The weeks that follow a presidential election, when the outgoing President occupies himself with putting the finishing touches on his legacy while leaving it to the President-elect to put together the team that will take the reins of power, are usually a fallow period in US politics. Not this time.
On the one hand, the outgoing president is engaged in a breathtakingly cynical and reckless game of brinkmanship against Russia. Joe Biden’s approval of the use of ATACMS missiles inside Russia, which Putin has described as “an act of war”, is aimed less at undermining Russia’s military campaign, on which it will admittedly not have any serious effect, and more at sabotaging Donald Trump’s road to the Oval Office by making it harder for him to make a deal with Russia over Ukraine. The intention is to pull Putin and Trump into a spiral of escalation that Trump would have a harder time to extract himself from.
Meanwhile Trump, who has learned much from his first term in power, is preparing a team to take on his enemies within the state apparatus. This could become the outline of an almighty struggle to come, inside the American state.
What we saw on 5 November was a pitchfork rebellion. Trump won a thumping victory, not just in the popular vote, but in every single swing state. Millions of voters made clear that they are fed up: fed up with inflation, fed up with insecurity and fed up with the establishment. Not least of all, they are fed up with these endless, expensive wars being waged by the ruling class while ordinary people struggle to pay bills, to feed their children, to juggle multiple jobs.
Trump knew how to skillfully tap into this mood, and assured voters that a vote for him would be a vote for a grenade into the lap of Washington, the establishment, the ‘deep state’. And that’s how millions voted: to send Trump into Washington to cause as much destruction as possible to an establishment that they despise, and which despises them in turn.
The establishment had better believe that Trump means business when he says he’s coming for them, a fact made quite clear by his picks for his new cabinet.
Panic is sweeping through the media, the halls of power, and the tops of the army and the civil service. In the run up to this election the ruling class threw everything at Trump: countless court cases, the united opposition of almost the entire media, and now he will take charge of a state apparatus which is openly hostile to him. The man is set on revenge, and he intends to purge his enemies from their positions.
Reading the ‘who’s who’ of Trump’s candidates we get a picture of a taskforce for waging a struggle against the establishment that has controlled the state in the whole of the postwar period. They are men and women like Trump: outsiders, maverick billionaires and hedge fund managers, all with axes to grind, and loyal to Trump and his agenda. By all indications they are all determined to take a machete to the heart of the state, to cut down their opponents and put their own hand-picked nominees in place.
Trump’s cabinet
One thing we can say about Trump is he never forgets and he certainly never forgives. Trump remembers well how, in his first term, all the wings of the state worked against him.
Back in 2016, when he won his first term, the Democratic party establishment, having continuously banged the drum about the ‘fake news’ of the Trump camp, could think of no better explanation for how an abysmally unpopular character like Clinton could lose to Trump than the conspiracy theory that Russian electoral interference was responsible. The CIA and NSA gave more than tacit support for this theory when they released ‘intelligence reports’ to support these claims.
To head up these shadiest parts of the ‘deep state’, Trump has nominated anti-deep-state crusader Tulsi Gabbard as director of intelligence. A former Democratic party congresswoman who left that party over her opposition to the war in Ukraine, she will now oversee intelligence agencies including the CIA, the FBI and the NSA among 15 others – to the great dismay of the ruling class.
Trump also has not forgotten how the military top brass resisted his orders at each step. They resisted his isolationist policies, on withdrawal from Syria, on winding down the US presence in Afghanistan and on many more matters.
Now, to carry out his revenge, he is sending a certain Pete Hegseth to head up the Pentagon. “Who the fuck is this guy?” asked one defence industry lobbyist. Clearly, in violation of time-honoured custom, Trump forgot to consult the barons of the weapons industry when making this appointment.
Hegseth is a Fox News presenter, who has promised a purge against the US Army, on the pretext of driving out “woke” and “left-wing” generals. In fact, despite what Trump’s team says, and despite what the Democrats repeat, this has less to do with identity politics and ‘culture war’ politics and more to do with purging army officers that would be hostile to his administration.
If the defence industry lobbyists aren’t happy that they, of all people, have not been granted their customary right to be consulted on the pick for the Pentagon, then Big Pharma must be aghast at the nominee for health secretary. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK), well-known anti-vaxxer, is being sent there with a mission to uproot all opposition to Trump in the bureaucracy of that department. Again, RFK’s views aren’t what’s important here. He’s specifically being sent into the department to uproot the influence of Big Pharma and Big Food, both of which poured cash into the Harris presidential run to stop Trump.
