The Republican organization in the United States deviates from another Western political forces. While American Democrats, British Conservatives or German Social Democrats have adopted the programme in fresh years belt tightening, mistakenly reasoning that this would reduce public debt, but Republicans never truly sought fiscal discipline. Politicians from their camp, from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, conducted run campaigns against the “big government”, which is simply a major national government spending, but erstwhile they came to power, they wound up a budget deficit, reducing taxes to the rich and packing further gigantic resources into armed forces.
However, Republicans never stopped pursuing austerites as a moral principle. They built a budget to reduce the spending on support for the working class, and they deliberately increased the deficit to benefit the rich. The slogan "starve the Beast" – starved the beast – meant, on the 1 hand, cutting off American social programs and, on the another hand, taking fresh debts in the interests of the most wealthy citizens.
In this sense Trump is the essence of post-war Republican organization politics. The advantages in his waist are the attraction of Silicon Valley, Stablecoin, low taxes for companies, the threat of introducing duties and, of course, a dollar – a currency that, like no other, can attract abroad investors, aces up the sleeve of all erstwhile presidents. Trump plays with these cards to turbocharge the deficit, desiring to accomplish the goal that Republicans have been pursuing for years: he wants to rise in legislature specified enthusiasm to tighten the belt so he can yet break the spine of social and wellness insurance programs, Social safety and Medicaid.
However, ‘A Great, Beautiful Law“ Trump is unique even for the standards of Republican class politics, in which, it would seem, all moves are allowed. Explicit excuses for belt tightening ("fiscal responsibility", "debt reduction") have been laid down on the altar of the actual objective: to completely disassemble the support strategy that many citizens usage so that fewer people can become even richer.
However, this is where the comparisons between Trump and erstwhile Republican organization presidents end. The alleged "reaganovian Democrats", or voters who voted for the right, keeping it in power in the 1980s and in subsequent decades (like Margaret Thatcher's supporters in the UK class), were fortunate to hold their employment during a period of large unemployment growth and benefit from higher wages. However, the postponement of their descent into the ranks of the precariat could not last forever.
After the 2008 financial collapse, American capitalism changed forever. The banks were saved thanks to the bailouts, but all year more and more workers with stable, good jobs started to lose their jobs and had to fight for survival, remaining with short-term, low-paid jobs without growth prospects. Reagan and the Bushs won the election due to the fact that they were voted proletariat with safe employment; but now the degraded and destitute workers were so discouraged from everything that in general no longer curious in politics. And it was them that Trump yet mobilized, they gave him a triumph – especially since their ranks made many proletarians who had previously enjoyed a unchangeable position.
When Bill (and Hillary) The Clintons openly romanced Wall Street, Barack Obama rescued bankers with bailouts, and Joe Biden He pursued a suicide strategy, ensuring voters that due Democratics have a “notable” economy, Trump managed to float on the anger of the working class. It took very small to attract voters long ago abandoned by Democrats. All we had to do was share the thought and composition that in the country "everything fell apart" or talk a small bit about the "bloody pot" that the heartless, selfish elites had given to people like them.
Democrats hope that erstwhile voters begin to feel the painful effects of the introduction of the Great, Beautiful Act, they will turn their backs on Trump. His budget is without a shadow of a uncertainty the most perfidious tool of class fighting since Reagan, Thatcher and Bush. Trump's on Robin Hood's trail, just for a spin. He received a mandate from the poorer Americans to rule, and utilized it to deprive them of their social and medical services with 1 hand, that is, all their security, and the another to give out powerful benefits to the richest.
I besides have all the hope that the working class so rapidly betrayed by the president, which was a large part of his election base, will turn distant from Trump. But I'm afraid it'll be different. A class working in the United States did not rebel against Reagan erstwhile it turned out that the chances of gaining wealth of workers had gone far away, and the wealthy earned even more thanks to the national government's debt. Why? They were fed with 2 related illusions: a dream of profiting from the sale of their property (whose price, raised by long and bubble reaganomika, yet collapsed in 2008 with disastrous effect) and dreams of the power of America, which was to gain the primacy again in the world, as if not persecuting its Vietnam war spectrum.
Today Trump besides sells 2 related stories. The first is simply a dream of cryptocurrency wealth in the form of a run for privatization of the dollar, that is, an effort of a completely fresh attack on social welfare – an effort that the erstwhile Republican presidents could not even imagine due to the fact that they did not have specified technology. With the frenzy of artificial intelligence it has not only brought fabulous profits Wall Street and Silicon ValleyBut she besides sparked a wave of fresh optimism among Trump's electorate from the working class.
A crucial section of the MAGA movement dreams of future sources of income independent of earnings and is completely blind to the hazard posed by the "something for nothing" mentality that stood behind the collapse of the subprime lending market. Trump can bargain their food stamps, or food stamps, or take distant their wellness insurance, and they inactive see it as an “anti-systemist” who conjures up magical forms of wealth.
The second communicative is the Trumpist equivalent of America's triumph in the Cold War. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave Fox News tv an interview in which he spoke of a late signed trade agreement with the European Union. It contains many unilateral EU concessions to Trump and an absurd commitment by the Union to invest $600 billion in the United States by 2029. erstwhile asked if it all came down to “taking over offshore assets”, Bessent diplomatically He agreed. with that assessment. "I think we can put it this way: another countries supply us with specified a state investment fund," he said.
These 2 promises – that the money from cryptocurrency will grow on trees and the planet will fund the revival of America – may be adequate to shield Trump from the anger of the betrayed electorate of the working class. And if so, who will gather up the wrath erstwhile his scam is yet revealed, and the cumulative rage will spawn a fresh populist narrative?
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Copyright: task Syndicate, 2025. www.project-syncicate.org. From English he translated Maciej Domagała.
