The logic of Trump’s reactionary agenda
As Wall Street plummeted, shedding more than US$6 trillion in the days after Donald Trump’s 2 April “reciprocal” tariff announcements, the president posted on social media: “ONLY THE WEAK WILL FAIL!”
But equity markets refused to settle from their wild paroxysms. The treasury market, which underwrites the US government and the global financial system, also showed signs of stress.
Yesterday, Trump relented, blaming investors who were “getting a little bit yippy; a little bit afraid”. At least for now, an all-out global trade war has been averted. Trump took on the world and the financial markets and came off second best. But this will not be the end of the matter. “Nothing’s over”, he insisted.
Internationally, Trump’s crash-or-crash-through strategy is to extract as many concessions as possible for US capitalism. Poor country, rich country, ally or adversary—all states have been put on notice. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, speaking on the CBS News program Face the Nation on 6 April, outlined what the administration believes to be the stakes:
“You’ve got to realise this is a national security issue. I mean, we don't make medicine in this country any more. We don't make ships. We don't have enough steel and aluminium to fight a battle, right? All our semiconductors are made overseas ... [T]he point is, you need to reset the power of the United States of America and reset it against all our allies and our enemies alike.”
“Why would he treat even our allies like this?”, ask so many US commentators. Maybe it’s because, as Tom Wolfe noted long ago, the ultimate power is just seeing them jump.
The primary target, though, remains China, which faces a 125 percent tariff until further notice. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91, US administrations have had one overarching national security priority: to prevent a peer-competitor state from emerging. They failed.
China has developed the most extensive and efficient industrial economy the world has ever seen. It extended its global trade network despite the first Trump administration’s and the subsequent Biden administration’s attempts to undermine it. It has rapidly modernised its military, become a leader in high-tech engineering and AI applications and transformed into a state with global reach and interests—a diplomatic powerhouse.
Trump believes he has the remedy. Yet this week’s gyrations are not simply a matter of geopolitics and trade.
Domestically, the tariffs are an attack on the working class—raising prices and taxing consumption to give the government the budgetary space to proceed with corporate tax cuts. While blaming foreign countries for purportedly destroying the US economy and the lives of millions of workers, Trump is gutting the Department of Labor and attacking agencies that protect workers’ rights.
He is attempting to purge National Labor Relations Board members viewed as sympathetic to unions. (The NLRB enforces labour laws protecting the right to join a union and organise in the workplace.) Last month, the president issued an executive order to end collective bargaining rights for up to 1 million federal workers.
All this is part of a broader wave of “deregulation” designed to empower US capitalists and weaken the working class’s capacity to defend itself—a prerequisite for both corporate profitability at home and force projection abroad.
Indeed, Trump is waging war on anyone perceived to be an obstacle to his reactionary, ultranationalist agenda. From student anti-war activists to liberal law firms, from national security staff deemed disloyal to the president to universities and schools teaching the real history of America, from anti-discrimination laws to the union movement—Trump is taking a wrecking ball to US civil society and purging the state of all opposition to his program.
Some of this is purely ideological—like the anti-science irrationalism at the heart of the administration. Yet the international and domestic agendas dovetail with the far-right promise of national renewal: the veneration of hierarchy, be it the US at the top of the world, men as patriarchs in the family or bosses as rulers in the workplace; the valorisation of military service, both as individual submission to the state and as a contribution to the projection of national power; the perverse attacks on “communism” in the federal government and the school system, which identify the enemy abroad and depict a culturally corrupting fifth column within; the war on perceived weakness, understood as anything short of hyper-masculine blue-collar value creator at home or soldier of fortune at the front.
“Imperialism ... introduce[s] everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom”, Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin wrote more than 100 years ago. “Whatever the political system, the result of these tendencies is everywhere reaction and an extreme intensification of hostilities.”
Well, we are seeing the intensification of hostilities. The last week was a staring competition between the world’s major powers. Trump may have blinked, but any temporary easing of international tensions might result only in him refocusing on the domestic war and shoring up support for the next confrontation.
