A New Republic

The second Trump administration is taking the world by storm. At home and abroad, it has attacked institutions as well as the established norms, patterns, and rules. The United States has begun to dissociate itself from the rest of the world, throwing any pretensions to care about the problems of others or the importance of its soft power. Dismantling a whole array of organizations, the hegemonic power of the world order has opened space for its rivals to fill the void left by its withdrawal without any clear indication of how it means to maintain its influence, except by the use or the threat of the use of force. At the same time, the administration has had to find out the hard way the limits of its economic power as the tariff cascade of “liberation day” turned into an embarrassment and an unnecessary exposure of the United States’ vulnerabilities, particularly to China’s economic retaliation.

Possibly far more consequential for the world are the domestic developments in terms of the redistribution of power in the United States’ economic order, whereby the technology corporations would be the ascending force, and the nature of its polity. This is consequential for the contest between democracies and autocracies because the United States is the standard bearer for many things political and economic internationally. The speed of the autocratic turn there is emboldening authoritarians everywhere and deepening the crisis of democracy worldwide.

How did it come to this? Very few people imagined that the institutional order in the United States would cave in so rapidly. Powerful actors in the body politic, the economic realm, and the media have chosen the path of least or no resistance when confronted with the wrath of the executive. One conclusion one can draw from the success of the Blitzkrieg against the established order is that US executive power is overwhelming and that the functioning of the separation of powers necessitates more than the formal arrangements between the branches. It requires respect for intangible norms, for liberal democratic codes of conduct and propriety of behavior. It is also clear that the much-celebrated institutions as the would-be protectors of democratic principles can crumble easily when faced with a determined executive.

The Trajectory of Trumpism and Trump

One need not fall into a deterministic trap and judge the ascent of Donald Trump and the movement that bears his name as inevitable. There were plenty of occasions when a different approach to politics and more humility in self-assessment by the elites could have turned the tide.

Contingency is the essence of history, however strong structural causes and currents may be. Agency does matter and Trump’s agency managed to pull victory from the jaws of defeat between 2021 and 2024. In power for a second time, his rule gives new urgency to Benjamin Franklin’s caution about the regime of the newly founded state at the end of the Philadelphia Convention: “A Republic if you can keep it.”

Trump rode a wave of discontent that grew stronger by the year and whose roots were planted in the mid-1970s, if not earlier, as US manufacturing started to lose ground to competition from abroad and, eventually, manufacturing jobs became scarcer and wages stagnated. Economic hardships faced by those who were in one fashion or another victims of roaring globalization, and the growing estrangement between the more locally planted working classes and the cosmopolitan liberal elites that translated into a furious Kulturkampf (particularly over issues related to women’s empowerment, race, and gender) prepared the ground for a shake-up in American politics. For example, even part of the economically globalist elites concluded by the presidential election of 2016 that some degree of protectionism and even the adoption of industrial policy would be expedient to protect American economic power.

Trumpism had many antecedents as well. There has always been in the American body politic a consistent illiberal/antiliberal vein that was only defeated by the end of the Second World War, when the previously insulated country ascended to international hegemony. Even then, in the liberal era of the Cold War, American conservatism was alive and well. But it was under attack, subdued, and certainly not ascendant.

Trump is probably the unlikeliest of personalities to articulate and to amplify the deep resentment of the mostly less educated white American males who felt they were being left behind. Their discontent first gained an organizational home in the Tea Party movement that gradually redefined the Republican Party and culminated in the success of 2016. As Tim Alberta notes, “The revolt was near. Not everyone could see it—and not all those who did took it seriously. Trump saw it. He took it seriously. And he became its voice, as the unlikeliest of insurgents, the commercial tycoon who cheated the little guy, who employed illegal workers, who made his products overseas, and who enhanced his inherited fortune through scams and fixers and lawsuits, railing against a shredded social contract from the gilded penthouse of his Manhattan skyscraper.”

All this is true, but Trump has also exhibited a high degree of consistency in his political and economic views. As early as 1987, he paid $100,000 to publish in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe an open letter excoriating US leadership, defense spending, and economic policy with views that were considered marginal. The basic tenets of Trump’s worldview have not changed since. What makes his second term different and more dangerous for the “Republic” is that he now has a blindly loyal movement behind him, an intellectual fount, and powerful corporate support. He now knows how to wield the enormous power of the executive branch, unchallenged by the Republican majority in Congress, and scornful of rules, norms, and legalities.

As Jennifer Miller argues, Trump has a well-articulated mercantilist ideology. For him, its allies have taken advantage of the United States economically. To reverse this, an economically aggressive, protectionist, and interventionist state in areas such as trade is needed. Yet, this activist state should disappear when it comes to taxes and regulating the economy domestically. Finally, as Fintan O’Toole points out, the state of affairs Trump decries could be reversed by political will, by a strong and determined leader. No doubt Trump sees himself as that leader. At the same time, the countries that took advantage of American foolishness and weak leadership (Japan in the 1980s and China later) should carry on underwriting American profligacy. Hence their capital and their investments in the economy are welcome.

For all his complaints about the ways the United States has been exploited economically by the world and his promises that he will bring manufacturing back to the country to help blue-collar workers, Trump’s economic policies have been consistently in favor of the very rich. Meanwhile, his voter base relies on government loans and programs to access healthcare and other essential services that are now in jeopardy. Neither Trump, nor his vice president or any of the cabinet members have much, if anything, to say about income inequality. In fact, the administration’s budget, which the Republicans in Congress support, will exacerbate the inequalities in society. It will lift the meager protections offered particularly to the poor by the federal government, whose capacity has been considerably diminished by the cuts to and closures of many of its services and agencies. This could be a recipe for future social instability.

That a shake-up of the “administrative state” was necessary is a valid thought. But destroying its capacity, undermining the rule of law, defunding research, and belittling science, intellectual freedom, and international cooperation ill suit a functioning capitalist democracy. Given the vulnerabilities of the United States related to its dysfunctional educational system, blocking the migration of even qualified people threatens its future in terms of innovation and scientific accomplishments, and hence economic growth and technological superiority.

The challenge for the United States’ people, ruling classes, and politics will be to reverse this direction and to use the destructive attack on the “administrative state” as an opportunity to start anew and to build a better-functioning one. Whether or not they have the wherewithal to do this may well be the key to keeping the “Republic” democratic.

Soli Özel is a political scientist. He was a guest at the IWM in 2024–2025.