Order appropriates, law serves power, and there is no just Authority.
Politics is the Art of Fear, as my father taught me, and there is a Calculus of Fear whereby states rise or fall; too little and unity of purpose and social cohesion evaporate, too much and it loses all power to compel obedience when there is nothing left to lose.
The recursive engine of centralization of power in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force drives the legitimation of authority as a protection racket, but security is an illusion and all the emergence of carceral states of force and control can achieve is the transfer of wealth, power, and privilege from those who create it to the hegemonic elites who become their masters. Thus are birthed the terrors of class, authorized national identities, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
The use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own Resistance, Resistance like that of the Hands Off mass protests which have seized our nation in over 1300 protests involving three and a half million American citizens galvanized to action by the economic instability of Trump’s foolish tariffs and trade wars, by the monkeywrenching of the institutions of democracy by Musk’s teams of juvenile hooligans and especially fears of loss of social security and medicare, by the horrors of our complicity in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians as our tax dollars buy the deaths of children, journalists, and doctors, and by the state terror of ICE and the abduction without trial and deportation to foreign gulags of just about anyone including our citizens, tourists, political dissidents, and nonwhite folks with tattoos of their mama or a football team.
Part of what is happening is that capitalism in its terminal stage wherein all wealth and power goes to the top one percent is attempting to free itself from its host political system, democracy; another source of destabilization is that the Trump regime is composed of conflicting ideologies.
As written by Ben Davis in The Guardian, in an article entitled Two visions within Trump world are battling for primacy. Which will win? The second Trump administration was backed and is staffed by two major – and widely differing – ideological projects; “The start of the second Trump administration has been chaotic, to put it mildly. It is difficult for Americans to understand what exactly the administration is trying to do and how it will affect them. It has been simultaneously a colossal remaking of the US state and the entire global order, but also seemingly haphazard, with significant policy decisions such as spending cuts and tariff rates clearly made with little thought or preparation. Analysts and commentators of all stripes have speculated on the motives and strategy behind the Trump administration’s huge overhaul of society. But what is the Trump administration’s plan for the US?
The primary moves the administration has made are major cuts to federal government capacity through the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and now an unprecedented tariff regime that has sent financial markets into a free fall. Some view these changes as part of a grand overarching strategy to rebuild some version of an imagined past America: globally hegemonic and able to exercise power nakedly over other countries, economically self-sufficient with a large manufacturing base, and a reassertion of the previous social norms and order around gender, race, and sexuality. But a deeper dive into the Trump administration’s explanation of their policies and vision reveals that rather than a single, coherent ideological project, the Trump administration is sclerotic and being used as a vehicle for more than one competing ideological project.
While the first Trump administration had no real ideological project, with Donald Trump’s surprise win being based on a personalist coalition without the backing of an organized movement, and different factions within the administration battling for control over policy and favor from the president, the second Trump administration was backed and is staffed by two major ideological projects, representing different segments of capital: the oft-discussed “national conservatism” of the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, and tech capital, which has used Trump as a vehicle for its own priorities.
These two overarching political projects and visions both see Trump as able to advance their goals, but these projects are competing with each other. Both have accepted that Republicans will lose the midterms in 2026, as the president’s party nearly always does, and are thus trying to radically reshape society in that time in ways that can’t easily be reversed. They have deeply different visions for the future, and whether one wins out or both of their incompatible sets of policies are carried out will have enormous implications for the lives of Americans and people around the globe.
On tariffs, the administration has offered multiple, mutually exclusive visions: with some viewing tariffs as primarily a way to rebuild US manufacturing by incentivizing producers to build in the US; some viewing tariffs as primarily a way to raise revenue, cut the deficit, and in the long-term replace the income tax entirely; and some viewing tariffs primarily as a negotiating tool to force countries to make concessions to the US on a variety of issues.
Trump personally has suggested that the US become an autarky, with no trade of any kind with the outside world. It’s unclear which of these will be the plan because they each have dramatically different implications for how the tariffs are structured in the long-term, how long they will last, and their effects on US workers.
