This is not the first attempt to read Trump through the lens of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire. Others made the comparison in the aftermath of his initial victory, casting him as the American Bonaparte, the clown who succeeds where the general fails. But most arrived too early—before January 6th, before the routinisation of chaos, before the second act. What follows is not an allegory, but a political anatomy: a Brumaire not of empire, but of entropy.
“A Brumaire not of empire, but of entropy.”
There is something grimly appropriate in the fact that Trump’s name, like Bonaparte’s, became a kind of shorthand not only for a man but for a political condition, a rupture in the smooth reproduction of bourgeois rule, when the formal institutions of democracy persist while their substantive legitimacy collapses into farce. Marx wrote that the state becomes “the appalling parasitic body” when the class that rules in the economic base finds itself unable to rule in the old way; Trumpism, in its first and now second coming, is the name for the convulsions of precisely that moment in the American context, a moment that is not momentary, but prolonged, sticky, suspended in a fug of nostalgia, flag-waving and algorithmic feedback loops.
The American bourgeoisie, or what remains of it, never quite had the revolutionary élan of its European cousins. It had money, guns, and God, and later, tech. What it has now is something altogether more uncertain: asset bubbles, TikTok psyops, police foundations, and the gnawing fear that the confidence trick might be wearing thin. Trump did not emerge from nowhere. He is the logical consequence of the state hollowed out by decades of neoliberalism, the class compromise undone, the working class defenestrated, union density left to rot, and the promise of racial justice reabsorbed into the logic of market segmentation. The Democrats, technocratised and financialised, lost the ability to speak even the language of reform. The Republicans had already fused culture war and tax policy into a single incoherent scream. And into this came Trump: not the return of the repressed, but the acceleration of the absurd.
“Trumpism is not the return of the repressed, but the acceleration of the absurd.”
Like Bonaparte, he does not represent a class so much as a void: the absence of class politics, the absence of hegemony, the absence of anything beyond the endless reproduction of spectacle. His genius, if that is the word, is not in strategy but in intuition: that in a society saturated with images, the fastest route to power is to be a meme. Bonaparte surrounded himself with uniforms and proclamations; Trump with gold toilets and Fox News. Both rule not by strength but by disorganisation, of parties, parliaments, oppositions, norms. In this sense, Trump is not the American Caesar but its Louis-Napoléon: part grift, part coup, all theatre.
“Trump no longer needs the theatre. The state no longer needs the theatre.”
If January 6th was Trump’s 18th Brumaire, it was performed in the register of low-budget cosplay rather than military putsch. The Jacobins wore red caps too, but they didn’t pair them with buffalo horns and QAnon slogans. Still, the image lingers: the Capitol breached not by an organised vanguard but by a crowd of atomised citizens convinced they were starring in a livestreamed revolution. The footage is grainy, the soundtrack confused, shouts of “1776!” over the thud of police batons and the whirr of smartphones. But the farce conceals a deeper truth. The riot wasn’t just a product of social media derangement or conspiratorial delusion. It was the expression, however garbled, of a political class structure in collapse. When the popular classes lose all meaningful representation, they do not vanish. They reappear in degraded, distorted forms. In that sense, the MAGA horde was not outside the political system, it was its natural outgrowth.
“When the popular classes lose all meaningful representation, they do not vanish. They reappear in degraded, distorted forms.”
The Democrats, for their part, play the role of the Party of Order with dutiful mediocrity. Like their mid-19th century counterparts, they misrecognise the crisis as one of manners, procedure, or security. They speak of “norms” as if they were eternal, rather than the historical artefacts of a bourgeoisie that once had ambitions beyond share buybacks and AI content moderation. They call for bipartisanship while financing their campaigns with tech money and locking arms with the national security state. Their fear of Trump is sincere, but their solutions, more intelligence coordination, more social media censorship, more corporate diversity training, amount to little more than redecoration of the same decaying edifice.
The real continuity lies beneath the surface. Just as Louis-Napoléon’s coup consolidated a new phase of capitalist development—state-sponsored infrastructure, imperial adventure, and Bonapartist repression—so too has Trump’s reign, and the liberal response to it, deepened the authoritarian logic of capital in crisis. Amazon and Palantir now handle logistics and surveillance more efficiently than any government bureaucracy. Elon Musk plays the part of the delusional moderniser, promising Mars colonies while dissolving labour contracts and undermining the National Labour Relations Board in 280-character bursts. But the performance is wearing thin. Musk, once installed as the czar of ‘government efficiency’, now appears to be being quietly let go, released back to his private empires, a liability whose spectacle could no longer be contained. Trump no longer needs him. The state no longer needs the theatre. This is what power looks like when it no longer requires even the pretence of innovation. These are not aberrations but functions. The tech barons are today’s finance aristocracy, complete with their own bodyguards, private islands, and fantasy of transcending earthly politics altogether. They do not oppose Trump so much as oscillate between endorsement and opportunistic neutrality. His vulgarity offends them, but his tax cuts do not.
Trumpism, then, is not fascism in the classical sense. It has no mass party, no coherent ideology, no theory of statecraft beyond vengeance and self-promotion. But it does share with fascism the essential feature of capitalist crisis management: the redirection of class rage downward and sideways. Immigrants, trans people, teachers, social workers, these become the scapegoats in the absence of a dominant class willing to be named. And unlike the fascisms of the past, which sought to mobilise the masses, this version aims only to atomise them further, to make politics itself appear futile, degraded, or absurd.
