regime that shuns the exchange of contradictory views, as in Washington today. Even in the most powerful country in the world, the inability to take criticism can end up having serious consequences.

This brings us back to Congress, which will be key to implementing the essential features of Project 2025. DOGE’s disruptive work will obviously produce only penny-ante savings, and those mediocre outcomes will therefore provide an excuse for going further, i.e., passing laws to dismantle and privatize existing forms of social protection and cut taxes for the wealthy. And that’s where the problem lies. Trump may dream of exercising undivided power, but he simply can’t get by without the legislative branch. Unfortunately, the Republicans have only a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives, which they are very likely to lose in 2026. A recent incident speaks volumes about White House unease on that score. Trump intended to appoint Elise Stefanik, a New York State representative, as ambassador to the U.N., but decided against it on March 27 in order to preserve that majority (for the time being), since it would have required her resignation and the holding of a by-election to fill her seat. Yet Stefanik had beaten her Democratic rival in 2024 by 40 points ! The administration deserves at least some credit for grasping just how unpopular its initial measures are.

For even MAGA voters are increasingly protesting government service shutdowns, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has meanwhile announced a 25-percent reduction in HHS staff—all, of course, in the name of cutting bureaucratic waste.⁴⁷ On-camera deportations of small numbers of illegal immigrants or the elimination of DEI programs are unlikely to offer much consolation to those who believed in campaign promises of immediate inflation reduction and rapid job creation in manufacturing.

Protest actions have thus been developing across the country : often lively, sometimes imaginative, but still relatively limited in scope. At the same time, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are enjoying notable success with a “Fight oligarchy” rally tour. Sanders is formally independent of the Democratic Party, except that he, like the democratic socialist “AOC,” filmmaker Michael Moore, and many others on the left will end up, as always, mobilizing voters to beat the Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections—that is, to elect the Democrats. The result would, at best, be a repeat of the Rainbow Coalition conceived by Jesse Jackson for his 1984 presidential campaign, and likely with much less success, given the country’s political stagnation. Above all, Sanders and AOC’s message revolves essentially around the idea of catching up, in other words, finally bringing U.S. social welfare provision up to the level available in other developed countries. That would certainly be a relief for many people, but it would be a long, long way from a radical transformation of society. And so far, the proposals put forward by others, even if they seek to escape the electoral straitjacket, hardly go beyond the multiculturalist and genderist playbook that has contributed to confining American society to a stereotypical opposition between wokeness and anti-wokeness, between “progressives” and “reactionaries,” which has led to the current impasse.⁴⁸ On the other hand, we can already see a chance for getting out of that impasse when we observe the current downsizing drive, which is being applied on a haphazard, non-discriminatory basis. (Even fervent Trump supporters suddenly find themselves unemployed or without local social services.) A case in point is the government’s plan to cut the budget of the Department of Veteran Affairs, with 83,000 layoffs scheduled. Veterans, who already make up about 30 percent of the country’s federal employees and tend to be conservative (nearly 60 percent voted for Trump), appreciate even less than others being called lazy, cheats, or just mouths to feed.

One last point needs to be addressed. If the Trumpian project does indeed take the path outlined in these pages, who stands to benefit ? It’s hard to say, but if we absolutely had to make a bet, it would be on China. Despite its internal difficulties and its dependence on exports, especially to the United States, the Chinese regime is in the process of working out agreements in the rest of the world, where Xi’s Stalinism may seem preferable to Trump’s hardball tactics. Beijing also has considerable technological, industrial, and financial resources that it will undoubtedly leverage to at least mitigate the impact of Washington’s aggressive policies. More broadly speaking, Trump and his team generally overestimate their ability to cow the entire world into submission, much less reorganize it as the American occupation forces did in Germany and Japan after 1945. It’s enough to consider the negotiations with Putin over Ukraine, which Trump boasted he could wrap up in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, but with nothing to show for his efforts to date. Likewise, occupying the Panama Canal might be an attainable goal. Seizing Greenland, possibly, too. But annexing Canada is another kettle of fish.

Whatever happens, any revolt that simply seeks to restore the conditions, laws, and functioning of pre-Trump American institutions is doomed to failure, especially in the form of returning the Democrats to power. As some participants in recent public events acknowledge, risks will have to be taken, and in a way, the government’s attacks on judges, on law firms that previously dared to stand up to it, and on legality in general leave little choice to those unwilling to bow down. While familiar slogans from the past are currently being rehashed a great deal, it should be borne in mind that it’s not uncommon in history for an unprecedented situation to end up provoking equally unprecedented reactions. Let’s hope that this will soon be the case in the United States.

 

Notes