Core Aspects of Trumpism Have Been Institutionalised

“Over the last eight years, but especially during the Biden administration, core aspects of Trumpism have been institutionalised.

Let’s take a look at the record. First, the ‘China problem’ identified by Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, became a bipartisan obsession. It is now hegemonic to the extent that Harris attacked Trump from the right on this issue during their debate, condemning him for having ‘sold us out’ by selling chips to China. (He, in fact, limited sales of chips to China.) Second, economic nationalism – including protectionism, stimulus and a domestic industrial policy – was embraced far more vigorously by Biden than Trump. Ironically, he was enabled in this by pressure from the Sanders left, just as Trump was inhibited by pressure from the Republican right. Third, the far right’s borders agenda has been adopted uncontested, and now forms a major plank in Harris’s platform.

Fourth, in all essential ways, Biden adopted Trump’s foreign policy. The withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Abraham Accords and nationalist contestation with China, were all continuous with the previous administration. I suppose it could be argued that Trump would not have supported Zelensky as fulsomely as Biden. We can’t know what Trump would have done because in practice he is mercurial, but in office he deferred to the higher wisdom of the Pentagon. Fifth, Biden has – for different reasons than Trump – made unconditional support for the Likudnik-fascist coalition in Israel a bipartisan affair. That has rebounded into a growing domestic authoritarianism. The countersubversive thrust against the noisome ‘watermelon people’ also corroborates vigilante and racist ‘lone wolf’ attacks.

In the coming election, my hunch is that a Trump victory is nailed on barring some last-minute meltdown on his part. He’ll lose the popular vote and win the college vote on a low turnout.

I’m trying to think about the present historically – always historicise, as [Frederic] Jameson insisted – and find that I have to think against the surfeit of senseless data, the endless flow of emotionally devastating events, and the eternal present of capitalism where all that ever happens is new rounds of accumulation in altered conditions. I think we can understand the institutionalisation of Trumpism as a response to three or four basic trends, including relative imperial decline, problems of ‘secular stagnation’ (dixit Larry Summers) in the capitalist core, the rise of Chinese state-capitalism, and the energy crisis.“

—Richard Seymour, 25 October 2025

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