The prospect of the return to the White House of a figure who in any other modern democracy or moment in time would have been disqualified from office and possibly incarcerated for his multiple legal infractions, including most importantly the range of offences relating to his attempts to thwart the result of the 2020 Presidential elections in which he was the certified loser, fills liberals and democrats with horror and dread.
Having lived in a collective state of suspended animation since his election on 6th November due to the transitional period between administrations, the reality is now upon us. How then do progressives deal with what pessimists’ view as the prospect of the definitive end of the long durée of the hegemony of Western liberal democracy?
So, to invert FDR’s famous aphorism is everything about Trump to fear? Fear is what Trump and his capricious, shape shifting ally (of transactional convenience?) Elon Musk smell in an anxious world. For both men are bullies. Bullies enjoy keeping their prey on tenterhooks; their pathological will to power is about freezing their victims into existential fear and crippling impotence. Trump knows that US allies’ nerves are jangling as his inauguration may well presage the consignment of the liberal, internationalist post-war global settlement to history. Musk similarly is revelling in his ability to misinform, provoke and incite without rebuke or sanction as we have seen in his outrageous interventions in British politics over child sexual abuse and his support for the far right, anti-Islam agitator Tommy Robinson and of the far right AfD party in Germany.[1]
The atmosphere of foreboding about Trump’s second administration is thickened by some of the outlandish ideas, even by his standards, that he has floated. Is he serious about seizing control of the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America, of forcing an Anschluss with Canada and to annex Greenland in defiance of international law and military logic? Does he seriously envisage creating an American imperium in the manner of President Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the 20th century with the conquests of the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and all that? But are these id type gestures merely performative? For example, Trump’s promise to build a wall on the border with Mexico never actually came to fruition. The value of surprise and threats has always been part of his transactional modus operandi.[2] It is possible to view his “All Hell to Pay” warning about the Israeli hostages in Gaza and its role as a catalyst in the achievement of the ceasefire in that light.
But, unlike first time around, Trump has full control of the levers of power and is surrounded by a circle of devotees, a Praetorian Guard of loyalists not by competent adults in the room. His reaction to the Los Angeles wildfire inferno in which he resorts to playground bully taunts like “Gavin Newscum,” the Governor of California offers a disturbing portent of things to come and a reminder of his career of verbal thuggery. Matthew Ancona cautions that while the opening pages of this Presidency will not read “This American carnage” rather “Morning in America” or the “dawn of America’s golden age”, he will draw on his reserves of narcissism and deceit as well as a fiendishly skilful narration of an “American folklore of national exceptionalism, of westward conquest, of the red state frontier rather than the liberal coasts”.[3]. To take one example of compliance by a democracy gatekeeper to the MAGA agenda, consider the rays of positivity emitted by John Thune, the new Senate majority leader, to Trump’s prospective appointee as FBI Director, Kash Patel.
So, to invert FDR’s famous aphorism is everything about Trump to fear? Fear is what Trump and his capricious, shape shifting ally (of transactional convenience?) Elon Musk smell in an anxious world. For both men are bullies. Bullies enjoy keeping their prey on tenterhooks; their pathological will to power is about freezing their victims into existential fear and crippling impotence. Trump knows that US allies’ nerves are jangling as his inauguration may well presage the consignment of the liberal, internationalist post-war global settlement to history. Musk similarly is revelling in his ability to misinform, provoke and incite without rebuke or sanction as we have seen in his outrageous interventions in British politics over child sexual abuse and his support for the far right, anti-Islam agitator Tommy Robinson and of the far right AfD party in Germany.[1]
The atmosphere of foreboding about Trump’s second administration is thickened by some of the outlandish ideas, even by his standards, that he has floated. Is he serious about seizing control of the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America, of forcing an Anschluss with Canada and to annex Greenland in defiance of international law and military logic? Does he seriously envisage creating an American imperium in the manner of President Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the 20th century with the conquests of the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and all that? But are these id type gestures merely performative? For example, Trump’s promise to build a wall on the border with Mexico never actually came to fruition. The value of surprise and threats has always been part of his transactional modus operandi.[2] It is possible to view his “All Hell to Pay” warning about the Israeli hostages in Gaza and its role as a catalyst in the achievement of the ceasefire in that light.
