“Words mean just what I say they mean", Humpty Dumpty

There is a noted propensity in policy, intellectual and journalistic circles in the West to see the Trump presidency as a vast departure from the supposedly rational policies pursued by previous presidents not themselves noted for much connection to any observable reality. The presumption appears to be that Trump’s intellectual grasp of facts is strictly limited and that has been the basis for what appears to rational observers as “chaos worse confounded” in what can only vaguely accurately be described as his policy agenda. To a significant extent, that is an accurate reflection of what has transpired, but simply assuming that may well miss a more consistent underlying right-wing evangelical agenda that does have a logic based on religious bigotry, ultra-conservative logic and an overwhelming desire to return to a mythical past where order reigned and where there was a space for everyone and everyone was in their socially and biologically determined space.

When you dig a bit deeper into the very recent past of the increasingly extreme US Republican Party, some sort of order begins to emerge that tie many of the idiosyncratic policy actions of the second Trump presidency into a semi-coherent whole. As is so often the case in the US, where the financial elites increasingly set the policy agendas of both political parties through their control of vast financial empires that have long since bought the US Congress. Indeed, it was Will Rogers, in the early part of last century, who said even then that the “US has the best Congress that money can buy”. What was true then, is vastly truer today where election to the Congress is intimately tied to the greater expenditure on the election by each candidate ultimately elected than those with whom they allegedly competed (Thomas Ferguson, et al “How money drives US congressional elections: Linear models of money and outcomes”)

If corporate control of Congress was widely noted in the Gilded Age, it is vastly greater today since the Supreme Court decision (Citizens United v. FEC 2010) allowing corporations to spend unlimited funds to ensure control of Congress. That has totally neutered any pretence of the US being a democracy. It is now an oligarchy where the views of the citizens rarely have any impact on the way they are governed. The real control of US governance has increasingly been handed to the proliferating cancer of “think-tanks” that are generally funded by this oligarchy to draft the arguments to substantiate that oligarchies’ control of public policy. These are the bastard children of the “age of reason” and can trace a direct descent from the Medieval Schoolmen, the wandering band of philosopher courtiers of the courts of Europe whose role was to provide the intellectual arguments for the divine right of kings and the justifications for the continuation of that authoritarian model, sanctified, of course, by God.

One of the most toxic of these “think-tanks” is the Heritage Foundation. It’s “scholars” produced a report in 2022 entitled “Mandate for Leadership”, under a project entitled The Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project that bears, in much of its detail, the stamp of what Trump has been attempting to implement since his apparently chaotic return to power. This report was authored largely by ex-Trump officials from his first presidency and summarised in 900 pages the largely uncompleted agenda for that first presidency.

What it amounts to is a plan to systemically undermine “the quality of life of millions of Americans, remove critical protections and dismantle programs for communities across the nation, and prioritise special interests and ideological extremism over people". (Democracy Forward June 2024).

To summarise just a few of the targets:-

• Cut the American Rescue Plan which includes programs that have created or saved 220,000 jobs.
• Cut overtime protections for 4.3 million workers.
• Stop efforts to lower prescription drug prices.
• Limit access to food assistance, which an average of more than 40 million people, or 21.6 million households, rely on to survive.
• Deny students in 25 states and Washington, DC, access to student loans because their school provides in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants.
• Push more people (33 million) towards Medicare Advantage and other worse, private options.
• Roll back civil rights protections across multiple fronts, including cutting diversity, equity, and inclusion-related programs and LGBTQ+ rights in health care, education, and workplaces.
• Eliminate the Head Start early education program, which serves more than one million children.
• Stop efforts to lower prescription drug prices.
• Restrict access to medicated abortion.
• Expose the 368,000 children in foster care to risk of increased discrimination.

The consistency of these goals with much of what Trump has already done, and what he has indicated he will do, is impressive. What that suggests is that the confected confusion and disorganisation of his presidency may well be a tactic to cover the overall consistency of his agenda. That agenda consists of a systematic attack on the little that remains of the social safety nets and protections for the weak against the strong created by Franklin Roosevelt during the liberal reforms of the late ’30s through to the early ’70s of the last century. It is about recreating the social and economic divisions of the Gilded Age and before, and returning the US to the status of a fundamentalist, evangelical, authoritarian and feudal society with an established and strict hierarchical order with white male elites at the top and women, minorities, children and immigrants at the bottom, without any of the hard-won rights of the last century.

It is a racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, elitist and violent conception of society that the US grew on for its first 150 years of religious extremism and genocidal attitude to the original inhabitants of the continent. This is the dysfunctional and dying empire to which both major parties wish to tie us with such bonds as will ultimately strangle us, as it experiences its dying spasms. Meanwhile the Global South, that other 85% of humanity, moves purposefully towards the new multipolar order that is emerging across the planet.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.