Heading up the Department of Education will be Linda McMahon. Her qualification is that she is the owner of World Wrestling Entertainment. But qualifications are hardly necessary, as Trump has made clear his intention to axe the department entirely.
Again, he seems intent on purging the whole academic bureaucracy, which has been a solid pillar of support for the Democrats in the past decades, and in particular in the struggle against Trump.
And then, of course, there’s Elon Musk, who fits the same pattern as the other nominees: an outsider, a maverick billionaire, who will get his own brand new ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (yes, ‘DOGE’). His task will be to advise the president on where to slash agencies and civil servants in his war on the ‘deep state’.
But perhaps the appointment that has focused the rage of the establishment and press most was Trump’s first choice for the attorney-general’s role.
For years, the ruling class has wielded the courts to destroy Trump and, remarkably, they have failed. Now that the boot is on the other foot, Trump will seek to purge the legal system and to turn this ‘lawfare’ against the establishment itself. We can expect not only that the charges against him will be dropped, but that he will seek a host of charges against his enemies. He will attempt to come for them in the same way that they came for him.
During discussions at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion over who would take that role, some candidates trumpeted their legal experience. Matt Gaetz’s pitch was somewhat different to the others: “Yeah, I’ll go over there and start cutting fucking heads,” he told Trump and his team. That, it would seem, was the kind of talk that ultimately won him the nomination.
Gaetz has since withdrawn himself from that position after the hue and cry raised against him by the ruling class, highlighting Trump’s first battle: his nominees need Senate approval. The Republicans have a majority there, but among them there remains a handful of Republican holdouts from the days when the party was in the hands of men the ruling class could trust.
They may yet have enough votes, combined with the Democrats, to block a few nominations. To that end, Trump has had to let go of Gaetz, and has included a few other nominees as sops to this wing, including Marco Rubio as secretary of state and Michael Waltz as national security advisor.
The ‘deep state’
Nevertheless, the overall picture is clear. Trump intends to wage a no-holds-barred fight against what he calls the ‘deep state’.
The Democrats, in their attempts to make Trump sound like a lunatic, depict all this talk of a ‘deep state’ as mere conspiracy-mongering. In fact, there very much is a deep state. However, it is not a new creation of a conspiratorial cabal. It is nothing but the state bureaucracy, which performs the essential functions of the state on a day to day basis, that he intends to take a sledgehammer to.
In the past, the American ruling class had control over both the Democratic and Republican parties. There were differences between them, but these were largely cosmetic. The parties were governed by a coterie of patrician families who were all on the best of terms with one another. They dined together and wined together, and held down a reliable ‘bipartisan consensus’ together. They were part of the large body of state bureaucrats and top functionaries which form the political establishment, a single continuous organism which has governed American politics – and in essence that of world capitalism – since World War Two.
While administrations would come and administrations would go, the state itself remained. The real day-to-day business of the ruling class would be administered by a carefully selected bureaucracy: senior army and intelligence officers, judges, police chiefs, top civil servants, all linked by a thousand threads to big business, a completely closed circle holding real power, depicted as the impartial, innocuous servants of the people.
This establishment was and remains subservient to an aristocracy of wealthy families, an Old Money crew, who imbibe their conviction of their own right to rule from their mothers’ milk.
Trump himself is an outcast from his own class for daring to push his own interests ahead of those of the rest. He has committed the mortal sins of appealing to broad layers of the middle and working class to elevate himself to power, and of shining a light on the ‘swamp’ of Washington. For that, the ruling class has attempted to destroy him.
The feeling is mutual. Trump is after their untouchable ‘deep state’, to which he intends to take a machete. He intends, as far as possible, to replace the ruling class’ hand-picked general staff with his own loyalists.
Trump’s first hurdle in this battle will be the Senate. If and when he clears that, he will be up against a formidable united body of opposition in the state, the media and the whole establishment. Further down the line, this could lead to a split in the state and the ruling class.
Trump has cobbled together a disparate group of misfits like himself that have fallen foul of this establishment, nouveau riche upstarts, crude individuals that the ruling class would never trust with their delicate machinery of state. Meanwhile, in order to win the elections he appealed to certain layers of the middle and working-class, as well as some lumpen layers, who are furious at the whole system that has left them behind. But the interests of the different parts of Trump’s kaleidoscopic coalition point in opposite directions to each other.
