By Paul Sutton

In February, the veteran political journalist and BBC correspondent, James Naughtie, spoke to an Edinburgh audience about his many years of living in and reporting from the United States and commented on what Donald Trump was now doing as President the second time around. This time, Naughtie thought, Trump was initiating change that would be as momentous as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the attacks on the US of 11^th September 2001. No one, anywhere, would remain unaffected and as change gathered pace the future under Trump would be a ‘roller coaster’ of spiraling global instability as well as a decisive departure from the patterns of US engagement at home and abroad since the end of the Second World War.

TRUMP’S BLITZ

The evidence of Trump in action from the moment he took office this time would certainly appear to confirm such an understanding. The blitz of executive orders, issued by him from Day One covered everything from the vindictively trivial to the profoundly important. Among them were the imposition of trade sanctions on US imports, sealing of US borders and withdrawal from international agreements and international agencies, promotion of US territorial imperialism through ownership of Gaza and Greenland and control of Canada and Panama. Sections of the federal US government were closed such as the US Agency for International Development and the close monitoring and oversight of others was introduced through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. There was the end of federal programmes promoting equality, diversity and inclusion and the Green New Deal as well as getting rid of the automatic right of citizenship to those born in the US. Around 1600 of those convicted of abetting and storming the US Capitol in January 2021, were pardoned and released from prison. The Gulf of Mexico was renamed the Gulf of America and much, much more.

In themselves many of these were idiosyncratic, disconnected, and contradictory actions with no coherent overall discernible pattern to them other than they could be done and were being done to undo much of what had been done before. They were demonstrations of Trump the iconoclast.

SUPPORT FOR TRUMP

But what was to follow? No one seemed to know and perhaps Trump himself did not know. Perhaps he was caught in a blizzard of his own construction. He was undoubtedly behaving differently from his first presidency which had been slow to start and inconclusive in delivering change. This time around he was seeking to avoid this by priming his administration from the beginning with hand-picked officials who would do his bidding without question. They included those with experience of running corporations as well as those without, including in his cabinet no less than four US$ billionaires as well as the world’s richest man Elon Musk as a close advisor.

What these had in common, other than personal loyalty to Trump and/or a commitment to a more self-serving capitalism, is difficult to detect. But it is perhaps the beginning of an examination as to what he can be expected to do, at least initially.

At the end of his first administration Trump was criticised and condemned by many of those who had served under him but also praised and supported by others who remained committed to his programmes even though they faced terms of imprisonment, such as Steve Bannon. He and others turned to the internet and the airwaves, drumming up support for Trump in social media, podcasts, interviews and sponsorship by right-wing broadcasting organisations. Others, with a more militant outlook and easy access to weapons such as the Proud Boys formed more defiant and belligerent groups, attacking those opposed to Trump.

Trump also retained the support of wide swathes of the US public including sections of the white working class, religious evangelicals of various persuasions, anti-elitist populists, and staunch conservatives and free marketers who traditionally supported the Republican Party. His capture of that party in his first administration and then the four years prior to the 2024 US election was complete. By the end of his first administration 47% of Republicans elected to office in Congress at the beginning had gone for various reasons, the highest rate of attrition in any administration back to the early 1960s. (1) They were replaced mostly by those more conservative in outlook and action, while others, such as the current Vice President JD Vance, changed their minds from opposition to Trump to largely uncritical support. The number of elected Republicans in Congress now willing to oppose him is a tiny minority.

THINK TANKS 

Outside of Congress numerous think tanks have either been formed or become committed to a more right-wing agenda to propose policy. Among them two in particular stand out in their promotion of Trump: The Heritage Foundation and the America First Policy Institute.

The former rose to prominence during the Reagan administration where in his own words it was a “vital force”. Many of its domestic and foreign policy proposals were implemented and it remained important throughout the successor George H W Bush administration and then that of his son, George W Bush. It supported Trump during his first administration, recommending and placing senior staff and by January 2018 claimed that Trump had embraced 64% of the 334 policies it had initially projected for him (2). It has again sought to directly influence policy in his second through staffing and most importantly through the promotion of Project 2025.

This was a political initiative launched in 2023 to ensure Trump was fully engaged in right-wing policy actions from his first day in office. At its core is a 900 plus page agenda with, “four main policy aims: restore the family as the centrepiece of American life; dismantle the administrative state; defend the nation’s sovereignty and borders; and secure God-given individual rights to live freely”. (3) Once again it has sought and placed advisors in key government positions and once again a claim has been made of its key importance: “Four days into Trump’s second term, analysis conducted by Time found that nearly two-thirds of his executive actions ‘mirror or partially mirror’ proposals from Project 25”. (4) Project 25 is too long to list all the possible areas of activity but its principal concerns are the economy, education and research, environment and climate, expansion of presidential powers, federal staffing, foreign affairs, healthcare and public health, immigration reforms, gender identity, journalism, law enforcement, national security, pornography, transportation infrastructure, and women’s reproductive health, including abortion. The plan has been seen by many as the precursor to authoritarianism in the US and so vigorously opposed, but there is no escape from its centrality to Trump’s policies even if he does claim not to be implementing it.

