Musk and Trump clown show at the White House - public domain image
By Simon Božič-Dougherty
Trump is the US Empire unmasked.
Few, if any, Western leaders will dare to admit that the American Empire is crumbling and that China is surpassing it. In its death throes, the old centre is demanding more tribute from the periphery. And the periphery has shrunk so much that the targets of US imperialism are no longer limited to Africa, South America, or Asia, but as close to home as Canada, Mexico, and the working class within the United States itself. Trump didn't make the Empire start cannibalising itself, but he's accelerating the process by hiring goons like Musk to put it into overdrive.
Most American oligarchs know their ship is sinking. Like the fire sale of post-Soviet assets to Russian oligarchs in the 1990s, American oligarchs are scrambling to strip their imperial vessel (and vassals) for parts so that they will have as much wealth and power as possible during this turbulent transition of American decline.
The Empire's usual tactics of diplomatic coercion and neo-liberal austerity haven't extracted as much tribute as desired by American capital, so now the oligarchs are resorting to shake downs and more direct forms of bullying and extortion.
In order to extract a greater supply of tribute in more aggressive ways than past Republicans and Democrats, Trump relies on political tactics of a narcissistic bully who normalises abuse. To defeat a bully like Trump, we need to understand the tactics of narcissistic abusers like him and what responses work and don't work.
Trump destabilises his targets to make them easier to control. Reasserting the illusion of control is Trump's goal. Never lose sight of this when he makes ridiculous proposals without a workable plan to achieve them. Trump hasn't read all 900 pages of Project 2025. He doesn't really care about the shape of specific outcomes or how to win them. His mercurial means and capricious ends change like the wind. What matters to Trump is that he is seen to be using power to gain more power precisely because he, and the racist American Empire he represents, is incredibly insecure about losing it.
Trump threatens tariffs one day, pauses them the next but keeps the threat on the table. This is an erratic, destabilising show of power.
Remember when Trump talked about banning TikTok in 2020? He eventually got his way with the help of Biden, only to bring TikTok back once he returned to the White House. And now Trump hopes TikTok gets taken over by the broligarchs of Silicon Valley. Another erratic, destabilising show of power.
Trump quickly negotiated a ceasefire in Gaza to upstage the genocide-enabling Democrats. Before the first stage of the ceasefire was complete, Trump announced plans of ethnic cleansing so brash that he even surprised Netanyahu who has an arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Erratic, destabilising show of power yet again.
The same goes for plans to turn Guantanamo Bay into a concentration camp for 30,000 migrants. Or talk of annexing Panama, Greenland, Canada, Gaza, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico.
It doesn't matter to Trump whether his proposals are legal or even achievable. What matters is that political opponents, pundits, and populations are destabilised, blind-sided, put on the back foot, confused, and left scratching their heads trying to figure out if there's a method to the madness.
There is. Populations are easier to control when they are exhausted, overwhelmed, and confused by too many erratic displays of nonsense to keep track of.
Take Trump's tariffs on Canada, for example. Whether or not he starts, pauses, or resumes a trade war with a close ally isn't the point. The confusion is designed to manipulate junior imperial partners like Canada and have them accept an even more subservient role within a declining American Empire.
Provoking a defensive reaction is the goal of bullies. Whether the reaction is fawning, fighting, freezing, or fleeing, Trump wins.
Of course, Trump would prefer the usual fawning and appeasing reactions exemplified by useful idiots like Jordan Peterson. Simply capitulate and become the 51st state of the American Empire.
Trump also doesn't mind a fighting reaction. Reactive fighting shouldn't be confused with effective political resistance, but often is. This is when junior imperial partners start mirroring the abuse and hitting back with their own tariffs, tightening of borders, and forms of nationalism epitomised by Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's "Team Canada" approach isn't much better. Trump still wins in this scenario, because the victim adopts the same economic and nationalistic logic of the abuser, becoming even more co-dependent on the bully's system. Even when Trump is gone, the system remains.
