The Trump Policy Wave: Unpacking the Shockwaves Beyond Expectations
The hazard of analysing the policies of the Donald Trump administration is that you never know if what you’ve written is already outdated. It’s a roller coaster ride with many detours. We are still in the early stages of the Trump phenomenon but, given that scores of policies are already in the process of being implemented, both domestically and in the international arena, perhaps it’s time to take stock.
This is especially relevant since the early impact of tariffs and economic uncertainty has been felt in the contraction of the GDP in the first quarter of 2025, although experts had already predicted a slowing economy for 2025 back in 2024. How do we make coherent sense of what appear to be drastic initiatives? Is there a pattern to this chaotic, impulsive force of nature? Whose interests are being served? How to assess, at this moment, the domestic and international consequences of these inconsistent proclamations and policies?
Many of these pronouncements and policies being implemented seem to defy analysis. In a pre-Trump era, the reasoning could be somewhat more linearly predictable. Surely a country with a huge military industrial complex would not cut down on “endless wars,” or throw sand in the wheels of international commerce, until now a source of profits to the financial backers of any administration?
If this is crony capitalism, then the cronies cannot be happy with the gyrations in financial markets or with the on-and-off-and on-again tariffs, at least, at this moment, before the tax cuts kick in to placate them.
One possible framework to understand the Trump phenomenon and his support base is by looking through the prism of several dichotomous categories and fault lines, which throw light on the underlying contradictions, and perhaps help understand the potential consequences.
The Constituency: ‘MAGA folks vs Tech Bros’
The “Make America Great Again (MAGA) folks” and “Tech Bros” are the two key demographics who represent, broadly speaking, different sides of two pressing issues –immigration and tariffs – the outcomes of which have consequences reflecting something close to a class schism within the Trump movement itself. Believing that the Maga supporters care only for regressive cultural issues, seeing everything through a primarily nativist prism, is a mistake.
The Democrats paid a price for buying into that simplistic belief. Biden not only lost a substantial percentage of the white working-class vote, but also Black and Hispanic working class votes because of their precarious economic status, low employment prospects and inflation (it should be noted that the US economy was creating over 230,000 jobs per month in the 1990s, whereas it created an average of 186,000 jobs per month in 2024, when the population was 30% higher and the economy was supposed to be experiencing robust post-pandemic growth).
Signs of conflict between the two camps are evident when it comes to their stance on immigration and tariffs. After all, in the eyes of many working-class folks, immigrants who enter “illegally” compete with them and keep their wages depressed, while benefiting those who are purchasers of their services. We cannot also discount the impulse of some settled immigrants to “shut the door behind them”. Tech tycoons, on the other hand, need unfettered access to global labor and free trade. The perennial specters of job creation and inequality loom over these topics.
The domestic realm: The sociocultural versus the economic
Throughout the presidential campaign, Trump’s core domestic themes were sociocultural (the gender-trans debate and diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), for example) and economic (the promise to bring manufacturing back, restore America economic dominance, and correct the trade imbalance). The key policy instruments for the former were a mix of executive orders and conservative value signaling, such as attacks on DEI; for the latter, they were the promise of higher tariffs and tax breaks.
In Trump’s vision, the sociocultural and economic policies are aimed at complementing each other – both immigration and DEI are supposed to positively impact jobs for key constituencies, whereas tax cuts would benefit the business constituency. Considering the alacrity with which many US companies have withdrawn their DEI initiatives, it is clear that many segments of the business world are perfectly happy to live with or without them.
In the case of tariffs, it’s a more complex calculation, and can play out in number of harmful ways for the support base, with the business world harmed by rising input costs and most others by general consumer goods inflation. A key factor underlying the two sets of policies is what some have called the politics of resentment; resentment against immigrants is often discussed. To this one can add resentment against foreign countries, especially those whose economic success and sovereign actions would seem to threaten US dominance in economic, financial and geo-political spheres.
The foreign realm: America first versus globalism and the empire’s interests
With the exception of two constant foreign policy themes – talk of disengagement from Ukraine and doubling down on support for Israel – the main thrust of Trump’s campaign had been a focus on domestic issues. Even his trade policy had the resurgence of the US economy as a primary domestic concern. The shift of economic power away from the old western axis – with greater competition in global markets and pushback from the BRICS have compelled a look for a renewal at home.
Global developments over the last couple of decades, including the aftermath of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, the conflict with Houthis, and the grinding attrition of the war in Ukraine, together with other hotspots, has led to a more realistic and pragmatic view of the limits of US global power, and the recognition that it might be spread too thinly.
The immediate manifestation of this may well be disentanglement from Ukraine. Instead, we see consolidation in the near abroad in the American hemisphere with what might be otherwise considered strange goings on with Panama, Canada, and Greenland, together with selective muscle flexing in other parts of the world.