The other think tank, the America First Policy Institute was founded in 2021 to actively promote Trump’s policies. Its website states its mission as to advance policies, “that put the American people first. Our guiding principles are liberty, free enterprise, national greatness, American military superiority, foreign-policy engagement in the American interest, and the primacy of American workers, families and communities in all we do”. These concerns match Trump’s political rhetoric, especially ‘Make America Great Again’, and its proposals echo those of the Heritage Foundation, with an even greater political assertiveness. The New York Times claims it will be more influential than Project 2025 and its leading personnel are close to Trump and include its billionaire Chair, Linda McMahon, proposed as the new cabinet Education Secretary.

OPPOSITION

It is clear that Trump is better prepared now than he was in 2017 and will face far fewer restraints in government than he did in his first administration. That does not mean he will not face limitations on his power, whether those are imposed by Congress which now supports him but may not do so after the mid-term elections in November 2026 if the usual pattern is followed and the House of Representatives is won by the political party opposing the president’s party. Similarly, while the Supreme Court is now stacked in his favour it may declare some of his policies unconstitutional. Some of his recent executive decisions are already facing court action.

It is also the case that the US remains politically divided. While Trump won the popular vote with 49.9% compared to 48.3% for the Democrats, the winning margin in many of the constituencies was small. It is a mandate to govern but for many it is not the mandate for sweeping change that Trump says he is set upon. At the moment the Democratic Party is divided among itself and following its defeat it needs to rethink its electoral base and its policies. When it reforms and re-engages it will mount a significant challenge as it has the networks, resources and people to do so. They, plus the Democrats in Congress and the many think tanks and media channels sympathetic to the Democrats, can match and beat him.

Trump will also face opposition abroad. He has already set his administration against China and Cuba but as his actions in meeting Kim Jong Un in North Korea in 2019 and his direct engagement with Vladimir Putin to restore relations and dialogue, including ending the conflict in Ukraine show, he remains flexible and not wedded to concepts such as an alleged ‘axis of evil’ against the US. That said, his publicly uncritical support for Israel has a long pedigree and his recent proposal to expel the Palestinians from Gaza and turn it into prime American ‘real estate’ have been widely condemned, not least by generally supportive Arab states. He cannot take support or approval for his foreign policy for granted, except from the UK which remains committed to the ‘special relationship’ and which all Labour governments, including the present one, have never questioned.

WHAT DOES TRUMP REPRESENT?

In conclusion, whither Trump? Is he a re-invented Hitler and Mussolini dedicated to fascism, a renewed Ronald Reagan or just something new and dangerously unpredictable as Naughtie suggested? There is evidence to support these views but it is better to take a long one and to put Trump into context. To do so is to turn to Marx and his celebrated The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (6) which discusses the relationship of politics to personality and opportunity, among much else.

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was the nephew of Napoleon. He was elected president of France in 1848, staged a coup in 1851 to stay in power, ruling as emperor from 1852 until deposed in 1870. Marx wrote his ‘little book’ in 1851/52. It contains several much-quoted passages one of which has direct bearing on Trump: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” This reminds us that Trump comes to power with considerable baggage which he must accommodate in some way.

On the other hand, the ‘Bonapartist state’ that Marx was analysing came to power, he argues, in “exceptional circumstances” in which all classes were temporarily rendered powerless allowing the state a relative freedom of action to impose conditions, in this case in favour of Louis Napoleon. It is difficult to conclude that classes were rendered powerless in the US in 2024, but such a situation has been used in the past to explain the circumstances in which Hitler and Mussolini came to power and in which the ruling class pays a “political price” for remaining on top by “submitting to a dictatorship over which they had no genuine control”, especially over foreign policy. (7) Ralph Miliband continues: “This is not a situation in which an economically and socially dominant class, however secure it feels about the ultimate intentions of its rulers, can contemplate without grave qualms, since it introduces into the process of decision-making, to which its members have been used to making a major contribution, an extremely high level of unpredictably”.

This is where we are with Trump today - but it is not where we may be next year and beyond. Marx noted that “state power is not suspended in mid-air” and that ultimately Bonaparte’s mission was to “safeguard ‘bourgeois order’”. (8) The political ‘roller coaster’ Naughtie anticipates will come to a stop but contrary to his expectations nothing much, and nothing of economic and social substance, will have been changed by Trump’s turbulent politics in the US, leaving progressives and the working class still with everything to do.

 

(1) The GOP is Trumps’s party now, ABC News, February 10, 2025, website

(2) The Heritage Foundation, Wikipedia website

(3) Project 2025: The right-wing wish list for Trump’s second term, BBC News US and Canada, February 12, 2025, website

(4) Project 2025, Wikipedia website

(5) Mission, AFPI Institute, website

(6) In Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, Selected Works (Lawrence and Wishart: London 1968)

(7) Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Societies, (Quartet Books: London, 1973), p.85.

(8) Karl Marx, The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon

 

President Trump signing executive orders. Photo by The White House

Trump has designs on the Panama Canal. Photo by Information of New Orleans