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With the US election approaching faster than a speeding plastic bullet it's important to draw up a balance sheet of the Trump era that isn't based on liberal hyperventilation and leftist fantasies about the phantoms of fascism.
So how are we to asses Trumps Presidency? Lets start off by looking at the themes and policies that Trump promoted on the campaign trail in 2016 and how these have born out whilst he has been in office.
The campaign in 2016 saw Trump focus on 4 key issues that he kept hitting that saw him easily beat the republicans in the primary and did enough to overhaul Clinton. These were:
1) Immigration
2) Trade Deals
3) Recreating manufacturing
4) Reorienting US foreign policy
1) Immigration
2) Trade Deals
3) Recreating manufacturing
4) Reorienting US foreign policy
Let us deal with these one at a time:
On immigration the promise of "build the wall" turned into ashes before Trump had even got behind the desk in the Oval Office. The biggest factor in the failure here is that he simply did not have the support within the republicans for it.
On immigration the promise of "build the wall" turned into ashes before Trump had even got behind the desk in the Oval Office. The biggest factor in the failure here is that he simply did not have the support within the republicans for it.
The GOP leaders talk a big game on immigration and the leftist panic mongering about it helps them do this. In reality though the GOP leaders are just as committed to an economy with very low wages and an easily cowed workforce as the democrats are.
This means that the GOP might sound off on immigration and even give a nod and wink to white IDPol every now and again but they know that waves of migration are crucial to keeping wages low. Trump therefore dialled up the role of ICE and CBP but that was also being done by Obama.
The role of ICE and CBP is not as the leftists imagine, to institute Trumps reich, but to act as a labour discipline force. Employing large amounts of illegal and semi-legal labour is great for profits and even better when they have the threat of deportation hanging over them.
Therefore ICE and CBP are best seen as instruments of the employers to prevent workforces with large numbers of migrant labourers unionising. The hysteria over ICE is just performative nonsense from the left. Their weeping and moralising misses the brutal capitalist reality.
Trump is therefore stymied on the wall. The "Muslim ban" was always more about PR than anything else and was a show piece designed to get the left involved in a fake fight over a fake policy. A tactic that worked perfectly in that respect.
Trade - This was an issue Trump drew on a lot of the same messaging as Ross Perot did in 1992. Of course taking a message that the working class Americans had been screwed by trade deals that sent jobs to Mexico and China is going to be popular.
The GOP primary opponents and Clinton were all on record as supporting some truly dreadful trade policies so it was an easy point to score and won Trump a good deal of working class support that other GOP nominees wouldn't have got.
Again though this turned to dust as soon as he entered office. The "renegotiated" NAFTA was just renamed and very little else was done to it. The TPP was dropped but Trump had the advantage that it had still not passed by the time he got in so he didn't have to do anything.
The trade war with China is a new development but not unique to the Trump era. TPP was not just a free trade scheme but represented the next stage in Obama's "pivot to Asia" which was a scheme designed to isolated Chinese development and expansion in the area.
So for all Trumps talk of China being the big threat he is (again) continuing themes from the Obama era as the contradictions between the US and Chinese ruling class's become ever larger.
The trade war has been a failure in terms of bringing back manufacturing jobs, as it was never going to, and has damaged Trumps standing with US farmers who face barriers to shipping agricultural produce to China. It also hasn't significantly damaged the Chinese economy.
Which leads us to the question of manufacturing. Trumps promises here, yet again, were turned to dust by the fact that neither party in congress supports the huge economic interventions that would be needed to rebuild manufacturing capacity.
The globalisaton of US capital means that the American bourgeoisie now have huge interests outside of the USA more than ever before. The opposition to Trump is based around this. Beyond all the noise of the "resistance" and their leftist codpieces what it comes down to is this.
What made Trump unacceptable to the ruling class at first was the fact that he did represent an anti-globalisation sentiment in 2016. He did bring working class issues into the political process in a way that hadn't been done for decades.
His promise to draw down troop levels was also popular in poorer areas that have large numbers of military personnel with families within them. Trump thus ran head long into the interests of American state monopoly capitalism and thus the US empire.
All the opposition to Trump (and I do mean all of it) has been marshalled by the forces in the US ruling class that are the most dangerous and imperialistic. Trumps economic nationalism never stood a cat in hells chance of succeeding but it needed to be destroyed politically.
So Russia-gate was designed to push Trump away from withdrawal in key areas of the world. The hysterical screams of "fascism" were wheeled out to oppose any restrictions on immigration and a information war was kept up against Trump to ensure that he stayed within GOP control.
Trumps failure here is rooted in the utopianism of the American conservative nationalist project he (perhaps unwittingly) found himself at the head of. His promise to return the USA to the era of fordist mass production and social harmony were always going to fail.
What is instructive about the Trump era though is that (just as with Brexit here in Britain) the US ruling class were able to rely on the left to hysterically defend every centre of US imperial power in the guise of "opposition" to Trump.
With this in mind I must agree with the sentiment expressed by @tereseaimee that the US and British left is now merely capitalisms "moral laundromat" and little more.
