The ink has barely dried on Trump’s latest executive orders, yet the shape of his second term is already unmistakable—part spectacle, part crackdown, all consolidation of power. The old playbook of neoliberal governance—privatise, deregulate, suppress dissent with polite proceduralism—is cracking at the seams. In its place, something more brazen, more desperate. The threats against political enemies have escalated from Twitter rants to official policy. The FBI and CIA are being remade in his image, purged of disloyalty and repurposed as tools of political enforcement. Gestapo, anyone? Diktats are issued not just from the White House but from X, where Musk, a regime loyalist, crowdsources show trials and reprieves, issuing polls to determine whether the Twitler Youth should mass-report dissidents or celebrate their next victory against “the deep state.” The question is no longer whether America is sliding towards authoritarianism, but whether we are witnessing, in real time, the mutation of neoliberal collapse into something more dangerous.
Command by Decree
Executive Order 14151, a blunt instrument masquerading as policy, abolishes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives across federal agencies. No more unconscious bias training, no more funding for workplace anti-racism programs. The justification? That such measures “sow division” and undermine “meritocracy.” The reality? A surgical strike against the small, fragile concessions capitalism has made to those it exploits most brutally. A cleaning-out of the bureaucracy, ensuring that those who serve the state—its functionaries, its enforcers—are ideologically aligned with the project at hand. The bourgeoisie has no interest in a workforce conscious of its own subjugation. A fragmented proletariat, isolated and stripped of solidarity, is far easier to control.
Then comes Executive Order 14159, a decree with all the swagger of 1930s revanchism: “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” The southern border is to be militarised, with federal agencies empowered to override local and state laws in the name of “national security.” Immigration has long been the great sleight of hand of capitalist crisis, the eternal scapegoat for falling wages, for gutted public services, for social unrest. The function of this order is not to “defend” America but to give shape to an enemy, to construct an “other” against whom legitimate grievance can be redirected. Classic fascist manoeuvre: nationalism as social control, the external enemy as a proxy for internal contradictions.
And then, the coup de grâce: the pardons. The absolution of January 6 rioters, the exoneration of blue-collar criminals whose loyalty to capital outweighs their infractions. This is where the mask slips entirely. A state that threatens union organisers and college students but frees insurrectionists? That punishes petty theft or drug offences but rewards those who defraud millions (Watch that crypto bubble burst)? The state is never neutral. But here, its function is made explicit: law and order for the dispossessed, impunity for those who serve the donald machine.
Fascism or the End of Neoliberalism?
Is this fascism? Or is it simply capitalism, at its most desperate, shedding its democratic skin? The Marxist answer is that fascism is not a departure from capitalism, but a particular response to its crisis—a defence mechanism when capital finds itself under threat, when the old tools of ideological management no longer suffice. Trump’s executive orders are not the rantings of an erratic demagogue; they are a calculated adaptation to capitalism’s deepening contradictions. Neoliberalism promised free markets and open borders, but it has instead delivered stagnation, crisis, and an increasingly volatile working class. The bourgeoisie now faces a dilemma: does it double down on neoliberalism, risking further instability, or does it embrace authoritarianism as a survival strategy?
The answer is unfolding in real-time. Trump’s America is not yet a fully fascist state, but it has moved decisively away from the liberal-democratic façade of past decades. The fusion of state and capital is accelerating. The executive order, once a bureaucratic tool, is now an instrument of direct class war. What follows from here, whether this authoritarian shift is consolidated, whether resistance emerges in a form strong enough to counter it, remains the open question.
But this much is certain: the old order is dead. What replaces it is not yet determined.
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