Trying to salvage and empower an empire in decline, only to end up hastening its demise – we’ve seen that somewhere before
The Great Trump Toddler Tariff Tantrum that we have all been living through is so very Trump – blunt like a baseball bat, burn-it-down-first-figure-out-the-consequences-later reckless, and attention-grabbing like Kim Kardashian – that it is easy to forget that Donald Trump is merely human, too.
The now 47th US president has an extraordinary gift for occupying center stage. Yet, as Karl Marx wrote almost two hundred years ago with reference to France’s Napoleon III, another bigger-than-life “global disrupter” leading his country into a fiasco, “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please […] but under circumstances existing already.”
And if the co-founder of “scientific Communism” isn’t your thing, take it from the other side: Arch billionaire capitalist and creator of the world’s largest hedge fund Ray Dalio is warning us that the current tariff brouhaha, fundamentally driven by Trump’s crude ideas about how to re-industrialize the US, is obscuring what is really at stake: namely, a “once-in-a-lifetime event”: a “classic breakdown of the major monetary, political, and geopolitical orders.”
Yet collapse is only half the picture. We are also witnessing historic transformation on a global scale: yes, the old world order of so-called “liberal hegemony” – that is, really, US “primacy” – is tottering and crumbling. But it is also already being replaced by emerging multipolarity. With American politics simultaneously, according to Dalio again, “fraying” at home, conditions are “ripe for radical policy changes and unpredictable disruption.”
And hasn’t Trump made good on that? Before his subsequent U-turn and suspension (not yet canceling) of his “Liberation Day” tariff blitz, accumulated 2025 US import tariffs were scheduled to grow higher than ever since 1909. Rapid subsequent US stock market cratering alone wiped out well over $5 trillion – as if, to quote the Communist Manifesto, melting into the air. A post-U-turn rally then recovered some of the losses. Yet, whichever way you look at it: “Radical policy changes” and “unpredictable disruption” indeed.
Now – after what the Trump team tries to sell as the president’s brilliant pressure tactics and an analyst has called Trump’s “capitulation to the markets” (except regarding China) – even if Trump may end up negotiating away some or many of his tariff hikes, great damage has been done to Washington’s already shoddy standing and credibility: Because it has once more displayed the staggering irresponsibility, stunning shortsightedness, and sheer incompetence that make living on the same planet with the self-appointed “indispensable nation” so painful for the rest of us, and this lesson will not be forgotten.
Yet the bigger point is that – with his giant ego, lovingly cultivated idiosyncrasies, and Freudian-sized Sharpie signatures – Trump remains locked into his time and place even more firmly than he can cage migrants in El Salvador.
And his time is one of America never going to be great again. Like a late-Roman emperor, Trump is trying to stop and reverse history itself. Little wonder that some specialists on Roman history see parallels between his tariff storm and that ancient empire of relentless aggression, ruthless exploitation, and, finally, decadent perversion, decline, and fall.
But, like those stubborn Roman emperors, Trump cannot succeed. It does not matter whether he himself politically survives the brutal toll his tariff offensive will impose on the American home front: Before Trump’s U-turn/capitulation, the Budget Lab, a research center at Yale University, had estimated that toll at, on average, 3,800 dollars per household annually. It may or may not turn out less catastrophic in the end, but there is no reason to assume it will be negligible.
This may cost Trump’s Republican Party the midterms in 18 months. It may also cost Trump his whole political career, his unconstitutional dreams of a third term included. For even if he were able to re-industrialize America with his simplistic and misguided methods, it would, of course, take years, if not decades. And it would not, as he suggests, produce an abundance of jobs – and certainly not well-paying ones – because job losses have been due more to automation than to off-shoring.
Meanwhile, the self-hobbling US is also supposed to do all of the following, at least: First, fight an escalating economic – and not necessarily only – war against a cohesive, patriotic, and internationally well-connected China that is not ceding ground but retaliating in kind and also has the difficult but devastating option of dumping its humungous holdings of American government debt. Second, wage the usual catastrophic wars in the Middle East to please Israel and American Zionists, with Iran currently in Washington’s sight. Third, cajole or conquer its neighborhood, including Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, as a minimum. And, fourth, in general keep spending as if there’s no tomorrow on its already insanely expensive, bloated overkill forces – yes, that would be the same ones that cannot defeat Yemen (at a price tag of, at least, a cool billion, and counting) and are just losing their proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
Just now, Trump has announced a new annual military budget “in the vicinity” of one trillion dollars, or, in the original Trumpese “the biggest one we’ve ever done for the military.”
But, in reality, Trump’s attempt to recreate a mid-twentieth-century industrial-manufacturing base in the 21st-century US is quixotic anyhow. And vaguely reminiscent not of ancient Rome but of a large, powerful state much more recently deceased and also often called an empire. It was the late Soviet Union about which Cold War Westerners liked to joke that it had the most impressive early-twentieth-century industry on the planet.
