The most important political divide in the world is no longer between left and right. It is not even between liberal and authoritarian. It is between those who grasp the sheer scale and potentially revolutionary consequences – in the US and around the world – of what Donald Trump is trying to do in his second term; and those who don’t.
The sheer kineticism and blunt force trauma of his first weeks back in office should be a pretty big clue. Since he took the oath of office once again, he has issued more than 55 executive orders, ranging in subject from the mass deportation of undocumented migrants and abolition of birthright citizenship to the pardoning of more than 1,500 January 6 felons and the withdrawal of the US from both the World Health Organisation and the Paris climate agreement.
Compare and contrast that with the steady-as-she-goes pace of his predecessor. Joe Biden achieved much in four years. But it is telling that – for example – $42bn allotted to broadband access in 2021 had not resulted in a single household being connected to the internet by last December. Of the $1.6tn appropriated by Biden’s landmark legislation, more than half remains unspent.
So it is small wonder that early focus groups suggest the public is impressed by the aggressive pace of Trump’s initial measures and his apparent determination to get things done. It scarcely needs to be said that speed and effectiveness are not the same thing.
Equally, it is politically illiterate to dismiss Trump’s methods as merely chaotic. In the hypermodern context of the 2020s, velocity overwhelms all else. Public life now has more in common with the warp speed of social media than with the old-fashioned grind of institutions, reviews and “milestones”. Keir Starmer, take note.
Trump’s first big experiment is being enacted by Elon Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency” (not, in fact, a department at all, but a temporary organisation authorised by the president). Aided by his youthful gang of so-called “Muskrats” (some as young as 19), the world’s richest man has chosen his initial targets cunningly.
First, he stormed the US Treasury department and accessed its payments system, which stores highly sensitive personal data related to social security entitlements, veterans’ benefits and federal employee salaries, and provides private information on 90% of expenditure by the federal government (which spent $6.75tn last year).
Second, Musk went after USAID, the foreign aid agency established in 1961 by John F Kennedy, which is responsible for 40% of all global development funding. Declaring it a “criminal organisation”, he shuttered the agency, jeopardising lifesaving programmes all over the world with a keyboard click.
Hand in glove with Musk, the White House published a list of 12 absurd projects that USAID was supposed to be subsidising: 11 of these allegations were found by Washington Post fact-checkers to be misleading, taken out context or straightforwardly false.
Early on Saturday, US District Judge Paul A Engelmayer issued an emergency order temporarily restricting DOGE’s access to the Treasury department’s systems and cited the risk of “irreparable harm”. But Trump and Musk are pressing on with their destructive mission.
DOGE has barged its way into at least 17 federal agencies. Among the next on the list is the Pentagon, the department with the largest discretionary budget – with which, do not forget, Musk has contracts worth billions of dollars.
But egregious conflicts of interest do not bother this regime, any more than the obviously unlawful despatch of a private citizen into departments of state to take massive fiscal decisions that belong to Congress, in which the power of the purse is vested by the US Constitution.
Ah yes: the constitution. The text of 1787, periodically amended, is perhaps the most subtle and finely balanced codification of governance in history; its reputation burnished by the fact that the founding fathers left an operating manual in the form of The Federalist Papers (1788).
Their primary objectives were to prevent the return of monarchy and to make pluralist coexistence possible by the separation of powers (legislature, executive and judiciary) and an intricate system of checks and balances.
In theory, this ought to be ideal software for the 21st century, with its ever-greater complexity, social pluralism and clashes of belief. But Trump and Musk are ruthlessly exploiting broad-based exasperation with the status quo and the traditional institutions of government.
In their useful book The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future (2024), Stephen E Hanson and Jeffrey S Kopstein argue that “the ‘democracy versus authoritarianism’ debate has blinded us to an even more important contemporary threat: the global spread of patrimonial regimes – that is, regimes in which leaders posing as the “father” of the nation demand unquestioned personal loyalty and treat the state like a family business”.
Trumpism, they continue, is as much an attack on the conventional role of government as it is on democratic liberties. In this respect, we witness – to adapt an image from Ghostbusters -– -three powerful streams crossing.
The first is the disruptive ambition of the tech oligarchs who swarmed around Mar-a-Lago between election day and Trump’s inauguration. For these astonishingly wealthy men, every challenge, every question of human organisation, can be resolved by speed and destruction.
In the tech world, it has become commonplace to propose that algorithms will one day replace laws; that, as Curtis Yarvin, the “neo-reactionary” intellectual applauded by JD Vance, puts it, America needs “a national CEO” rather than a president subject to constitutional guard-rails. In 2012, Yarvin suggested that a future disruptor should “Retire All Government Employees” (RAGE); which is beginning to seem less like an edgy acronym and more like an official plan.
Second, and related to this, there is a strand of MAGA thinking that embraces what Antonio Gramsci called “Caesarism”. In his book The Stakes (2020), Michael Anton defines it as a “form of one-man rule: halfway… between monarchy and tyranny”. And in case you were wondering if Anton is an irrelevant egghead, writing esoteric screeds in the basement of a thinktank, he has been appointed by Trump as director of policy planning.