But, unlike first time around, Trump has full control of the levers of power and is surrounded by a circle of devotees, a Praetorian Guard of loyalists not by competent adults in the room. His reaction to the Los Angeles wildfire inferno in which he resorts to playground bully taunts like “Gavin Newscum,” the Governor of California offers a disturbing portent of things to come and a reminder of his career of verbal thuggery. Matthew Ancona cautions that while the opening pages of this Presidency will not read “This American carnage” rather “Morning in America” or the “dawn of America’s golden age”, he will draw on his reserves of narcissism and deceit as well as a fiendishly skilful narration of an “American folklore of national exceptionalism, of westward conquest, of the red state frontier rather than the liberal coasts”.[3]. To take one example of compliance by a democracy gatekeeper to the MAGA agenda, consider the rays of positivity emitted by John Thune, the new Senate majority leader, to Trump’s prospective appointee as FBI Director, Kash Patel.
For Patel is a nominee who has never concealed his ambition to turn the bureau into an arm of MAGA and Trump’s score-settling. In his book Government Gangsters (2023), Patel enumerated an explicit list of “Deep State” targets and “corrupt actors of the first order”. Yet, in an interview with the NBC’s Meet the Press on 5th January, the supposedly impartial Thune praised Patel for grasping that the FBI is “in need of reform and needs a good makeover”. He then added that the Senate would “get the president his people as possible in the key positions where he wants them.”[4] Considering the pedigree of other Trump’s nominees such as the antivaxxer, Robert F. Kennedy Jr as Health Secretary; the “Private Pike” but rabid Christian dispensationalist Pete Hegseth as Defence Secretary and the former Assad friendly and possible Russian asset Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, it is not hard to imagine the United States becoming a banana republic with untold nuclear weapons capacity or as a state where the supposed leader of the “free world” has fallen into the hands of a latter-day Quisling fascist regime.
But a challenging reality for a liberal constituency horrified and disgusted by the dawning of Trump 2.0 is that such a consensus is not shared, at least universally, outside the “West.” For the main players on the new geopolitical stage are non-western states and on that stage Trump’s US is likely to behave more like other transactional great powers like Russia or China rather than older traditional democratic powers like Germany, France, and Sweden. A 24-country poll recently published by the European Council on Foreign Relations in collaboration with the Europe in a Changing World research project at Oxford University; the third that has been undertaken since Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine revealed a number of uncomfortable findings for liberal thinkers.
For starters, many people in the world beyond Europe welcome Trump’s return, believing that it will be good for their country, for world peace and especially for achieving peace in Ukraine and the Middle East. Majorities believe these things in India and Saudi Arabia, as do majorities or pluralities – depending on the question put - in China, Brazil, South Africa, and Russia. In fact, Europe, and South Korea (dependent, like Europe, on its security for the US) stand almost alone in the degree of their worry about the impact of Trump.[5]
As established in earlier surveys, many countries, including China, India, and Turkey, continue to regard Putin’s Russia as an entirely acceptable international partner, despite its egregiously aggressive and imperialist war in Ukraine. Majorities or pluralities in those countries also think Russia will have more global influence, despite its much vaunted “strategic defeat” (in Western imagining at any rate) in Ukraine. Majorities in almost every country surveyed also say China will be stronger and even in the US; where a clear opinion is expressed, there is a 50:50 split. Drilling further down into the survey findings, one finds that taking the average across nine EU member states surveyed, only 22% of Europeans say they regard the US as an “ally”; a further 51% say they see US as a “necessary partner” but within European responses to Trump there is a significant divide with respondents in South Eastern Europe countries (Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania) much more favourable to Trump.