Once in power, this disparate gang itself will begin to fall apart, and the seething anger in US society will seek a new outlet. All this has profound implications for the trajectory of the world’s foremost imperialist power.
The ‘mad emperor’?
In its article commenting on these developments titled, Trump’s demolition of the US state, the Financial Times suggested a parallel from the history books to its readers: “It is time to study Caligula. That most notorious of Roman emperors killed what was left of the republic and centralised authority in himself. Donald Trump does not need to make his horse a senator; it will be enough to keep appointing charlatans to America’s great offices of state.”
The article doesn’t dig any further into the historical analogy, which is a shame. History has remembered Caligula as the ‘mad emperor’, the man who proposed to appoint his horse as a consul. In fact, it’s unlikely that Caligula was mad at all, despite the popular myth. Rather, his unusual appointment was motivated by a desire to humiliate the Senate and the Roman aristocracy, whose chroniclers, despising him, first propagated the myth of his madness.
Donald Trump too is no madman, despite what the US billionaire aristocracy propagates about him. He understands very well what he is doing.
But it wasn’t madness or hunger for power that elevated the Emperors to their positions of power in Rome. It was the seething class struggle that tore Rome apart, that having arrived at a deadlock, gave the world Caesarism. The aristocratic Senate was despised by the masses, but among the masses, no class was able to overthrow the old dying order. Thus, the Emperors rose above the Republic, resting now on a section of the aristocracy to beat back the masses, now on the masses themselves to deal blows against the Senate.
Capitalism knows of an analogous phenomenon to Caesarism: Bonapartism. When the class struggle has reached a deadlock, the strongman leader is able to raise himself up.
Though things are far from having developed to that point yet, there are elements of Bonapartism in the situation in the USA.
It is clear that Trump is a product of a temporary deadlock in the class struggle in the United States, which has seen powerful swings of the political pendulum. We can go back to 2009, in the immediate wake of the financial crisis of 2008, to the election of Obama. There was a wave of mass enthusiasm for Obama, who promised ‘change’ and ‘hope’ – and hope is a powerful thing when the mass of the population is desperate.
Obama was a man of the establishment, inserted in the situation to defuse the rising anger and dissatisfaction with the system. But he disappointed the hopes he had aroused. For all the bastardisation of the term that it implied, the Democrats were always painted as ‘left-wing’. The rage and disappointment of the masses continued to look for a way out.
The possibility was there for the pendulum to swing even further to the left, as Bernie Sanders called “a revolution against the billionaire class”. Sanders caught the imagination of millions, and could have put up a serious opposition to Trump. But his betrayal and refusal to break with the Democratic Party machine meant the pendulum swung the other way, to the right, and this same rage found its expression in Trump.
In order to overcome the powerful body of opposition from within the state, Trump himself may yet resort to mobilising a section of the masses, as he did on 6 January 2021. But Trump’s presidency will ultimately prepare a new, sharper swing of the pendulum to the left. The struggle he will attempt to wage in the state has the makings of a potential split in the ruling class.
The rage of the working class will force its way through the gaps among these divisions. We saw that in outline during the George Floyd protests in his first term, which saw some 20 million people mobilise on the streets. His attacks on the state bureaucracy and the civil service may well engender a clash with some of the most powerful unions in the US, which organise in the public sector.
Until now, Trump has managed to channel part of this bubbling rage into his own camp. But once tested in power, his coalition is going to begin falling apart. Once that happens, this rage will seek another outlet. Where will it go?
Under Obama and then Biden, the masses have twice experienced the school of the Democrats. For working-class Trump voters, they are identified with an establishment that they hate, while Trump is seen as the ‘lesser-evil’. For many millions more who didn’t vote for Trump, they are also a hated party of the establishment, and now of genocide. The establishment has lost total control over the situation and the American ruling class can no longer take its firm control over its own state institutions for granted. But the arrival of Trump will not mean stability. While we cannot predict which direction he will take, he will not be able to solve the crisis of capitalism, which ultimately underlies all of the present events. The situation is pregnant with intense instability, explosive social upheavals and ultimately class struggle on a higher level than we have ever seen in modern times.
