“Four years of this won’t work, folks.” So spoke Thomas Friedman, prominent conservative New York Times columnist and strategist for/representative of the U.S. capitalist class in a recent column of his entitled A Great Unraveling Is Underway. He was referring to four years of a Trump/Vance/Musk administration, and he was expressing what is starting to dawn on those in corporate boardrooms across America.

Support for Trump in corporate boardrooms
It wasn’t always this way. In fact over the last six months or so, widening sectors of the US capitalist class were warming to Trump. On the one hand, they were becoming increasingly frustrated with Biden, whom they saw as making unnecessary concessions to the working class. Consider what Stephen Rattner reports, for example. He is a former official in the Obama administration and the CEO of Willett Advisors (which serves as the family office of Michael Bloomberg). He explained that corporate executives resented not having enough of their own appointed to the former Biden administration, they resented Biden‘s pro worker rhetoric, they didn’t like the regulatory burdens Biden placed on them, and they resented the steps — however small and inconsequential – that Biden called to oppose discrimination (in other words, DEI). Biden took these measures, however ineffective they may have been, because he thought they would undercut the drift of tens of millions of workers into MAGA. Due to the absolute passivity, to put it mildly, of the union leadership, the corporate tops started to feel that Trump‘s coming attacks on workers could succeed beyond anything that they had previously hoped for. So led first by the Silicon Valley venture capitalists, ever wider layers of the capitalist class moved into the Trump camp leading up to and after the election. They thought that once Trump got elected they could control him just as they have controlled all previous presidents.

He got the support of the oil industry executives but a lot of others, too.

Here is an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled How Wall Street and business got Trump wrong: “Investors assumed Donald Trump‘s second term would be like his first…. Tariffs would come later after lengthy deliberations. [In other words, after they had their input.] We now know the business, investors, and many of the incoming president’s own advisor, misread him. His priorities weren’t theirs…..”

Trump does not have to be subservient to them because he has his own mass base that he developed outside of and opposed to almost all major wings of the US capitalist class. Also, as Thomas Friedman put it, Trump “never had a coherent theory of the biggest trends in the world today and how best to align America with them to thrive in the 21^st century.” His only “coherent theory” is how best to align himself, what best serves the immediate monetary interest of Donald Trump himself.

Russia and Ukraine
If Corporate America was upset at Trump‘s appointment of the Putinist Tulsi Gabbard to the critical post of Director of National Intelligence (where she will be in a position to funnel US intelligence directly to Russia) they are now even more upset at Trump’s clear intent to hand

Trump with Putin v Trump with Zelensky: subservient with one, domineering with the other.

Ukraine over to Russia. Here is the Wall Street Journal editorial board on the Trump-Putin “ceasefire” negotiations: “Mr. Putin wants the killing to continue until he gets closer to achieving his war aim of subjugating Ukraine…. As for Mr. Trump, he somehow detected good news in the Kremlin comments….

“With his bludgeoning of Ukraine to make a deal without promises of U.S. aid or security, Mr. Trump has given Mr. Putin every incentive to keep the war going to put himself in the strongest possible position if there ever are serious peace talks. Does Mr. Trump have a Plan B beyond beating up Ukraine to make more unilateral concessions?….  Nothing Mr. Putin has done or said since Mr. Trump began his war tilt toward Russia suggest that Mr. Putin has any such intention [of ending the invasion of Ukraine, short of taking it over completely].”

The Silicon Valley venture capitalists don’t really care who has access to the markets or to investments in Ukraine because they can sell access to data transmission — which is really what cyberspace is all about — with equal ease to any capitalists around the world. For industries such as mineral extraction (including mining and oil and gas production), agriculture, and manufacturing, it is a different matter. They do not wish their Russian and also their Chinese rivals to control that potentially important market. Of course, the Ukrainian working class, and the masses of Ukrainians in general have their own interest in fighting off the authoritarian Putin’s domination of Ukraine, and the world working class has that same interest, but that is a different matter.

Tariffs

1970s and beyond: Real world trade grew faster than production, increasing competition and forcing domestic produces to keep prices down. It also kept down the price of labor power/wages.

