Trump as Today’s FDR
On U.S. Imperialism Taking a New Form
This article is an extended version of the one that appeared in The China Academy last month. The month of hindsight has, in my view, confirmed the concerns that I had expressed about the Trump administration’s apparent “dismantling” of the institutions of U.S. imperialism. Far from seeing any genuine attack on the institutions of empire, what we are seeing is a restructuring – empire taking on a new form to sustain a dwindling hegemony. For this ‘new form,’ the institutions of woke, humanitarian imperialism of the past (USAID, NED, etc.) are of little use.
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History teaches us that empires can never explicitly affirm the real reasons for their imperial pursuits. It is impossible to get a population of dispossessed people to support sending their children to war when you are open about which class of people is ultimately benefiting from it. It was Plato in his Republic who had already noted that states whose economic foundation is grounded on the “endless acquisition of money,” find it that they must “seize some of [their] neighbor’s land.” This economic drive inevitably leads to war. And “when the rich wage war,” as Jean Paul Sartre said, “it is the poor who die.” This is true of any of the societies that have been fractured by class. There is always a class of people that does the profiting, and a class that does the dying, in times of war.
The ruling elites of the warring states have never been able to explicitly announce the economic reasons behind war. The legitimation for war has always had to include a deception of the general public. Aeschylus was correct to say that “in war, truth is the first casualty.” Upholding war always required a narrative that can be spun to manufacture the consent of the governed.
The ancient Greeks and the British empire justified war efforts and colonization through noble, almost humanitarian-like, appeals to civilizing the barbarians. Those that were of their ilk were always the ones that were fully human. And those that weren’t carried the stench of barbaric otherness on them. From Hellenization to the empire where the sun never set, colonial war was itself presented as an act of charity and goodwill. You should be thankful that we have expended our valuable resources “civilizing” you.
Paradoxically, expansionist wars have also often taken the form of a defensive enterprise. The Roman Empire frequently resorted to the need to protect oneself from barbarian external threats to justify expansion. Offense is often presented as the best form of defense. It is by conquering that we can keep our people at home safe. During the Punic Wars, for example, colonial expansion was legitimized as an attempt to counter the Carthaginian threat.
The ideological legitimation of the not-so-Cold War in the 20th century took the same form. It was imperial looting and conquests justified by presenting these as defensive measures of preventing the spread of communism. Offense was once again masqueraded as defense.
In the modern era we have seen a consistent combination of both by the U.S. empire, although at any given moment it could be either the “offense-as-defense” or the “humanitarian conquest” which could take dominance over the other.
For instance, during the Iraq War “offense-as-defense” was the model that proved most effective. Yes, we still had a contingent of the “humanitarian conquest” justification model that appealed to the need to “help oppressed women” or bring “democracy” to the region. But this played ultimately a secondary role to the fear of the brown, Muslim “other” that the ruling class was able to fabricate in the population, especially after 9/11. This fear was pivotal for the offense-as-defense model of legitimation. As Bush said in the West Point speech June 1st, 2002, “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.”
The dominance of the offense-as-defense model left a bad taste on the mouths of Americans, who came in time to unanimously oppose the Iraq war, realizing it was a war for oil and the control of oil markets, not to defend us from the fabricated dangers of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
This allowed the ruling class to pivot toward the humanitarian model as the key form the legitimation for war will take. Assad had to be toppled because he was “gassing his people.” Cuba had to be overthrown because it was repressing the “black artists” of the Miami-funded San Isidro movement. Venezuela had to be overthrown because Maduro was a brutal dictator that was oppressing the LGBTQ, the same with Iran, Russia, etc. China had to be toppled because they were carrying forth a “genocide” of the Muslim Uyghur minority. Real evidence of any of the accusations, like the “evidence” of the Weapons of Mass Destruction, were of course never provided.
More and more, the specific form that the humanitarian conquest model took was wokeism. The political theorist Marius Trotter put it nicely some years ago when he said that:
“Facing a rising China and a resurgent Russia, the American ruling class needs a moralizing crusade to motivate its counter offensive against its enemies, both at home and abroad. Under the banners of Black Lives Matter, multi-colored Pride flags and trumpets announcing the correct gender pronouns, the guns of the American Empire will spread the creed of Woke Imperialism.”
