The big, beautiful empire at the end of history

Interpreting Trumpism 2.0

Donald Trump at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on February 22. (Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore, used under a Creative Commons license.)

A little over 12 hours ago at time of writing, the Trump administration finally made good on its tariff threats against Canada and Mexico. It’s still unclear how permanent the tariffs will be, how much they’ll escalate further, or to what extent the current disruption of North America’s longstanding trade consensus actually reflects the future. The continent’s trade Cold War, in any case, has now very much become a hot one.

All this comes just days after Trump’s public humiliation of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, and amid his ongoing remaking of America’s wider geopolitical orientation. On the domestic front, meanwhile, the Elon Musk-led remodelling of the American state continues apace, steaming ahead every bit as chaotically and stupidly as Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

The second Trump administration is barely two months old and, by all appearances, is hellbent on undoing America’s most essential trade relationships, realigning its position in the world and (at least some of) its major alliances, and stripping the US federal government for copper wiring.

Taken together, these three radical thrusts pose genuine challenges of interpretation — and not just because they’ve been so unpredictable and volatile at the level of execution.

As I wrote last month, Trump’s trade war fundamentally misconstrues the United States’ already dominant trade position vis a vis Canada and Mexico, and will force both US and businesses to pay a heavy price without getting much in return (among other things the cost of basic goods and commodities is going to spike dramatically and, despite the rhetoric of Trump-adjacent figures new factories in Ohio and Michigan aren’t going to sprout from the earth overnight). DOGE, to say nothing of Elon Musk’s own cavernous personal approval ratings, is wildly unpopular and will become even more so if it succeeds in eliminating zillions of federal jobs and closing down entire federal departments. As a rule, and also by design, foreign affairs tends to be a more elite-driven domain of public policy of less interest to the average person. But, needless to say, just as voters didn’t seem to care all that much when Joe Biden talked incessantly about his submarine deal with Australia, there isn’t some massive domestic constituency suddenly enthralled by Trump’s neo-Paleocon vision of America on the world stage.

What we are really seeing with Trumpism 2.0, here and elsewhere, is longstanding tendencies of the American state stripped of artifice; rendered finally without any pretence to idealism or the public interest; expressed as a politics of pure plutocratic transaction on the domestic front and the belligerent exercise of raw imperial power abroad.

With the specific exception of the war in Ukraine — notwithstanding the revolting recent behaviour of Trump and Vance, and whatever your opinions about the war happen to be, the posture taken by Trump now enjoys much stronger public support than the one taken by Biden — Trump and the coterie of weirdos governing with him are investing most of their political capital in a series of boutique right wing causes whose impact will either be destructive or go unnoticed, and will dramatically weaken the administration’s popularity.

During his initial rise and throughout his first term, it was fashionable to attach the “populism” label to the Trump phenomenon. However else we might describe this stuff, “populist” it most certainly is not.

Many commentators, I think, have succumbed to the idea there’s simply no rhyme or reason to anything Trump does or any kind of underlying coherence to be found in his mercurial and chaotic behaviour beyond a penchant for performance and the disruption of norms. There are absolutely serious contradictions in the worldview and policy priorities of Trumpism, and to a greater extent than any other administration its patterns and affectations are completely inextricable from the sentient avatar of moral corruption and capitalist greed at its centre.

Still, there is a deeper coherence to be found in all this, and identifying it necessarily requires dispelling one of the central liberal myths about Donald Trump.