AS PROMISED, Donald Trump has kicked off his presidency with a show of “speed and strength.” Citing what he has called a “massive” mandate, complete with a “powerful win in all seven swing states and the popular vote,” Trump has launched what his allies termed a strategy of “shock and awe,” alluding to the massive bombing campaign that made way for the US invasion of Iraq.
Trump unleashed a blitz of dozens of executive orders on everything from pulling the United States out of global agreements and rescinding Biden-era directives, to laying the groundwork for a large-scale purge of the federal workforce and taking aim at conservative bugbears like birthright citizenship and wind energy.
In short, it seems like the worst fears of what a second Trump presidency would mean are coming true: of an unstoppable right-wing wrecking ball that will leave a very different country behind in the ruins of what it’s smashed. This is certainly what the president would want his demoralized opposition to believe.
But for all the big talk, both Trump’s presidency and his political project are more fragile than either side realizes.
Trouble in the Coalition
For one, cracks are already starting to show in Trump’s coalition, having appeared before he was even inaugurated.
Late last year, a nasty split formed between the immigration-restrictionist, “America First” segment of his support, and the H-1B visa–supporting billionaire cohort, represented by people like Vivek Ramaswamy (now excommunicated for running down working Americans in a tweet) and Elon Musk.
Musk, in particular, has become a flash point. Having used his $277 million boost to Trump’s campaign to worm his way into Trump’s inner circle and seemingly become the new president’s adviser, spokesman, and unofficial appointee all in one, he has already stepped on Trump’s toes once, leading the charge to torpedo a congressional deal over the debt ceiling at the last minute that preempted Trump himself.
Musk’s inordinate influence in the movement he only really joined half a year ago quickly rankled longtime MAGA figures like Steve Bannon, who has vowed to have Musk “run out of here” and complained about US policy being shaped by “the most racist people on earth, white South Africans,” referring to Musk and several other South African tech venture capitalists.
Trump and his team’s tolerance for Musk already seemed to be wearing thin just a week out from the election. Since then, Trump put out a somewhat undignified statement denying that he had “ceded the presidency to Musk,” and now the tech billionaire just siphoned off vital oxygen from the president’s big day by drawing headlines at the inauguration for bizarrely doing what one prominent white supremacist celebrated as a “straight-up, like, ‘Sieg Heil’” salute. The fact that fissures like these were opening up before Trump had even taken office is an especially ominous sign for the president, who has been lecturing Republicans that they need to “stick together” if they want to be successful.
Trouble Managing Crises
Another potential vulnerability for Trumpworld is that the president is inheriting several potential crises.
On the home front, Trump inherits the fallout of several historic natural disasters, including ongoing destructive wildfires in California, the state that contributes 14 percent of the country’s GDP — the state is now in need of vital aid, which Trump and his allies have threatened to turn into a political football, and which one of his anti-immigrant executive orders has already jeopardized. That’s not to mention the countless other emergencies that could pop up during his term, from the inevitable next set of climate disasters to the next financial crash. It pays to remember that while his predecessor may have performed dismally on disaster response, Trump wasn’t so hot in a crisis either, whether his botched response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico or the chaotic, deadly pandemic response that helped lose him the election five years ago.
Looking beyond US shores, the Gaza cease-fire may have taken a major political headache off Trump’s plate for now, but with Benajmin Netanyahu threatening to restart the war in a few weeks — and Trump seemingly giving him the backing to do so — the horror in Gaza and all that comes with it could well end up transforming from Joe Biden’s disaster to Trump’s. Ditto with a possible war with Iran that Israel and its US lobby are planning to push Trump into.
In Ukraine, meanwhile, if Trump’s planned negotiations fall through and Russia simply continues to push forward on the battlefield to achieve its goals via military means, Trump will be put in the position of either accepting what would be framed as a US defeat or escalating US military involvement in the war and plunging Americans back into nuclear-tinged crisis to prevent it. Any of these would not only undo Trump’s loudly stated desire to establish a legacy as a “peacemaker” but would be a major betrayal of the war-weary public mood that brought him to power, slowly poisoning Trump’s domestic agenda the same way it did Biden’s.
Meanwhile, no one in Trumpworld so far seems to know or care that even if the president makes good on that peace agenda, it will do little to solve the core issue that brought him into the White House: popular anger at the spiraling cost of living. In fact, it could very well make it worse.