But as wokeism itself was extended to such absurd extremes that no sane person could accept, it became quickly hallow as a model for war legitimation. No one cares about going to war for trans rights fought for by the USAID in Eastern countries. No one really buys into the baseless narrative that the U.S., which spent the first 20 years of the century bombing Muslims, killing millions of them, now cares about them in Xinjiang. And where was the proof that anything was going on in the first place? As the Cuban philosopher Ruben Zardoya has argued, when the machinations of domination become transparent, domination itself is weakened. This is what has occurred to the woke form of imperial legitimation, and to avoid the further weakening of imperial power and domination, the ruling class has had to switch course.
When the consciousness of the people outmodes the woke model of imperialism, the ruling class needs a clean slate. Trump and his cohorts of fake dissident rightists, carrying out an anti-woke crusade, was the perfect alternative. At a time when the American people want to be dissident and anti-establishment, give them the same status quo but in the form of dissidence. Give them people who fight against the form imperialist ideology has taken in the last few years, but not against imperialism itself – not against the system that produced it in the first place.
As Jackson Hinkle and Haz Al-Din have previously noted, we should not be surprised if the intensification of the absurdities of wokeism were intentionally designed to prop up a “dissident right” that is “dissident” only with regard to the most superficial and depthless components of the ruling order.
I’ve argued previously that this is an age, in the U.S., marked by the necessity of hegemony presenting itself as counterhegemonic. The rulers must, at all times, manipulate the public into seeing them as subaltern, as powerless and waging a crusade against the elites themselves. From conservatives, to liberals, to the various Trotskyite “leftists” and “democratic socialists,” all American politics is coming more and more to take the form of dissidence. It is an aristocracy of capital that survives through the conceit of continuously struggling against itself for power. Like in Kafka’s The Trial, where the court bureaucracy is reproduced precisely by presenting itself as powerless subjects subjugated by the system, the dialectic of American political authority today also takes the form of this feigning of impotence to sustain their systemic omnipotence. Power sustains itself through the pretense of powerlessness.
And now we are here. In a Trump presidency that is dismantling USAID – one of the wretched henchmen of “humanitarian imperialism” – and that is moving towards possibly doing the same with the National Endowment for Democracy and many other institutions tied to the modern form of legitimizing, and carrying out, imperialist assaults.
I would like to think this is a revolution against a parasitical Deep state sucking the host republic dry, as Scott Ritter has suggested. I really hope it could be that, and that the debt jubilee that Ritter claims is possible with this “revolution” pans out.[1]
But my Marxist common sense, my understanding of the ever-evolving forms of ideologically justifying U.S. imperialism tells me that, perhaps, something else is going on: A switch back to a previous form of legitimation.[2]
Perhaps a turnback to the dominance of the offense-as-defense model that we saw in the Cold War and in the first decades of this century. This one certainly seems to be dominant in the discourse around China, which is presented as an “existential threat” to the U.S.’s security and geopolitical standing. Trump’s National Security Advisor, Michael Waltz, has said that “we are in a Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party” and that China is an "existential threat to the US with the most rapid military build-up since the 1930s." This discourse on China as an existential threat, which is very common in the foreign policy establishment, is foundational for the offense-as-defense model of legitimizing imperialism.
Some analysts have suggested a return to a Monroe Doctrine style imperialism, where one is more open about the aims of conquest for conquest’s sake, veiled thinly with an appeal to a divine mandate. This is another form we have seen in the history of empires. It is clear that this model of discourse is employed in the rhetoric used for U.S. foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere.
The truth, however, is that we don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see what actually happens.
This indeterminacy isn’t simply in our knowledge of the existing state of affairs. I do not think that the problem, at the moment, is one that is located in our knowledge of the world, of how U.S. imperialism will develop in the coming years. The indeterminacy is in the world itself. The U.S. regime is itself scrapping to figure out its next moves, to see what it can do to sustain at least a semblance of hegemony in a world where the Weltgeist is moving eastward.
