Trumpism: A Morbid Symptom of Declining Empire

by Socialist Horizon · January 23, 2025

The second Trump administration exposes the deepening crisis of US imperialism and deterioration of its preeminence within the global capitalist system. While still the dominant global economic and military power, the US is seeing fracture and decline in the “world order” that it has constructed and maintained through bipartisan commitment and execution since the end of World War II. It is facing counter-hegemonic challenges by Russia and its emergent allies in Central Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as by political division and political fragmentation among its allies in Europe and Asia; by Chinese economic influence across Asia and Africa and its subsequent burgeoning military buildup; and from Iran and its aligned forces across the Middle East.

Recently, the BRICS alliance, a bloc of nations consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates (with Turkey, Azerbaijan and Malaysia recently applying to become members and several other countries also indicating their interest in joining), has continued to lay the groundwork for establishing and strengthening economic and political relations that can bypass or counter US and Western European-dominated global financial and political institutions. As the pro-US imperialist think-tank Council on Foreign Relations laments in a recent report, an expanded BRICS bloc represents “a shift away from the Western-centric system of world order.” For his part, Trump has declared economic war on the BRICS Alliance, threatening a 100 percent tariff on BRICS nations “if they try to undermine the U.S. dollar.” In other words, if they develop any economic initiatives or countermeasures that work against or around established nodes of US preeminence in the global system.

System Failure

While the US economy is booming for Wall Street bankers, tech firms, oil and gas corporations, war industries, and other types of shadowy, unregulated, and predatory investor instruments—much of the real and productive economy is flailing, and most of the US population experiencing economic stagnation, decline, or merely surviving in precarity.

The Republican ascendancy pushed forward by Trumpism does not represent a hard right shift in the politics of the working class. Rather, it is indicative of a heightening social polarization and tension in US society between a more emboldened and empowered capitalist class—supported by reactionary elements of the middle-class—and most working-class people who are losing ground rapidly.

The far-right surge is also the result of the failure and decline of Democratic Party liberalism. The Democratic Party’s promotion of Kamala “the Cop” Harris and the promotion of a patently rightwing party platform (including more aggressive pursual of war, genocide, and anti-immigrant repression) was part of an effort to stake out a more “responsible,” pro-imperialist position, to vie for more backing from within the ruling class and billionaire donors to edge out Trump. Despite their massive fundraising effort and a desperate effort to surge right to pander to the capitalist class, Trumpism won the day.

In fact, the Democratic Party exhausted its own vision for propping up US imperial and capitalist interests: executing a relentless genocide in Palestine, funding and escalating the war against Russia in Ukraine, engineering and broadening the cold war with China, and scaling up state repression of migrants and refugees. Furthermore, Democratic Party policies of bailouts, subsidies, and cheap credit to prop up ailing industries and hand over huge amounts of cash to the biggest sectors of capital, helped massively advance the new “oligarchy” that Biden half-heartedly denounced while exiting the presidential office. The massive handouts and giveaways to bankers and capitalist speculators also played a significant role in driving up inflation, which has been devastating for the working-class majority, and exacerbating inequality to unprecedented levels.

The Democratic “Left” of Bernie Sanders and the “The Squad”, which wielded significant influence in the period of transition from Trump’s first presidency to that of Biden, shifted significantly to the right, abandoned any criticism, and gave an unqualified defense of Biden and Harris. They became Biden’s most stalwart defenders during the Party’s effort to push him out of the re-election campaign and then tried to prop up Harris as the great “progressive” hope during her short-lived and categorically rightwing presidential bid.

The once standard-bearer of “Democratic Socialism”, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, even went into attack mode against Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Amid Harris’s flagging campaign, Ocasio-Cortez tried to use here “progressive” credentials to provide left cover for Harris’s unapologetically pro-war and pro-genocide presidential campaign. The Democrats’ slide to the right enabled Trump to dictate the terms of the election, and the “left” that developed around Sanders and the Squad within the party, has become dormant or obsolete.

For these reasons, Harris and the Democrats’ campaigns to continue managing the empire crashed. They offered nothing to the working class except more war and pain, and millions of people who voted for Democrats in 2020, opted to withhold their votes this time around. Since Trump and the right’s victory, and immediate unleashing of repressive attacks against all sections of the working class, none of the Democrats—from Kamala to AOC—have taken a stand against the reactionary measures, or are leading any type of public opposition.

In this election cycle much more of the capitalist ruling class, led by tech and sectors of finance capital, have aligned with Trump’s aggressive gambit to use political, economic, and military force to weaken allies and adversaries and re-impose US primacy and imperialist exceptionalism. When Trump announced in his inauguration speech that he will “end America’s decline,” what he means is that the US state must now wage a multi-front war of position against capitalist and imperialist allies and rivals alike. Furthermore, Trump is quickly scaling up a war on the US working class, weaponizing and mobilizing racism, sexism, and queerphobia as methods of authoritarian class rule whose goal is to divide, weaken, repress, and control the working class to enable greater exploitation—and thus increase capital accumulation and extract more profit for himself and his class.

Make American Capitalism and Empire Dominant Again

The Trump phenomenon reveals a raw, unfiltered, and unapologetic capitalist class consciousness; and a ruthless and reactionary type of class warfare waged by the US ruling class when threatened or challenged. It is the most extreme form of homegrown self-interested greed, the deployment of white nationalist victimhood, Christian nationalist identity, and an aristocratic sense of self-entitlement. It is also a rage-faced incredulity that “America” is losing its imperial hegemony, and a visceral hatred, fear, and authoritarian repressive impulses against the poor and the working class, rebellious and resistant communities of color, refugees and migrants, queer people, Muslims, Arabs, socialists, communists, antifascists, feminists, and other dissident groups.

