There is no jobs programme. There is no plan to rebuild industry in the American interior. There is no reshoring of supply chains, no renaissance of the steel belt, no future in which Youngstown or Kenosha or Akron rise again from the ashes of deindustrialisation. What there is, instead, is spectacle: a set of gestures—audacious, disruptive, and highly mediatised—that simulate sovereignty through chaos. Trump’s latest tariff announcement, dubbed “Liberation Day,” is no exception. Its immediate consequence: over £1.5 trillion erased from US equity markets, a fresh wave of volatility across global bourses, and the sudden reappearance of 2008-era language in financial newsrooms. “Systemic risk,” “contagion,” “flight to safety.”
It was, predictably, spun as an act of economic populism. The President’s statement spoke of “American strength,” “independence from foreign influence,” and “a rebirth of domestic industry.” The MAGA faithful heard what they wanted: payback. The fantasy that the empire had been too generous, too open, too fair—and that now, finally, America would look after its own. But no factories are being reopened. No trade unions are being invited to the table. No protections are being offered to those who live one debt payment from eviction.
The liberation in question is not economic—it is financial. And it belongs not to workers but to capital.
To understand what is happening, we must start from a simple proposition: that global capitalism is not in retreat, and that Trumpism is not an attempt to dismantle it. Rather, it is an attempt to reorient its command structure, to make it even more violent, even less accountable, and even more insulated from democratic pressure. In this context, the tariffs are not aimed at restoring the lost golden age of Fordist America. They are designed to trigger a rupture—a shock to the system that transfers power from those who manage capital on behalf of others to those who own it outright.
The “others” here include a vast class of people not usually thought of as workers, but who are, structurally, no different. The so-called middle class, particularly the millions of Americans with 401(k)s and private retirement plans, whose economic security is tied to the performance of markets they do not control, understand, or benefit from in any meaningful sense. When the Dow drops a thousand points, it is not Trump’s billionaire allies who suffer. It is the schoolteacher, the nurse, the laid-off auto worker retrained in IT, who watches the already-meagre projection of retirement shrink by five or ten years. It is those who budget to the cent, who use cashback cards to cover groceries, who delay dental visits, who have student debt into their fifties. These are not the beneficiaries of Trump’s economic nationalism. They are its collateral.
So who benefits? The list is short and telling. Peter Thiel, whose long-standing hostility to democracy as a constraint on capital finds fertile ground in economic disorder, and whose investments in cryptocurrency and surveillance infrastructure are premised on the breakdown of social trust. Larry Fink, whose firm BlackRock increased its exposure to hard assets and digital currency ETFs in anticipation of the shift away from fiat stability. And then, inevitably, the Trump family itself—not only the patriarch, but his sons.
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. have quietly positioned themselves to cash in on the very chaos their father unleashes. Through a partnership with bitcoin mining giant Hut 8, they have launched American Bitcoin, a project that aims to become the world’s most powerful mining and strategic digital asset reserve. Eric Trump now serves as Chief Strategy Officer. Meanwhile, the family holds a controlling stake in World Liberty Financial, a decentralised finance platform offering crypto-based financial services unencumbered by regulation. Taken together, these moves represent more than opportunism. They are a bet on systemic collapse—a portfolio designed not to survive the storm, but to harvest it.
In this respect, Trump’s economic policy is not merely hypocritical. It is extractive. It uses the language of working-class revival to consolidate new forms of elite advantage. This is not neoliberalism with a populist face. It is class war in its purest, post-democratic form: capital seceding from society, hoarding its assets in decentralised code while the rest of us are left with volatility, inflation, and the fumes of nostalgia.
Even the pandemic—briefly imagined as a moment of reckoning for global capitalism—did little to change this trajectory. When supply chains buckled and container ships idled off the coast of Los Angeles, there was talk of “bringing business home,” of shortening the circuits of production, of restoring strategic industries. But none of this materialised. The periphery held. Capital didn’t retreat; it adapted. New logistics networks were formed, labour discipline intensified, and state subsidies flowed into the very firms that had offshored in the first place. Trump’s tariffs don’t alter this arrangement. They perform a fantasy of decoupling while leaving the architecture of exploitation untouched.
The left must not be tempted by the lure of false symmetry. Trump is not enacting a confused or contradictory agenda. He is executing a coherent class strategy, one that recognises the fragility of the global order and seeks to monetise its collapse. The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve is not some ideological anomaly—it is the logical terminus of a politics that has given up on collective goods and replaced them with digital scarcity. It is austerity by other means.
To call this fascism is not hyperbole. It is to name the form of rule that emerges when liberal democracy no longer serves the interests of capital, and when violence—economic, symbolic, and eventually physical—is the only remaining means of securing elite dominance. Trump’s movement has no serious interest in restoring national production or repairing social bonds. It is not about work. It is about wealth, and the force necessary to protect it.
As the working class in the US is offered crypto scraps in place of pensions, and gun rights in place of housing, we are reminded that capitalism, in its late imperial form, no longer needs consent. It requires only compliance.
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