One of five commentaries from the 13 November 2024 event in the Panel Discussion Series: American Election 2024, from The Finsbury Institute, City International Policy Studies, and the Research Group on Global (Dis)Order.
By Professor Bobby Banerjee
War has always been a popular metaphor to describe society’s many failures – wars on drugs, on poverty, on terror have been going on for decades and some critics would argue they have all been lost. Perhaps war is an apt metaphor to imagine the state of the world under Trump 2.0 – from geopolitical wars, economic wars, environmental wars to culture wars. To soothe panic-stricken liberals let us remember that we’ve all been there before – the Americans and the world did survive four years of Donald Trump. Perhaps his past behaviours might give us some inkling of what to expect over the next four years, albeit given the comprehensive mandate he has been given to govern any resistance to his more draconian policies will be significantly diminished.
Geopolitically probably the only thing we can be sure of is that Trump will not bomb Europe. What’s at store for the rest of the world – especially for what he delicately referred to as ‘shithole countries’ – is anybody’s guess. But Trump’s record of bombing countries pales into insignificance when compared to the number of countries bombed and millions of civilians killed under the Bush and Obama administrations. As far as Ukraine is concerned Trump’s promise to end the war in ‘one day’ does not really tell us who is going to win that war despite his aversion to using American military resources abroad and his admiration for Putin. It seems unlikely that the war will end without some territorial concessions by Ukraine especially if continuing US military assistance remains uncertain. And as far as Palestine is concerned Triumphant Trump may well finish the job of Genocide Joe.
In terms of economic wars, the global panic about the immediate introduction of punitive tariffs may be overstated – going by Trump’s approach during his first presidency at least. In 2018, he threatened to tear up NAFTA calling it the ‘worst trade deal ever made’ and renegotiated it as the USMCA, which was basically an update of key NAFTA policies but with some new incentives to build cars and trucks in North America, strengthening of labour laws in Mexico and providing more market access for US dairy farmers. However, his campaign promises to ramp up tariffs – notably a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods - could certainly trigger a trade war, as it did during his first presidency. The scale and scope of any trade war will depend on the retaliatory actions taken by US trade partners. And to dispel any illusion that Republican and Democratic trade policies are substantively different it is worth noting that the Biden administration not only retained the tariffs imposed by Trump but also introduced additional levies on Chinese goods like electric vehicles and solar panels.
Things look decidedly worse as far as environmental wars are concerned. One of Trump’s first executive orders when he became President in 2017 was to overturn Obama’s ban on offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean. However, in 2019 a US court rejected Trump’s executive order and ruled that the President had ‘exceeded his authority’ in overturning the ban. In his first term, the Trump administration rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations. But many any these reversals were challenged in courts by states and environmental groups and some rollbacks have already been struck down. The deep state has its advantages. And while he famously withdrew the US from the Paris agreements the COP climate change meetings have been reduced to a farce, resembling more an oil and gas industry trade show than a climate summit. While Trump’s ‘drill baby drill’ and ‘kill wind’ policies may not reverse the tide towards renewable energy – the economics of sun, wind and battery energy are too sound and gaining strength – they could certainly slow progress. Although fossil fuel expansion seems to be a bipartisan issue: despite Biden’s rhetoric of clean energy 20% more oil and gas licenses were issued during the Biden administration term than during Trump’s first term.
The culture wars that have proved so divisive in the US will become even more intense and bitter during Trump 2.0. Trump’s singular achievement in his first term is that he was able to reconstitute the judiciary in his own image. In his second term he could very well command a supermajority of conservative judges in the US supreme court that could rule for the next 25 years. Which does not bode well for women’s rights – even a few years ago it was almost inconceivable that Roe v Wade could be overturned but thanks to Trump-appointed Supreme Court judges, the right to abortion upheld for nearly half a century was revoked in 2022. When the highest court in the land shares your ideology it makes governing (and criminalizing dissent) easier.
If Trump 2.0 is to be a gamechanger for the cultural and environmental wars much will rest on how much of the administration’s policies are informed by Project 2025 – a sweeping manifesto that is so radical in its intent that even Trump tried to distance himself from the proposal even though it was written by his advisors. The cornerstone of the 887- page-long document is to replace the top tier of Washington’s entire bureaucracy with appointees loyal to the President. Project 2025 proposes to take partisan control over key federal agencies beginning with a Trump campaign promise to abolish the Department of Education, which he accused of ‘indoctrinating young people with inappropriate racial, sexual, and political material’.
Project 2025 will also end support for renewables while expanding oil, gas and coal production. It proposes to shut down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on the grounds that the scientific data published by the agency are ‘one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry’. Project 2025 will also influence the direction of the culture wars: it promises to reverse all federal policies of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion and eliminate ‘racial classifications and critical race theory trainings’. And the next four years will be dangerous times for those that are planning to protest Trump 2.0 policies on the streets: Project 2015 promises warrantless surveillance and the deployment of federal agents and the National Guard authorized to use force to quell protests. Antonio Gramsci’s words have never rung truer: ‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters’.