Canadian capitalists are almost as duplicitous as Trump. They'll say "we're all in this together" to redirect consumer spending and bolster their corporate profits. At the same time, we know these profits won't trickle down to Canadian workers who create this wealth in the first place. And the profits certainly won't go back to First Nations whose resource rich lands are the basis of Canadian wealth. If anything, emboldened Canadian corporations riding a wave of nationalistic sentiment will feel empowered to extract more profit through wage suppression, layoffs "in the national interest," deregulated trade between Canadian provinces, and other modes of squeezing the working class and oppressed. Mirroring Trump's abuse by empowering Canadian corporations to squeeze more profit from workers and Indigenous people will just make Canada even more co-dependent with capitalist bullies. Reactively fighting MAGA chauvinism with Canadian corporate nationalism will not make things better for anyone except oligarchs on both sides of the border.
Junior partners of the American Empire can also freeze with overwhelm, but this allows the bullies to strip the victims of their assets in the way Naomi Klein describes in "The Shock Doctrine."
The same outcome can be achieved by bullies if citizens flee into apathy, individualism, localism, clicktivism, or any other politically impotent form that hasn't worked to turn the neo-liberal tide or fend off its neo-fascist offspring.
The Anglo-Western left has largely abandoned the party form to counter the political power of neo-liberal and neo-fascist capitalism. This has been a colossal mistake. Even the leftist critics who correctly resist nationalism are stopping short of articulating the type of organisational form that is needed to resist Trump and help co-ordinate international solidarity efforts. There might be vague talk about the need for independent or international working class solidarity, but few specifics are offered about the program, scale, and organisational form that is necessary to overcome Trump's politics of bullying.
In the absence of militant left parties that could build and co-ordinate international resistance, union leaders in Canada are partnering with corporations in much the same way the Teamsters' president embraced Trump at the Republican Convention. The working class needs reliable leftist parties to ensure unions, workers, and the oppressed aren't captured by and redirected into the very forces that are screwing them over in the first place.
Amidst the chaos and confusion created by Trump, people are losing their memory of effective resistance. The level of collective amnesia is startling. Too many progressives have forgotten how New Deal reforms were won. Improved living standards were only extracted from capitalists after World War II when the latter were scared of losing state power to the organised masses. People didn't just organise social movements, which are necessary but insufficient. People also had well developed political parties that were learning how to effectively organise like successful revolutionaries overseas. President Roosevelt was scared that anti-capitalists would take power if a deal wasn't struck with them. Much progress came from the New Deal. But after the global protests of 1968, much of the new left mistakenly believed protests would be enough to secure gains and further the cause. Unfortunately, they were wrong.
State capitalists have learned how to manage protests that go nowhere. Our protests are largely directionless and ineffective because there are no well developed political parties of the left to channel the political energy of crowds and convert it into institutional and state power. Millions can take to the streets as they did in a futile effort to stop the war on Iraq, but policies and economics stay in line with the same systems of exploitation, oppression, and imperialism. Without leftist political alternatives for capitalists to fear, the genocidal neo-liberals and neo-fascists take turns looting the national treasury while the public goes down with the ship.
We should know what not to do by now: Don't get stuck in trauma reactions that would have us retreat into comfortable yet ineffective forms of nationalism or even predictable forms of protest that go nowhere.
But what is to be done?
The best response is to not react to the bully. Stop and take pause. Acknowledge each other's feelings and frustrations. Vent with supportive comrades, and do whatever works to regulate your emotions so you can think clearly and get some historical memory back. Then reflect on why the mask is coming off the US Empire, and why Trump is exaggerating his power through a show of force with all his executive orders. He is desperately trying to assert dominance and control precisely because the US is losing it.
Think about the role Canada has played as a junior partner in US imperialism. Self-reflect and ask if this is really a role Canada should continue to play or if it would be better to become an international partner among equals, which respects the sovereignty of other nations, including First Nations at home and Palestinians abroad.
Even from a purely pragmatic or self-interested perspective, think about whether it's worth going down with the sinking ship of America's declining empire, or if it would be better to realign with other international partners who could help forge a more just path between Western capitalism and the BRICS.
Finally, think about what organisational form is required to co-ordinate alternatives on a mass scale and build the kind of international solidarity that's required. Then carefully and deliberately build mutual protection in the power of organised resistance groups and cadres that are willing to scale up into parties and coalitions that can tackle capitalism's poly-crises of inequality, genocide, and ecocide.
If we really want to disarm a bully like Trump, take away what he wants. He wants defensive reactions to his projections and accusations so that everyone but himself looks like the problem. He wants control, drama, and attention whether it's negative or positive. All of it supplies his ego. Don't give it. He doesn't care if we point out that the emperor has no clothes so long as people think of him as the emperor. There are countless ways to de-throne this imposter.
