Analysis
‘Consequences for the rest of our lives’ – Trump remakes the US in his image
Ocasio Cortez: ‘We have had an enormous setback in this election, because the fascists won a lot of working-class support, which has happened before in history.’
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” wrote Bernie Sanders in a scathing post-election analysis.
The Vermont senator was referring to the collapse of Democratic turnout (67 million voters compared to 81 million four years ago), while turnout on Trump’s side held relatively steady (72 million, compared to 74 million in 2020).
According to Sanders, this was the result of a system calibrated to favor the prevailing oligarchies in both parties, while lower incomes have been stagnant for decades. Paradoxically, the “protest vote” Trump offered only favored a competing plutocracy, one which is heavily invested in robotics and artificial intelligence, the next big threats workers are facing.
To quote Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the upcoming Trump term promises to be a “very, very, very difficult, challenging time” that “will have consequences for the rest of our lives“: “there’s no going back” from going over 2 degrees Celsius of global warming, the New York congresswoman added in reference to Trump’s announced abandonment of environmental policies.
Meanwhile, confirmation came from the GOP camp that passing tax cuts would be a top priority, a prize agreed upon with the “sponsor” class featuring new and even deeper cuts in taxes paid by corporations. In his first term, Trump had signed a $2 trillion tax gift by lowering corporate rates from 35% to 21%. Now a further reduction down to 15% is planned.
In short, it will be a continuation of the policies of Trump’s first term, which gave a tax cut of $60,000 a year to the top 1 percent of incomes but only $500 to the bottom 60 percent. And the cuts will add $9 trillion to the public deficit, with the full-throated approval of the party that used to stand for fiscal restraint.
“Project 2025,” the government program drafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, leaves no doubt about the fundamentalist and ultra-neoliberal agenda of the second Trump term.
The key element looming is the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” the notion coined by Steve Bannon.
Under cover of the crusade against the “deep state,” Trump will move quickly to remove all bureaucratic constraints on his own power. The playbook includes purging the state apparatus with extensive staff cuts and replacing it with a much-reduced bureaucracy of Trump loyalists (20,000 names have been identified for this purpose, in a vast selection operation that used AI technology contracted from Larry Ellison's Oracle).
Thus, there’s nothing surprising about Robert Kennedy Jr.'s statements that “entire departments” of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “will have to go.” The crusade of the anti-vax scion of the honored Democratic dynasty is part of a broader war on regulatory agencies. Kennedy has aligned himself with the conspiracist attacks that have been aimed particularly against Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Health (NIH). Many Republicans have spoken about possibly prosecuting him based on those theories, which might be a test case for Trump's stated intention to use the judiciary to punish political opponents such as Nancy Pelosi or “traitor” Liz Cheney.
At the same time, the recruitment process for potential cabinet members has begun. Before the election, John Kelly, former chief of staff in the first Trump administration, together with 13 other former staff members, issued a public warning about Trump's “fascism.” This time, the executive apparatus will be reserved for loyalists.
The selection of would-be department heads and secretaries has been contracted out in part to Howard Lutnick, the billionaire CEO of the Cantor Fitzgerald financial services company. He’s working together with Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner (who proposed building luxury hotels in Gaza after Israel manages to “move the people out and then clean it up”). Lutnick will “pre-select” potential candidates based on the dictates of corporate efficiency (which will presumably also apply to the plan for the announced mass deportations, which will start “immediately” after the inauguration).
Amid the crony-friendly environment of the presidential transition, there will undoubtedly also be a role for Elon Musk. Although the details still haven’t been worked out, his skills as an “expert at firing people” are expected to be put to use, in the name of government “efficiency” (he himself has promised he can get the federal budget cut down by a third).
In their speeches to the country on Thursday, both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris spoke of the American experiment as something that went beyond the fortunes of one party or the other. But they might be proved wrong this time by the upcoming late-capitalist experiment that promises to be a regime with affinities to the U.S.’s two antagonistic superpowers, Russia and China.
In her own address, Ocasio-Cortez stressed the urgent need to rebuild: “We have had an enormous setback in this election, because the fascists won a lot of working-class support, which has happened before in history.”
“Our entire system is consumed by big money, by billionaires, by lobbyists … Donald Trump works for Elon Musk, he works for Jeff Bezos, he works for the oil execs,” she added.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/tempi-cupi-il-trump-bis-e-plenipotenziario on 2024-11-08