Adapting To Trump’s Changing Climate.

New World Orders: The challenge facing Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins is how to keep their small and vulnerable nation safe and stable in a world whose economic and political climate the forty-seventh American president is changing so profoundly.

IT IS, SURELY, the ultimate Millennial revenge fantasy. Calling senior Baby-Boomer and Gen-X bureaucrats and asking them to justify their salaries. “Come on, dude, just tell me what it is that you do!” All the time knowing that the hapless federal employee at the other end of the call is fighting for his job, his status, his self-respect.

Except, this scenario is no fantasy. Such conversations have been going on for days: proof that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is every bit as real and scary as its critics predicted. Musk’s twenty-something “tech geek” hires are cutting a swathe through the federal bureaucracy with the implacable determination of the Grim Reaper.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world struggles to make sense of the Trump Administration. What is its ultimate purpose? What is the nature of the political dynamic driving the raging torrent of Executive Orders pouring out of the Trump White House?

It is a testament to the essential mildness of their country’s politics and politicians that New Zealanders struggle to make any kind of sense of Donald Trump. Can he really be serious? Is there the slightest method to policies that strike so many Kiwis as utter madness?

There is – but it’s in the service of an agenda so completely foreign to the thinking of the vast majority of the world’s politicians, administrators and journalists, that even conceptualising it requires considerable effort.

Consider the following self-characterisation, offered-up to a puzzled world by one of Trump’s most hardcore supporters, Steve Bannon:

“I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too.”

Seriously? How can a MAGA Republican possibly cite the Russian revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin, as his inspiration? Wasn’t Lenin responsible for establishing one of the most ferocious states in all of human history?

He certainly was, but Bannon’s Leninist sympathies amply confirm the old French aphorism: Les extrèmes se touchent. (The extremes find each other.)

Certainly, that is what the world is currently witnessing in the United States. The deliberate destruction of the 80-year-old state machine arising out of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” policies of the 1930s – by right-wing revolutionaries determined to create a new one?

It’s what Bannon attempted to do in 2017, when he was, briefly, Trump’s White House chief-of-staff. But, he failed.

The strength and resilience of the old state machine was simply beyond the First Trump Administration’s powers. The “Country-Club Republicans” had yet to be purged from the Republican Party. The Supreme Court was not yet fully harnessed to the Right’s agenda. Most importantly, Trump and his MAGA court had seriously underestimated the obstructive capabilities of the ancien regime. Transformative regime-change clearly required an “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” battle-plan – and Trump 45 didn’t have one.

The crucial difference between Trump 45 and Trump 47 is that the forty-seventh president of the United States does have a battle-plan, Project 2025, and one of its principal authors, Russell Vought, has been safely installed as the new Director of the Office of Management and Budget. If the American ship-of-state has a bridge, then the OMB is it.

Trump’s greatest challenge, over the next four years, will be working out how to smash the status quo without, simultaneously, smashing the working-class Americans whose votes carried him to a comprehensive (if narrow) electoral victory. That Trump’s MAGA movement expects him to unleash holy vengeance upon the “Deep State” (aka the old state machinery) is indisputable. Less certain, however, is whether those same working-class voters appreciate how effectively the old state machinery has protected them and their families for the past 80 years.

If Elon Musk is to keep his promise to carve one trillion dollars off the Federal Budget, then the health, education and welfare services currently available to working-class Americans cannot avoid taking a massive hit.

Trump’s Democratic Party opponents simply cannot understand why American workers don’t get this. But, the very fact that the Democrats don’t “get it” is the very reason so many of those workers gave their votes to Trump. The extraordinary cluelessness of Democratic Party politicians when it comes to communicating effectively with ordinary Americans, let alone understanding their grievances, explains entirely the latter’s indifference to the plight of those federal bureaucrats on the receiving end of Musk’s tech geek interrogators.

Revolutions happen when, at roughly the same time, both the elites and the struggling masses arrive at the same conclusion: things cannot go on as they are. That the respective solutions advanced by these two groups are likely to diverge spectacularly only begins to matter after they have, between them, brought the failing system to its knees.

New Zealanders who shake their heads in disbelief at the speed and breadth of the Trump Administration’s changes are either too young to remember “Rogernomics”, or too embarrassed to acknowledge how fulsomely they embraced its breakneck “reforms”. If the machinations of Elon Musk seem sinister today, then so, too, should the machinations of Bob Jones and all the other ideologically-driven members of New Zealand’s elites back in 1984.

Those who argue that the “quiet revolution” of the 1980s simply represented New Zealand’s rather belated recognition that the world had changed, can hardly now object that the USA has collectively made the same determination. The economic and geopolitical doctrines that have dominated the policy-making of the last 40 years have been recognised, by billionaires and “deplorables” alike, as no longer fit for purpose.

Globalisation. Free Trade. The International Rules-Based Order. Donald Trump’s black felt pen has confirmed the death sentences of all three. Likewise the entrenched institutional power of the professional and managerial classes which emerged out of the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 70s.

The challenge facing Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins is how to keep their small and vulnerable nation safe and stable in a world whose economic and political climate the forty-seventh American president is changing so profoundly. Faster and better than anybody else, Trump has grasped the possibilities of a world which is more in tune with the nationalist and imperialist marching songs of the Nineteenth Century, than the Kumbaya globalist singalongs of President George H. W. Bush’s and President Bill Clinton’s “New World Order”.

A President who openly canvasses the annexation of Greenland, Canada, Panama and the Gaza Strip, to the applause of an admirer of Lenin who once, rather incautiously, confessed: “Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power”; should alert us to the fact that, like Dorothy and Toto in The Wizard of Oz, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 10 February 2025.