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Donald Trump’s victory is an inflection point – not merely for the future of American democracy, but for the future of the West, and the planet. The driving forces behind his re-election must be properly understood.
Some analysis suggests material forces and structures, and the disenfranchisement of sections of the white working class, are to blame. Other explanations have pinpointed the apathy and failure of the mainstream liberal agenda to offer any meaningful vision that appeals to Americans. Disinformation has also been cited as a reason behind Trump’s return.
Each of these factors played a role, but there is a more alarming, overarching – and insidious – factor at play: a network of billionaires, think tanks and lobbying groups that believe, as does the Russian Government, that democracy must be destroyed.
Economic Drivers: Inflation and Energy
Social and economic dynamics, in the context of an intensifying global systemic crisis driving rocketing rates of inflation, clearly played a key role in Trump’s re-election.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, prompting the West to attempt to cut off Russian oil and gas exports from global markets, was a major trigger for the oil and gas price spikes that have driven US inflation. Indeed, it seems this inflationary impact was part of Vladimir Putin’s ‘hybrid warfare’ strategy to destabilise Western democracies.
But this is not the whole story.
A long-term rise in inflation and declining rates of economic growth over the past half-century have been occurring for deeper structural reasons.
The massive decline in the energy returns from fossil fuels, relative to the rising energy required to extract those returns, appears to be one of the most significant (but largely overlooked) reasons for this long-term structural crisis in the global financial system.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats fully recognise the nature of this crisis.
There is a more alarming, overarching – and insidious – factor at play: a network of billionaires, think tanks and lobbying groups that believe, as does the Russian Government, that democracy must be destroyed
But while the Democrats see the solution as trying to maintain the prevailing system with some tinkering here and there, the far-right movement behind Trump has an altogether different idea.
It wants to maintain the fundamental unequal resource ownership structures that underpin the neoliberal financial order, while tearing down and re-engineering the liberal political organising structures that currently regulate this system.
This is not because this movement wants to transform the economic order, as such. Instead, it wants to replace these structures with new authoritarian regimes that can manage it in a way that can be more effectively dominated by a very particular faction of elite interests across key extractive industries, automation, and information technologies.
Emotion and Disinformation
The persistence of a global structural economic crisis – felt by Americans in their pockets due to continuing inflation – has stoked anger and resentment.
The Trump campaign used a set of tried-and-tested cognitive tools – honed from the days of Cambridge Analytica’s psychological profiling and beyond – to channel this energy into a polarising ideology blaming migrants, minorities, and leftists for America’s problems.
This was not a campaign won on a rational assessment of policies, but on feelings and perceptions connected to those policies, which the Trump campaign fought hard to manipulate. The prism through which it achieved this was emotionally-charged disinformation.
But who was really fighting this disinformation war on behalf of Trump?
X – Marks the Spot: Russia’s Second Front
Peter Jukes looks at the mounting evidence that Elon Musk is using his social media platform as a vector to attack Ukraine and support Putin’s murderous invasion
As I reveal in my book Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West From Within, in his bid to recapture the White House, Trump was backed by a well-oiled machine including a network of far-right billionaires, think tanks and lobbying groups, with a strange convergence of ideas.
Despite their competing visions, and sometimes contradictory values, they agree on one key thing: democracy is finished.
A Clear Agenda
‘Project 2025’ is a blueprint forged by one of the most venerated and influential conservative think tanks in Washington, the Heritage Foundation, for the next Trump administration.
It offers a detailed step-by-step guide on how Trump can dismantle the checks and balances of American democracy. This includes: giving the President unprecedented unilateral executive power, permitting him to deploy armed forces on US soil against dissenters, subjugating law enforcement agencies to his control, and removing restraints on fossil fuel exploitation – all while supercharging extreme Christian nationalism.
Pundits have made much of the apparent competition between Project 2025 and other Trumpist factions that have worked on different blueprints, such as the America First Policy Institute, and Trump’s own manifesto, Agenda 47. But the differences are largely negligible.
Together, these various documents converge on very similar policies that would result in massively centralising state power around Trump.
There are also clear connections and coordination between individuals across these groups. For instance, Carla Sands, vice chair of the America First Policy Institute’s centre for energy and environment, and a former Trump administration ambassador to Denmark, is a Project 2025 author.
American Carnage: The Musk-Trump Plan for Total Collapse
A systems lens suggests a quarter of GDP could evaporate on a pathway to violent civil unrest, concentration camps, and genocidal violence that would be a free gift to Putin
In other words, these are not ‘competing’ agendas at all.
Despite publicly distancing himself from the Heritage Foundation over criticisms of Project 2025’s authoritarian programme during his election campaign, Trump appears to have privately endorsed it. This is unsurprising, given that more than half of its authors and contributors had roles in the first Trump administration, his campaign or transition teams.
Project 2025 is widely assumed to be a primarily American nationalist project but, in reality, the Heritage Foundation has extensive ties with the Atlas Network of almost 500 free-market think tanks across more than 100 countries.
Sir Antony Fisher, the Heritage Foundation’s founder, simultaneously mobilised its infrastructure, personnel, and funding to seed the Atlas Network across the world, including organisations such as the Institute of Economic Affairs in the UK.
In this way, the key ideas and values behind Project 2025 are not confined to the United States, but are being actively disseminated, reworked, and adapted from country to country in different ways.
The Techno-Utopian Flank
Then there is the contribution to the Trump project of ‘techno-utopian’, transhumanist, and longtermist ideologies that are espoused by some of the most powerful billionaires in Silicon Valley.
Such beliefs centre the notions that technology is key to bettering the human condition, and that actions taken today will impact how the lives of future generations develop.
Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and David Sacks – three South African-born billionaire oligarchs – aim to refashion the American national, and world, order to suit their own interests, which combine with extreme market ideologies demanding zero restrictions on techno-capital.
This has converged under a shared elite consensus view that national democracies must be shattered to pave the way for a ‘patchwork’ of newly defined corporate-controlled sovereign territories that operate, not according to the democratic views of citizens, but according to the corporate sovereign.
