“America is driving slow in the fast lane,” says Professor Jan Nederveen Pieterse

Trump or the United States: who is to blame for the country’s current problems?

Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Professor of Global Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara considered this question and more in a lecture delivered on campus City St George’s, University of London on Tuesday 25 November 2025.

The event discussed globalisation, populism, Trump and the Make American Great Again (MAGA) movement.

Professor Pieterse’s talk was introduced and moderated by Inderjeet Parmar, Professor of International Politics at City St George’s and Associate Dean for Research for the School of Policy & Global Affairs.

“Professor Pieterse has always provided the big picture analysis on things,” Professor Parmar said. “His talk is very timely, given the hints of unravelling going on in the Trump coalition.”

Trump as a distinctly America cultural fusion

Professor Pieterse framed the Trump administration as the political culmination of a distinctly American fusion: billionaire capital rooted in organised-crime-adjacent networks of casinos, construction, real-estate speculation, and reality-television spectacle.

“You listen to his language, and a lot of it is mafia language,” explains Professor Pieterse. “‘I threaten you with this-and-that. You will pay if by Friday you don't deliver.’”

He traced Trump’s own trajectory – from the Roy Cohn-mentored New York of the 1970s, through Atlantic City casino dealings riddled with mafia ties and money-laundering allegations, to the branding-as-politics of the style of “The Apprentice” – as emblematic of broader shifts.

His tendency to taking legal action against news organisations whose reports are unflattering towards him, most recently threatening the BBC which is in its own leadership turmoil, are also indicative of an American society that frequently relies on aggressive lawsuits.

“America is a society of laws and lawyers. The United States makes up 4% of world population yet has 70% of the world's lawyers,” Professor Pieterse adds.

Make America Great Again: all theatre and no meaningful action

MAGA, Professor Pieterse contended, is less a coherent ideology than a politics of delusion, grievance, and performative masculinity: a never-ending reality show that substitutes nostalgic myth (“Make America Great Again”) for material redistribution or structural repair.

Pieterse insisted that this spectacle deliberately distracts from the real conditions of the American working class – deindustrialisation, the opioid addiction crisis, wage stagnation, crumbling infrastructure and inequality – which Trumpism never seriously addresses, preferring tax cuts for the rich and culture-war theatrics.

The movement’s energy comes from entertainment logic rather than from any workable programme for ordinary lives.

How billionaires went from donors to political actors

“The free market for Americans means no government policies and no national economic strategy,” says Professor Pieterse. “In other words, industrial policy is un-American and a no-go.”

The ramifications of a laissez-faire approach to domestic economics and government involvement have deeply impacted 21^st century politics.

The 1980s deregulation of finance and media in the US produced the first billionaires. After the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, the US saw Federal Reserve quantitative easing, which “let loose the enormous flow of finance.”

He argues these combined created a “billionaire world, in which billionaires are not simply donors, but think they are in charge.”

This forms the backdrop of episodes such as Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US.

A fading empire?

The USA is a historically conservative country, drawing back to its colonial beginnings, but Professor Pieterse argues its delusion of grandeur is a sign of imperial decline.

The US ruling class, habituated to unipolar dominance through financial bullying and vexatious litigations, cannot psychologically or institutionally abide the emergence of a multipolar world.

He said:

The Senate is the powerhouse of American politics, and also the world’s bottleneck for social issues, climate change, international law, the United Nations, women’s rights…

For so many issues, the US is driving slow in the fast lane.

Trump’s “America First” rhetoric is thus seen to be the symptom of an empire that prefers casino-style zero-sum gambling to the patient diplomacy multipolarity demands.