According to this school of thought, the aggregation of supreme executive power in the presidency is positively desirable. The constitution gives primacy to Congress, which it describes in its first article. But “Caesarists” want to remove the restraints on the commander-in-chief and dismantle the so-called “administrative state”.
For them, it is very much part of the plan that Trump’s nominee as FBI director, Kash Patel, should do his bidding and persecute his opponents. The mass release of the January 6 militias is consistent with the need of every Caesar to intimidate his opponents into quiescence.
Third – and under-reported at present – there is Christian nationalism. Though its champions pay lip service to the constitution, their true purpose is to restore the theistic version of America that predates even the Declaration of Independence in 1776. According to their notion of national exceptionalism, scripture is more important than law, church and state should not be separate and secularism is to be deplored.
One of the most passionate advocates of Christian nationalism is Russell Vought, the driving force behind MAGA’s Project 2025 blueprint, who believes that “the Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last 200 years”. On February 6, he was confirmed as director of the Office of Management and Budget.
These three forces are not perfectly aligned; but they have produced a powerful chemical compound that represents a clear and present danger to constitutionalism. Musk and his fellow tech oligarchs, in particular, are not trying to perfect government; they want to demolish as much of it as possible, leaving behind a great wasteland into which they can roll their digital battalions.
The more demoralised the public becomes with conventional administration, the better. Musk hopes it will fail in its progressive functions. He wants voters to lose all faith in the state.
The new tech barons have no interest in America as a shining city on a hill. In their ketamine-addled vision of the future, a tiny number of mega-corporations will sell health, education and insurance products via AI to citizens who once used taxpayer-funded public services. The few will inhabit high-security gated communities – perhaps, in Musk’s imagination, a plutocratic space station – while everyone else gets by as best they can, monitored by drones.
To date, Congress has done next to nothing to resist this all-encompassing threat; its best opportunity will arise when Trump seeks to renew his tax cuts, which expire at the end of 2025. Meanwhile, more than 40 lawsuits have already been filed to thwart Musk’s work and the president’s objectives. Some will succeed. But not all.
The crunch will come when and if the Supreme Court rules against Trump. Bear in mind that, last July, its justices granted the president absolute immunity for all “official acts”. Even before this ruling, Vance was encouraging Trump to emulate one of his heroes, Andrew Jackson, who, in 1832, resisted the Supreme Court’s decision in a case affecting the rights of the Cherokee.
The seventh president is said (apocryphally) to have declared: “John Marshall [the chief justice] has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” It is at least conceivable that, faced with such a ruling, Trump would also refuse to abide by it. What then?
I have no doubt that opinion polls will quickly start to suggest public anxiety about executive overreach and unease about Musk’s rampage through government. But polls are snapshot quizzes. They are poor detectors of deep emotion and barely articulated sentiment.
Quite rightly, the billionaire’s vandalism is being called out for what it is: a constitutional outrage. “Of course it’s a coup,” writes the brilliant American historian, Timothy Snyder. But January 6 was a constitutional outrage and an attempted coup – and look how well that played as an issue for the Democrats in the election.
Four years ago, I wrote that politics had not only changed but “moved house, shifting from institutions, non-governmental organisations and office-based campaigns to digital networks”. More than ever, citizens – and not just in the US – experience a mismatch between their satisfaction as online consumers and their frustration as users of public services.
Since the beginning of the century, trust in public institutions has plummeted. Throughout the free world, people are increasingly sceptical of the capacity of government to give them a fair shake in life and reduce the savage inequalities that lead to deaths of despair.
For those whose faith in the old ways has been shattered, the spectacle of a tech disruptor taking a flamethrower to “the System” may well be exhilarating as well as shocking. And which teenage keyboard warrior would not find punk-rock appeal in the opportunity to occupy a great department of state and torment Gen X officials in cheap suits?
It is also a grave mistake to imagine that a comparable assault couldn’t happen here. In last weekend’s Sunday Times, Dominic Cummings said that what Trump and Musk were doing was “basically all great from my perspective”.
Don’t the pimply “Muskrats” remind you of the “weirdos and misfits” that Cummings sought to recruit to No 10 in January 2020? Imagine what such a unit might have gone on to do, had he not fallen out so badly with Boris Johnson and resigned in November of that year.
In truth, this is a global story: not only because the occupant of the Oval Office is the most powerful person in the world, but because Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, and Olaf Scholz are the last of a dying breed.
Liberal technocracy, with its ponderous incrementalism, is finished. As things stand, techno-populism and nativism are the future. The question now is how ready progressives are to rewire liberalism from scratch; and how serious the opponents of the right are about the huge lift that is required to alter this perilous trajectory.
Does it really need to be spelt out? Ten years after Trump descended the golden escalator, this is still only the beginning.
