Book Review: Kevin A Young,Michael Schwartz and Richard Lachmann (eds) Trump and the Deeper Crisis

The pornographic quality of Donald Trump’s stage persona – his effrontery and immunity to shame enthralling to some while repellent to others – already before his presidential candidacy had prompted a conservative columnist to coin the neologism ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ in response to patrician disgust at his vulgarity and coarseness (Goldberg 2015). Today, this posture undergirds most conventional news coverage, pruriently exploiting Trump’s egregiousness of manner and rhetoric alongside trenchant advocacy of liberal norms far beyond any pretence of objectivity. Trump’s routine lying, his dismissal of unfavourable reportage as ‘fake news’ and disparagement of individual journalists and news outlets has been used to justify such editorialising. His Bonapartist proclivities culminated in the storming of Congress on 6 January 2021, but are all his supporters to be simply dismissed as ‘deplorables’?

An increasingly divided US ruling class confronts both relative and absolute decline globally. Its domestic economic base, hollowed out by decades of deindustrialisation, is increasingly exposed as an elaborate conjuring trick resting ultimately upon the projection of military and financial power. This is increasingly difficult to sustain, due to a succession of lost wars and expensive military equipment failures (Martyanov 2021), and overreliance on weaponisation of the dollar and other economic sanctions that incentivise other states to seek and develop viable alternatives (Demarais 2022; see also Bina 2023; Lachmann 2020).

As Kevin Young writes in the introduction, Trump is symptomatic of a much deeper crisis, decades in the making. Continuities across presidential administrations are highlighted, while the partisan theatrics that facilitate policy shifts through such techniques as the ‘radical flank effect’ (p. 34) are exposed. Trump’s extremism often enabled diluted versions of his policies to appear palatable by comparison. His ‘aggressive, rude, loudmouthed, and surprisingly candid political style . . . made previously unpopular policies appear as victories for the left’ (p. 43). Joshua Murray’s example of the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 is particularly well chosen because the Agreement itself is so ineffectual that President Biden’s reversal of Trump’s withdrawal is of negligible import.

Other chapters discuss Trump and racism (Malik Miah), Trump’s unlikely alliance with White evangelicals (Grace Yukich), immigration policy trends that transcend Trump’s overtly xenophobic rhetoric (Justin Akers Chacón), the US health care system and its failures during the COVID-19 pandemic (Colin Gordon), and ruling class divisions over fossil fuel use (Kevin Young).

Concerning foreign policy, Corey Payne and Beverly Silver note, ‘as President, Trump acted more like a mafioso than a statesman, with an approach to foreign allies that had more in common with a protection racket than a partnership’ (p. 160). In this respect, Trump is hardly unique, following Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush. In 1973, Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger downgraded intelligence cooperation with Britain, threatened troop withdrawal from West Germany, and even promised ‘to use his influence on Wall Street to “wreck” the French economy’ (Robb 2013: 88). Trump’s querying of North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) continued existence amid European allies’ free riding was already an issue for Kissinger decades ago (Anderson 2023: 10), and again for George W. Bush’s final and Barack Obama’s first Secretary of Defense, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) head Robert Gates (Blitz 2011).

Nor were Trump’s open displays of contempt for protocol a ‘complete aberration’ but instead ‘the culmination of a decades-long process that transformed US foreign policy from a regime of “legitimate protection” in the mid-twentieth century to a “protection racket” by the beginning of the twenty-first century’ (p. 160). Biden’s outbursts concerning world leaders as ‘thugs’, ‘killers’ and ‘pariahs’ have done little to restore decorum, let alone security, but instead seriously damaged US–Saudi relations (McKernan 2022), intensified restrictions on trade with China, and threaten all-out war with Russia and eventually China, with a Global South pointedly remaining neutral. These are exceedingly dangerous times.

As Malik Miah observes,

US capitalism under Biden as much as under Trump and those who came before is contingent on the functioning of imperialism: the state-led advancement of US economic, geopolitical, and military interests of the US capitalist class against rivals and opposition movements in subjected or dominated countries. (p. 97)

This linkage provides important clues as to the one policy area in which Trump represented a genuine, substantive rupture with the policy consensus and in which he was eventually and decisively defeated – an aspect largely neglected by the book.

The panic over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election effectively poisoned all efforts to pursue any sort of détente with Russia. Indeed, it ‘deformed Trump’s presidency’ even before it began (Cohen 2022: 157). Trump’s repeated efforts to establish a more cooperative relationship provoked hysterical accusations of treason. Democratic Party leaders and their media supporters seized on this and other relatively minor transgressions ‘while largely ignoring his most harmful actions’ (Kevin Young, p. 12), many of which are analysed here.

This was widely understood: ‘Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign skilfully spoke to many Americans’ discontents with the effects of their government’s efforts to maintain hegemony’ (p. 180). Yet, underlining Cohen’s observations, Richard Lachmann explains that while it is easy to deploy military forces, ‘it is much harder for US presidents to withdraw troops from war zones unilaterally. The military elite remains the main obstacle’ (p. 185).

This is a worthy collection of class-based analyses of the contemporary US political economy, placing Trumpism in historical and material context. It is also a fitting tribute to its co-editor Richard Lachmann, who died suddenly as the book was in press.