America’s homeland goes MAGA
More freedom for government power to make world power greater

I.

As everyone knows, the “systemic conflict” between Western market-economy democracies and Soviet real socialism was decided in favor of the West three and a half decades ago. Not in the sense that democracy now prevails everywhere on the globe, but in the — politically and economically far more substantial — sense that countries have no alternative any more to competing with each other for capital growth. That makes all the forms of government around the world, on the spectrum from liberal democracy to despotism, just that: forms in which states direct all their activity to this globally decisive and decided purpose. This is the historical success of an American world power that has applied all its economic and military capacities — including the capacity to destroy the world multiple times over — to prove that it can only live up its own politico-economic principles if these principles apply to all states and peoples around the world. Which explains what the world looks like now: completely occupied by states that take it upon themselves to maintain their own power base by committing their societies and themselves to a competition in which America is economically and militarily the superior competitor.

In this competition, the US insists on having a special position. As the power that not only sets the standards of success for all others but also enjoys the corresponding success, it insists on being unquestionably superior economically, and invincible, even invulnerable, militarily. It bases this on the size of its capitalists and the advances they make; on the size and indispensability of its market for goods, money, and credit; on the singular status of its dollar, in which the bulk of world trade is conducted, especially the financial-capitalist superstructure; and finally on its unique military capacities. However, it is striking that America is finding ever more frequent and ever more pressing reasons to reaffirm this claim of superiority, variously combining offers and threats. This is because the world of competition based on the US military and the US dollar has spawned other powers that have succeeded within this competition — quite in line with the system — and thereby increasingly acquired the means and the will to contest America’s special position. The rise of such rivals by no means conflicts with the way the American world order functions, but it does conflict with the function this order has for America. Globalized capitalist competition is supposed to reliably reproduce America’s superior economic and military might, thus making its competitors’ successes functional for America. For this special position to be challenged is unbearable to American statesmen, across party lines. America’s supremacy is its raison d'état. But no American politician embodies as consistently as Donald Trump the standpoint that this supremacy, once the competition of systems has been replaced by a global system of competition, no longer consists in America creating a world in its own image in order to make this system safe for American capital, but rather in America being the unquestionably strongest competitor within this world.

Trump’s Republican and Democratic predecessors liked to propagandize a world of states made completely functional for the US by demanding that the world be made safe for “democracy.” Trump raises no such demand, especially not that America should be doing the job. He explicitly does not care whether rulers elsewhere get themselves elected by their people freely, secretly and with fair party competition, and then conduct their rule in accordance with the constitution, with lots of respect and room for parliamentary opposition and dissenting public opinions. The MAGA advocate has neither praise nor criticism on that score. He sees all states as sovereigns in that regard; they alone determine what kind of rule their subjects are entitled to. Whether they respect international rules and institutions obviously interests Trump just as little as the rules and institutions themselves do. He is willing to make deals with all states regardless of their style of rule. Of course, local leaders have to be qualified to make deals, i.e., they have to have mastery of nationalistic “common sense.” They have to present themselves as rulers who are openly and directly pursuing nothing but the interests of their power, who represent the unconditional identity of their rule with their, and only their, native people, i.e., who have complete control of their shop both above and below. Above all, they have to respect the only proper law in a world of nation-states where all are competing for the same thing: the right of the strong, which America reserves for itself as the right of the very strongest. The other leaders have to recognize the will of the MAGA boss as the immutable natural condition for their freedom to compete ruthlessly for success against their peers. Anyone who wants to skew the honest contest with rivals in their favor by invoking some objective necessity or higher rule, some international or even supranational obligation, deserves Trump’s honest hatred of hypocrisy. Harping on values like that already tells him everything he needs to know about the internal affairs of other states, above and beyond whatever migrant- or minority-friendly deviations from proper nationalism he may discover there. What Trump demands respect for is neither the greatness of the American political system — the only one that fits human nature — nor a US-guaranteed set of global rules, but “only” how great his power is and how determined he is to use it against all competitors. Conversely, Trump promises to see to it that precisely this kind of respect is shown: America is the strongest power, so it gets what it wants.

Trump obviously receives very bad press for his way of updating America’s imperialist success story, even and especially in America itself. Critics denounce his disregard and contempt for the highest political values and the West’s value-based community, his destroying the international community’s institutions, i.e., the proven model of American world power — while they make no distinction whatsoever between these various casualties. Such criticism only makes Trump even more certain that the ‘establishment’ in charge of America’s power considers it more important to protect the world order, its principles and values than to make sure America succeeds in it. Trump seriously thinks the brand of American imperialism that has been practiced up to now is not nationalistic enough.

