On 20 January Donald Trump officially became president of the United States, much to the consternation of almost 50 percent of the US electorate, and many others around the world. When Trump lost the 2020 election, much relief was expressed by those who feared that he would have established some kind of dictatorship, stamping on all dissent and taking draconian measures against all ‘progressive’ forces. Similar fears are now being expressed.
He says he knows how to quickly resolve the Russia-Ukraine conflict (even if he seems to have moved away from his earlier ‘single phone call’ boast). He has promised mass deportations of ‘unregistered’ people. He has vowed to counter attempts to limit fossil fuel and carbon emissions. He has proposed heavy taxes on imports from foreign countries, especially China. And he wants Greenland and the Panama Canal.
Will any of this happen? Whoever has to run the capitalist system in any country often sees their ‘best laid plans’ go awry, because capitalism cannot be controlled by governments. Trump’s desire to take over those other territories could only come to fruition if other global players inexplicably chose not to resist. And his mass deportation plans are likely to meet obstacles at local, state or international levels, making them no more successful than his previous plan to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it.
His promotion of the fossil fuel industry may have earned him votes in the ‘rust belt’, but – with climate change implicated in multiple disasters including the recent Los Angeles fires – it could end up losing him support. If his confidence over the Russia-Ukraine war is based on cutting off weapons to Ukraine, he might find that Ukraine manages to get its weapons elsewhere, making him look impotent.
What would he say if such failures, or one of capitalism’s periodic downturns, lose him support? Some say he won’t care, because he will have established a police state that lets him rule unhindered. But advanced capitalist democracies like the US, and others such as the UK, Canada, Germany, France, Holland, Sweden, South Korea, etc, have well-entrenched mechanisms for preventing dictatorships. That’s true even if the would-be dictator surrounds himself, as Trump seems to be doing, with a cohort of compliant disciples who compete to express the most extreme views.
Examples of Trump’s puerile narcissism abound, for example, pinning the blame for the Los Angeles fires on the state governor, Gavin ‘Newscum’ Newsom. Expect further vilification of opponents by him and his best bro, the increasingly preposterous billionaire Elon Musk. Journalist Patrick Cockburn in the i Paper calls it ‘the most crazed administration in US history’. Another commentator calls it ‘the power of dumb’. Even so, it will still have to play by capitalism’s rules.
What has happened in the US seems aeons away from the kind of society we advocate – leaderless, moneyless, wageless, frontierless and entirely democratic. But even if the US election had voted in the ‘lesser evil’ (ie, the Democrats), that party would still have been obliged to run the system in a business-as-usual way, ie, in the profit-seeking interests of the tiny minority who monopolise the majority of the wealth. And so it will continue as long as most wage-slaves continue to support, or at least acquiesce in, capitalism and the profit-seeking force that drives it.
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