What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[crazy canuck]

So, at least another 3 or so years of the US closing its doors to the world's scientists, engineers, scholars, doctors etc etc.

I wonder who will become the next great centre of innovation.

[Josquius]

So, at least another 3 or so years of the US closing its doors to the world's scientists, engineers, scholars, doctors etc etc.

I wonder who will become the next great centre of innovation.

Meanwhile in Britain....
Yup. Not us.
Canada?

[HVC]

Germany deserves another chance. What could go wrong 

[Iormlund]

The easy answer is China.

[Grey Fox]

It's going to be Dubai.

[Savonarola]

Trump banners now adorn the USDA building:



And Department of Labor:



USDA does had Abraham Lincoln as well and I think Department of Labor also has Theodore Roosevelt; but it still has a Josef Stalin/Mao Tse Tung feel to it.

[Valmy]

Meanwhile Trump's policies are driving out manufacturing jobs and destroying farmers export markets.

[Savonarola]

And flooding the zone fast and furiously this weekend:

Trump calls on Attorney General Bondi to use power of the Justice Department more aggressively

From his Truth Social account:

Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, "same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam "Shifty" Schiff, Leticia??? They're all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done." Then we almost put in a Democrat supported U.S. Attorney, in Virginia, with a really bad Republican past. A Woke RINO, who was never going to do his job. That's why two of the worst Dem Senators PUSHED him so hard. He even lied to the media and said he quit, and that we had no case. No, I fired him, and there is a GREAT CASE, and many lawyers, and legal pundits, say so. Lindsey Halligan is a really good lawyer, and likes you, a lot. We can't delay any longer, it's killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!! President DJT

Erik Siebert is the US Attorney that Trump is referring to.

[Tonitrus]

Trump banners now adorn the USDA building:

USDA does had Abraham Lincoln as well and I think Department of Labor also has Theodore Roosevelt; but it still has a Josef Stalin/Mao Tse Tung feel to it.

I mean, Soviet banners would have the Lenin/Marx/Engles trifecta...

I don't think Hitler/Mussoli did a lot of banner-ific self portraits...does that make Trump more of a communist dictator?

[Sheilbh]

The HQ of the Fascist party


But Simon Kuper actually did an article a little on that in the FT:

How Maga rewrote the Little Red Book
Trump's populist rhetoric has echoes of communism

© Harry Haysom

Simon Kuper
PublishedSep 11 2025

It's an image posted by the Trump administration, but it looks straight out of the Soviet Union: a square-jawed worker in a simple button-down shirt stands before a backdrop of factory smokestacks, beneath the slogan, "AMERICAN WORKERS FIRST!" The image appeared as the administration was taking stakes in Intel, US Steel and MP Materials, as well as entering revenue-sharing agreements with the chip companies Nvidia and AMD. To borrow from once-familiar jargon, the workers' state is nationalising the means of production.

Obviously, I'm not arguing that Trumpism is communism. (It's a family-first version of state capitalism.) Yet, the movement does have echoes of communism — not in its policies, but in Donald Trump's rhetoric and, especially, his embrace of the notion of class struggle. Today's populism is often compared with 1930s' fascism, but it can also be understood as an emotional replacement for communism.

When communism dwindled around 1990, it left a vacuum. Though few missed its policies, many craved its story: a proud working class united against its oppressors. Social democratic parties had told a softer version of that story, but during the Blairite 1990s they abandoned that, too. "The workers themselves, their culture, their conditions of life, their aspirations . . . disappeared from political and intellectual discourse," writes French sociologist Didier Eribon. When workers were mentioned, it was often with contempt. They were derided as "chavs" in the UK and "trailer trash" in the US.

Soon, far-right nativist parties realised they could meet the unfilled demand for pro-worker rhetoric. Eribon recounts in his memoir Returning to Reims how his white working-class family switched from the French Communist party to the far-right Front National. Working-class people, he writes, "turned to the party that seemed to be the only one to concern itself with them".

