Anarchy or autocracy: What exactly is the Trump presidency aiming for?

Let’s begin with things we can be sure about. I believe that at least three indisputable trends have been revealed so far. First, a deep antipathy for expert knowledge. Second, blatant racism. Third, a drive for territorial expansion. These features affect not just America, but the world.

Consider the disdain for expertise. There is close to complete consensus on some key tenets in the contemporary world. One is that trade is good for society. Yes, there are losers from trade (as there are from technological change), but the net social gains are indisputable. Another is that climate change is real. The specifics of its future impacts are unknown, but there is little doubt among experts that they will be consequential. 

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Similarly, modern healthcare is built on the foundations of innovations that arise from funding and scientific research. Lay persons may have views on trade, climate change and medicine, but they are usually based more on ideology than knowledge.

In these first few days, Trump has taken a hammer to these building blocks of modern existence. He is instituting a regime of tariffs against China, Canada, Mexico and the EU—that is, friend and foe alike—that could take us back to the trade wars of the 1930s that accelerated a global depression and provided fuel for fascism. 

Trump, who has called climate change a “Chinese hoax," has taken the US out of the Paris climate accord (just as he did on day one of his first presidency), is gutting the US Environmental Protection Agency, and withdrawing support for clean energy and electric vehicles. 

He has nominated Robert Kennedy as health secretary—a man widely believed to hold fringe views on medical issues such as vaccines. Trump has tried to stop funding for all research, including medical research, and taken the US out of the World Health Organization.

An antipathy towards dark-skinned people is increasingly transparent in the political shift that America has undergone. Trump is trying to kill the very idea of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in all institutions, public and private, educational and commercial. He openly equates diversity with incompetence. After the helicopter-plane collision in Washington DC, before any details were known about the tragedy, Trump blamed it on DEI.

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Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the president is Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who grew up in apartheid South Africa and uses his media platform X to cheer Caucasian nationalists everywhere, especially in Germany and the UK. 

Together, they are in the process of destroying the US Agency for International Development (USAID), on which tens of thousands of impoverished lives depend. They have just stopped all aid to post-apartheid South Africa on the grounds that Caucasian landowners (the architects and prime beneficiaries of apartheid) are being mistreated.

Trump’s territorial ambitions range from merely greedy to outlandish. He has renamed the Gulf of Mexico as ‘Gulf of America,’ is demanding to buy Greenland and retake the Panama Canal, musing about making Canada the 51st US state, and proposing to occupy Gaza after evicting all Palestinians. 

Such contempt for the wishes of the international community is unprecedented in the post-war era. An imperialism this naked has not been seen since the 1874 Berlin Conference and scramble for Africa.

What is the purpose of all this? If it is winning US mid-term elections in 2026, it isn’t clear that any of these actions will help either his core voters or swing voters who actually decide elections. The trade war he has initiated can only reduce global and US economic activity and raise prices in the US, with likely job losses. Meanwhile, overt racism will repel the few minorities who were willing to give Trump and Republicans a chance. Blatant land grabs, should they occur, will only undermine the international system and its institutions but translate into few new votes.

If winning the next election is not the Trump administration’s objective, what is?

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The concept of ‘state capture’ has been floated as an explanation. According to Tyler McBrien in the New York Times: “State capture occurs when wealthy private interests influence a government to such a degree that they can freely direct policy decisions and public funds for their own benefit or for the benefit of their ideological fellow travelers (or both)." This limited view of state capture is one of nightmare capitalism in which the wealthy elite and the state collude to enrich themselves.

But there is another version of state capture of democracies, as shown by the Nazis in Germany less than a century ago. Here the goal is to destroy the institutions of democracy, especially the judiciary and media, to install an autocracy. This is typically done by manufacturing a crisis (such as the Reichstag fire in 1933), followed by the suspension of democratic rights.

There are fears that the Trump administration will provoke a crisis by defying judicial orders. The president possibly believes he has a pliant Supreme Court that would go along with his plans and therefore a final showdown with the judiciary will not be needed. If that turns out to be incorrect, or even partly correct, then all bets are off for the future of American democracy.

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It goes without saying that neither anarchy nor autocracy is an appropriate model of governance in the modern world. This is especially true of its oldest democracy, its champion of markets and trade, a country that accounts for a quarter of the global economy and possesses the world’s largest and most lethal military. This is a very dangerous moment for the world.

The author is a professor of geography, environment and urban studies and director of global studies at Temple University.