Trumpism does not signify the midpoint of US imperial decline or even its late stage, it is the dumpster fire of its wreckage.

Groundxero | March 11, 2025

Chris Hedges has described Trumpism as an authoritarian cult which seeks to restore the United States to the status of a world hegemon, but whose policies are completely self-destructive.¹ “These self-inflicted wounds, characteristic of all late empires, will cripple and destroy the tentacles of [US] power,” wrote Hedges. “And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse.”

Hedges’ warning is accurate, but comes 17 years too late. The house of cards began to tumble all the way back in 2008, when the implosion of the Wall Street bubble and the worst global downturn since the Great Depression ended the post-1945 era of US dominance over the planet. Trumpism does not signify the midpoint of US imperial decline or even its late stage, it is the dumpster fire of its wreckage.

This dumpster fire is the culmination of five decades of decline. The first symptoms were collapsing bridges and roads and exploding wealth polarization. Then came inefficient and destructive monopolies in healthcare, education, telecommunications and the internet. Huge chunks of the wealth of the American middle class were vaporized by trillion dollar financial bubbles, once-thriving companies like Intel and Boeing were run into the ground by financiers, while American democracy was strangled by billionaire-sponsored autocrats. The decline culminated in falling US life expectancy and what Ed Citron famously dubbed the rot economy of the silicon plutocrats.

The year 2025 is a watershed in this process, because it marks the moment the US has decayed into a presidential monarchy. Trumpism is now employing flagrantly unconstitutional presidential decrees to carry out what essayist Sarah Kendzior and historian Timothy Snyder have both called a coup.²

The first act of this coup was declaring war on immigration. This will wreck the US hospitality, agricultural sector, and high-technology industries which depend on immigrant labor. Its next acts were to gut the Federal Drug Administration, the National Institute of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, condemning millions of Americans to needless deaths. Trumpism subsequently expanded its war on US life expectancy by installing Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a science-denying lunatic who wants to abolish vaccines, as head of the US Department of Health and Human Services.

On the economic front, Trumpism has closed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, enabling scammers and monopolists to fleece ordinary citizens. Later this year, Trumpism plans to abolish the US Department of Education, effectively destroying public education in the United States. Trumpism has also announced plans to destroy the US Post Office, which will end mail service in rural communities and prevent US citizens from voting by mail. Finally, it has imposed blanket tariffs on imported goods, which will disrupt US supply chains and impoverish US consumers.

That said, Trumpism bears a fatal internal flaw. This is the fact that its digital bombast, cringey threats, and imperial bluster does not express irresistible might, but hopeless weakness. This weakness is personified in Trumpism’s leader, a chronically angry and resentful real estate mogul with a fake name who, as Timothy Snyder put it, is a  “weak strongman”. This weak strongman was an abysmal failure as an entrepreneur, but was gifted at hawking a 1990s reality TV show to a US television audience which was angry and resentful at the destruction of the American middle class. 

As a genre, reality TV shows portray a competitive, zero-sum struggle for hefty financial rewards which seems to be completely unscripted to viewers, but which is carefully scripted in advance by producers. Trumpism borrowed the format of the reality TV show, but changed its reward from a real financial payout to an illusory speculation. This innovation was copied from the get-rich-quick real estate hucksters who populated late night cable television during the 1990s. These hucksters did not sell actual properties but rather financial advice on how to parlay a small real estate holding into a fortune – i.e. they were selling a literal and figurative bag of nothing.

Trumpism is selling a much bigger bag of nothing, namely the empty spectacle of the Orange Emperor. The single most obvious example of its emptiness is the fact that only 28.3% of the adult US population voted for the emperor in the US national elections of 2024, while 71.7% did not. A small minority of the US population has enabled Trumpism to control the US Senate, the US House of Representatives, and the US Supreme Court. That minority has also allowed Trumpism to rule 27 of the 55 US governors and occupy 55.7% of all state-level legislative seats.³ The overwhelming majority of American citizens detest Trumpism and reject the rule of billionaires, but do not have an actual opposition party they can vote for.

