Does Trump actually want to change the structure of the US economy, or does he just want to cosplay as the man who scared the world into giving him better deals?
Two lines from his recent remarks offer a clue. The first is boilerplate Trump-as-business-guy: “A lot of people say, ‘Oh, it doesn’t mean anything having a surplus.’ It means a lot, in my opinion. It’s almost like a profit or loss statement.” As ever, the point isn’t policy but posture. He’s not interested in how public spending works, only in sounding like a man who understands the bottom line. Government as business, but without the ledger.
The second comment is more revealing. “Our country was the strongest from 1870 to 1913. You know why? It was all tariff-based. We had no income tax. Then in 1913, some genius came up with the idea of let’s charge the people of our country, not foreign countries that are ripping off our country.” Strip away the nostalgia and what you get is a straightforward bit of reactionary fantasy. Trump isn’t talking about economic history. He’s invoking a time before the income tax, before the welfare state, before any redistribution worth the name. It’s a vision of national strength built on pain exported elsewhere. Let the foreigners pay. Keep the poor in line. That’s the model.
But let’s talk about that period, 1870 to 1913, the so-called Gilded Age. It was an era of high tariffs, but also one of staggering inequality, rampant corruption, and frequent economic panics. The rich got richer, the poor got nothing, and the economy crashed with alarming regularity. The absence of an income tax meant the government was funded on the backs of consumers through tariffs, which are, after all, just taxes by another name. So when Trump waxes nostalgic about this era, he’s longing for a time when the state served capital and capital alone.
And how did that Gilded Age end? Not with triumph, but with collapse. A financial system rigged for speculation and monopoly eventually buckled under its own weight. The 1893 crash gutted the economy, throwing millions out of work and pushing whole sections of the country into revolt. The Panic of 1907, triggered by a failed attempt to corner the copper market, revealed just how fragile the whole edifice had become. By 1913, even America’s ruling class understood that the party couldn’t go on. The Federal Reserve was created not out of altruism but fear — fear that unregulated finance might destroy the very system it enriched. The income tax followed, not as an act of justice, but as a last-ditch effort to keep the lights on.
Trump’s America is a rerun. Another Gilded Age, with the same grotesque inequalities and the same delusions of national strength built on economic cruelty. The billionaires are back in charge, only now they wear hoodies and run platforms instead of railroads. Labour is weaker than it’s been in decades. Growth depends on speculation, not production. And behind it all looms the same basic contradiction: you cannot build a stable society on the limitless enrichment of the few.
So this will end the same way the last one did, with crisis, with rupture, and with a dominant class scrambling to save its own skin. Trump, like the robber barons he admires, doesn’t fear collapse. He assumes he’ll land on top. But history tells us something different. The question isn’t whether this will break. It’s who will be ready when it does.
Tariffs in this schema aren’t economic tools but totems of grievance. They’re not about rebuilding industry or rebalancing trade. They’re about expressing anger. About punishing someone, anyone, for the hollowing out of the American heartland, so long as it isn’t the corporations who did the hollowing. Trumpism doesn’t care about outcomes. It wants spectacle. The tariff becomes a performance of sovereignty, even as the actual system remains firmly under the thumb of capital.
Enter Peter Navarro, still raging in the pages of the FT about the EU’s refusal to accept hormone-soaked American beef. He calls it lawfare. He warns of European attacks on the sacred cows of Silicon Valley. Apple and Meta are under threat not because they dodge tax, abuse monopoly, and run what amounts to privatised behavioural control systems, but because they’re American.
But the reality is simpler. What US capital hates about the EU is that it won’t roll over. Brussels refuses to deregulate food safety to accommodate factory-farmed beef pumped full of growth hormones. It refuses to let surveillance capitalism run unchecked. And it still occasionally insists that monopolies should be broken, fines levied, and user data protected. That is what Navarro and Trump find intolerable, not protectionism, but the assertion of any standard that capital cannot reshape to its will.
Trump joins in, now railing against European car standards. “They make it impossible for you to sell a car… the standards and the tests… they come up with rules and regulations that are just designed for one reason: that you can’t sell your product in those countries.” What’s worth noting is that this is exactly the model he wants for America. Fortress trade. Regulation as a weapon. But consistency was never the point. The enemy is always elsewhere.
What’s on offer here isn’t an economic programme. It’s a revenge fantasy. Not a vision for how to build an economy that serves the many, but a promise to hurt the right people on behalf of the few. There’s no plan for reindustrialisation. No thought for how the climate crisis reshapes production. No recognition that the real enemy isn’t the foreigner, it’s the billionaire class that bankrolls it all.
Trump doesn’t want to dismantle the neoliberal economy. He wants to preside over it as warlord. His America isn’t post-neoliberal. It’s neoliberalism with a gun in its hand and a flag in its teeth.
Back where we started. No answers. Just threats. No transformation. Just tribute. Not a challenge to global capitalism, but its most lurid, most bellicose form.
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