The probable course of history under Trump's second term is becoming clear, and it could easily turn out to be the most significant turning point in our history since the time of Franklin Roosevelt. The media remains largely focused upon Trump's personality, the moral deficiencies of some of his appointees, and the failure of his supporters to understand what is good for them to understand what is going on. Trump is truly a revolutionary figure in US politics. No one from outside the political class has ever had comparable impact, and his rise, as I have said many times, reflects the collapse of the relationship between our political elite and much of the American people. Yet he is only part of the story, because he leads a coalition with at least two other critical elements. Most important of all, that coalition now knows exactly what it wants to do and has identified and recruited the personnel that will do it.
The most important element of Trump's coalition is itself a coalition: the various Republican pressure groups and think tanks that have dreamed for decades of undoing the work of the Progressive Era and the New Deal and creating a free-market utopia with no obstacles to the growth of capital. These include the American Enterprise Institute (which produced Project 2025), the Heritage Foundation, the Koch network, several other foundations such as the Bradley and Scaife foundations, the Federalist Society which has effectively taken over our judiciary, Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, and a good many more. Many of these groups had their doubts about Trump in 2015-16 but they all appear to be full-blown supporters now. They will staff the upper levels of the federal government and try to prune the lower levels drastically.
The other new element in his coalition, however, may turn out to be the most significant: the small cadre of tech billionaires who have climbed on the bandwagon, led by Elon Musk and including Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel. While the Silent and Boom generations developed the Republican pressure groups listed above in reaction to the New Deal liberalism of their parents, these Gen Xers have never known effective government management of the economy and apparently see no need for it at all. They also include leading players in cryptocurrency. They believe that technology--and in particular AI--can and should disrupt and remake all our major institutions, including education, health care, and finance, and they dispose of vast resources of their own. While I have been writing this post, Musk has used X, which he owns, to force Republicans in Congress to abandon a spending deal that would have kept the government open. He can never be president himself, having been born a South African, but he seems determined to eclipse Henry Kissinger as our most politically powerful foreign-born political figure. Liberals are now eagerly awaiting a falling out between Musk and Trump, but I am not at all convinced that that will happen. Trump has evidently fallen for Musk, who is relatively young, vigorous, innovative, and as rich as Trump has always dreamt of being, but never actually came close to. Trump clearly has less energy than he used to have at 78, and Musk seems to be moving into an unprecedented role as prime minister to Trump's chief of state, with broad effective power to reshape the federal government.
I see some possibility that Trump might surprise us on the foreign front. I watched his entire press conference the other day. His affect is very different from what it was four or eight years ago, even when the words are the same. He is a bit quieter and more relaxed, or perhaps, just worn out. Meanwhile, he gives the strong impression that he wants to win a Nobel Peace Prize. Stopping the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East seems much more important to him than heaping fire and brimstone on foreign enemies. This could change, and he is certainly leaving the door open to military action against Iran together with Israel as well, but I think it bears watching.
The domestic changes Trump plans seem most unlikely to help anyone but billionaires, particularly the young ones from the world of Silicon Valley. Yet his appeal will remain, I think, for one simple reason that hearkens back to a brilliant line from the Showtime series Homeland. Late in its run, as I recall it, Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) was talking to President Elizabeth Keane, whose character was evidently designed on the assumption that Hillary Clinton would be president in 2017. After surviving an assassination attempt carried out by rogue intelligence agents, Keane has locked up more than 200 intelligence operatives, including Berenson. Now, having released them, she expresses surprise that the move seems to have been popular. "It showed balls," Berenson replies. "They like a president with balls."
I have said many times that Trump has triumphed in two elections out of three because he understood how disaffected tens of millions of Americans were from our political establishment, which the Democrats could not face. He shared their contempt for the old order. In addition, he has shown again and again that he will not allow anything to get in the way of changing it. This is not unprecedented, and the fury and frustration that it has provoked among Trump's opponents isn't either. Southerners and some northern Democrats during the Civil War and Republicans in the 1930s felt exactly the same way about Lincoln and FDR as Democrats feel about Trump today, but those presidents had coalitions of their own that enabled them to transform the country. I think that he will too.
Lifelong Democrats like myself now face a great challenge: to accept a very uncomfortable reality. Most of them share a sense of their own righteousness and a feeling that somehow their side must prevail because it is right. That is why the mainstream media write endlessly about how Trump's policies will not help his supporters, or how he will not be able to get along with Musk or other leading figures in his administration. To anyone who dislikes posts like this one, let me simply say once again that I am simply trying to record what is happening, and that I am sure that some day, long after we are all gone, things will go in a different direction again.
1 comment:
Well, you're leaving a lot out of that, and it has the effect of distorting the reality you're trying to portray. If I didn't know anything else about Trump and his presidencies and just read your post, I would come away thinking that Trump was just *some guy*. But he's not. He's a very specific guy, and he's the worst possible kind of guy to put in charge of your country.
He's a man who hates. He's a man who loves getting revenge. He's a man who really wants to fire off nukes. He's a man who wants to act on his racist ideas. He's a man who admires Hitler.
I'm probably leaving out some juicy ones. That's the problem with Trump. You can't fully describe him without inadvertently leaving out some of the juicy stuff.
And let's not forget, what he and his adviser Bannon really want is to destroy society so they can build what they want in its place.
I'm neither optimistic nor pessimistic about the ability of Trump to have his agenda carried out without being stopped by those people of the USA who still have the energy and moxie to do so. But I believe the very worst about Trump's intentions. "Trump might surprise us"? Come on.
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The other thing is, when listing elements of Trump's coalition, you didn't mention the Christian right, which is a large part of it and has some huge ambitions for transforming the country, none of which are going to be any fun.
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