If we actually survive it, recovery will be long and hard
Stephen Eric
Bronner in Common
Dreams
Much can be said about Donald Trump, but it
is impossible to say that he has “done nothing.” This boorish, megalomaniacal,
unpredictable, and frighteningly ignorant real-estate salesman has transformed
his country by unleashing an avalanche of executive orders, edicts,
institutional transformations, legislative shifts, and policy changes. Whether
the nation can recover its democratic roots should not be taken for granted
despite its institutional resilience and civic culture.
Trump-World is about more than Trump the president and
demagogic ruler of the Republican Party.
MAGA stands on tradition. Its base is rooted in the same backward classes, with
a similar authoritarian and fascist ideological outlook as its right-wing extremist
forerunners such as the “know-nothings,” the KKK, “America First!,”
McCarthyism, and the White Segregationist Councils.
Whatever the president’s
decline in poll numbers, his mass base isn’t going anywhere and its racist,
xenophobic, chauvinistic, and anti-working class beliefs are firmly entrenched.
A reactionary sword of Damocles still hangs over a Democratic Party torn
between a sclerotic mainstream and an exuberant faction of democratic
socialists. Republicans
collapse the former into the latter and then attack this essentially
“center-left” political organization as “liberal,” “socialist,” communist,
“Marxist,” and “anarchist,” even as Trump followers haven’t a clue what these
words actually mean.
For a forest to recover from a fire takes more than planting
a few new trees. Rolling back what amounts to a domestic counterrevolution is a
daunting task, and it is easy to be misled. It is not a matter of the next
election or putting together a grab bag of issues that will leave the public as
confused as it was before, but a readiness to change institutions, reorient
economic policy, and refashion foreign policy by highlighting three or four
crucial points in each domain.
Trump has issued over 500 executive orders in 2025-2026
alone. These now touch upon virtually every aspect of everyday life. Every
progressive social movement with a marginalized constituency has come under
attack through legislative and often coercive means. Public lands have been
privatized, coal has been
promoted while wind and solar energy projects have been shut down. Agencies
such as the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of
Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security have been “weaponized;”
indeed, between the beginning of June and the end of August 2026, more than
150,000 arrests were made by Immigration and Customs
Enforcement.
Meanwhile the “leftist” departments of education,
environmental protection, and health and human serves have been gutted. Other
regulatory agencies have been purged, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Legal gambits have insulated the presidency from criminal indictment, legal
harassment of critics and “enemies” has become an everyday occurrence.
The
press has been intimidated, television shows have been canceled, and academic
freedom is on the ropes. The threat to democracy is real and the nation’s fabric is fraying. Drastic changes to the tax codes favoring
elites and the top 0.1% have contributed to the greatest upward shift in wealth
in American history.
Unions
have been banned from 40 federal agencies, collective bargaining agreements are
imperiled, and worker health programs have been eviscerated. The new imbalance
of class power is fixed, if not set in stone. Everything associated with the
“New Deal” of the 1930s, and the “Great Society” programs of the 1960s is
hanging by a thread.
With the Trumpist counterrevolution, the whole has become
more than the sum of its parts, and everyday people find it difficult to
process this avalanche of reactionary measures or the dangers that they pose. A
mixture of political frustration and disorientation that provides fertile
ground for nostalgia associated with the 1950s, when America was seemingly
admired by the whole world.
US foreign policy has changed for the worse as
multilateralism has surrendered to “America First!” Indeed, reference to the
isolationist and quasi-fascist movement of the 1930s with the same name is not
coincidental. Trump has identified the American national interest with his own.
His personal enrichment by $2.6 billion in 2025-2026 occurred in concert with
constantly fluctuating positions on the Russia-Ukraine War, the Iran War, NATO, the European Union, and
Canada. The rule of thumb: Where cash is not to be made, support is not to be
given.
The United
States has reneged on all major climate treaties. Aid to the United Nations, UNICEF, the World Health
Organization, and the world’s most vulnerable nations has been cut to the
bone. Trump has signed a sweeping bill imposing sanctions on Russia while
simultaneously negotiating new “business deals” before the conflict ends, thus
contradicting his previous warnings.
His on-again, off-again imperialist
threats to turn Canada into America’s 51st state, “protect” Greenland and Denmark, “run” Venezuela’s oil industry, create a “Gazan
Riviera” (presumably based on Trump company investments), exploit Ukrainian
minerals, sign a bill with sweeping sanctions and set up hotel deals in Russia,
constitute the mix of personal and institutional goals that provide the president’s
zigzag approach with a certain logic.
Trump’s foreign policy has no need for a state department,
which has essentially been hollowed out along with the experts necessary to
create prudent policies. Our president values the personal touch, and he is not
above blackmail, threats, intimidation, bluster, and childish tantrums to get
his way. None of this has worked.
Trump has alienated NATO and the EU to
Russia’s delight. Relations with Canada are at their lowest point amid a bitter
tariff war. America’s squandering of military sources and diplomatic setbacks
have left Taiwan and South
Korea feeling increasingly uneasy as Chinese military actions linger in the
background.
Trump’s record of failure is astonishing. After all the
grandiose claims, mediation efforts to end the Russian-Ukraine War are stalled,
policy toward Israel is an embarrassment, Venezuela has the same
authoritarian regime, Iran’s geopolitical importance has actually increased,
and there are rumblings about charging the United States with war crimes.
Trump’s
attempts to intimidate China have failed, the tariff offensive is tottering,
and the president’s charismatic charm apparently hasn’t prevented North Korea’s
“supreme leader” Kim Jong Un from further nuclear testing. Never has the moral
and symbolic standing of the United States been lower, and never has it shown
itself so incapable of distinguishing between democratic friends and
authoritarian enemies.
“America First!” has turned into America last. Reversal of
discrete policies is possible, restoring checks and balances is more difficult,
and reigning in the charismatic presidency is likely. But this ignores the
forest for the trees. Trump-World is more than the sum of its parts, and the
avalanche of policies and edicts makes the counterrevolution difficult to
process and threatens to overwhelm the ability of critics to prioritize their
responses. MAGA will offer ongoing opposition to progressive forces and, in
response, they must forward a rational and radical agenda of their own. This
calls for shifting away from Trump, the insufferable person, and focusing on
Trump-World’s devastating attack on the welfare state, neofascist battle
against civil liberties, cultural parochialism, and xenophobic-imperialist
foreign policy. That is what it will take for the United States to recover from
its decade-long trauma—and even then...
Stephen Eric
Bronner is Board of Governors distinguished
professor emeritus of political science at Rutgers University and executive
director of the “Independent Experts’ Peace Initiatives.”
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