Trump knows he has taken over a fragile empire, ‘with clay feet’, weighed down by $40 trillion of debt - just under half the world's GDP, held in the portfolios of private individuals, funds, banks and central banks around the planet and does what he thinks every nation in a hyper-competitive world governed by the iron logic of capitalism should do: increase domestic productive capacity to improve the balance of trade, keep the value of the currency high to drain investment from abroad, colonise as much other territory as possible to gain access to cheap raw materials and to secure outlet markets for US-branded goods, maintain military supremacy (but without wasting it on ‘non-strategic’ conflicts such as the Ukrainian one), keep the morale of its people high in view of the bloodletting that will be imposed on them (welfare dismantling, inflation, consumer taxes). No little matter.

First to suffer are the people kept on the margins of the system: the immigrants, those within the fortified borders of the empire, and those who have no alternative but to hope to enter it. Second are the people in the peripheries of the global South who are trying to resist the robbery of their resources and labour. Moreover, - and this is the real news - it is the peoples of the vassal countries of the state constellation of the former North Atlantic imperial alliance who will no longer be able to enjoy the most favourable clauses in trade and military defence. Finally, every living being, human and non-human, will pay the consequences of the unbridled predation of land, oceans, forests, the Arctic, and space.

Obviously, in order to have a free hand in the real global competition that the empire is playing with China and other emerging countries, The Tramp has to tear up all agreements, treaties, international cooperation pacts and related inter-state institutions and agencies. The UN is first on the list. So is democratisation. Multi-polarity looks more like a saloon brawl than a harmonious dance.

The United States, having gained all it could get from the globalisation of goods and finance, is now forced by the ‘secular stagnation’ of profit rates to change course, to close ranks and try to start afresh. For this, they need some bread patriotic rhetoric, stadium crowds, divine investiture, the reinvention of the White Nation and a new great external enemy: China, the BRICS and their (for now only hypothesised) dollar-independent means of payment for international trade.

No, Trump is not a circus waffler, he follows a well-rehearsed script, and Trumpism is not an acolyte of shamans, stuffed with fake news from social channels and TV preachers. Just as the European right-wingers are not a romantic regurgitation of yesteryear. They have in their heads a design for a modern restoration of the natural order of things: breadwinners, taskmasters, plebiscised heads of state. Perhaps it is these things that unite Trump with Putin and, I fear, also with Xi Jinping.

The dangerous underestimation - by liberal democrats as well as social democrats - of the advent of right-wingers worldwide depends on the removal of the reasons behind their popular consensus. The various progressive political families and their maîtres à penser, well established in the academies and the mass media, are adrift, dazed and aphonious, because they refuse to admit the vertical fall of credibility and legitimacy of the liberal representative institutions they mythologised, shaped and misgoverned.

It is probably true: we are at a regime transition. The long golden age of Keynesian compromise in the former First World is over. We have entered stagflation. Not having taken this ‘terminal crisis’ (Emmanuel Todd, The Defeat of the West, Fazi, 2024) of the liberal-democratic social model seriously and in time has inevitably left behind a rising tide of dissatisfaction, resentment and hatred towards the ruling elites. From the slow decomposition of the ‘post-democracy’ (C. Crunch, 2003) arose the new monster of the supremacist, nationalist, patriarchal, neo-colonialist, xenophobic, sexist, classist and techno-modernist ‘white international’ - just to throw some stardust in the eyes! Until the social-democracies and liberal-democracies come to terms with the reasons for their failure - in all fields: socio-economic, geopolitical and, above all, common rules - they will never be able to understand and, therefore, cope with the new situation. The promises of prosperity (‘we will leave no one behind’), of peaceful export of democracy everywhere (but under the NATO umbrella), of green regeneration of the planet (but without eliminating fossil subsidies) have collapsed.

What stopped working was precisely the system of representation and power with the handing over of public decisions to transnational economic-financial power groups and, as a cascade, to the fixers at home. The result has been the dismantling of the corporate system and public assets, the privatisation of welfare, regressive tax policies, environmental inactivism. Above all, the emptying and disqualification of elective assemblies, reduced to huddles of lobbyists.

We have thus arrived at the most paradoxical and - this is surprising - mental, before political and geopolitical, reversal on the issue of the war in Ukraine. In the face of Emperor, The Donald's realistic assessment of the unsustainable cost of war, the European vassals, betrayed in their pride, find nothing better than to ask their subjects for money (read: exceeding the Stability Pact) to buy more bayonets and send even more soldiers to their deaths. If these are the elected ones, the guardians of the democratic order, poor liberal-democracies. Then let them not be surprised if the ‘sovereign people’ seek other ways to be represented.

No, Trump is no circus waffler, he is the icing on a cake that has been baking for decades before our eyes. And, if he and the other ‘bad me’ are winning everywhere, won't it be because the others have no winning proposals?

See, Trump non è un cialtrone da circo

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