However, the global stage is too much of a temptation for grandstanding, what with an opportunity to promote peace in Ukraine, or cease-fire between India and Pakistan, and trying to redraw the Middle East. These twists and turns are a feature not a bug. And if one parses the Riyadh speech closely one could say that there’s really nothing much more to see here than business as usual, the stress being on business.
In a sense, the frantic deal-making in the middle-east underscores the possibility for Trump to both hunt with the hound and run with the hare. As long as Israeli security is not on the line, business with the rest of the Arab world presents vast opportunities; Israel in that regard holds limited appeal. Make America dominant again is a subtext of the Maga slogan and, given the make-up of the administration as well as many of its announcements and policies there is reason to believe that the US may have altered, but not put to rest, its imperial ambitions.
The logic: The idiosyncratic versus the systemic
There is a tendency, bordering on the obsessive, to focus on the personalities of Trump and people in his administration. But it would be a mistake to discount the large, though contradictory, forces behind him and their impact on his policies. The idiosyncratic aspect plays out in impulsiveness, cussedness and doubling down. It also shows up in open promotion of short term pain versus a promised long-term gain, easy talk of recession, and tariff-induced price increases and cuts in government spending as a “harsh but necessary medicine to restore the economy to health.”
Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary is on record with the claim that the economy needed a “detox period”. Beyond personalities, however, lies the systemic. The forces that drive the US economy, polity and society are too decentralised to be completely subordinate to a single locus of power. The actions of any state, let alone one occupying as dominant a global position as the US, are based on evaluation of overall interests and competing powers.
They may not always be well thought out, but they cannot be attributed wholly to whims of those in power. In the long run, the underlying structural interests that constitute the foundational bedrock of US society and economy will emerge on top, and Trump may end up doing what needs to be done for a modified form of status quo.
Is there a visible and coherent ideology behind these policies, even if based on an incomplete analysis of both the structural problems faced by the US economy, and the assessment of its place in the global order? A somewhat tenuous analogy from the recent past, from a vastly different country can help shed some light on what is unfolding.
Trump, Musk and their group of radical reformers have taken a battering ram to the institutions in Washington. Their methods bring to mind the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, with a similar unfolding of a full spectrum upheaval. Here are some early takeaways, with echoes of a 30-year-old past (Caveat: the Trump phenomenon is sui generis and a peculiar product of US conditions. All the same, here goes).
In the runup to both sets of abrupt policy changes, there was a widely shared and growing sense of unease (in Soviet Union then, in the US today), a sense that they were headed down the wrong path, with economic stagnation for a sizable part of the population, accompanied by a plethora of slogans and performative progressivism.
Like some of the so-called “young energetic reformers” under Yeltsin (Jeffrey Sachs, an early participant, who quit his advisory role in dissent in 1993, has written a clarifying note on the contentious developments of the 1990s), the young troops of the Department of Government Efficiency, and many of the newly minted Secretaries at various departments have shown considerable enthusiasm for tearing down the Ancien Régime, while the outline of what is to come is still nebulous, apart from broad homilies about deregulation and dismantling welfare.
The traumatic reform approach of the Gorbachev/Yeltsin era focused primarily on domestic issues. This is also true of the Trump administration, as I have suggested above. However, given that the United States and the then Soviet Union were global powers, turbulence in the domestic sector set off shock waves in different parts of the world. In the case of the Soviet Union, the first global impact was the withdrawal from East Europe; in the US case, Ukraine seems to be playing that role.
Both in the 1990s as well as now, the objective of this rapid fire, shock and awe approach, apart from paralysing the opposition, was to create a sense of inevitability and irreversibility.
One need not take the analogy too far, but a key question that it raises is – what are the unforeseen consequences of this “shock therapy”? After all, none of the reformers of 1990s Russia aimed for the kind of Russia that exists today, which, to a large extent, has come about as a result of the reaction to the 1990s.
Policies of the Trump administration are symptoms of a deeper crisis going back decades
In conclusion, there are two developments, one global, and one domestic, that colour the policies of this administration. Many of the trade and economic policies of the Trump administration are symptoms of a deeper crisis going back decades. Those who have been studying the easy route taken by US manufacturing companies to pad their profits by offshoring an overwhelming majority of their manufacturing capacity sounded the alarm a while ago.
The ongoing hectic activity seems like a reaction and result of reassessment of priorities in the wake of a relative decline in global fortunes, but will it lead to further waning of the empire, or a rejuvenation of national prospects, by means yet unknown?
On the domestic front, the limits of presidential power and the inbuilt checks and balances are being tested. Many aspects of American democracy that functioned well did so due to two social compacts. The first is well known: the promise of the American dream, that anyone who worked hard had a good shot at living better than their parents. That is still operative but has been tarnished for a significant chunk of the population.
It seems, in retrospect, that the other reason American democracy flourished is due to something akin to a gentleman’s agreement between different branches of the political elite rather than institutional solidity; an agreement that above all else guaranteed an even playing field for the elite during stable prosperous times. It’s that gentleman’s agreement that is being disrupted today.
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