In the first two views, the tariffs are a part of the national conservative project of returning the US to a previous social order. They view the nation-state as the primary actor in a zero-sum anarchic global order of competing nation-states seeking to dominate each other. Tariffs are then a way of reasserting US national power relative to other states. This fits in with Trump’s rhetoric about the US, taking the country back and reasserting American nationhood, and is the primary way analysts and commentators have viewed the administration.
The tech capital that oversees Doge, however, has a different project entirely. Elon Musk, who has personally overseen the large-scale slashing of the federal government, rejects tariffs entirely. The Doge project and the tariff project are at odds. The Doge project is cloaked in the rhetoric of retro America First nationalism that would seem on its face (and is understood as by its supporters) to be precisely the opposite of what it is in practice: the outmoding of the nation-state entirely.
It’s notable that the first target for Doge’s cuts were not the New Deal programs conservatives have long wanted to cut, but instead the cold war-era nodes of American state power: scientific research, funding for education and the arts, foreign aid, and other programs that were created to allow the US to outcompete the Soviet Union and other countries. Musk does not care about American great power competition, such as with China, as Trump does. Indeed, Musk has close ties with the Chinese state.
For Musk and his cohorts, the US must progress past the nation state model – where the state exist to project power against other nation states and part of this bargain is keeping a certain social compact of living standard with citizens – to the vendor state model where international firms are paramount and states exist instead to compete for their favor. The Doge project of Silicon Valley technolibertarianism aims to sublimate the state to capital entirely and to outsource state capacity to transnational tech firms. This is, rather than an end of globalization as the national conservatives want, the final conclusion of globalization, where international capital exists above and beyond the bounds of the nation-state.
This is the reason large swathes of tech capital reversed course on Trump during the Biden administration and became his biggest financial backers. For them, Trump exists as a vehicle for their overall project.
Both of these projects are disastrous for the American people on their own, but both being partially implemented in opposing ways is even worse and will lead to disaster for US workers and our society’s basic capacity to function.
While the tariffs by themselves are devastating to US consumers and could lead to a major economic crisis, the Doge cuts strip state capacity that would be needed to implement the most positive vision of tariffs returning manufacturing jobs. While tariffs drive up prices on things like semiconductors or electric vehicles, the government is simultaneously slashing the programs designed to encourage these goods to be manufactured domestically. And while the Doge cuts have slashed the state and led to the direct capture of swathes of the state by tech capital, their overall project of global tech hegemony cannot progress in a world where international trade has broken down completely.
Trump and the national conservative’s dream of a return to a pre-financialization manufacturing-based economy, where the US has security through economic self-reliance, and the tech right’s commitment to creating shareholder value at all costs, and whose entire model is based entirely on the result of financialization, are incompatible and on a collision course. Different sections of capital – tech on the one hand, and the revanchist small capital class who form national conservatism’s base on the other – have different and competing interests and control of different sections of administration policy. The consequences of this intranecine competition are enormous, but either way, the next four years look dire for the American working class. The damage may take generations to fix.“
Yet there is a silver lining in this cloud of our doom and the fall of civilization; the personal humiliation of Trump and the loss of credibility of his regime and his treasonous and dishonorable minions in the Party of Treason, and the fracture and incipient collapse of the whole agenda of Trump and the Fourth Reich in the subversion of democracy.
As written by Robert Tait in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s about-face on tariffs reveals chaos at the core of his presidency: Time will tell how much damage has been inflicted on the credibility of Trump’s economic policy and administration; “Donald Trump’s climbdown on Wednesday from the most draconian aspects of his tariff regime has uncovered a damning picture of chaos at the heart of his presidency without necessarily alleviating their most painful effects.
The president’s landmark “liberation day” unveiling of tariffs in the White House Rose Garden on 2 April was supposed to be symbolic gateway to his promised “golden age of American greatness”; instead, it triggered a cascade of global market crashes that prompted warnings of a recession, or even a 1930s-style depression, while Trump brushed it all off as temporary “disruption”.