Trouble Delivering for American Workers
One of Trump’s signature issues, massive across-the-board tariffs on imports from the United States’ two closest neighbors and China, is tipped to make everything from vegetables and beer to toys, cars, and a host of other consumer goods more expensive.
At the same time, the centerpiece of his domestic agenda is another tax cut for the rich, which congressional Republicans plan to pay for by taking a hatchet to safety net programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
This self-contradictory effort has actually already begun, with one of the casualties of Trump’s rollback of “unpopular, inflationary, illegal, and radical practices” being a Biden directive to explore ways to lower prescription drug costs.
Trump and his team are betting that further unleashing fossil fuel production will do the trick to bring down prices. But the United States was already the largest fossil fuel producer in human history when prices were going crazy under Biden, and many of the drivers of the cost-of-living crisis — like surging housing costs and extortionate medical bills — aren’t due to a lack of fuel but are driven by greed.Whether Trump will go further than his Democratic predecessor’s underwhelming moves in checking that greed is doubtful.
Maybe the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Trump’s coming presidency is that he campaigned as the working man’s champion against the Washington swamp but has now handed the reins of government over to a group of creatures from that same swamp, namely the record thirteen billionaires named to his cabinet and the numerous others he gifted front-row seats to his inauguration to.
His machine-gun spray of executive orders has so far overwhelmingly advanced the goals of the same corporate-driven Project 2025 he thought was so politically toxic he distanced himself from it during the campaign.
Mind you, Trump is doing all this, and engaging in breathtaking new levels of graft, at the same time that a recent poll purporting to show public support for some of Trump’s views also found that large majorities of Americans across party lines believe the US political system is broken and exists to benefit the wealthy and elite. This poses a major possible vulnerability for Trump as he proceeds with what is shaping up to be a plutocratic agenda.
Don’t Give Trump What He Wants
Finally, though the conventional wisdom in Trump’s orbit now seems to be that his first term was simply done in by saboteurs and a vengeful establishment, this is looking back with rose-tinted glasses. Trump and his team were often their own worst enemies, saying and doing inflammatory things and pointlessly stirring up controversy in ways that hampered his presidency and undermined his public support.
Despite a brief flirtation with a more disciplined approach, plenty from both the campaign and these past few weeks — including the sudden U-turn on the debt ceiling deal that sent his own party scrambling — doesn’t suggest much has changed.
Underlying all this is that, whatever he might say in public, Trump isn’t actually coming into office with deep reserves of public support or even a particularly impressive mandate. In the end, Trump only won the election by a 1.5 point margin — half the Republican popular vote lead in the 2022 midterms, a performance that was considered a flop at the time. He begins his presidency with an approval rating higher than it was in 2017, but still well below the majority support US presidents have tended to start their terms with, and well below what Biden enjoyed when he was inaugurated in 2021. The TV ratings for Trump’s inauguration were way down from both that of his first term and four years ago.
This doesn’t exactly point to a thoroughly Trumpified public that is ready to grant Trump bottomless grace for a never-ending series of scandals and controversies. It reads more like an exhausted electorate that’s checked out, unhappy with politics, and which pulled the lever for Trump and Republicans in the vain hope they would at least do a better job than the other guys — and might be ready to throw them out too, if they don’t deliver.
It’s easy to forget that Biden and his people also came in riding high on an ambiguous (but substantially bigger) mandate, with grand ambitions of a populist presidency that would reshape the country, keep it out of overseas wars, and win its political future for their party by going big and fast on their agenda. They even enjoyed robust approval ratings after one hundred days.Then it all fell apart, as the Biden presidency bent and broke under its own internal contradictions, having handed government over to representatives of corporate America, struggled to keep its narrow majorities in line, pursued an agenda of trickle-down corporate handouts and safety net cuts, and found the lure of more US-involved conflicts too much to resist. It was not the first presidential campaign in US history to win and assume it would be forever ascendant only for it all to quickly come crashing down, and it will surely not be the last.
There is every chance that none of this comes true and that Trump and his people avoid these pitfalls and enjoy political success beyond their wildest dreams. But it’s at least just as likely that the Trump movement’s vulnerabilities and internal contradictions create openings for a well-organized and strategic opposition to exploit, just as Biden’s own constant unforced political errors did to his presidency. While Trump will no doubt do plenty of damage in the next four years, viewing him as a triumphant, indomitable conqueror may be exactly what he wants.
Culled from JACOBIN
