Donald Trump has always made clear he hates government. But during his first term in office, he behaved like most politicians when they reach power, administering the state in ways that were both broadly predictable and largely consistent with precedent. But not this time. With four years to prepare, and a massive grudge to drive him, he listened to the Heritage Foundation and the admirers of Ayn Rand, and set out to deliver a reform that no one imagined anyone might ever try.
What are they trying to do?
There has been much speculation about whether Trump has a long-term agenda. One interpretation could be that Trump, and perhaps his acolytes, are not seeking to reform government structures, but to destroy them. We see it in attacks on the universities, on the social security system, on the federal education department, on the legal system, and on medical support for the tens of millions of people in the US and globally.
It seems that Trump may have become president precisely so that he can destroy what he is in charge of. But the more he destroys, the less his power. And the more he questions the very existence of the US as it is, the more that he makes whatever he rules over ungovernable.
Perhaps he is asking the question which the Civil War was supposed to have answered. Should there be any form of federal organisation in North America? Should the US exist?
Destroying the dollar
Such a move achieves another goal of the American far right: to destroy or weaken the tool which has, above all else, given the US its power: the US dollar, which gives the US federal government the power to tax income.
The far-right in the US has long challenged both the existence of the Federal Reserve and the right of the federal government to charge a federal income tax. Trump is now seeking to deliver on the promise to dissolve both. The dollar as we know it then ceases to exist.
And it would take with it the US internal market in goods and services, based on a monetary union, as well as much of US economic power, US financial markets, and much of the world order of trade. North America would become a chaotic patchwork of states, and the US would cease to be a world power, leaving a void in the international political order.
Corporate power
What Trump’s cohort are doing is entirely logical. They are immensely wealthy people who believe in their right to govern. They know that in the early 20th century, when there was last a similarly powerful group of people in the US, steps were taken to control that power through federal legislation. President Theodore Roosevelt’s antitrust legislation broke the 43 largest companies into smaller, more competitive companies, limiting the power of the owners to exercise control over the US economy.
Now we have an even smaller number of companies exercising even more power. So Musk, Zuckerberg and others need to block any return of antitrust legislation. To do this, they need to capture and neuter the US legal system and the federal government. And once power is devolved to individual states, there will be no coherent government to constrain their monopolistic power.
Control of what?
In 1905, the basis of corporate wealth was physical infrastructure and the finance that underpinned that. Now, power lies in control of data. But federal legislation constrains that power to ensure that it is exercised for the common good. This, too, is seen by these companies as an assault on their wellbeing.
So they need to remove the threat to their power from antitrust legislation and from legislation that limits their use of data. And if they can capture some, or all, of the federal government data, while at the same time destroying the power of the federal government to use it, they create a new monopoly for themselves. They can then license that data to the individual states who will need it to operate whatever vestige of government might remain. But their window of opportunity to do this is limited, hence the speed with which Musk is moving.
Who wins?
So perhaps everything that Trump is doing is directed to these goals, clearing the way for the removal of the US federal government. The winners are the new oligarchs, who we saw, in plain sight, at the Inauguration. Ironically, the losers will include those who voted for him in the poorer states of middle America, the millions who depend on federal support, and all those whose pensions and savings are locked into the collapsing stock market..
The oligarchs may think that when the dollar ceases to be all-powerful, they can escape through alternative currencies. So, the cryptocurrencies which Trump and Musk have promoted, are integral to the plan. Privately created ‘currencies’ suit their purposes very well. There may be a problem, in that without the dollar there is no power to tax. But perhaps taxes might come in a very different form – for example, transaction levies for the right to use the currencies they have created, to buy the assets they control.
This is all confusing, precisely because it has taken us so far, and so quickly, into unknown space. This might merely be a paranoid delusion, but in a world where so many rules have been torn up so fast, it does offer a coherent explanation for some fairly mystifying behaviour.
This article is based on a blog from Professor Richard Murphy
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