A similar weakness masquerading as strength is apparent in the emperor’s rhetorical attacks on the sovereignty of Canada, Greenland, Palestine, Panama and Ukraine. There is zero public support for military adventurism in the United States, due to the catastrophic failure of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The sole reason for Trumpism’s fake bluster is to conceal the real life bankruptcy of the United States. 

According to the World Bank, US private debt almost doubled from 115% of its GDP in 1990 to 192% in 2023,⁴ while US public debt tripled from 41% in 1990 to 120% in 2024,⁵ for a current total of 314%. Simply, the US can no longer afford to pay for the expensive security alliances it built back in the 20th century to rule the planet.⁶

Similarly, the heart of Trumpism’s two most spectacular policies meant to emphasize chest-beating strength – its war on immigration and its tariff wall – contain irreparable weakness. In the case of immigration, we must briefly return to the world of the 1950s and the 1960s, when the US had the largest middle class in the world. While politicians argued fiercely over the precise number of immigrants allowed into the country at any given time, there was a general consensus that immigration was a crucial motor of US economic revitalization and cultural dynamism.⁷

This consensus began to fray during the 1990s when a combination of plutocratic looting and disastrous financial bubbles began to destroy the US middle class. Ordinary citizens experience this decline in the form of cutbacks in public education, the spiraling cost of attending private and public universities, and by the closure of American factories due to imports produced in foreign sweatshops. 

In any other country, these cutbacks and closures would trigger a fatal shortage of skilled workers and a severe economic crisis. But US imperial elites temporarily put off the day of reckoning by importing large numbers of skilled workers from abroad. 

Between 2000 and 2022, the United States granted permanent residency to an average of 1.02 million new citizens every single year.⁸ The most important subset of these immigrants are students. According to the National Science Foundation, 49% of all postdoctorates and 29% of all researchers located in the United States in 2020 were born overseas. Foreigners became indispensable in the fields of mathematics, engineering and computer sciences, where non-US citizens account for three-fifths of total PhD enrollment.⁹

Between 2003 and 2023, slightly more than one quarter of all the doctorates awarded by US universities were earned by foreign students.¹⁰ About seven in ten of foreign-born, newly-minted PhDs end up staying in the United States to pursue their scientific and research careers, granting the US economy an enormous advantage over its competitors.

While the US corporate-owned media celebrated immigrant success stories as proof that the American dream was alive and well, the majority of the native-born US middle class was experiencing the pain of falling real incomes, decaying public services, and the skyrocketing cost of housing, healthcare and education. The result was ever-increasing rage at immigrants who were competing against the native-born population for a dwindling number of middle-class jobs.

This rage was reflected in the consistent rise in deportations from the US since 2008. Whereas the two Obama presidencies gave pro-immigrant speeches, they also deported an annual average of 312,500 foreigners from the US between 2009 and 2016. The first Trumpist presidency gave anti-immigrant speeches, and deported an average of 536,923 foreigners annually between 2017 and 2020. The Biden presidency gave pro-immigrant speeches – but doubled down on deportations by removing an average of 1,157,280 foreigners annually between 2021 and 2024.¹¹

This past history also explains why Trumpism wants to destroy institutions such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health and the Department of Education. This campaign actually has nothing to do with the nonsensical chimera of “diversity”, and everything to do with the fact that these institutions are a gateway of skilled immigrant workers to enter the US.

Yet destroying these institutions or cutting off the United States from flows of skilled immigrants is wholly self-destructive. Those flows compensated for the fact that the US has been failing to produce enough native-born scientists and skilled workers to power its economy for decades. The lack of foreign talent will hit especially hard given that Trumpism is trying to gut the US public education system, drastically shrinking the US talent pool.

There is a similar weakness at the heart of Trumpism’s tariff wall. It is true that this tariff wall acknowledges the basic reality that after five decades of plutocratic looting, the US economy has become pathologically dependent on inflows of capital and goods from exporting countries.¹² The problem is that Trumpism’s tariff wall will only make that dependency worse. 