But before reflecting on what the liberal democratic response to a new Trumpian World Order should be; it is worth critiquing the order whose passing is being mourned and celebrated in equal measure; the “liberal international order” (ILO) or the rules based international order that has structured global relations and conduct since 1945. According to its champions, the LIO origins lie in the architecture of multinational treaties and institutions created after the Second World War, from NATO to the World Bank to the UN and EU, that aimed to bind nations and prevent another global conflict.[6] The threat posed by Trump to this order was expressed most starkly in 2018, a year into Trump’s first presidency, by G John Ikenberry, a leading liberal internationalist who declared “For the first time since the 1930s, the United States has elected a President who is actively hostile to liberal internationalism. In his opinion, America would no longer provide “the hegemonic leadership” essential for “fostering cooperation and championing ‘free world’ values.”[7]
But for Kenan Malik, the LIO is a “slippery beast” whose meaning shifted across time to suit contemporary interests of the American hegemon. He notes the absence of the term “liberal internationalism” in the first three decades after the end of the Second World War since the aims of the new treaties and institutions were to cement US power on its side in the Cold War; to contain Soviet expansion and to manage the transition from the world of empires to one of sovereign states under the watchful eye of the US hegemon. The concept of “liberal internationalism” only came into vogue with the trauma of the US defeat in Vietnam and the entry of the language or rules and rights into the parlance of international relations.[8]
The collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-91 and the apparent End of History triumph of liberal democracy ushered in a cogent representation of the LIO through the expansion of the EU and NATO to incorporate the nascent democracies of the former Soviet bloc; the spread of democracy in many parts of the “developing world”, “Third World” or “Global South”; the creation of free trade zones such as the EU Single Market and NAFTA (North America Free Trade Association); judicial innovations such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) and ad hoc courts such as the Rwanda and Former Yugoslavia Tribunals to create transnational remits for the prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity (including the crime of genocide). Active liberal internationalism found expression in the UN Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine promulgated in 2005 to give retrospective justification to the “humanitarian interventions” in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and East Timor at the turn of the millennium. This type of muscular international liberalism suffered terminal reputational damage due to the disastrous outcomes of interventions in Iraq and Libya and the human rights abuses associated with the Global war on Terror launched by President George W. Bush.
In truth there was nothing “liberal” about the Cold War arrangements that saw the United States willingly underwriting authoritarianism in its client or ally states from Latin America, to South East Asia, Saudi Arabia and the Congo, all the while proclaiming its support (and surreptitiously aiding) for the cause of liberty and democracy in the USSR and its vassal states. More recently, the commitment of past recent US administrations to the rule of law and international justice has looked hollow to many outside Western spheres of influence with the opposition of departed President Joe Biden and other top officials of his administration to the arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu issued by the ICC for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza while vigorously (and rightfully) supporting a similar warrant for Vladimir Putin for war crimes in Ukraine. The refusal of the US to be a signatory to the ICC in order to stymie any possible prosecution of US service personnel for such crimes.
Thus, the ILO rested on quite illiberal foundations. Its economic aim was to keep the world safe for global free markets, not through the pursuit of laissez-faire policies but as Malik opines through quoting the historian Quinn Slobodian by “designing institutions … to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy” and establishing “rules set by supranational bodies beyond the reach of any electorate.” He writes that this constitutes the project of neoliberalism, conceived by the work of economists like Friedrich von Hayek in the 1930s and transmitted through the institutions and mechanisms of the ILO.[9]
So the election of Trump 2.0 is an even more emphatic reaction to globalisation and the liberal international order particularly its perceived effects in the deindustrialisation and deskilling of America’s former manufacturing heartlands and the emasculation of its workforce, thanks to, in the view of Trumpites, the deleterious workings of NAFTA such as cheap Chinese imports and the outsourcing of jobs to the Global South. Parallel to this American economic carnage, has been, in the Trumpian universe, has been the other major downside of globalisation – open borders and immigration, particularly the “invasion” of undocumented migrants south of the Rio Grande and elsewhere. Whither then, the idealised American story of the melting pot of migrants seeking a better life and the route to the summit of the hill for their descendants as Trump also seeks to remove or deny US citizenship to residents not born in the US; setting up a direct challenge to the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.
But yet for all the talk of Trump as the great disruptor who will drain the Washington swamp and take a swing to its elite consensus; there is something very familiar to the radical order which is set to transform America. It will perhaps be the most oligarchic and plutocratic Presidency in the history of the United States. At least thirteen billionaires are set to have government posts under a Trump Presidency, with his expected cabinet worth at least $7bn, double that of his first administration, and a jaw dropping sixty times more than the net worth of the Biden administration.
In truth there was nothing “liberal” about the Cold War arrangements that saw the United States willingly underwriting authoritarianism in its client or ally states from Latin America, to South East Asia, Saudi Arabia and the Congo, all the while proclaiming its support (and surreptitiously aiding) for the cause of liberty and democracy in the USSR and its vassal states. More recently, the commitment of past recent US administrations to the rule of law and international justice has looked hollow to many outside Western spheres of influence with the opposition of departed President Joe Biden and other top officials of his administration to the arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu issued by the ICC for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza while vigorously (and rightfully) supporting a similar warrant for Vladimir Putin for war crimes in Ukraine. The refusal of the US to be a signatory to the ICC in order to stymie any possible prosecution of US service personnel for such crimes.