That was, of course, an absurd and mean exaggeration – no one built satellites and intercontinental missiles in the first half of the twentieth century, for one thing. But it is true that one weakness that brought down the Soviet Union was clinging to an outdated and always insufficiently modernized economic structure skewed toward heavy industry.
Curiously enough, there are other aspects of Trump’s second presidency that bring the Soviets to mind, in particular the one-and-a-half decade between, roughly 1985 and 2000, that is the period of the Soviet collapse and its long, extremely painful reverberations.
For one thing, there is Trump’s perverse sense of imperial grievance. In reality, for decades the US has profited massively, economically and politically, from its position at the center of its own empire, including what a French finance minister once called the “exorbitant privilege” of the dollar, that is, a unique ability to live on virtually unlimited credit.
And yet here is an American president who cannot stop whining about how everyone else is “ripping off” of his poor, downtrodden country. And to top off the absurdity, that president also happens to be a billionaire business clan leader raking in money around the globe.
Meanwhile, Trump’s bad habit of believing his own demagoguery makes him mistake any trade deficit for evidence of a raw deal; and his oddly pinpoint forgetfulness makes him simply overlook American trade surpluses in services.
A disruptive, charismatic, rabble-rousing politician presenting the dominant core of an empire as the victim of exploitation by its peripheries? A natural-born populist – with an occasional dancing habit – resorting to a nationalist appeal fusing crude economic quarter-truths with widespread resentment at declining living standards and life chances?
That description would also fit Boris Yeltsin, of course, the man who first exploited late-Soviet Russian frustrations to deliver the death blow to the Soviet Union and then misruled what was left through the dark and dismal 1990s.
Or consider the curious fact that, among other things, Trump triggered a massive wipe-out specifically of wealth held in stocks. But that kind of wealth is anything but evenly distributed among Americans. Bloomberg even goes so far to speak of an “American investor class — that top 10% that owns almost all of the stocks.”
Make no mistake: Trump’s tariff shock is already hitting all other Americans as well – through rising prices, declining retirement funds, reduced labor income and, soon, lost jobs. Indeed, as an American, the harder you already have it, the worse the Trump’s brutalist economics will harm you. That’s because, tariffs are, in effect, a kind of tax on the domestic population, too, “burden[ing] households at the bottom of the income ladder more than those at the top as a share of income.”
In other words, if you are already poor, these tariffs – to one extent or the other – will make you even poorer; if you are teetering on the brink of poverty, they are likely to push you over into full destitution. And that means large numbers of Americans will be hit severely: According to a Congressional Research Service paper, as of 2023 between 11.1 and 12.9 percent (almost 37 to nearly 42 million) were already in full-blown poverty (depending on which of two US Census Bureau definitions is applied). 15 million of them were enduring an inner circle of hell by the name of “deep poverty.”
And yet another 15 percent of Americans (or almost 50 million) are still just above the poverty line but precariously close to it. All in all, more than a quarter of the American population is either poor or almost poor. And they are all going to suffer especially badly from Trump’s wrecking ball policies.
Sorry, ordinary Americans: With all his populist braggadocio, this president is not your friend. And he’ll cost you. A lot.
And yet, it was also striking to see how Trump’s “Liberation Day” impacted Bloomberg’s “investor class” and in particular the even narrower circle of the rich and super-rich. After the tariff blitz, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg taken together, for instance, lost an estimated $42.6 billion – in one day.
That does not really hurt them, and they may generate more wealth soon, through no discernible effort of action of their own, as so often. But even if they do, here as well there is a lesson that will remain: namely that America’s oligarchs, with all their ostentatious finance power which allows them to corrupt and bend politics, are not invulnerable but, when push comes to shove, also depend on one man at the top.
Of course, the above cannot be compared to the taming of the Russian oligarchs gone feral in the 1990s, which was a necessary, healthy stage in Russia’s recovery from the Soviet collapse. And yet, fragile as the analogy may be, there it is: around the end of empire no one is entirely safe, not even the richest.
And then, there is the final and greatest irony of empire’s end: It may be hard to see at first glance, but there is a fatal similarity between the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev and Donald Trump as 47th president of the US.
They were different in ideology, personal ethics, temperament, and style. Gorbachev was, for one thing, what Trump only claims to be – a peacemaker. The last Soviet leader was so smugly naïve toward the West that he greatly damaged his own country in the process, but he did play the single most important role in ending the first Cold War, which, otherwise, could well have ended with World War III.
Trump, by contrast, is failing to end the Western proxy war in Ukraine while co-perpetrating the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians as criminally as his predecessor Joe Biden. Moreover, one reason for his abrupt change of course on tariffs may well be that Netanyahu and friends have ordered him to get the US shipshape for attacking Iran on Israel’s behalf.
And yet, Gorbachev and Trump do have one fundamental trait in common: trying to save and make great again a proud superpower in deep crisis. Trump may not end up having to preside over the full, official demise of his country, as Gorbachev tragically did. Yet, just like Gorbachev in that one respect, history will remember Trump as a would-be “reformer” whose policies of change only hastened the decline he tried to fend off.