One of the most stunning indicators of US economic decline is the fall in the export share of high-technology and manufactured goods from 59.9% in 2000 to just 36.0% in 2022, and a corresponding surge in the export share of medium-technology mineral products from 2.2% to 21.81% during the same period:

Table 1. Share of US exports by type and value, 2000-2022.¹³

The structure of US external trade is now closer to that of neocolonial economies such as Argentina and Brazil than to self-financing economies such as Japan and Germany. Trumpism’s tariff wall will do nothing but allow a handful US corporations to construct poorly-managed and technologically stagnant monopolies which specialize in ripping off US consumers. 

Trumpism’s curious admixture of fake omniscience and real weakness raises one final question. Why would US citizens allow a deeply unpopular regime, led by an odious sexual abuser and convicted criminal, to burn their country to the ground? After all, ordinary Brazilians blocked a coup attempt by a former president in 2022, and ordinary South Koreans stopped a coup attempt by their former president in 2024. Why aren’t millions of Americans marching in the streets?

The short answer is that those protests are coming. However, they will not be a repetition of past movements, which is why they are taking slightly longer to emerge. It’s worth remembering that the three main protest waves in the United States since 2008 were mostly defensive reactions to decades of imperial decline rather than attempts to construct a post-imperial future. 

The 2011-2013 Occupy movement demanded nothing more radical than keeping public spaces public, the 2016-2018 immigration protests demanded an end to Trumpism’s arbitrary immigration bans, while the 2018-2020 Black Lives Matter protests demanded that US police officers should follow the law. By contrast, the 2025 protests signify far more than the mass rejection of the looting of America by billionaires and bullies. They signify the beginning of a decade of struggle to create a genuinely inclusive democracy.

Reference:

¹Between 1945 and 2008, the United States was the hegemonic polity of our planet. Its rule was based on the neocolonial domination of other polities, rather than through the colonial conquest or military annexation of the latter. Following the loss of its hegemonic status in 2008, its economic power, its political credibility and its cultural influence have declined exponentially.

²See Timothy Snyder. “Of Course It’s a Coup.” The Independent. February 12, 2025. https://www.independent.com/2025/02/12/of-course-its-a-coup/. Also see Sarah Kendzior. “Intermission.” December 1, 2024. https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/intermission. 

³This data is current as of February 19, 2025 and was collated by: https://ballotpedia.org/Partisan_composition_of_state_legislatures. 

⁴Data from the World Bank. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FS.AST.PRVT.GD.ZS?locations=US.

⁵Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S. 

⁶In the near future, Trumpism will remove US soldiers from Europe and Asia, it will leave NATO, and exit the United Nations. This does not mean that any other country or even group of countries will rule the world, but it does mean that the democracies of Asia and Europe will create their very own security alliances to defeat Putinism’s war of colonial conquest against Ukraine and to deter China’s own version of regional imperialism.

⁷ “Our nation is a nation of immigrants. More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands. No free and prosperous nation can by itself accommodate all those who seek a better life or flee persecution. We must share this responsibility with other countries.” President Ronald Reagan. “Statement on United States Immigration and Refugee Policy.” July 30, 1981. 

https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/statement-united-states-immigration-and-refugee-policy.

⁸Office of Homeland Security. “Yearbook of Immigration Statistics.” https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook. The 2022 Yearbook is available here:  https://ohss.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-03/2023_0818_plcy_yearbook_immigration_statistics_fy2022.pdf.

⁹National Science Foundation. “National Science Board Science and Engineering Indicators.” 2020. https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/one-pagers/Foreign-Born.pdf

¹⁰Data: National Science Foundation. “Survey of Earned Doctorates 2023.” https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf25300/report/u-s-doctorate-awards.

¹¹Department of Homeland Security. “Immigration Enforcement and Legal Processes Monthly Tables.” https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/immigration-enforcement/immigration-enforcement-and-legal-processes-monthly.

¹²This dependence has resulted in the fall of the net international investment position of the US from a positive 10% in 1980 (the US owned 10% more than it owed) to negative 80% at the end of 2024 (the US owed 80% more than it owned) . Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “U.S. Net International Investment Position/(Gross Domestic Product*10).” https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=qF7j.

¹³Observatory of Economic Complexity https://oec.world/en/profile/country/usa

(The author is an activist from U.S.)