Thus, the ILO rested on quite illiberal foundations. Its economic aim was to keep the world safe for global free markets, not through the pursuit of laissez-faire policies but as Malik opines through quoting the historian Quinn Slobodian by “designing institutions … to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy” and establishing “rules set by supranational bodies beyond the reach of any electorate.” He writes that this constitutes the project of neoliberalism, conceived by the work of economists like Friedrich von Hayek in the 1930s and transmitted through the institutions and mechanisms of the ILO.[9]
So the election of Trump 2.0 is an even more emphatic reaction to globalisation and the liberal international order particularly its perceived effects in the deindustrialisation and deskilling of America’s former manufacturing heartlands and the emasculation of its workforce, thanks to, in the view of Trumpites, the deleterious workings of NAFTA such as cheap Chinese imports and the outsourcing of jobs to the Global South. Parallel to this American economic carnage, has been, in the Trumpian universe, has been the other major downside of globalisation – open borders and immigration, particularly the “invasion” of undocumented migrants south of the Rio Grande and elsewhere. Whither then, the idealised American story of the melting pot of migrants seeking a better life and the route to the summit of the hill for their descendants as Trump also seeks to remove or deny US citizenship to residents not born in the US; setting up a direct challenge to the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.
But yet for all the talk of Trump as the great disruptor who will drain the Washington swamp and take a swing to its elite consensus; there is something very familiar to the radical order which is set to transform America. It will perhaps be the most oligarchic and plutocratic Presidency in the history of the United States. At least thirteen billionaires are set to have government posts under a Trump Presidency, with his expected cabinet worth at least $7bn, double that of his first administration, and a jaw dropping sixty times more than the net worth of the Biden administration.
What Joe Biden has, with grim foreboding, termed the “tech industrial complex” is set to take shape and mark its imprint on the second Trump cabinet with the arrivals from Silicon Valley. These figures include the venture capitalist David Sacks who is slated to be “AI and crypto tsar" and of course Elon Musk, set to head the advisory “department of government efficiency,” walking in the footsteps of the PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Expecting to flank Trump at his inauguration is the CEO of Tik Tok, Shou Zi Chew[10], banned and unbanned in the US in the flicker of an eye. Mark Zuckerberg, chair of Meta, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI have each donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration committee. The tech venture capitalist Marc Andreesen and close collaborator of Musk has been assisting the transition team in Mar-a-Lago.[11]
But yet for all the talk of Trump as the great disruptor who will drain the Washington swamp and take a swing to its elite consensus; there is something very familiar to the radical order which is set to transform America. It will perhaps be the most oligarchic and plutocratic Presidency in the history of the United States. At least thirteen billionaires are set to have government posts under a Trump Presidency, with his expected cabinet worth at least $7bn, double that of his first administration, and a jaw dropping sixty times more than the net worth of the Biden administration. What Joe Biden has, with grim foreboding, termed the “tech industrial complex” is set to take shape and mark its imprint on the second Trump cabinet with the arrivals from Silicon Valley. These figures include the venture capitalist David Sacks who is slated to be “AI and crypto tsar and of course Elon Musk, set to head the advisory “department of government efficiency,” walking in the footsteps of the PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Expecting to flank Trump at his inauguration is the CEO of Tik Tok, Shou Zi Chew[12], banned and unbanned in the US in the flicker of an eye. Mark Zuckerberg, chair of Meta, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI have each donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration committee. The tech venture capitalist Marc Andreesen and close collaborator of Musk has been assisting the transition team in Mar-a-Lago.[13]
In a brief odyssey into the history of American oligarchy, Matthew D’Ancona recalls that in 1896, the mighty cartel of JP Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller engineered the election of President William McKinley. After his assassination in 1901, McKinley was succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt (namechecked in approval by Trump in his second inauguration speech) who, in contrast, railed against “the men of swollen fortune” and pledged that “America must not be “the civilisation of a mere plutocracy, a banking-house, Wall Street-syndicate civilisation.”[14]
Replace “Silicon Valley” for “Wall Street” and observe Roosevelt’s dystopia made real in Musk’s hyper-capitalist ascendancy. For not only is he one of the federal government’s biggest contractors, he will now have sweeping power over its budget (which he and fellow techno-plutocrat and anti-woke crusader Vivek Ramaswamy plan to reduce by “at least $2tn”) and huge influence over the regulatory and procurement regimen that determine his own businesses’ fortunes. Since the election, his personal fortune has shot up by 70% to $450bn.[15]
