America’s voters have signalled profound discontent with their governing elites by returning to office a felonious former president with an avowedly revolutionary agenda.
If implemented, it will see the most radical shift in how the US engages with the world since 1945.
That “if” is a huge one though. There is a track record. President re-elect Donald Trump came into office the first time round determined to shake up the status quo after he unexpectedly took control of a Republican party, whose leaders he saw as increasingly indistinguishable from Democrats.
In his view, both parties had mired the US in disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had lost control of the country’s borders and streets, and had sat back as corporate America shipped well-paying jobs, working-class dignity and industrial capacity to China, ignoring the dire economic and social fallout in the heartland.
Trump, an outsider, questioned conventional wisdom. Why were we subsidising European defence 25 years after the end of the Cold War? If Russia was still such a threat, why were the Germans making themselves so dependent on Russian gas rather than buying liquefied natural gas from US frackers?
If we got off our high horses in dealing with Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, might we not find a mutually beneficial way to get along, and be in a better position to deter China’s neo-imperial ambitions in East Asia?
In 2016 the time was ripe for a reappraisal of US doctrine, but as would become clear over the next four years, Trump did not have the temperament, focus or leadership skills to drive one, let alone manage a coherent strategy based on the results.
There is no reason to suppose he has acquired the needed qualities in the interim. So what can we expect? A good bet is chaos.
The agenda Trump has sold American voters is, as noted at the top, revolutionary. Topping it is a deep purge of the federal bureaucracy, including those parts of it devoted to international relations, and the installation of cadres who have proven their loyalty to the leader by subscribing to the myth that he actually won re-election in 2020.
Trump will seek to appoint an attorney-general who is willing to wreak revenge on his opponents, “the enemies within”. The Trumpist vanguard and institutional Washington will be at war in the courts and the media, if not the streets, from day one.
The front Trump assembled to win the election is faction-ridden and unsustainable. One reason tech billionaires such as Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos threw in their lot with him was to shield themselves from the populists who see them as bloodsucking monopolists. They also want to keep their snouts in the federal trough without having to replenish it with higher taxes.
If Robert Kennedy Jnr, a crank, is really put in charge of agencies responsible for public health and tries to interfere with childhood vaccine programmes and water fluoridation, there will be huge blowback.
While Trump has a mandate for change, whether that covers the $2-trillion in budget cuts Musk is promising to find in some as-yet-undefined capacity with the new administration remains to be seen. There’s a reason the US deficit is out of control. Fiscal austerity is no-one’s dish of tea.
An early crisis in civilian-military relations cannot be ruled out if Trump follows through on threats to use the army against undocumented immigrants and protesters. His relations with the top brass are fraught. Generals who served in his first administration were among the loudest voices declaring him unfit to lead a second.
Whatever else he is, and however violent his language, Trump is not, I believe, a warmonger. Having eluded the Vietnam draft on a false claim of bad feet, he distrusts the military and militarists.
His creature, Stephen Miller, who will likely be overseeing the immigrant round-up, recently tweeted: “This isn’t complicated. If you vote for Kamala, Liz Cheney becomes secretary of defence. We invade a dozen countries. Boys in Michigan are drafted to fight boys in the Middle East. Millions die. We invade Russia. We invade nations in Asia. World War III. Nuclear winter.”
Liz Cheney, a rare Republican holdout against Trumpism who campaigned for and with Kamala Harris, is the daughter of Dick Cheney who, as the younger George Bush’s “veep”, bears much of the responsibility for the invasion of Iraq after 9/11 and its catastrophic consequences. As such she is if anything more of an anathema to hard-core Maga than Harris herself.
One could argue that Miller’s tweet, ridiculously overblown as it was, was nothing more than a Putin talking point, further proof of Trump’s affinity for the Russian autocrat. There can be no doubt that Putin deployed his intelligence services to help him.
However, it does not automatically follow that Trump is acting in bad faith or is a witting Russian asset in seeking a speedy end to the war in Ukraine. Rather, his instinct is to minimise what he sees as America’s fruitless foreign entanglements, taking his party back to its pre-1940 isolationist roots to the extent he can in a shrinking, interdependent world.
The implications for SA are unfathomable at this point. If Trump returns the GOP to the era of president William McKinley at the close of the 19th century, when the federal government relied heavily on tariffs to fund itself, the trick will be to ensure SA’s continued exemption under the African Growth & Opportunity Act, or whatever replaces it. Musk could be helpful if he keeps Trump and vice-president elect JD Vance’s ears.
• Barber is a freelance journalist based in Washington.
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