For the past two weeks scores of opeds and political analyses have insisted that the US has lost its mind; that it has slipped into a kind of mania that has changed it into something completely alien to itself and unrecognisable to us. Well, yes and no. Of course, I concede that the speed at which Donald Trump’s handlers have moved has been dazzling and has definitely upended many preconceptions.
For instance, I was taught by Hollywood that should rights ever start being rolled back in the US, liberals would spring into action. Now I know that when neofeudalism comes knocking on the door the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy simply sighs, makes sure its portfolio is tech-heavy, and goes back to trying to find ways to keep Benjamin Netanyahu out of jail.
It’s also been a confusing week at home, as many of the people who pillory the ANC for keeping our economy on its knees finally had their lies about land confiscations and white genocide ventilated in Washington and promptly caused the rand to sag. Say what you like about AfriForum, but even their critics now have to admit that it is an organisation with the clout to move international markets.
But some of the shock seems misplaced, not least because the plan now unfolding in the US has been signposted so clearly for so long. The Trump administration might be furiously deleting mentions of some vaccines, LGBTQ+ healthcare and the identities of 1,500 insurrectionists from federal websites, but its sales pitch is still up on countless news sites: Project 2025 and its plan to turn the US into Bible Disney; the urgent scapegoating of immigrants to make sure billionaires don’t pay their taxes; the lionising of convicted insurrectionists as political prisoners; appointing unelected officials to positions of executive power; and, of course, the supercharging of already-endemic corruption.
In the past fortnight the reaction from some liberals has been one of startled betrayal, as if Trump ran on a platform of progressive grooviness and then ripped off a rubber Bernie Sanders mask to reveal his true agenda, instead of Maga writing everything in letters 10-feet tall and then asking the voters what they thought. The answer was clear. The largest group of voters decided they couldn’t really be arsed either way, and didn’t vote at all. The second-largest group said they liked what they saw, or could at least stomach it. And here we are.
As for the supposed new direction the US is going, well, that too doesn’t seem particularly new. In fact one might argue that the US is merely returning to its traditional relationship with the world: that of a bartender in an Old West saloon, pointing grimly up at the sign that reads, CASH ONLY, TRESPASSERS & FURNURS LIABLE TO GIT SHOT.
Certainly, Thomas Jefferson couldn’t have made it any clearer when he urged the country in the early 1800s to adopt as its motto “Commerce with all nations, alliance with none”: from overt isolationism and vacillating noninterventionism, the story of the US until World War 2 has, except for some colonial high jinks south of the border, been profoundly inward-looking.
In fact, if we’re talking about historical anomalies or aberrations, it’s not the current Trumpian moment that’s the outlier but rather the past 80 years’ Pax Americana, a Latin phrase that means “Terms and conditions apply: your Peace™ subscription will depend on how you vote, whether you have oil, or if you are just trying to exist in Cambodia.”
Even the US’s entry into World War 2 — the moment it took up the mantle of Defender of Freedom (T&Cs and so on) — was touch and go until Pearl Harbor: in May 1940, as Nazi Germany rolled across Western Europe, a Gallup poll showed that 93% of Americans wanted to stay out of the war, with the America First Committee established a few months later to lobby for nonintervention.
(Henry Ford, one of that group’s most prominent members and an eager publisher of anti-Semitic tracts, is the only American praised in Mein Kampf. Luckily we’ve moved on since then: just imagine if the world’s most famous carmaker agreed with someone on X that Jews harbour “hatred towards whites”, or did a Hitler salute on live TV! He’d be cancelled at once, right? Because cancel culture is out of control, right?)
No, so far all of this “new” America is mostly the old America. It’s even rolled out the old Gilded Age foreign policy playbook, in which the US avoided conflicts with large powers (anyone heard about China or Russia lately?) while threatening small ones (Denmark! Panama! SA! Report to Daddy’s office!)
All of this said, however, this new iteration of America First does seem to have deviated from the source material in two notable ways. It seems intent not on refining the state but on dismantling it, presumably to remove legislative and legal impediments to Big Tech and Big Church: the state, after all, is the only thing preventing Amazon from working people to death or creationism from being taught in primary school science classes.
More intriguingly, there is the question of who fills the void once the US pulls back. China? The ever-expanding Brics? Some new formation just over the horizon? Trump has taken his ball and gone home, but the game goes on …
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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