To describe Trumpism as Bonapartist rather than fascist is not to minimise the threat, but to specify its form. Fascism, classically, was a mass movement with a theory of statecraft, an imperial project, and an ambition to remake society from above. Trumpism is none of that—yet. It builds no lasting institutions, mobilises little beyond the spectacle, and governs through decay rather than design. Bonapartism, by contrast, rules in the void: a disarticulated state suspended between classes, propped up by executive fiat and algorithmic feedback. But the distinction is not eternal. Bonapartism can harden. In moments of deeper rupture, it can curdle into something more programmatic, more militarised, more coherent in its violence. If there is a path from entropy to fascism, Trumpism may mark the crossing, not through mass mobilisation but through the institutionalisation of managed collapse. The risk is not a repetition of the 1930s, but a new formation that inherits its logic in degraded, digitised form. Naming this as Bonapartism is not a hedge against fascism, it is a warning about how it emerges.
“To describe Trumpism as Bonapartist rather than fascist is not a hedge against fascism—it is a warning about how it emerges.”
If the first Trump presidency was a half-remembered fever dream of tweets, tariffs and televised tantrums, the second has resumed with a clarity only crises can afford. On 2 April 2025, “Liberation Day” was announced, not with tanks on the streets, but in a staged address from the White House, complete with patriotic insignia and rhetorical bombast. A new round of punitive tariffs was slapped on imports from allies and rivals alike. The aim, we were told, was national rebirth. “We’re going to charge countries for doing business in our country and taking our jobs, taking our wealth,” Trump declared. “This is the beginning of Liberation Day in America.” In practice, it was the repetition of a familiar tune: economic nationalism for the masses, tax breaks for the class that no longer even pretends to invest domestically. The spectacle, again, concealed the structure. Or tried to.
These are not protectionist measures in the traditional sense. They are the erratic death throes of an empire in decline, lashes against the world market that built its fortunes. Trump does not wish to deglobalise capital, he wishes only to extract its benefits for his class, while offloading its costs onto the working poor. The tariffs, projected to cost households upwards of $4,000 a year, are sold as patriotic sacrifice; in truth, they are class war by other means, a regressive tax levied in the name of imaginary steel mills and ghost coal jobs.
The international response has been predictable. Retaliatory tariffs, diplomatic statements, thinly veiled threats. The UK, now firmly in its post-Brexit managerial mode under Starmer, attempted to position itself as a “reasonable partner” to the Trump administration, a phrase that here means nothing. “I like and respect President Trump,” Starmer insisted, despite having once said he wouldn’t have him round for dinner. Starmer’s Labour—having long since evacuated anything resembling class content—functions less as opposition than as a cultural counterweight: sober, technocratic, pliant. The Party of Order in another register. The most it can offer is a softly-worded policy paper and a few more drones to patrol the border.
Nor is this condition unique to the United States. The Brumairian moment has become a global motif. In Hungary, Orbán has refined the formula: soft autocracy, endless culture war, a paternalist state that secures consent through patronage and nationalist myth. In Argentina, Javier Milei performs the neoliberal rupture with theatrical absurdity, chainsaws, tantrums, declarations of war on the “political caste”, but beneath the noise, the same austerity, the same class recomposition in favour of finance. These figures do not emerge as historical detours but as answers to a specific problem: how to govern when the old ruling class has no ideas, and the working class no vehicle.
Meanwhile, the contradictions pile up. Capital, faced with its own inability to reproduce social consent, turns increasingly to the state, to its repressive capacities, its infrastructure for managing disorder, its monopoly on legitimacy. The mass base of Trumpism—disorganised, demoralised, paranoid—remains loyal not because it believes, but because it has nothing left to believe in. January 6th was the symptom; “Liberation Day” is the plan. Not one of construction, but of managed collapse.
Tech capital, which once flirted with liberal idealism, now drifts in Trump’s wake like a flotilla of data-driven pirates. Musk, having absented himself from official advisory roles, continues to shape the discourse through platforms he controls outright. His exit was not a retreat from politics but a shift in terrain, from boardroom to battlefield. In this, he resembles the bourgeois adventurers of Marx’s time, the financiers who dabbled in coups and newspapers, who hedged their bets on Bonaparte while thinking only of bonds.
And in the Gulf, the choreography of imperial repetition begins again. Carrier strike groups have been repositioned, stealth bombers redeployed to Diego Garcia, and the language of national security dialled up with all the subtlety of a late-night cable ad. The target this time is Iran. “There will be a bombing,” Trump has said, should Tehran refuse a new deal. But the real enemy is decline: not of oil routes or uranium enrichment but of American power itself—its dollar, its authority, its internal cohesion. War, or the promise of it, becomes the last standing ideology of a state that cannot legislate, cannot reform, and no longer even governs in the traditional sense. The liberal press, caught in the feedback loop of 2017, lurches between pixelated outrage and the professional sigh of resignation. The Democrats issue stern condemnations, then vote through the appropriations. Occasionally, one of them will stage a marathon speech, like Cory Booker’s 25-hour monologue—a filibuster without friction, theatre for a base too demoralised to clap. Performative resistance has replaced opposition, soundbites have replaced strategy. The military-industrial complex nods, bills, and builds.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx wrote that the revolution is not just betrayed by reaction but often misrecognised by those who claim to lead it. In Trump’s America, revolution has been so thoroughly stripped of content that even the word feels distant. What remains is its counterfeit: patriotic mobilisation, class ressentiment, the aesthetics of rupture without its substance. But history does not end here. It limps on, wounded and confused, looking for new forms in which to make itself known.
“What remains is its counterfeit: patriotic mobilisation, class ressentiment, the aesthetics of rupture without its substance.”
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