There’s very little more one can say about Trump. He must currently be the most famous person on the planet. (I imagine he revels in that.) Of course there may still be new Trumpian scandals to be revealed – kompromats, perhaps, going back to secret trysts in Moscow hotels years back, when he was touting for money from Russian oligarchs to save him from bankruptcy – but these would not surprise anyone, or damage his reputation among his supporters; who will probably dismiss them as ‘fake news’, or otherwise will have been inured to this sort of thing. After all, they’ve tolerated his known misdeeds until now. To the rest of us – probably a large majority of people world-wide – he’s obviously an appalling character: deeply dishonest, selfish, narcissistic, stupid, a liar, woefully ignorant, tasteless, illusionist, mean, over-sensitive, revengeful, hateful, insincere, amoral, instinctively criminal; and even (surely?) ridiculous; so much so, indeed, that it genuinely puzzles most of us outside America that that he could possibly have been voted in as President a second time.

The mystery of Trump and his appeal will be debated by historians for decades to come. Because the US is now so deeply divided – look at all the ‘comments’ on social media – we are far from any kind of agreement over why he is like he is, and why so many of his compatriots support him. Some think it’s rooted in Trump’s own personal psychology; others in local and contemporary cultural trends that he may reflect; while a third explanation is that he’s simply part of a global phenomenon: the American version of the ‘great reaction’ that is hitting almost every country now.

The psychological explanation is something that psychologists need to work on – not me. I have no expertise in this field. (If I had, I’d want to take a good look at his awful father, bearing in mind Philip Larkin’s famous line about parenthood.) But I leave that to others. – On the second kind of explanation – local and contemporary influences – I feel I have a little more purchase, having studied American history and lived and worked there at various times; and even before then having been brought up on ‘Western’ (cowboy) and gangster films and comic-books, which reflect an American popular culture that must have left its mark even on more modern minds. The pistol-toting range-rider, reclaiming vast wildernesses from the native American ‘savages’, and meting out rough justice to outlaws and Latinos, used to be held up as your typical American hero; until the ‘woke’ (or rather pre-woke) brigade, with their sentimental regard for the gun-slingers’ Amerindian victims, arrived to rub away some of our heroes’ sheen. ‘Individualism’ was a common virtue running through all of this, and indeed through American culture and society more generally; expressed best, perhaps, but also most tediously, in the novels of Ayn Rand. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2025/01/30/ayn-rand/.) This, together with male violence, plucky mothers; and of course guns.

Another contemporary cultural characteristic that will have influenced – and probably moulded – Trump’s personality was American capitalism; the ‘red in tooth and claw’ version that reached its apogee there and then, and which has dominated not only Trump’s personal upbringing (that awful father again), but American life and discourse more generally for at least two hundred years. All Trump’s words, actions, policies and ambitions are clearly rooted in what he learned as a real estate developer; the particular and least productive branch of the modern capitalist system that he is supposed to have excelled at, but might not have done if it had not been for all those Russian loans. I’ve not got around to it yet; but his famous early book The Art of The Deal (1987), albeit ghost-written, might be worth reading to see whether it gives as many clues as to what goes on in his mind as Mein Kampf did in Hitler’s case. Everything Trump has done in his first hundred days as 47^th President bears the mark of the ‘Dealer’; negotiating man-to-man with rivals and enemies to divide property – in this case international real estate – between them. To him, it’s as simple as that. The claims of democracy, principle, history, morality and justice don’t come into it; just as they wouldn’t if he were merely haggling over the price of a piece of land on which to build a new ‘Trump Tower’. It would depend solely on the material value of the property, its potential, and on the ‘cards’ that he and the other side held in their hands. (Remember that one of the early ventures he failed at was running a casino.)

It’s no wonder that Putin finds him so easy to manipulate, and that Trump has thrown in the towel with him over Ukraine. He can’t easily or profitably win that ‘deal’, and so the only sensible – businesslike – solution is to cash in his stake and withdraw. He’s done much the same over Gaza. At the same time he has appointed a score of his fellow billionaire capitalists to his cabinet, some of them real estate developers like him, who will have the same skills – but also the same limitations – as he has. In other words, he’s running the country as a business; and the last thing the CEO of any business wants is to be hedged about by ‘principles’, or beholden to a democracy. Hence his authoritarian and unconstitutional ‘executive order’ approach to governing in his first hundred days. It’s the capitalist coming through, again.

I made the point in my book Empire and Superempire, which compares British and American historical ‘imperialisms’, that they both followed broadly the same pattern, of economic dominance followed by annexation; except that America usually – but not invariably (viz. Hawaii and Puerto Rico) – avoided the annexation stage, at least overseas. That will no longer apply, however, if Trump’s wettest dreams come to pass, and he does a full-on ‘Cecil Rhodes’, by bringing Greenland, Canada, Panama and Gaza  under the formal protection of the Stars and Stripes. (Rhodes called his acquisitions ‘Rhodesia’. Is Trump swollen-headed enough to rename Greenland ‘Trumpland’?)

Lenin called this kind of thing ‘the last stage of capitalism’ – before, that is, the whole system’s collapse. The extreme Right-wing movements emerging all over the world just now, of which Trump’s is one, might be taken as evidence of exactly this: the final throes of a global capitalist system struggling to survive against the inevitable contradictions that are gnawing at it internally, provoking uncertainty and unrest, manifested in various forms of protest; of which ‘Populism’ and ‘Fascism’ are the two main ones – and ‘socialism’ might be another, although that’s not looking too likely just now. This sort of analysis would hugely expand the context in which to place and explain ‘Trumpism’, and the neo- or proto- or quasi-‘Fascism’ which it is now widely acknowledged to represent. But isn’t that a bit too ‘Marxist’ for comfort?