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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 forthcoming 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.
Blogger Curtis Yarvin is a key voice who originated the idea of ‘RAGE’ – ‘Retire All Government Employees’ – as early as 2012, which was recently endorsed by the incoming Vice President JD Vance. It helped inspire Project 2025 and similar blueprints.
Earlier this year, on his ‘Gray Mirror’ Substack, Yarvin stated that, for the US, he believes “there are only two real political choices before us: eternal bureaucracy, or elective monarchy”.
“The new President will not just theoretically claim the powers of a conquering enemy general,” he wrote. “For these powers to make sense, he needs to govern like a conquering enemy general – using direct command of the police to maintain public stability as he spins up a totally new executive branch, run like a start-up with start-up-quality people.
“The new President will not, of course, just change the policies of the new regime. He would not even just replace the personnel (security forces excluded) of the old regime. Radical as they might seem, these measures are wholly inadequate.
“It is not even enough to dissolve the organisational structures of the old regime, or even demolish its physical buildings. Any new regime worthy of the name will need to be ready to rewrite even its philosophical principles.
“The new President will not just take over the federal government – but also state, local and tribal government. Moreover, inasmuch as he finds any organisation, public or private, to have become a de facto state agency, he will nationalise and restructure it… And this new infrastructure will run at or near start-up efficiency – it must be run like Apple, not like the Department of Transportation.”
Such techno-authoritarian thinking is often combined with revamped forms of eugenics, which advocate that virtually anything is justifiable to guarantee a future in which trillions of humans populate the solar system and merge with machines to experience the delights of virtual reality via planet-sized computers.
Democracy itself is among the biggest obstacles to this vision which numerous Silicon Valley billionaires appear to believe in. In particular, they wish to suppress the political agitation of what they believe to be intellectually and genetically inferior groups of non-white populations who are supported by liberal social welfare policies – which should all therefore be jettisoned.
In this context, devaluing the US dollar and its reserve currency status – as well as the value of other Western currencies – while skyrocketing the value of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, can be seen as a tool to accelerate the path to this goal, by weakening national governments and maximising the centralised wealth of this group of tech billionaires.
American Putinism
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Trump’s victory is Russia.
The Heritage Foundation is working in formal partnership with the heavily pro-Russia Budapest-based think tank, the Danube Institute, funded by Viktor Orbán’s Government. This working relationship has seen the two organisations share personnel, events, and ideas, operating as a transatlantic bridge between the Republican far-right and Orbán’s pro-Putin lobbying groups.
For the Russian President, this convergence of ideologies works well for his strategic goals: to control or subjugate the United States, break off and isolate the United Kingdom, destabilise the European Union, and forge a new axis with other willing autocratic regimes to disrupt Western democracies.
Responding to Trump’s victory, Russian philosopher and Putin associate Aleksandr Dugin observed: “So we have won. That is decisive. The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat. The future is finally open. I am really happy.”
Following up in an article, he wrote: “We can confidently say that ‘Putinism’ has triumphed in the United States”. Republicans in power, he continued, “will forget about the Ukrainian war, at least temporarily – and perhaps permanently.” Under Trump, he urged, “Russian forces must reach as far as Lviv, liberating the entire former territory of Ukraine from the Nazi yoke.”
In another social media post, Dugin said: “One of the ideologues of Trumpism, Curtis Yarvin, has declared that it’s time to establish a monarchy in the United States. If Republicans gain a majority in both houses, what could stop them?”
A somewhat coherent vision is now emerging for far-right thinkers tied to the Russian state: to essentially break down the established liberal democratic order and replace it with a global network of authoritarian regimes tied to Vladimir Putin.
While Putin and many of the ideologues around him appear to sympathise with the ideas and values of their Trumpist comrades in the US and elsewhere, the Russian President has his own agenda: the return of Russian imperial power.
The Demise of the Liberal Order?
As much as Trump’s victory represents the abject failures of entrenched establishment liberal discourse – which has consistently failed to provide meaningful solutions to the social, economic, and cultural dislocation that many Americans feel – his ability to channel these grievances through weaponising disinformation to ultimately ‘divide and rule’ the American working class along the lines of identity, worked.
Its implications will be profound.
Trump’s triumph will empower an already existing network of authoritarian political parties, movements, and regimes – from Orbán to Putin, Le Pen and Geert Wilders.
In the UK, both Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch and Reform Leader Nigel Farage – who are connected to the networks that propelled Trump to his second term – will be emboldened to double down on nationalist and exclusionary agendas.
Trump will not seek to rein in Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly genocidal war in Gaza and Lebanon. Having already urged the Israeli Prime Minister to “do what he needs to do” weeks before the election, it is likely that he will preside over the acceleration of violence and will support the Israeli right wing’s most extreme goals in the region.
Trump’s re-election also comes at perhaps the most consequential time for the human species. We are in the midst of a planetary emergency in which our chronic dependence on fossil fuels is destabilising the natural balance, pushing us into the danger zone – where the risk of irreversible tipping points triggering a spiralling sequence of ecological catastrophes that culminates in an uninhabitable planet is all too real.
The data shows that Trump’s determination to remove all restraints to maximising US fossil fuel production will make it virtually impossible to keep rising global average temperatures below the 1.5°C safe limit urged by the international scientific consensus.
That, ultimately, reveals what is really at stake here.
It is not just that democracy is under threat; the liberal paradigm which has governed the growth of industrial civilisation is now increasingly embattled – and in many ways irrelevant.
Trump’s victory proves that the existing checks and balances of democratic governance are too weak by themselves to withstand the network war on democracy. One of the reasons for that, as exemplified by the Biden-Harris administration, is that prevailing political structures have ultimately failed to address the deepening systemic crises increasingly destabilising the economic and political order, while also being thoroughly incapable of effectively countering disinformation.
The Biden-Harris strategy combined a futile attempt to defend the indefensible (genocidal violence in Gaza; the structure of an outmoded neoliberal economic system) while highlighting the evidence of Trump’s fascism. But this strategy failed catastrophically.
My book documents in detail the dangerous vision of the network that has returned Trump to power and what they really want. But there is an irony: this network has successfully moved the Overton window to a point that vast swathes of the American public either do not believe the evidence of Trump’s fascism because they think this consists of lies disseminated by a ‘Deep State’ liberal conspiracy – or even worse, they do not care in the face of what they experience as the fundamental failure of liberalism to meaningfully improve their lives. As a result, they increasingly see this ideology as the answer.
The Trump victory represents a last-ditch effort by some of the most powerful interests vested in the fossil fuel-centric industrial order to stave off decline in the face of emerging forces – both technological and cultural – pushing for an entirely new type of order that operates within planetary boundaries and distributes prosperity to people.
The choice is stark. The failure to meaningfully transform our societies is creating a vortex that sucks democracies back into the rut of this ideology. Either the status quo is defended and we end up moving inexorably into that rut, which ends with collapse; or we move forward to rebuild and redesign our societies in line with economic, energy, and ecological reality.
To save what’s left of democracy, we need to focus the fight on transforming it.
Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West from Within by Nafeez Ahmed will be published soon by Byline Books. Register your interest here.