Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States of America on January 20th, 2025. Nation newspaper columnist and Associate Professor at North Carolina University Tennyson Joseph summarizes a perspective held by many about how Trump’s presidency may impact world politics. Say what you want there will not be a dull moment when Trump reenters the White House. The people have spoken.
See Joseph’s column published in the Nation newspaper dated 0 January 2025.
MAGA faces reality
DAYS BEFORE THE COMMENCEMENT of his second presidency, the gap between Donald Trump’s campaign’s rhetoric and actual political reality threatens to destabilise his new administration. It is not surprising that a period normally reserved for meticulous preparation for government has descended into infighting among Trump’s inner circle.
The causes of the fissures are as predictable as they are frivolous. First, the MAGA (Make America Great Again) inner circle is comprised largely of persons with limited political experience. Many of them are private sector billionaires who do not rely on government for basic daily survival. They are also philosophically opposed to the idea of government as “public service”.
More importantly, they betray a woeful ignorance of how government works. They understand government largely as an instrument to serve the powerful. They see elections as a zero-sum class contest, with the winner earning the right to self-reward while ignoring the normal built-in safeguards against bad governance, which they interpret as inefficiencies which “will never occur in the private sector”. It is this widespread “political illiteracy” among the key MAGA leadership, which explains some of the early tensions between the Trump inner circle and the more grounded republican congressional leaders. The republican split over the neargovernment shut-down in early December, was an early sign of future clashes between these two elements of MAGA.
However, the tensions within MAGA are far more complex. The recent debate over H1-B visas has shown how a reckless campaign trail aimed at appeasing a racist mass base can quickly go off-track when it enters the complex cross-rails of actual government.
While Trump was elected by working-class Americans on his promise to reduce immigration to safeguard American jobs, the reality of maintaining US global competitiveness has meant that MAGA billionaire financiers like Elon Musk who understand the importance of advanced technologies for national development, have insisted that the US widens its HIB programme.
This has led to a deep split within MAGA between those who continue to believe in the most racist aspects of the republican anti-immigration campaign on one hand and those, on the other, who more realistically understand that America will never be great again if it is unable to lure to its shores the best qualified global talent.
It was always understood by perceptive observers that there was never any profound practical substance to Trump’s campaign promises. It appealed to the basest majoritarian racist instincts aimed at luring votes away from a mixed-race female.
Given the hollowness of the campaign assumptions, the lack of actual government experience among MAGA leaders, and the tensions between the opportunistic racists, the greedy billionaires, the traditional republicans, and the white working-class base, all held together by an elderly, politically crude, criminally convicted President, these contradictions are expected to deepen further, even without considering the global resistance which Trump’s reckless utterances will engender.
America will never be great again if it is unable to lure to its shores the best qualified global talent.
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