Trump 2.0 is reviving America’s worst traditions. How far can it go?
US President Donald Trump’s first reign ended in flailing catastrophe. He was like a bad comic being booed off the stage. He was beaten fair and square by a demented, basement-dwelling Biden. His attempted self-coup was a discrediting farce: he was supported by no army divisions, but only the QAnon shaman. His cultural legacy was enormous yet seemed to leave little structural trace.
He is back now, and different. He has already created a climate of fear. Political opponents have been disappeared off the streets, and he has hundreds of victims in a Salvadoran gulag. Universities have rolled over. Big law firms have pledged to give pro bono advice to help him repress the enemy within. His sadistic cuts to state programs aim to call into question the legitimacy of any regulation, any redistribution or any orderly administration of a big bourgeois state. How far can it go? Where can it end? What limits exist to this process?
In some ways, Trump’s first term concealed his true nature. The radical demagogue, who inspired the world’s fascists, was almost immediately bound by circumstance. When he came to power, his own party tried to constrain and control him. Throughout his first months in office, appointees rebelled, or he fired them. Scaramucci, Spicer, Flynn, Bolton—the whole gamut from ultra-Trump spivs to neocon fossils—came and went in a laughable whirlwind. The Democrats took back the Congress. Black Lives Matter was simply too big to repress; it meant that Trump’s first term was defined by a progressive movement of astonishing breadth and persistence, with enormous immediate cultural impact.
“Trump’s famously sharp instincts, the ones that won him the presidency, have been subverted at every level”, Tucker Carlson complained when Black Lives Matter left Trump and the Republicans passive and irrelevant. COVID exposed Trump’s sheer personal stupidity. He was publicly mocked and deflated by his own scientists. The need for state intervention into the economy was made screechingly obvious. Trumpism appeared to have been refuted by reality.
Yet all this concealed an inner development. On another level, Trump was gaining in power—and radicalising.
Trump didn’t win in 2016 by accident. He had proved himself a campaigner of some genius. He could take power and give it to allies. Over time, more and more ambitious politicians came over to his faction. In 2016, he had few reliable, sophisticated allies; now, he controls the entire Republican Party at every level. In Project 2025, top policy minds provided a program and tactical outline for a radicalised reactionary presidency. Trump showed how a president could win while breaking the rules and defying the norms; for right-wingers, that opened up new and exciting possibilities.
Black Lives Matter made Trump seem weak while the protests were at their peak. But they also inspired a deep, violent racist reaction. In the same screed in which he bemoaned the failure of Trump’s instincts, Carlson explained to his audience of millions: “Our leaders are weak. Predators know it. That’s why this is happening”. What was needed? “American citizens are forced to defend themselves. They have no choice. No-one else is going to defend them.”
At the time, Trump was asking Defense Secretary Mark Esper if the army could be ordered to fire into the crowds. The answer was no. But the idea was there. Soon, the killer Kyle Rittenhouse would become a Republican hero, to be joined by Daniel Penny and even Derek Chauvin, the man who choked George Floyd, and for whom Elon Musk now wants a pardon. The protests at elite universities in solidarity with Palestine gave further drive to this current: use terror to crush anti-racist ideology, or future State Departmentemployees will sympathise with the enemy. Internal repression and imperial violence could come together—just like at the peak of the Cold War.
The pandemic had made Trump seem weak, but that radicalised his movement as well. Huge swathes of capitalists—not just Americans, but throughout the world—lived their worst nightmare: their system was paused to save people’s lives. For many, not least Elon Musk, the lesson was clear. Whatever it took—whatever mad ideas, whatever political alliances, whatever cost in human lives—regulation in general, and disease control in particular, had to be crushed.
The way that COVID radicalised capitalists has been too little discussed. Centre-left parties are embarrassed to mention it, and right-wing ones have largely embraced the insanity. When Trump ran for re-election, he had the support of a business community that had consciously decided to embrace far-right conspiracies and kill by disease if it meant they could wind back regulations and reduce taxes.
