A hundred days of the Trump revolution
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Maximillien de Robespierre, one of the leading figures of the French Revolution, famously said: “Terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice.” He was liberal in his use of terror. In the end the revolution he championed devoured him.
A lawyer, Robespierre was a censorious puritan — like Oliver Cromwell. He was indifferent to sex, drink and bribes. Both men were zealots. Both embarked on a revolution against monarchy and feudalism which eventually, perhaps inevitably, tipped into authoritarianism and, in the French case, terror.
Robespierre and Cromwell would recognise what is happening in the United States today under Donald Trump and MAGA fundamentalism, though perhaps not the President’s personal proclivities. What we’re witnessing is radicalism segueing into extremism.
The historical context is different, of course. This is the 21st not the 18th century. America has guardrails rooted in long-standing traditions and a constitutional democracy. There have been no executions although, as we shall see, there will be deaths, if not necessarily American ones.
But liberals (I count myself among them), the Left and those who deplore the narcissism and cruelty of some of the things Trump is doing should not trivialise what is happening. Nor should they deny the logic that drives some of them.
The most consequential mistake liberals have made – and keep making – is to talk down – to pontificate — to those who voted him into power and whom they regard as moral inferiors. Liberalism is in a hole and it keeps digging. Trump’s malapropisms, his flip-flop diplomacy, his neo-imperialism are distractions. The action is elsewhere.
It’s worth saying that MAGA and Trumpism are not always the same thing. Which is why it will survive him. Trump is a Palm Beach social climber. His inner circle are either billionaires or Ivy League graduates or both. They are not the working classes that propelled them to power and there’s scant evidence from his first 100 days that they want to make their voters’ lives better.
But they do matter. What they’re doing matters and runs deep. Those who wish to pivot America back to the bi-partisan centre ground where it has stood for, well, forever must begin by acknowledging three self-evident truths.
The first is that Trump is what the tabloids would call an icon. Trump is to politics what Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican rapper (50 million YouTube followers), is to pop music. Trump’s fan base is fiercely devoted and forgiving. They love him. They love what he says, however outrageous, and they love how he says it.
Second, Trump’s rhetoric speaks to real problems: runaway illegal immigration; the loss of jobs to low-cost industrial centres like China and Vietnam; soaring healthcare prices; stodgy, slow-moving central government; unaffordable housing. These are not made up.
Working class Americans, especially those in post-industrial, rural and small-town communities described by JD Vance‘s Hillbilly Elegy may blame immigrants or big-city woke values. But the pain they feel comes from much closer to home.
Over five million manufacturing jobs have been lost in the past quarter century; life expectancy among non-college white Americans has declined — which, in the richest country on the planet, is shocking. Deaths from drug overdoses or suicide among those hit by job losses have soared. Housing and healthcare costs have outstripped wages trapping people in chronic poverty and dependency on a state they despise.
Third, what Trump and the architects of Project 2025 have unleashed — contrary to the expectations of many (“surely he wouldn’t”) — is nothing less than a second American revolution. The aim is to reshape America from the top down and the bottom up. And the only way to do that, says Paul Dans, one of the architects of Project 2025, is by smashing the system and rebuilding it from scratch.
There will be victims. There already are. The effects of the overnight shutdown of US-funded foreign aid programmes will kill tens if not hundreds of thousands of people in low-income countries: HIV-related deaths; tuberculosis, malaria, polio, deaths from childbirth complications.
Deeply flawed as it has been (Vietnam and Iraq), America’s influence in the world from the Marshall Plan onwards has been a cornerstone in the advance of freedom and human dignity. Trump and his tech bro buddy Elon Musk are eviscerating it. America’s soft power is draining as fast as Tesla car sales, a gift to China and India among others.
But this wrecking-ball approach to change will not die with Trump, for the simple reason that the deep-seated disorders he says he wants to fix will still be there when he is gone.
The grievances and aspirations that propelled him to power for a second time are more than spin. MAGA is now an established political ideology, a new political reality. J.D Vance may not have Trump’s pulling power, but he is articulate, fiercely ambitious and speaks the language of millions of aggrieved Americans.
Vance may be defenestrated before his time. Trump’s ego is has phenomenal self-preservation antennae. But if not Vance then someone else will emerge.
Where does all this leave us?
The number one lesson is that populism will not be defeated by spin alone. Keir Starmer should take note. Reform UK is a symptom not a cause. Its win in the Runcorn by-election and big gains in the council elections suggest that Reform, like MAGA, is now the party of the Right, the party to beat.
The second is that the grievances of those who are drawn to populism are every bit as legitimate as the concerns of liberals who fear for health of democracy. It’s not a binary choice.
Trump has captured the Republican party by gutting liberal conservatism. Delivering America from extremism lies not in headlines or podcasts but in figuring out what works and what doesn’t work for those who feel dispossessed. Just as it does in Britain.
If America wishes to restore its belief in pluralism and tolerance and repair the damage Trump is wreaking on the world order it built, it must fix the ordinary things, from the foundations to the roof.
Extremism may be enticing, even thrilling, for a while. Let the Sudanese starve. Lift those gang members off the streets and throw them into a maximum security jail in El Salvador. Throw away the key. Arrest the judges. Build a sky-high tariff wall.
When radicalism becomes dogma and dehumanisation is an instrument of policy in a democracy, things start to go wrong. In the long run revolutions, in the absence of justice and humility, end up devouring themselves — as it did in France.
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