The American Revolution of 2025

People will go to work as usual. The mail will get delivered.   

There are no tanks in the street. 

But amid the quiet routine, a giant reordering of power and policy is taking place.

This week Trump announced that the U.S. was switching sides in Europe. We will be backing Putin and Russia, not NATO and Western democracies. 

President Trump and top administration officials announced the outlines of the new order to startled European leaders. The U.S. would be meeting with Russia to negotiate a ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine war, without participation of Ukraine. Ukraine would need to cede territory to Russia, Trump said. The U.S. may seek repayment from Ukraine by demanding a 50-percent share of Ukraine's minerals. We would be ending economic sanctions against Russia. We would restaff American and Russian embassies. The vice president scolded European democracies. He said that Russia is not the enemy. He said your enemy is within, in your own effort to protect globalized multiculturalism by suppressing right-wing populist sentiments.

This will reorder our trade relationships as well as our alliances. The U.S. used to be reliable. Businesses would make decisions with an understanding that the U.S. stood for something. We paid our bills. We were who we said we were. An investment in China, Russia, Haiti, or Zimbabwe has uncertainty built into it. Their governments might abruptly decide to change the rules of the game, and one's investment would be lost. But America was different. Now it isn't.

Trump may be the most consequential president since FDR. He is leading a giant reset in the locus of power at home and in the place of the U.S. in the world. The bell cannot be un-rung. Trump spoke to reporters on Tuesday and wrote Truth Social posts on Wednesday. They were full of outrageous misstatements. He said Ukraine started the war with Russia, and that Ukraine had stolen billions from the U.S. CNN "fact checked" his remarks. CNN need not have bothered. It is a new world. What is true doesn't matter. What matters is what Trump says. 

There was talk two decades ago about "the end of history" as the developed world became capitalist, free-trade and market-oriented, and democratic. We thought we had it figured out. 

Except there was a problem. Markets create inequalities that strain democratic society. The left (conspicuously voiced by Bernie Sanders) said we needed a revolution of income distribution so that frustrated citizens felt they got a fair shake. The right (conspicuously voiced by Trump) claimed we needed a revolution that re-established traditional values in nationality, religion, sex roles, and race, plus that economic fair shake. Sanders blamed and condemned billionaires. So did Trump in 2016, but then he switched. He embraced them in 2024. The real issue was who had power, and Trump said it was the "experts" embedded in the administrative agencies of government, people who were stand-ins for cultural elites. Trump chose billionaire oligarchs to be the mechanism for wresting power from the powerful elites. The billionaires were on the side of the forgotten American, he said.

Trump's first term wasn't the revolution. He tried to exercise power through the embedded experts and managers in government, and they stopped him. The revolution started in earnest after the election in 2020 when Trump declared openly that election rules don't apply to him because the whole system was rigged by experts and institutionalists in the government, the media, election departments, the courts, the FBI, and the health experts who manufactured and spread Covid to sabotage his presidency. He sold the idea to Republican voters who couldn't quite believe that Biden won handily and legitimately. This MAGA base became the revolutionary army, the equivalent of the Parisian crowds storming the Bastille, Mao's comrades on the Long March, and partisans in Castro's revolution. Trump was a messenger and a symbol, and like Cuba's Che Guevara, he has a defiant image and poster.

Trump is replacing all the people who ran the government prior to him. That enables the revolution in American government to proceed.

Revolutions make me nervous. Much could go very wrong in a world with nuclear weapons. But I am optimistic. Trump is doing what revolutionary leaders do. He is being bold, not careful, because the people he roused demand boldness. This is their moment of opportunity. Throw all the bums out. Burn it all down! Elon Musk is not designed for the long haul. Like Robespierre and Stalin's generals, he will get pulled into the fire. Tips will get taxed. Safety nets will wither. Poor people will get poorer. Deportations will please people, then anger them. Chaos is exhausting. 

This will be a rough patch for the U.S., but if we can avoid starting a nuclear war, I expect us to come out of this okay, but much weaker and poorer. It will be hardest on the MAGA working people who trusted Trump. 

Oligarchs are an unreliable ally for Trump, and I predict they will turn on each other and abandon Trump before long. They want stability and reliability in government. 

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