Now that Donald Trump has been in office for his first few weeks, the consequences of his electoral victory are clear. He wants to strip down the American state to save money, and intends US firms to be to the fore in reconstructing Ukraine and Gaza – a new era of heightened American nationalism and imperialist bullying. A new phase of oligarchic rule is being installed, including in the means of ideological production. There are new regimes at Facebook and ‘X’, designed to facilitate posts of the reactionary right, and there is to be a new regime in the opinion columns of the Washington Post, where owner Jeff Bezos has told staff to block anything too critical or liberal.

With a secure majority in Congress and the Supreme Court, Trump has used hundreds of executive orders to unleash a new era of ‘presidentialism’ – direct rule by diktat.

This kind of government was named ‘Bonapartism’ by Trotsky, referring to Marx’s analysis of the 1852seizure of all power in France by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the great military and political leader Napoleon Bonaparte. The Italian Communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci referred to this as ‘Caesarism.’ The essence of Bonapartism is presidential rule by a dictator who tries to balance between the different classes and sections of the capitalist state.

In his landmark writings on this question, Trotsky pointed out that Bonapartism can be the ‘antechamber’ of fascism. An example of this is Italy under Mussolini. He came to power after the ‘March on Rome’ in 1922, but he did not close down parliament or ban the Communist Party and imprison its leaders until 1926. During this interim period, the fascist black shirt gangs rampaged against the workers movement, even attacking left-wing deputies as they entered parliament. The Nazis in Germany referred to the post-1933 period as one of gleichschaltung – –where the legal and extra-legal methods are deployed to bring all wings of the state under their control. In thus the occupation of all government posts by Nazi place people was crucial.

In the contemporary world, it might be argued that Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has many parallels with pre-fascist Bonapartism, one of the many types of creeping fascism worldwide. Erdoğan can be seen balancing between his populist base in the Islamist mass party, the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) and the super-rich Turkish capitalist class. To achieve this, he used the state of emergency after the 2016 attempted coup d’etat to sack hundreds of judges, more than 100,000 teachers and lecturers, plus hundreds of police officers. Dozens of newspapers, magazines and TV channels were closed or taken over by AKP members), and many hudreds of military personnel, and supporters of the Turkish-led leftist coalition the HDP paerty were imprisoned.

All this was possible because of the mass base of the AKP, its big majority in parliament and the many capitalists who have become fabulously rich under Erdoğan’s rule. With the army, judiciary, parliament, and all government departments now led by his supporters, oppositionists thrown in jail with very long sentences and his AKP totally loyal,  Erdoğan can secure the deference of the capitalist class with a combination of economic policies that serve their interests, and his mass base among the poor by the welfare and religious work of the AKP itself.

In his departing speech, Joe Biden warned of the formation of an ‘oligarchy’, a dictatorship of a super-rich elite around a super-rich president. This warning came very late; already since the 2007-8 financial crash, the American capitalist class, in alliance with the transnational capitalist class in general, have transcended neoliberalism mark 1, to a deeper phase of monopoly capitalism characterised by the centralised control of financial investments in ‘asset management’ companies. These groups and the giant digital, electronics and defence industries in which they are working, have shown their willingness to operate in lockstep with the Trump government. And this involves a doubling down of reactionary media co. The promotion of  Elon Musk is like a bizarre update of the character Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s reactionary novel The Fountainhead – the genius capitalist who is the source of all wealth.

In Trump’s first weeks in office, he and his team have already made the orientation of the new US government very clear. Key measures include:

• The ramping up of direct, military-based imperialism, with the aim of seizing half of Ukraine’s mineral wealth.
• Giving the OK for a further onslaught against the Palestinian people in both Gaza and the West Bank. Leaked figures show that the United States has delivered 14,000 200-pound bombs, and several thousand Hellfire missiles. No wonder that Gaza seems like the site of a nuclear explosion. Given the biggest UK nuclear warhead delivers just 10,000 tons of explosive destruction, the bombs given to Israel are equivalent to many nuclear bombs.
• Trump’s plan to take over and rebuild Gaza as a luxury holiday resort is grotesque – and it depends on the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. It is now obvious that the joint US-Israel plan is to co-drive the Palestinians out of both Gaza and the West Bank, the final realisation of the Zionist project. Keir Starmer and his foreign minister David Lammy are playing a cynical game, trying to hide their complicity with the massacre of the Palestinians behind the pretence of wanting a Palestinian state.
•  Withdrawal, for the second time, from the Paris Climate Change process, which means the abandonment of federal climate change targets to limit temperature rises to a 1.5% rise above pre-industrial levels. The ‘window of opportunity’ to 1.5% may already have closed. Although the 2015 Paris agreement, signed by more than 200 countries, is weak, it nonetheless set tangible goals. The withdrawal of the US has already affected the political atmosphere with global oil giants BP and Shell having both severely cut back on their renewable investment, because key investors like Elliot Asset Management complained that short-term profits might fall. The consequences of climate failure are well known – floods, wildfires, drought and millions of climate refugees kept out of more climatically stable countries of the global north by force. Paramilitary persecution of refugees on the border will become even more commonplace.
• America has signalled its intention to support the radical right internationally, shown by JD Vance’s private meeting with representatives of the AfD party on the eve of the German general election.[1]
• The elevation of Elon Musk to the position of federal government cuts supremo could leave hundreds of thousands of civil servants sacked.
• The cancelation of US funding programmes that promote equality and inclusion.
• The freeing of the far right thugs who stormed the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, a move that gives a green light to attacks on pro-Palestinian and other radical political actions.
• The beginning of the programme to deport many thousands of undocumented workers, using military forces to help in trying to seal the Mexico and Canada borders.
• A new stage of US imperialism involving a reordering of NATO, to get European powers to pay for the US-dominated military alliance; threats to seize the Panama canal; a solution to the Ukraine war that involves seizing a major share of the mineral wealth of Ukraine, so far unmined, and the introduction of major tariffs against goods from abroad.
• A tariff regime that starts with a universal 10%, but zooms upwards on steel, electric cars and anything imported from China.

These measures include an attempt to address the critical problem of US government debt, currently standing at a jaw-dropping $33 trillion. Trump s Republican critics like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo say that under the previous Trump administration the national debt went up by $8 trillion. Why does this matter? The 2007-8 financial crashj was never resolved – giving trillions of dollars to the banks just moved the problem to some point in the future. America has financed its bank bailouts and social security, health and military expenditures since by issuing government bonds. The interest on 5-year, 10-year, and short terms bonds is around 4.5 per cent – low by the standards, low but secure and paid every six months.  But if the level of US debt gets too high, investors may conclude that the government may struggle to pay the interest. If that happens the dollar will crash and there will be a financial crisis worldwide with banks unable to repay investors the deposits on high street accounts. What would follow would be a sort of ‘global Argentina’ – a phrase which refers to the collapse of the Argentinian economy in 2000-2002 and its consequent financial ruin of millions of working class and middle-class people.

Of course, the United States dollar is in effect the world currency, so the United States could just print dollars to finance its operations. But this runs the risk of generating huge inflation, raising prices worldwide in a devastating way.

Putting Elon Musk in charge of ‘government efficiency’ means massive job cuts and the seizure by Musk s companies of huge amounts of government data on every US citizen. This can be used to target ‘illegals’ (even if they have lived in the US for 30 years). Vast quantities of data of different kinds could be used to enable new waves of artificial intelligence to track the movement of individuals and their political and trade union activities. A new stage in the establishment of a new Orwellian state is upon us.

Ten years ago three big tech titans – people like Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Jeff Bezos of Amazon – were all reckoned to be Democrats. But now they want to get close to Trump, especially as they want to secure concessions from him on tariffs and support for their intransigent opposition to unions.

Trump has sent clear signals about his alliances with the far right in the US and internationally. Domestically the release of the leaders of the fascist Proud Boys and Oath Keepers has renewed their alliance with Trump. It is no wonder that Tommy Robinson said he turned cartwheels when he heard Trump had been elected. JD Vance’s secret meeting with the leaders of the Allianz für Deutschland (AFD) on the eve of the German elections broke with hypocritical niceties which falsely claim countries do not interfere in the internal affairs of allies.

This second victory of Trump means huge tasks face environmentalists and pro-Palestinian activists, as well as campaigners for women’s and immigrant rights. But as the German surge for the AfD shows, the Trump 2.0 project includes an attempt to use American power to boost reactionary nationalist and dictatorial power worldwide. Campaigning on progressive issues has to go along with building a broad left counter-force against far right electoral surges. Britain is not exempt from this task. Keir Starmer’s huge parliamentary majority is brittle with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and Kemi Badenoch’s ever more right-wing Tories waiting in the wings. It is an open question whether the Starmer Labour government will survive until 2029, given the evident failure of the Starmer project, awaiting the magic bullet of ‘growth’ that never arrives. A broad left party is still an urgent necessity.

In the German election the AfD was the biggest party among 198-24r men (?). Among women in the same age  group, Die Linke (The Left) was the biggest party.