Like the Communist party before it, the Front National claimed to speak for the "working class". The class enemy was rebranded from "bourgeoisie" to "elite", communist xenophobia about "international capital" was supplemented with xenophobia against immigrants, and the proletariat had to ally with former adversaries such as small business owners, but the essential claim of working-class dignity remained intact.

The relationship between communism and populism was less direct in the US. The country barely had a communist tradition, and its working class had gone almost unacknowledged by politicians since vice-president Henry Wallace invoked the "century of the common man" in 1942, but Trump spotted a missed opportunity.

Now populists recycle communist verities: the fetishisation of working-class culture, the vision of a good "people" fighting a bad elite, the belief that the state should control business and the dismissal of parliamentary democracy as a bourgeois sham. Both communists and populists are impatient with such "bourgeois liberties" as the right not to be snatched off the street and incarcerated without trial. Similarly, both groups think the media's job is to produce propaganda for the ruling party. Poland's slavish state TV under the populist PiS party curiously resembled Poland's slavish state TV under communism.

Populist parties in Poland, France and Austria have wooed working-class voters by shifting economically to the left. Trump sometimes pretends to, for instance, when he mused about raising taxes on the rich (shortly before giving them a tax cut). Yet whereas communism was primarily an economic movement, populism is a cultural one. Instead of accusing the bourgeoisie of exploitation, populists accuse the elite of disrespect. Perhaps the most galvanising slogan of Trumpism was Hillary Clinton's sneer at the "basket of deplorables".

Trump's policies won't make the working class better off, but then nor did the Communist ones. The appeal is in the story of class struggle. Trump tells it better than Lenin, though his props are the same muscular white factory workers of yesteryear. The rhetorical similarity is obscured by populist rants against communism as if it were still alive, or, bafflingly, against "cultural Marxism". Giorgia Meloni's party recently posted a cartoon of her playing football against a team of red-shirted communists with hammers and sickles on their chests.

The lesson for Trump's opponents is that there's still a self-identified working class that wants political leaders to speak in its name. The left shouldn't ditch the language of ethnicity and gender, but it must reclaim class. Perhaps new left leaders like Zohran Mamdani, Democratic candidate for mayor of New York, can find ways to do that.

FWIW I think "family-first state capitalism" is a good description - and I think there's echoes in Europe where right populists position themselves as defenders of family capital. I suspect it will, with patrimonial sharing of gains, become part of the centre ground across the West very quickly. It's also part of why an opposition based on the old order struggles. I'm not sure the position of the efficiencies and gains of global capital are as attractive when there's a sense we might be on the losing side - but also just in the face of slowing growth, declining birthrates, China shock, volatility etc.

[Tonitrus]

The HQ of the Fascist party

A terrible resemblance.  AI rendering must not have been as good back then. 

[mongers]

So, at least another 3 or so years of the US closing its doors to the world's scientists, engineers, scholars, doctors etc etc.

I wonder who will become the next great centre of innovation.

My bicycle shed. 

[garbon]

Kimmel will be back tomorrow.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

FWIW I think "family-first state capitalism"

tbh, I read that as capitalism for the Trump family first...
which also fits

[Savonarola]

In good news, Donald J. Trump has stopped autism:

The Trump administration is expected to link autism to Tylenol use during pregnancy

Of course there are some spoilsports:

Meanwhile, groups like the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine have stood by recommendations to use acetaminophen to treat fever and pain in pregnant women. The group argues that untreated fever, for example, can cause grave harms such as miscarriage, birth defects or premature birth, especially early in a pregnancy.

But, as Homer J. Simpson put it best:  Has science ever kissed a woman? Or won the Super Bowl? Or put a man on the moon? This is what I think of your precious science!

And not only has he found the prevention, he has the cure:

The administration is also expected to say in its report that leucovorin or folinic acid — a form of vitamin B that is sometimes used to treat deficiencies caused by chemotherapy — could prevent or treat the disorder. The use of leucovorin is based on research suggesting that many people with autism have a metabolic difference that could reduce the amount of folate that reaches the brain. Leucovorin appears to offer a way around that metabolic roadblock.

And although leucovorin affects a system that is important for brain and nervous system development and is sometimes prescribed off-label as a treatment for autism, the evidence that it works is scant.