While this putative symbiosis between the tech bros and government looks like the standard operating process for the convergence of corporate and political power throughout the 20th century in America, some at the periphery of the tech-industrial complex hint at more radical forms of governance such as withdrawing from the state itself. Some such as the venture capitalist Balaj Srinivasan have even conjectured the creation of new private polities or “network states.” In 2009, Thiel spoke aloud about the fragmentation of the world map into thousands of new nations. Add to these fantasies, Musk’s resurrection of the idea of the company town in Texas and speculating at length about flights to Mars with a select few companions and one can deduce divisions in the Trump world between these “citizens of nowhere” and MAGA nationalists. Not for nothing has nativist nationalist Steve Bannon declared hostilities on Musk and other tech giants. Bannon’s calls in 2016 for and end to open borders, decoupling from China and the breakup of Big Tech are far from the language of the Silicon Valley libertarian right.[16]
Such divisions came into the open over the H-1B scheme which allows skilled workers to work for three years in the US and is valorised by the tech sector. For Bannon, the scheme represents a total negation of American First ideology:
But yet for all the talk of Trump as the great disruptor who will drain the Washington swamp and take a swing to its elite consensus; there is something very familiar to the radical order which is set to transform America. It will perhaps be the most oligarchic and plutocratic Presidency in the history of the United States. At least thirteen billionaires are set to have government posts under a Trump Presidency, with his expected cabinet worth at least $7bn, double that of his first administration, and a jaw dropping sixty times more than the net worth of the Biden administration. What Joe Biden has, with grim foreboding, termed the “tech industrial complex” is set to take shape and mark its imprint on the second Trump cabinet with the arrivals from Silicon Valley. These figures include the venture capitalist David Sacks who is slated to be “AI and crypto tsar and of course Elon Musk, set to head the advisory “department of government efficiency,” walking in the footsteps of the PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Expecting to flank Trump at his inauguration is the CEO of Tik Tok, Shou Zi Chew[12], banned and unbanned in the US in the flicker of an eye. Mark Zuckerberg, chair of Meta, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI have each donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration committee. The tech venture capitalist Marc Andreesen and close collaborator of Musk has been assisting the transition team in Mar-a-Lago.[13]
In a brief odyssey into the history of American oligarchy, Matthew D’Ancona recalls that in 1896, the mighty cartel of JP Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller engineered the election of President William McKinley. After his assassination in 1901, McKinley was succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt (namechecked in approval by Trump in his second inauguration speech) who, in contrast, railed against “the men of swollen fortune” and pledged that “America must not be “the civilisation of a mere plutocracy, a banking-house, Wall Street-syndicate civilisation.”[14]
Replace “Silicon Valley” for “Wall Street” and observe Roosevelt’s dystopia made real in Musk’s hyper-capitalist ascendancy. For not only is he one of the federal government’s biggest contractors, he will now have sweeping power over its budget (which he and fellow techno-plutocrat and anti-woke crusader Vivek Ramaswamy plan to reduce by “at least $2tn”) and huge influence over the regulatory and procurement regimen that determine his own businesses’ fortunes. Since the election, his personal fortune has shot up by 70% to $450bn.[15]
While this putative symbiosis between the tech bros and government looks like the standard operating process for the convergence of corporate and political power throughout the 20th century in America, some at the periphery of the tech-industrial complex hint at more radical forms of governance such as withdrawing from the state itself. Some such as the venture capitalist Balaj Srinivasan have even conjectured the creation of new private polities or “network states.” In 2009, Thiel spoke aloud about the fragmentation of the world map into thousands of new nations. Add to these fantasies, Musk’s resurrection of the idea of the company town in Texas and speculating at length about flights to Mars with a select few companions and one can deduce divisions in the Trump world between these “citizens of nowhere” and MAGA nationalists. Not for nothing has nativist nationalist Steve Bannon declared hostilities on Musk and other tech giants. Bannon’s calls in 2016 for and end to open borders, decoupling from China and the breakup of Big Tech are far from the language of the Silicon Valley libertarian right.[16]
Such divisions came into the open over the H-1B scheme which allows skilled workers to work for three years in the US and is valorised by the tech sector. For Bannon, the scheme represents a total negation of American First ideology:
a scam by the oligarchs in Silicon Valley to basically take jobs from American citizens, give them to what become indentured servants from foreign countries, and pay them less.
One wonders will these workers figure in the “largest deportation” in history.
