Trump: Shock Therapy as a Media Spectacle
1982: The Mexican government declares insolvency. A consequence of restrictive monetary policies in the US. The beginning of an international debt crisis. During the crisis, emissaries of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) granted loans to many countries in the South so that they could service their debts to creditors in the imperialist centres. The loans were tied to the following conditions: devaluations, spending cuts, and tariff reductions. This forced a reorientation from industrialization and growth of the domestic market to the export of cheap raw materials, agricultural products, and industrial goods produced with cheap labour. The management of the debt crisis became known as shock therapy. Left-wing critics of globalization see it as the starting point of increased exploitation of the poor South by the rich North after a developmentalist interlude during the post-war era.
2025: The American government under Donald Trump imposes drastic tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada, and China. Exporters from other countries, including the European Union (EU), are also threatened with tariffs. The reasoning: all countries in the world have enriched themselves at the expense of the US. Behind newly erected tariff walls, the country will reindustrialize and return to its former prosperity. The Europeans, until then loyal allies on the path of neoliberal globalization, are shocked that they are being bossed around like the have-not countries of the South. And that’s not all. In addition, Trump has humiliated the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in front of running cameras, has sat down at the table with the anti-Westerner Vladimir Putin, is jeopardizing the existence of NATO and is questioning the separation of powers in his own country.
Critique of Globalization From the Right
The emissaries of the IMF and World Bank carried out their shock therapy discreetly, Trump stages his as a media spectacle. Uninhibited and self-absorbed, he attacks his opponents at home and abroad. He intimidates and unsettles them. Unlike the shock troops of the IMF and World Bank, later also the World Trade Organization and countless governments of the G7 states from the 1980s to the present, Trump has no plan.
The neoliberal shock therapists wanted to create a world of free trade. After the end of the Cold War, globalists like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman proclaimed that the world was flat. In the search for maximum profit or individual benefit, goods, capital, and people would spread evenly across the world. In the process, the hierarchies in the global economy associated with competition between states would be eroded.
Friedman’s flat-earth theory met with reservations. Conservatives saw the special status of the USA under threat. They did not understand that this special status, and above all, the economic privileges associated with it, were in good hands under the ideological cloak of globalism. Until the 99% felt that the 1% had broken the neoliberal deal. Cheap imports of consumer goods and extensive lines of credit instead of well-paid jobs do not help with rising costs for housing, medical care, and education. Right-wing criticism of globalization from the Tea Party to Trump builds on these real problems.
This criticism presents globalism as a bogeyman that has exposed the US to exploitation by foreign powers and thus brought it to the brink of collapse. Trump can prevent this at the last minute with his revolution against globalism. Projection of their own, real or feared, social decline onto the decline of their homeland, which Trump has conjured up, is gaining Trump mass support. How long this will last once it turns out that shock therapy à la Trump will not bring back the good old days is uncertain. As are the results of this therapy. For the time being, it gives him room to maneuver vis-à-vis his opponents. Not because of the strategy behind it but because his blitzpolitik, amplified by the mass media and incoherent as it is, unsettles, intimidates, and overwhelms his opponents.
Cacophony of Right-Wing Ideas
The claim that Trump has no plan can be more precisely expressed as “no strategy, only tactics.” After every decree, media appearance, or meeting, see what happens and then carry on. In a way, that is as unpredictable as possible and contradicts the last actions or statements. The lack of strategy is a consequence of the crumbling of the neoliberal globalization consensus in response to the interplay of increasing inequality, economic crises, the dot.com crash in 2000 and the Great Recession in 2008/9, left-wing populism from Occupy Wall Street to Bernie Sanders, and criticism of globalization from the right. Trump has made a virtue out of the cacophony of right-wing ideas for overcoming globalism. After each of his steps, those he attacks ask themselves what Trump was thinking. Faced with constant changes of direction, they cannot find an answer. Therefore, they do not know how to react.
Asking what Trump is thinking is pointless. He acts without thinking. As US President, he can afford to do so. Even if, and that’s a very big if, Trump’s picture of decline was completely backed up by empirical evidence, the USA is still the country with the world’s greatest power resources. And that he surely knows. And he rubs it under his opponents’, and even supposed friends’, noses mercilessly.
Contradictions and Megalomania
In the short term, the various strategies being pursued by his team allow Trump to make quick tactical changes of direction without committing himself to any strategy. This is the core of his destructive shock therapy, in contrast to those older shock therapists who wanted to destroy the Keynesian state to pave the way for neoliberal globalization. In the longer term, however, Trump’s version of shock therapy will become a problem for him. Firstly, because it creates uncertainty and thus spoils the propensity to invest. Secondly, because at some point, in addition to shrill appearances, measures will also be taken that either create a somewhat coherent framework for investment or not. Given the team’s wild ideas, it seems more likely that no such framework will emerge.
For some in Trump’s team, tariffs are just a means of pressure to enforce even more free trade. Even if this were to work to the US’s advantage even more than in the past, the causes of discontent among the people would not be eliminated. After all, the team agrees on one thing: it is a team of the 1%. But there are also those who are saying goodbye to free trade for good, who want to radically reduce taxes and use tariff revenues to pay absolutely unavoidable government expenditure. This idea is not compatible with the model of tariffs as a means of pressure to enforce more free trade. And then there are also ideas of expanding the USA to include Canada and Greenland, Panama, and Gaza. The tech faction dreams of colonizing the moon and Mars. A strategy of megalomania. Beyond the profit-über-alles consensus, the team is in agreement on another point: America first – if necessary, alone against the rest of the world. This means that even previous friends become potential enemies.
Internal Enemies
Trump is stirring up uncertainty internationally. On the home front, he is creating facts. In keeping with the image of a decline of the USA caused by foreign countries, immigrants are presented as foreign infiltrators within the country. Especially those without visas. Since taking office, Trump has been deporting people on a large scale. There are too many to deport them all, and the US economy is at least as dependent on their cheap labour as it is on imports threatened by tariffs. Here, too, shock therapy is used to intimidate. To make immigrant labour even cheaper.
In Trump’s world view, it was the globalists who captured the state and, misguided by cosmopolitan, woke, and cultural Marxist ideas, then opened US borders to a “flood of immigrants and imports.” To close the borders again, the state must be cleansed of these un-American globalists. Here, too, facts are already being created. Trump is not Hitler. But the distinction made by the anti-fascist lawyer Ernst Fraenkel, in his analysis of the Nazi regime, between the normative state, which provides a more or less reliable basis for conducting daily business, and the prerogative state, which can rewrite the terms of business from one day to the next, also opens up an approach to understanding the state restructuring carried out by Trump.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk (world’s richest man), which is not provided for in the constitution, now intervenes in the operations of constitutional bodies, sometimes with the help of the police. Musk breaks the law every day. The courts are overwhelmed by this, as they already have to deal with countless lawsuits against Trump’s flood of decrees whose constitutionality is often questionable. What happens if individual decrees are rejected is unclear. Members of Team Trump have repeatedly stated that they are not bound by court decisions. A horror scenario for law and order-loving Americans. But not for Trump & Co. They are revolutionaries who want to finish the market revolution started by Ronald Reagan but which then slipped onto globalist paths. They are creating political chaos so that the market can develop freely. •