The US ruling class has shifted substantial support behind Trumpism to preserve and re-assert their way of life, and in trajectory towards reestablishing US imperial primacy amid a shifting international landscape. The ghastly assortment of rightwing billionaires that now staff Trump 2.0’s cabinet and backrooms has a combined net worth of over $450 billion dollars.

To reverse the “declinism” from the new rightwing capitalist class’s point of view, Trumpism 2.0 needs to forcefully expand neoliberal de-structuring of the US economy. This includes potentially cutting social programs such as Medicare, Social Security, and remaining welfare provisions to restore even more wealth to the rich. They also want to suppress wages, to make larger the captive and repressed segments of the workforce, to continue to degrade unionization, and to tame other forms of resistance to increase the rate of labor exploitation. This is the basis for implementing the wish list for rightwing capitalists known as “Project 2025.”

The heights of absurdity of this new class order have been exposed with the richest person in the world, far-right Seig Heiling Elon Musk, playing king-maker and chief funder for Trump’s campaign and getting rewarded with the his own neoliberal plaything with the creation of the “Department of Government Efficiency” to slash federal social spending.

This can also explain why Trumpism is also marshalling, platforming, and emboldening far right and fascist groups to exert power in the streets, inside police departments, in branches of the military, ICE and the Border Patrol, and into direct governance. Increased class war requires greater state-repressive capacity, more policing and violence, expanding carceral and detention capacities, surveillance, and punitive and restrictive laws. This process has already been in motion since Biden and the Democrats increased and expanded federal funding for policing by $35 billion dollars, putting 100,000 more police on the streets, funding the development of “Cop Cities” across the nation, and restoring and increasing funding for the police after the urban rebellions of the George Floyd uprising subsided.

Biden and the Democrats also turned hard right on immigration enforcement, keeping and expanding much of the anti-immigrant policy framework of Trump’s first administration, and re-positioning the party as the most committed to deporting migrants and closing the border during the 2024 election year. Trump’s return to power has been enabled in large part by capitalizing on the failure of Biden and the Democrats to fulfill their 2020 campaign pledge to create a legalization and place a moratorium on deportation. Even after Trump's victory, the Democrats have shown that they are now willing accomplices in his war on migrants and refugees, with 46 House Democrats and 12 Senate Democrats backing a Republican bill to expedite and expand deportation that will be the first law signed by Trump in his second term.

Trump has also mobilized, activated, and incorporated the Christian nationalist, far right, and fascist movements into open alliance, reflected in how the ideological struggle to restore the dominance of US capitalist and imperialism necessitates a multi-front “culture war” inside the statehouses (especially to continue the outlaw of abortion), the military, and education institutions.

Internationally, Trumpism is shedding any pretense at isolationism. Trump’s “America First” policy is about re-asserting US imperial preeminence, but in new ways. Trump is already moving to open the door and to further arm Zionist aggression and colonial occupation in Palestine, position for war on Iran, to strong arm US imperial restructuring of the Middle East through expansion of the Abraham Accords to normalize relations between Arab monarchies, especially Saudi Arabia, and Israel. Trump also aims to increase the military buildup and war preparations with China. According to a recent report, Trump’s China strategy is to accelerate and force economic and political conflict, characterizing Asia as

…an increasingly complex global security environment characterized by “rapid technological change and challenges from adversaries in every operating domain.” It identifies the Chinese government as pursuing “a military modernization program that seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near term and aims to displace the United States to achieve global pre-eminence in the future.”

Furthermore, Trump plans to force substantial economic concessions through provoking a trade and tariff war with the EU, Mexico, and Canada on behalf of US corporate and finance interests, showing that much of the US ruling class is now willing to go along with his “winner-take-all” approach if it means restoration of dictatorial power internationally, the extraction of more profit, the deployment of more hard power to intervene, manage, and profit from imperial matters, and even the potential acquisition of new colonies along the way.

Fight of Our Lives: Unite to Fight Capitalism, Imperialist War, and Fascism

Trumpism represents a new stage of open and unmitigated class warfare, a belligerent drive towards the next generation of global war to shore up US capitalist and imperialist objectives to restore preeminence, the shucking of remaining democratic processes and accountability, and the mobilization of far right and fascist movements to impose and enforce a more extreme and authoritarian regime of control and exploitation onto the working class. These are the morbid symptoms revealing the depth of crisis facing the US imperial capitalist system. Similar crises and responses are being replicated and spreading across much of the capitalist world system.

Liberal capitalist reformism has been in a prolonged state of decline. The Democratic Party variant of liberalism has degraded to the point that they can offer no substantial opposition or political alternative to Trumpism. What’s more, there are now more points of convergence between the two capitalist and imperialist parties in service of a rightwing ruling class determined to reassert its power and dominance internationally. There is no leftwing alternative to be found, or one that can be built, inside an electoral party system structured and staffed to enforce capitalist class rule and champion the causes of empire.

That is why the revolutionary and socialist left needs to carry out its own transition and implement our own anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist “Project 2025”. This necessitates incorporation and regroupment of radicals, revolutionaries, and organizations. It means building militant resistance and organization within and across the various class struggles that lie ahead that will forge the next generation of fighters of the working class and from oppressed groups. It means active organizing against US imperial war and further genocide. It means organizing defense of migrant and immigrant workers and communities against state repression. It means organizing defense with Trans people against the state and fascist groups. It means organizing and intersecting struggles and creating new organizational structures to facilitate a growing and widening revolutionary movement. This is the only way that we can build a new revolutionary left that can defeat and overturn Trumpism and the forces of the fascist and far right, and the whole rotten capitalist imperialist system that now needs them for its survival.

This analysis was developed by the members of Socialist Horizon, a revolutionary socialist organization. Learn more about Socialist Horizon at www.socialisthorizon.org