So, Trump 2.0 is now upon us. It represents a definite swing to the styles of authoritarian, populist and personalised government seen in dictatorships and pseudo-democracies. Many scholars of democracy and democratic theory have pessimistic prognoses for the health and even the future of democracy in Trump’s second term. The best optimistic scenario for the failure of the Trumpian project may be the malignant narcissism of The Donald which feeds his need for adulation and positive reinforcement of self-esteem and leads him to dismiss any negative or bad news as “fake news.” This will to please may negate his will to power particularly if the divisions between the tech bros and the MAGA nationalists become acute. Like any other regimes, it is “Events, Dear Boy, Events” and their contingency that will determine the future of Trump world and its successors.
So, Trump 2.0 is now upon us. It represents a definite swing to the styles of authoritarian, populist and personalised government seen in dictatorships and pseudo-democracies. Many scholars of democracy and democratic theory have pessimistic prognoses for the health and even the future of democracy in Trump’s second term. The best optimistic scenario for the failure of the Trumpian project may be the malignant narcissism of The Donald which feeds his need for adulation and positive reinforcement of self-esteem and leads him to dismiss any negative or bad news as “fake news.” This will to please may negate his will to power particularly if the divisions between the tech bros and the MAGA nationalists become acute. Like any other regimes, it is “Events, Dear Boy, Events” and their contingency that will determine the future of Trump world and its successors.
References
[1] Martin Kettle There’s a bully on the loose, but Musk will only win if we let him. Guardian 9th January 2025.
[2] Ibid
[3] Matthew d'Ancona The King of Manifest Destiny. Donald Trump is back. And so are long-buried American fantasies of national exceptionalism and conquest. The New European 16-22 January 2025.
[4] Ibid
[5] Timothy Garton Ash in a Trumpian world order, liberal states must adapt fast. Guardian Journal 15th January 2025.
[6] Kenan Malik Despite the eulogies, the postwar order did little for peace – and fuelled the rise of populism. The Observer Comment & Analysis p.54.
[7] Ibid
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid
[10] Quinn Slobodian The tech bros have a front seat, but they will want more. Guardian Opinion 18th January 2025.
[11] Matthew D’ancona Puppet Regime. America voted for Donald Trump. But in just over two weeks’ time, they will be getting Elon Musk. The New European January 2-8, 2025, pp. 12-13.
[12] Quinn Slobodian The tech bros have a front seat, but they will want more. Guardian. Opinion 18th January 2025
[13] Matthew D’ancona, Puppet Regime. America voted for Donald Trump. But in just over two weeks’ time, they will be getting Elon Musk. The New European January 2-8, 2025, pp. 12-13.
[14] Ibid
[15] Ibid
[16] Slobodian, Guardian 18th January 2025
[1] Martin Kettle There’s a bully on the loose, but Musk will only win if we let him. Guardian 9th January 2025.
[2] Ibid
[3] Matthew d'Ancona The King of Manifest Destiny. Donald Trump is back. And so are long-buried American fantasies of national exceptionalism and conquest. The New European 16-22 January 2025.
[4] Ibid
[5] Timothy Garton Ash in a Trumpian world order, liberal states must adapt fast. Guardian Journal 15th January 2025.
[6] Kenan Malik Despite the eulogies, the postwar order did little for peace – and fuelled the rise of populism. The Observer Comment & Analysis p.54.
[7] Ibid
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid
[10] Quinn Slobodian The tech bros have a front seat, but they will want more. Guardian Opinion 18th January 2025.
[11] Matthew D’ancona Puppet Regime. America voted for Donald Trump. But in just over two weeks’ time, they will be getting Elon Musk. The New European January 2-8, 2025, pp. 12-13.
[12] Quinn Slobodian The tech bros have a front seat, but they will want more. Guardian. Opinion 18th January 2025
[13] Matthew D’ancona, Puppet Regime. America voted for Donald Trump. But in just over two weeks’ time, they will be getting Elon Musk. The New European January 2-8, 2025, pp. 12-13.
[14] Ibid
[15] Ibid
[16] Slobodian, Guardian 18th January 2025
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
Since when was the US not a dictatorship on the World stage?
ReplyDeleteTrue - it refuses to recognise international law.
DeleteTrump has paused Biden's genocide so that is one up for him.
He's definitely come out swinging this time around. He knows how Washington works now and has only 4 years left to make a difference. The world is going to have some big changes in the next few years.
DeleteThe article reads as if Barry has a very bad case of TDS-----Trump Derangement S
ReplyDeleteSyndrome
Trump has paused Biden's genocide so that is one up for him.
ReplyDeleteWhat has happened is the Genocide has slowed back down to what academics call 'an acceptable level of violence'......It is still Genocide only at a slower pace....
'