Here is the domestic program of Trump 2.0: repress dissent, merge state violence with mob rule and shift the class struggle in favour of the bosses. These factors coalesce against a Democratic Party with little to offer. Trump is not coasting; he is not just kicking the can down the road for another few years. He wants to change the world.
And he has what he needs to do it. He represents a section of the capitalist class that is willing to fight. He has thousands of trained, confident and energetic activists, inspired by a worldview and a vision of the future. He has a political party—though a strange one, in the American model—through which he can coordinate and implement his program. What, then, can stop it?
Don’t look to America’s great traditions. Trump is a radical, but he is also a traditionalist. His terroristic internal program, and the forces that drive it, have deep roots in US political structures—deeper, in many ways, than Biden’s bumbling liberalism. The history of the USA is, in large part, a history of violent state terror meted out at Blacks, immigrants, leftists and the poor. Some of the methods were direct state power: executions, deportations and mass imprisonment.
The first Red Scare deported hundreds of radical “aliens” from the country in the years following World War One. The Smith Act of 1940 made radical politics a crime, and socialists were jailed under it. A follow-up, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, allowed radicals to be deprived of their residency rights and deported—just as Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are doing now.
Showpiece executions—like that of the Rosenbergs in 1953—created an aura of dread that could pervade society. In the early Cold War, “loyalty boards” investigated, disciplined and blacklisted employees suspected of radical ideas or simply of supporting the free speech and civil rights of radicals.
However, repression in the USA is traditionally decentralised. Employers and intellectuals can see which way the wind is blowing and play along. Joseph McCarthy’s public hearings could imprison victims if they didn’t provide testimony. But they also gave a signal to private employers about who they should blacklist, and how they should terrorise their own workers. The state “loyalty boards” gave legitimacy to bosses purging “disloyal” or rebellious employees. Anyone who caused trouble—organising a union, denouncing McCarthy or opposing racism—could be denounced for their radicalism and sacked.
It was a very effective way to crush the trade unions and enforce the bosses’ domination over the working class. In shipyards, dock workers were purged and blacklisted for failing to give correct answers to questions like, “What do you think of the Italian situation?” or “Does your wife go to church regularly?” The purge of the ports was particularly intense: any active trade union militant was a suspect. In another pernicious US tradition, anti-communist union bureaucrats enthusiastically helped management drive out unruly workers, collaborating in investigations and helping to pick targets.
Binding the public and private repression is the US tradition of the private death squad. The roots go deep, at least back to the Klan in the period after the Civil War. It’s familiar to most from the civil rights struggle: the lynchings, the church bombings, the kidnap and torture of Freedom Riders. Racism almost always helped justify the murders, beatings and bombings, even when the victims were white—because white subversives were disloyal to the race. Private killers often knew the state would turn a blind eye. These private killers overlapped with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which for decades was run as an internal political police—blackmailing, brutalising and in some cases probably assassinating subversives beyond any regular legal framework.
For much of the twentieth century, the US was a deeply authoritarian society. In parts of the country, it was a one-party state. Many of its policies were inspirational to European fascist regimes. Yet it was all established and maintained without any open coup, any apparent “revolution”, or any Nazi-style party in uniforms: it always called itself democracy, not totalitarianism. The American authoritarian tradition, on which Trump draws, operated through a patchwork collaboration of state institutions, bosses, right-wing union officials and private thugs.
Trump draws on that tradition, but it’s unclear if he can completely re-establish it. It’s one thing to maintain a violent and authoritarian society that has existed for decades; it’s another to recreate and reimpose it once it has been largely vanquished. Resistance is likely, and Trump’s institutional capacity to hold the line is unknown.
But the authoritarian history of the US shows that faith in the “democratic resilience” of the US or its liberal institutions is misguided. For most of its history, the country has been nominally democratic but substantially authoritarian. In times of repression, liberal institutions caved, or joined in, seeking their own advantage. Trump’s project is serious. He has a vision, he has activists, he has organisation and he has the backing of an aggressive class that wants to fight. To resist his attacks, our side needs the same.
