The Trump endgame

Paolo Kernahan

AMERICANS and strident critics of legendary reality TV performer Donald Trump will need to pace themselves. If you’re among those convulsed by what many interpreted as a double
Sieg Heil (hail victory) from billionaire and political power broker Elon Musk, you’re in for a rough ride.

Outrage is like chemotherapy, a cure as lethal as the disease. This 47th president of the US specialises in generating infinite quantities of outrage. If day one had your blood pressure peaking, you ain’t gonna make it.

Still, if there’s one thing Trump can’t be accused of, it’s laziness. He signed numerous executive orders on his first day back; a clear signal that this administration is likely to be one of government by fiat.

It’s not the number of executive orders issued, but their intent and likely impacts that matter. Many of them seem directed at dismantling much of Joe Biden’s brickwork.

This isn’t unusual for incoming presidents in US politics. Biden revoked the order imposed by Trump in his first term to ban the social media app TikTok. During his administration, Biden eventually signed a new law banning the app anyway, because, politics. What matters most are the impacts of those sweeping gestures of wrist and pen.

Trump rescinded an order issued by Biden to lower the cost by half of expensive prescription drugs Americans rely on to sustain health and, indeed, stay alive.

Among those to be hit by this move will be millions who donned MAGA hats and threw their support behind this carefully curated illusion of a "man of the people." This salt-of-the-earth president means to salt the earth in ways his most dogmatic adherents couldn’t anticipate.

It will perhaps never dawn on the MAGAlomaniacs that all the executive orders and policies headed their way aren’t, in fact, for them.

The conspicuous presence of the tech billionaires' upper 0.1 per cent at the inauguration was a striking visual representation of the ethos of this administration for the next four years. Some interpreted the prominence of the “tech bro” cabinet as a positive sign that the US is headed into a tech boom.

This is, of course, nonsense. The tech boom has been under way for several years; the extraordinary power of generative AI didn’t just crawl out of the sea onto dry land yesterday.

What the appearance of Google’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (all of whom control how Americans communicate) demonstrates is the emergence from the shadows of corporate moneyed interests directly into the governance apparatus.

Gone are the days of the Koch brothers pulling the strings from behind the velvet curtain, directing the lives of ordinary Americans by drowning US politics with their money and influence.

Now the billionaires who’ve paid to play are standing, so to speak, directly behind the chair in the Oval Office. How’s that likely to play out on the ground for the peasants working two-three jobs and chasing after extra shifts to make magnetically repellent ends meet?

Elon Musk’s Space X and Bezos’s Amazon have gone to court to have the National Labour Relations Board’s structure declared unconstitutional. The goal is to geld the labour board and dilute, if not wipe away workers’ rights. Musk is a key figure in Trump’s "revengers assemble" government – so much for looking out for the little guy/gal.

It’s these folks with outsized net worths and influence in US politics who will be the ones to watch.
Trump is the second oldest president in US history. His hand will be guided largely by those who’ve purchased a seat at the table.

When talk of the insidious aims of Project 2025 first escaped from the facility where it was hatched, Trump vigorously distanced himself from the document and its ideals. He went as far as to describe some of the objectives of the ultra-conservative manifesto designed to fundamentally change the US governance structure as crazy.

Yet it’s already clear how Project 2025 will play a role in charting a course for the future. Rhetoric about immigration, gender and the role of religion in society bear indistinguishable parallels with what Trump said on the campaign trail and the executive orders he’s already signed.

A war on migrants and the working class, the rise of an omnipotent oligarchy, increasing inequality in society and hardened America-first isolationism; such is the course in a society where the regular folk get the illusion of choice in a useless vote. The rich get the rest.