What Trump's Paradoxes Tell Us About His Plan

Toto, I don't think we're in capitalism anymore

Like all of you, I’ve been trying to make sense of Trump and Musk’s rapid dismantling of the American government, and feeling like we don’t have a framework to understand the motivations and even desired outcome. Yes, there’s Project 2025, the Conservative playbook which Trump distanced himself from but is now mirroring with each signed Executive Order. There’s also the all-too recent history of Nazi Germany in which Hitler, once he seized power, set about concentrating power by installing fellow ideologues and selling off government infrastructure to private markets. But there are paradoxes at the heart of the Trump/Musk regime which make it ideologically unstable, and thus difficult to grasp.

Hitler rose to power in the way most authoritarians do: after economic downturn. But the USA’s economy has been strong compared to its Global Northern allies, although, admittedly, living standards have decreased. That said, the USA remained the dominant hegemonic force, without the same external enemy that Hitler blamed for Germany’s massive recession after the first world war. America’s enemy is inside, it’s “the woke mind virus”, the “cultural Marxism” stampeding America towards Hellfire, as its self-entitled defenders claim. Yet, this period of cultural history has actually been incredibly beneficial to the economic elite who have successfully hoovered wealth to the top. As ardent capitalists, so they claim, it would make more sense for Musk and Trump to leave things be, because the system undoubtedly works better for them than it does for the rest of us. So why the sudden rush to dismantle it?

Some may say that they are merely mirroring the Nazis’ strategy to sell off key government structures to the highest bidder, securing more wealth and control within a small circle. But Trump’s rashness is spooking the global markets. His immediate tariff war with Canada and Mexico caused financial panic, the impacts of which were felt all around the world. Already, prices have soared, affecting his key voter base. The world economy is much more interconnected than the past century, and Musk’s and Trump’s personal wealth is not impervious to the American economy crashing. Surely, they are risking their own fortunes to grab for power, and a power that will be deeply reduced if America falls from its top spot in the global regime. They’re not behaving like capitalists, nor savvy authoritarian leaders. Something else is at play.

A paradox I can’t stop obsessing over is the regime’s blatant desire to increase the number of “American babies” combined with the proposed attack on Medicaid and plans to rollback the Affordable Care Act. If the regime wants more bodies to tackle the “population crisis” which Musk is also gripped by, then why are they planning on denying health insurance to millions of Americans? How many people will die because they can no longer afford insulin, for example? I can’t help but wonder if this is the first sign of a subtle eugenics program which will kill off certain groups under guise of capitalist logic.

Another inconsistency at the heart of the feverish desire for American babies is the lack of proposals which would make it easier for Americans to do so. The United States is one of the only nations in the world to not have a federal maternity leave policy. It has very little government support for new parents who have to saddle wildly expensive childcare. Many of my own generation, the millennials, are choosing to remain child-free in part because they can’t even afford a home to raise children in. But tackling these problems would have made a dent in the rampant neoliberal model which people like Trump and Musk enjoy. It was much better for them to simply ban abortion. If the ban goes nation-wide, it will add 1.5 million babies per year to America’s population.

There’s another brilliant argument made by Antonio Melonio that people without children are ungovernable. It’s much harder to make people with less to lose fall in line. They can pack up and move on swiftly, take huge risks, and protest ceaselessly. They are a danger to the regime. Saddling women in particular with children puts a barrier in the way of progress. Young women are significantly swinging to the left while young men swing to the right. In every election since 1988, the majority of women vote for the Democratic Presidential candidate. Splitting the data by race, Black women vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate, by up to 90%. Now, we know that abortion bans hit the most vulnerable women worst, with women in minorities with less than 12 years of education at the highest risk of unplanned pregnancies. Abortion is an avenue, for these groups, to remain ungovernable — and they don’t want to be governed by conservatives. How many of these voters won’t be able to spend the requisite hours travelling to polling booths and casting their vote in future? How many will be severed from a broader political life by trying to feed the mouths they did not invite into the world, but were coerced into carrying?

But this then adds yet another layer of confusion: if the USA is a highly privatised economy, on the road to be even more extreme, then what good does it do the capitalist class to saddle even more of the population with financial struggles that they can’t afford to participate in the consumer economy?

And this, maybe, points to the limitations of capitalism that Musk and Trump wish to truly dismantle. Enough wealth now circulates among the upper echelons of society that they can continue to extract natural resources and pay for machinery and employ labour to craft goods which only the rich will enjoy, rendering everyone else a serf. It’s not so long ago that Europe looked like this. Except, now most won’t be working the land but the cloud, a digitised attention economy in which we labour for free. This has been the case for some time, that when workers clock out for the day they go home and continue working by generating content on platforms owned by billionaires who sell adspace to other major companies. Our time has become even more valuable than our labour. But we will likely arrive at a point when the consumer economy is no longer targeting us, but securing the planet’s scarce resources for the wealthy. Whatever scraps are left over will be served up to us as cheap digital distractions and unaffordable material necessities, like food and housing. Sound familiar?

The world is running low and these men don’t want to share. They want to silence dissent, fatigue allies and return to a hierarchy in which wealth floods up and control floods down. As if to prove the point, they’ve riled up men to the point of fury at the state of their lives but, rather than materially improve them, Trump’s strategy has been to target women, queer and gender non-conforming political identities to make men feel like they have a sense of power once again. The focus on “family values” is just a ploy to give men something without giving up a cent of their personal fortune.

The United States is transforming into an extremely regulated monopoly, securing natural resources for the elite while sacrificing millions of citizens, turning the nation into a factory farm of labour and babies. As long as Silicon Valley and other bubbles can maintain their bloated value, which they may be able to given we all work for them already for free, then the American economy may very well survive, given its only metric is GDP. Its soft power will wane on the world stage but its military might threatens trading partners who will protest this slow torture of the American people. And the world economy will falter soon enough thanks to the climate crisis, ending globalisation — meaning there are kingdoms up for grabs.

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Want to learn more about Elon Musk’s campaign against women? Start here.