Marxism and Trump: Summary and Proposal

Marxist treatments of Donald Trump’s second presidency have yet to settle on a definitive classification of the regime-type that the current administration is evolving towards. In this article, I survey the main types of Marxist position in the scholarly and activist literature, presenting the arguments and weighing the evidence. To assist with this, I introduce a typology of emergency regimes of the capitalist state that is influenced by the work of Nicos Poulantzas and use it to locate the various assessments. I discuss Marxist assessments of Trump 2.0’s evolution in terms of arguments for Illiberal Democratic (ID-type), Bonapartist (B-type), Neofascist (NF-type) and new authoritarian Presidential Despotism (PD-type) classifications of the regime-type. The aim here is not scholastic categorization of a political process but understanding where empirical reality forces an argument to deviate from theoretical predictions. In this light, the second thing I do in this article is to present the case that the fourth camp, the PD-type argument, is on the right track. I locate this argument in relation to discussions of authoritarian neoliberalism and consider the kinds of evidence that make this argument the most plausible candidate amongst current evaluations.