Poke fun at Trump's over-inflated sense of power and importance. Show how bored you are with his really big signatures on executive orders. Flirt with the idea of developing fair trade deals with countries like Mexico and Cuba. Make NAFTA completely redundant. Withdraw from NATO and combat racism and xenophobia instead. Develop better diplomatic and economic relations with Trump's geopolitical targets in Africa and Asia. Build good infrastructure like China. Import the latter's better and cheaper electric vehicles that will make Tesla swasticars obsolete. If people are willing to boycott US goods because of tariffs, then they should be consistent and boycott, divest, and sanction Israel because of genocide. Support Palestinians in their efforts to rebuild Gaza, reclaim their land, and assert their sovereignty. Engage in mutual aid with neighbours at home to weather the impacts of higher costs of living. Organise with co-workers to democratise your workplaces, take the wealth you create back from your bosses, and take more control of your daily lives. Build new political parties and coalitions that can institute the best alternatives being developed in social movements and communities of justice. Be open and proud of doing these things because they are good and right to do in themselves, and because they build a better world than anything a dying Empire has to offer. Courageously flaunt these social achievements in the face of Trump, his MAGA enablers, and the faux "Resistance" that is peddling corporate nationalism as an "alternative" to what, exactly? Trump's national chauvinism and capitalist triumphalism? Demoralise the nationalistic oligarchs across all borders by taking away their sense of power and importance.
Whatever we do, authoritarians will continue lashing out, and we will need to stand in solidarity with the most vulnerable. But Trump and his enablers will also begin to self-implode as all narcissists do when we take away the things that supply their egos and illusions of control. They will continue revealing their insecurities, and we need to be politically astute enough in those moments to displace their politics of bullying with a politics of solidarity.
We have a chance to change the world here. Let's not squander it by retreating into false comforts offered by faux progressives, nationalists, and neo-liberal capitalists. These are the covert narcissists who want imperialism with a human face. They paved the way for overt narcissists like Trump and Musk who are simply taking off the mask of Imperial America to show us what a dying Empire really looks like.
When faced with covert narcissists on one side and overt narcissists on the other, don't collaborate with either of them. They're both brick walls that block social progress whenever they can. It would be better to outwit both kinds of bullies by collectively organising at the scale that's required to achieve social, economic, ecological, and international justice.
It may feel like we're outnumbered and overwhelmed by authoritarian forces all around us. While in survival mode, it might be tempting to react without thinking. But unreflective reaction risks defeat in moments like this.
If we pause to think and understand the weakness and desperation in Trump's authoritarian tactics, we should be able to see openings on the horizon that can lead to a better future, no matter how narrow those paths might be. There is a whole world of internationalists over that horizon who want a better future than what Western corporatists and oligarchs want. There is still a path to slip between these bullies and build that better world. It's ours for the taking if we do the work together.
Battle of Sutjeska Memorial Monument Complex in the Valley of Heroes, Tjentište, Republic of Srpska, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Former Yugoslavia. Designed by Miodrag Živković &
Ranko Radović. Completed in 1971.
Context of memorial: In 1943, an Axis coalition of 127,000 Italian-German-Croatian-Bulgarian fascists encircled 22,000 Yugoslav Partisans, including their leader Tito. Outnumbered 6-1, the Partisans used their local knowledge to fend off the attackers and escape the valley under bombardment by over 300 Axis aircraft. One third of the Partisans suffered casualties, including Tito who was wounded in action. Fascists executed over 2,500 civilians, but the battle marked a turning point for the Partisans. Despite great losses, the Partisans repelled the Axis offensive. The survivors went on to unite with fragmented pockets of resistance and win the support of the civilian population. Together, they liberated Yugoslavia from fascist occupation. After the war, they built a vibrant worker self-directed economy. Principles of anti-fascism, worker self-management, and decolonisation would inspire Yugoslavia to unite the Global South in the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War. The monument reminds us that even when the odds were against us another way was possible, and still is.
Simon Božič-Dougherty is a political theorist and organiser who was raised by Yugoslav and Irish parents in Canada. He has worked in trades, aged care, education, politics, media, unions, and social justice organisations. Simon migrated to Australia where he completed his doctoral thesis on "The Art of Political Solidarity." He is now raising his children with his partner on Ngunnawal land with the support of friends and comrades, near and far.
Comments