Why Trump II represents a revolutionary break from the post-1980 era
Future historians might one day judge Donald Trump’s comeback to the White House as a watershed moment of American democracy, and, by default, of western democracy. To many, such a notion might sound preposterous.
Some are equating the 5 November election to those which brought Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to power, in 1979 in the UK and 1980 in the US, respectively. Both led western democracy and capitalism into a new era marked by neoconservative and neoliberal ideologies, with a further opening of the markets, the unrestrained circulation of financial capital and, ultimately, the Cold War victory followed by a unipolar American era and globalisation.
However, where Thatcher and Reagan supervised a political shift that developed within well-known political, economic and cultural boundaries, Trump’s victory could be something quite different - a metamorphosis, which, according to the late German sociologist Ulrich Beck, is a far more radical transformation, where all the old certainties of modern society collapse to give birth to something radically new.
The American geopolitical scholar, George Friedman, has divided his country’s history into three 80-year institutional cycles: from its birth in 1787 to the end of its civil war in 1865; from the latter until the end of the Second World War in 1945; and from there to 2025, when Trump will be sworn in for the second time.
Friedman also identifies 50-year socioeconomic cycles. From our viewpoint, the relevant ones are the last two: the so-called Roosevelt cycle from 1932 to 1980, marked by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal - which overlapped US economic thinking with John Maynard Keynes’ theories - until the end of the 1970s; and the Reagan cycle, which was intellectually monopolised by Milton Friedman’s monetarism.
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According to George Friedman, we are still in the Reagan socioeconomic cycle, which is projected to end in 2030.
A true metamorphosis?
Of course, these cycles do not end abruptly; they slowly wind down, with elements of the old order coexisting with those of the new one. This coexistence causes tension, uncertainty, and disorientation, both among increasingly fragile leaders who appear less and less up to managing emerging challenges and among the growing confusion, polarity, and easily manipulated opinions of the public.
This coming decade, according to Friedman, will be the first time in American history that the end of an institutional and socioeconomic cycle will coincide.
My personal feeling is that the second Trump administration might be for America what the Bolshevik revolution was for Russia in the second decade of the 20th century, or what the Islamic revolution was for Iran in 1979.
Will Trump usher the US into a true metamorphosis? Difficult to say. As Friedman emphasises, US presidencies are not reliable benchmarks with which to detect and foresee true change.
“Presidents are elected by aligning with the pressures that already existed, and they govern in response to these pressures,” he wrote.
Will this change with Trump? While he might not be the agent of change many expected, there is no doubt that he is determined to bring political, economic and social upheaval to the US unprecedented for at least half a century.
He is cultivating his declared intention to bring down the US political establishment - widely known among his supporters as the "deep state" - in its wider configuration.
From removing “rogue bureaucrats”, to cleaning out all the corrupt actors in the US national security and intelligence apparatus; from making “every inspector general's office independent and physically separated from the departments they oversee so they do not become the protectors of the deep state”, to asking “Congress to establish an independent auditing system to continually monitor…intelligence agencies to ensure they are not spying on [US] citizens or running disinformation campaigns against the American people, or that they are not spying on someone's campaign”.
He says he will ban federal bureaucrats from "taking jobs at the companies they deal with and that they regulate”, and “push a constitutional amendment to oppose term limits on members of Congress”.
And there is much more also for "Big Pharma" and the military-industrial complex, and for the "forever war" lobby concealed in the “deep state”, which easily harnesses Russophobia, Islamophobia and Sinophobia as useful tools. (The new and more comprehensive acronym is Micimatt complex - military-industrial-
Trump seems committed to such an accomplishment, assisted by a heterogeneous group of people among die-hard supporters and former enemies, where the richest man on earth, Elon Musk, in a quite unprecedented move, has assumed a role as primus inter pares.
In the past, billionaires have always been well concealed behind US presidents to promote their core interests and wider agendas. With Musk and others, they have come forward in full daylight.
Trump’s re-election, then, is the apparent culmination of a social, economic, cultural and identitarian unease which began to take shape during the two Obama presidencies and after two shocking events - 11 September 2001 and the 2008 financial crisis - but whose deeper roots go back to the inequalities unleashed by the Reagan cycle.
Trump's election in 2016 might have been an unexpected, unforeseen and tormented general rehearsal, but the election that really counts is this one - curiously, not won by Trump, but lost by his Democratic opponents.
Big gamble
A comprehensive analysis of the 5 November vote will take time.
However, some preliminary conclusions might be drawn by assessing the slight differences in voting patterns (just a few hundreds of thousands of votes) in the three swing states that gave Trump his victory: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
One conclusion is that the Democratic powerbrokers, who picked (and controlled) Kamala Harris as candidate, preferred to lose the election instead of hindering, as they could have done, the ongoing carnage that Israel was - and still is - carrying out in Gaza and Lebanon.
Now they are shocked and melting down, as are their Republican partners in this criminal endeavour, by the fact that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has validated the arrest warrants against Israel's current prime minister and former defence minister.
All this is further proof of how much the US political establishment is anthropologically and morally different from the rest of the world, and how detached it is from reality.
To put all that in an easy slogan: Israel Firsters prevailed over America Firsters, and this is true for both Republicans and Democrats.
Of course, the "deep state" is preparing its counterinsurgency against Trump and laying minefields that the incoming president will have to deal with after his inauguration on 20 January 2025.
The Biden administration’s decision to authorise the use of ATACMS missiles by Ukraine against Russian territory is part of this attempt. The impression is that Trump’s claimed intention to end the war in Europe without delay must be prevented at any cost, including the risk of a Third World War.
However, it also looks like a deliberate, desperate and reckless attempt by the Biden administration to prevent the upheaval that Trump is determined to bring to America by setting ablaze further the rest of the world in its last two months in power.
It is a big gamble. It is starting with Ukraine, but the Middle East could follow. Benjamin Netanyahu, after all, is desperate for a conflict with Iran, which could delay his own appointments with justice, this time with the Israeli legal system and not the ICC.
This is not to mention China, following the unequivocal “ultimatum” that President Xi Jinping presented to Joe Biden during their last meeting on the sidelines of the recent Apec meeting in Peru.
A brilliant analyst, Alastair Crooke, has summarised this escalating foreign strategy from the outgoing Biden administration as a “loaded weapon locked onto America’s domestic war” aimed to “hog-tie [Trump], and divert his attention to war that he does not want”.
Trump will need to play his cards carefully.
So far, he seems to be gathering a group of people committed to fighting his two main domestic wars: the dismantling of the "deep state" and the ending of out-of-control government expenditure and its $35tn debt, which is exposing the entire global economy to an existential threat.
Conversely, he has picked up a bunch of die-hard forever warriors in the foreign policy and security ranks, who apparently share the aim of setting ablaze the planet, especially in the Middle East and in east Asia.
Will Trump be able to juggle such gigantic contradictions?
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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