U.S. capitalism opposes tariffs, which among other things are inherently inflationary. But Trump’s on-again off-again, now-you-see-them, now-you-don’t approach to imposing tariffs is even worse for Corporate America than a broad but clearly defined tariff program. (As is the case for the Ukrainian working class in regards to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the interest of the US working class are entirely irrelevant to them.) Here is the Wall Street Journal again in an article entitled Trump‘s economic messaging is spooking some of his own advisors. They report that “the president’s team received floods of calls from business executives concerned about mixed messaging on tariffs….. senior officials… have received panic calls from chief executives and lobbyist… many in the business community have abandoned efforts to get the president to reverse course on trade, instead pleading with the White House for clarity on his approach.”

To quote Thomas Friedman, again: “our markets will have a nervous breakdown from uncertainty, our entrepreneurs will have a nervous breakdown, our manufacturers will have a nervous breakdown, our investors – foreign and domestic – will have a nervous breakdown, our allies will have a nervous breakdown And we’re going to give the rest of the world a nervous breakdown.

“You cannot run the country, you cannot be an American ally, you cannot run a business, and you cannot be a long term American trading partner when in a short period the US president threatens Ukraine, threatens Russia, withdraws his threat to Russia, threatens huge tariffs on Mexico and Canada and postpones them again, doubles tariffs on China and threatens to impose even more on Europe and Canada.

“Top officials of our oldest allies say privately they fear that we are becoming not just unstable, but actually their enemy. The only person who gets treated with kid gloves is Putin.” Friedman bemoans “seeing a world that you knew for 80 years being unraveled by the most powerful player who doesn’t know what he is doing and is surrounded by bobbleheads.” (For more on tariffs, world trade and inflation see A Primer on Inflation, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.)

Corruption and money laundering
Flowing from Trump’s purely self-interested method of governing, his administration is the most corrupt, and therefore out of control, administration this country has ever seen. The London Financial Times commented on this in regards to Trump’s wanting to make the United States the “crypto capital of the world”. The article comments on the role of David Sacks, who is Trump‘s “crypto and AI czar”, and whose investment firm has stakes in all five of the cryptocurrencies that Trump is promoting. The use of cryptocurrencies is powered to a great extent by the drug cartels and other money launderers, and Trump made clear his purpose for encouraging these cryptocurrencies. As the Financial Times, pointed out, “a few hours later [after announcing his cryptocurrency policy] Trump scrapped America’s chief anti-money laundering measure…. These steps… amount to a charter for criminals…. The planned launch of a crypto reserve [by the U.S. Treasury] is more transparent than most [other examples of Trump’s corruption]; the fed would serve as back up for investors in a speculative asset with no obvious use value except to criminals and the dark web. It will be an insurance floor for billionaires, including the Trump family.”

Just as with Trump’s pardoning of New York City mayor Eric Adams, the rules of the game, and at least a somewhat level playing field for all the major capitalists are out the window. Instead, it is a matter of which corporate head sucks up to Trump the most and/or pays him the greatest bribe in the form of “campaign contributions”. The Office of the President has become in part a giant money laundering and extortion racket!

The next four years
Another conservative NY Times columnist, David Brooks, summed it up: “Over the next few years, I predict, Trump will cut a deal with China, doing to Taiwan some version of what he has already done to Ukraine — betray the little guy to suck up to the big guy. Nations across Asia will come to the same conclusion the Europeans have already reached: America is a Judas [!].

“So what’s going to happen?

“NATO is over…..
“The West is (temporarily) over….
“The new civilizational struggle is between hard and soft [that is between naked military power and diplomacy]”

To repeat Friedman: “Four years of this will not work, folks.” The question is what way out do they have?

More on that in a future article in which we will also discuss the mounting popular opposition to the Trump/Vance/Musk triumvirate. 

For background reading, also see: “The Trump/Musk/Vance Triumvirate and the Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists Part 1 and Part 2. These articles explain who this wing of the capitalist class is, how they developed and why they were the first ones to back Trump and MAGA. Oaklandsocialist is the only blog that spells out the crisis in the U.S. working class and the shifts in the U.S. capitalist class, as well as covering other international events. If you want to make sure not to miss the second part of this analysis as well as other articles, you might consider subscribing to Oaklandsocialist.