We can say today about this indeterminacy the same thing that Hegel responded to Kant’s dilemma regarding the “gap” between our phenomenal knowledge and the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich): there is no thing-in-itself that is not already a thing-for-us. The gap is not between my knowledge and the world; the gap is in the world itself. It is the “ontological incompleteness of reality,” as Slavoj Žižek calls it, that we are dealing with here, not simply an incompleteness in our knowledge. To suspect otherwise — that is, to cling to the idea that world events are already determined, that the problem is epistemological in nature — is to follow the same abstraction that Hegel criticized in Kant. Just as the “thing-in-itself,” which is not always-already (as Heidegger would say) a thing-for-us, is for Hegel nothing more than a Kantian “empty abstraction,” maintaining that today’s imperialists have a clearly determined and mapped-out agenda, and that what prevents us from knowing it definitively is a limitation in our understanding, is to move at the same level of abstraction… to postulate, through a mental operation divorced from the world itself, a concealed determination in the world to which we have no access.
This grants these institutions a mystical power that is not necessarily there, one that more closely resembles Hollywood movies about the CIA than the actual state of affairs. They too, in the face of the present crisis, are trying to orient themselves in the world, attempting to devise new ways through which their plundering of the planet can continue without being challenged.
What I think we could be the surest of is the following: this isn’t an anti-imperialist revolution occurring within the belly of the beast via the hand of the billionaires themselves. When some of the leading billionaires, NGO’s, think tanks, and financial investment firms are perfectly fine, or even supportive, of the Trump administration, that does not inspire confidence in the thesis that he is carrying out a great assault against the system. After all, if anyone personifies the system best, it is those profiteers who have continued making money hand-over-fist irrespective of who’s been in the White House. They compose the unelected body of rulers that stays the same with every change in administration. Together with the intelligence agency who serve their interests, they make up the famous “Deep State.” When BlackRock CEO Larry Fink tells us, as he did during the presidential campaigns, that he is “tired of hearing that this is the biggest election in your lifetime,” and that “the reality is over time, it doesn't matter,” perhaps we should listen.
Instead of an assault on the imperialist system and the Deep State, it is much more likely that this is a pivot toward a new form of imperialist governance and legitimation. Just like American capitalism needed to take on a new form after the great depression to survive, in this great crisis of Empire, the U.S. needs to do the same. Trump is here, then, a figure homologous to Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR). FDR broke with the orthodoxies of free market ideologues to save capitalism. He broke with the form the system had up to then taken in order to keep it alive. Perhaps Trump, similarly, is a figure that aspires to help save American imperialism through the assault on the orthodoxy and institutions that have brought it to the brink of collapse.
It is what bright statesmanship, aimed at sustaining U.S. hegemony in the long run, would do to try to save the empire from this decline. After all, as Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote in his novel, The Leopard, things need to change so that they can stay the same.
While I hope I am wrong, I think this is the type of change we are seeing. A change to a new form of legitimation, necessary to sustain the essential basis of U.S. imperialism.
[1] To be fair with Scott, he has grown more critical of Trump’s actions in the Middle East since the original publication of this article. In a tweet the day the bombing of Yemen re-started, Scott said: “And, in one night of narcissistic megalomania, Donald Trump gave up the title peacemaker, exchanging it for warmonger, and put himself on the path of becoming America’s greatest loser. America can’t be “great again” when the price of oil shoots through the roof. And starting a war with Iran will go down in history as one of the worst self-inflicted wounds an American President ever committed.” However, even with regard to the war in Ukraine, what actions Trump has taken have been half-steps. No serious attempt to stop the Zelensky regime has occurred. Here, the perspective given by Colonel Douglas Macgregor is, in my estimation, much more correct.
[2] After publishing a shorter version of this article for The China Academy, a comrade called by attention to a video that Brian Berletic had done on the subject, where he brought up an extremely helpful analogy to capture what I had in mind writing this article. Think about a warlord who has gone out plundering various regions, adding in each adventure subsidiary swords of his fallen enemies to his. While the sword looks frightening, the blades are going every which way, and hence, cannot serve the function of actually cutting anything. Upon this realization, the warlord decides to get rid of all the extra swords and just stick with his original one. The infantile villagers, of course, rejoins and think “finally, our collective nightmare is over with.” Upon closer inspection, all he has left is the original blade, which he is sharpening with all his might. While the sword might not look as scary as the previous one, it is now much better at doing what the sword is supposed to do – take some skulls. Can this be the sort of Trump “dismantling” we have before our eyes?
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Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy professor. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the Secretary of Education of the American Communist Party. He has authored many books, including The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming On Losurdo's Western Marxism (2025) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2025). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Carlos’ just made a public Instagram, which you can follow HERE.
What a monumental pile of nonsense. But congratulations if you’re getting paid by the word.