Time alone will tell how much damage has been inflicted on the credibility of Trump’s economic policy and indeed his entire administration by the ditching of nearly 80 years of US economic and free trading architecture, only to be followed by a sharp, if partial, U-turn.
The president’s sudden and unheralded retreat from a signature policy that he has advocated for more than four decades has placated Wall Street and international bond markets, which rallied at the news of his 90-day pause on tariffs that rose to above 50% on the goods from some countries deemed to have been “ripping off” the US in their trade practices.
But left untouched was a 10% across-the-board duty levied on all foreign imports – not to mention a further tariff hike on all goods from China – meaning that higher consumer prices are on the way for Americans, no matter how relieved the masters of the universe on Wall Street and other international trading centers are feeling.
“Most Americans care less about the spin and more about the fact that his 10% across-the-board tariff will still cost families an average of $2,600 more annually,” Matt McDermott, a Democratic pollster, posted on Bluesky.
The market mayhem unleashed by Trump’s “liberation day” tariff rollout is reminiscent of the reaction to the attempt by the British prime minister, Liz Truss, to stage a radical reordering of UK economic policy in 2022.
The constitutional niceties of the America’s political system will no doubt save the president from the fate of the hapless Truss, who was memorably outlasted by a head of lettuce and driven from Downing Street within 50 days of taking office as international markets rejected her policies as non-credible.
No such mechanism exists for removing a US president whose policies trigger market turmoil at home and abroad.
Perhaps buoyed up by that knowledge, Trump’s closest aides and acolytes tried to present his political backflip as a sign of strategic genius that had always been part of a brilliant plan.
“This was his strategy all along. President Trump created maximum negotiating leverage for himself,” said Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, who had been locked in urgent discussions with the president onboard Air Force One on Sunday about the effect of last week’s “liberation day” tariffs, according to the New York Times.
“Many of you in the media clearly missed The Art of the Deal. You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here,” explained the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, who a day before had said that Trump was not considering a delay to putting the tariffs into effect.
Yet the depiction of a carefully plotted strategy going perfectly to plan was undermined by Trump himself, who gave a strikingly blunt explanation for his volte-face.
“Well, I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line,” he said. “They were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid.”
It seemed a graphic portrayal of a loss of nerve – all the more so given that Trump had told Republicans that “I know what the hell I’m doing” and urged his followers to ignore the plunging markets and “BE COOL” on a post on his Truth Social network just hours earlier. “Everything is going to work out well,” he insisted.
That remains to be seen.
So too does the strength of Trump’s determination to plough ahead with a tariff policy which, even in its diluted iteration following Wednesday’s announcement, threatens to lumber Americans with higher living costs – an outcome at odds with the president’s campaign promise to reduce prices “on day one”.
Writing in the Washington Post, Aaron Blake noted that Wednesday’s decision was Trump’s second tariff climbdown since taking office without gaining anything in return, having previously backed away from duties on Mexico and Canada with only minor concessions.
Rather than being strategic, as Bessent, Leavitt and others claimed, he wrote, there was “reason to believe that this is indeed another example of Trump caving. And a big one at that.”
Trump has marketed his leadership on a message of strength, which has communicated itself to congressional Republicans, who – with a few notable exceptions – have fallen publicly into line with his tariff policies, whatever their qualms.
But having seen the president apparently buckle to market pressure, the question now arises over whether more of them will find the courage to push back. It is a question that could acquire added urgency as next year’s midterms loom into view, presenting an opportunity for voters to punish the GOP at the ballot box if inflation surges.’
Two visions within Trump world are battling for primacy. Which will win?
Trump’s about-face on tariffs reveals chaos at the core of his presidency
Robert Tait
We’ve been spared financial Armageddon, but Trump’s tariff chaos is far from over
Nils Pratley
Trump says ‘I know what I’m doing’ before stepping back from global tariffs
The Guardian view on Trump’s trade war: no one will win, but China is taking the long view
Editorial
Ten National Unions Call for Anti-Trump Resistance
How much will Trump’s tariffs cost US consumers?
US markets close with steep losses as Trump tariffs branded ‘worst self-inflicted wound’ by a successful economy – as it happened
Torch of Liberty 