This is precisely what every emergency Trump declared at the beginning of his second term is about: America has been unwilling to be the incontestable and overwhelming superpower that it fundamentally is. Which makes it clear what correction has to be made: it is time to reject all the institutions and principles relating to global politics and world economy, international law, alliance policy, humanitarian matters, etc., that America used for expanding its world power into a universally valid world order and glorifying this as its own higher commitment. Trump sees these things not as making a system out of American power but as shackling it. His remedy is a simple procedural principle: either America has free disposal of its means of power, or they are means of power not for America but for its rivals. An incomplete overview:

• America’s persistent trade deficits and its notorious Rust Belt show that the US establishment attaches more importance to a system of global free trade than to American trade success and industrial dominance in that system. Yet it has the world’s largest market, the most advanced technologies, the indispensable global currency, and unbeatable military destructive capacities, all this proving that America does not need to compete to defend its superiority, but can force its competitors politically to reproduce American superiority. This is also proof that America has a right to collect this debt from its competitors. Boldly applying tariffs makes it possible to set up a global tribute-paying relation, which, logically enough, does not have to be limited to enforcing economic services.^[1] Though Trump regularly claims there is an emergency that is forcing him to take extraordinary measures, he makes it clear at the same time that transforming the economic competition between all countries into their political subjugation to America means establishing the only proper normal order — “common sense” for a superpower.
• The same applies to the energy crisis, which, according to Trump, exists for the simple reason that America does not enjoy the worldwide energy dominance it is capable of by virtue of its God-given fossil-fuel resources. These resources can be used to force competitors to serve America, and here again not just economically. The US establishment was obviously more interested in preventing a supposed planetary disaster and creating a global market for green energy. By finding that the climate change his predecessors cited can only be an anti-American conspiracy, Trump is following his sure instinct for the natural laws of American power. A genuine “emergency” cannot possibly require America to impose restrictions on itself; it can only mean that America is on the contrary suffering from too many restrictions. Trump has accordingly decided to make unlimited use of time-proven American energy sources — “Drill baby drill,” “Mine baby mine” — and would put an end to wind farms, which do produce independent energy but still look too much like ugly self-restriction. Here, too, what Trump decides to implement while citing a supposed emergency obviously coincides with the only proper state of normalcy for American might.
• His beloved people’s massive drug use and the business it offers foreigners show Trump that US policymakers have not been taking their decades-old “war on drugs” seriously, i.e., once again not deploying America’s military power for America. Instead, they have been wasting it on those “forever wars” beyond the “big beautiful ocean” for defending the rules of a world order that only benefits the competition. It is the political elite itself that has gotten its people into this health crisis, which Trump knows the only appropriate solution for. He is putting his southern neighbors in an (up to now, pre-)war-like state of emergency until America gets the services it wants from them. When asked what specific services America ultimately wants and from whom — more help fighting drug cartels, more oil for US multinationals, a voluntary regime change, voluntarily taking back refugees — Trump always gives the same answer: “We’ll see.” To overcome the emergency that America itself is facing, Trump insists on his freedom to determine all these issues unilaterally, i.e., to make the deals that other countries have to accept.
• The presence of millions of illegal immigrants on American soil is proof of treason to Trump. American politicians have placed their imaginary responsibility for the world’s misery above the home rights of their own people — the national resource par excellence. If these politicians fail to see the unauthorized immigration of millions as the act of war that it is, then they apparently prefer to turn America’s homeland into a global village. The Trump administration is in this case accordingly taking action against a double enemy. First of all, it is combating foreign invaders by massively upgrading and deploying police and military force at home, and exerting economic and military pressure on the countries sending and receiving them to take them back. Secondly, it is combating the huge fifth column in its own country, which certainly must exist if the war scenario in which America finds itself is not even being recognized as such. Here it is even clearer that the emergency situation is identical to the normal one. A campaign of violence that the country would previously not have thought possible — either morally or in terms of the actual violence — is being conducted for the express purpose of establishing that state of affairs that the people have always had an absolute right to: state power being totally free and sure in having control of its human material.

*

America has thus allowed itself to be duped, cheated, and exploited by foreign powers and people — while always invoking higher commitments and invented necessities that the country has obeyed due to misguided deference, miscalculations, or malicious disregard for the nation’s interests. From the outset, Trump has made clear that this accusation against the US establishment is directed at more than the individual crimes and the personnel of previous administrations who have criminally committed them. He is criticizing the entire party landscape, the whole way of governing that has established the principle of weakness as the guideline for policy. And he is criticizing the condition of the people themselves, including the self-image they have been cultivating for far too long. As a living paradigm of successful deal-making, i.e., of dictating terms from the position of the winner, Trump tackles the task at hand on the home front.

II.

Here, Trump first encounters a “two-party system” with a mixed reputation: one’s own party always has the good reputation, the other party the bad one. This neat division is the goal and, according to polls, also the result of the parties’ own resolute shaping of political opinion. They have actually managed to convince large sections of the American electorate that the parties dwell at opposite moral poles, enabling voters to make a simple choice between good and evil. Voters show themselves to be products of this competition, often seeing their party affiliation as deciding their whole moral self-image and worldview, and vice versa. But by emphasizing how irreconcilable the values of their respective campaigns are, the parties at the same time do a great deal to damage their overall reputation among the same citizens they have apparently politicized successfully otherwise. Citizens are constantly complaining that the parties — mainly the other one, but not only — are unwilling to cooperate properly, causing the political business at hand to fall by the wayside; the parties are so busy competing that there is no proper governing going on. So both parties are suspected of being nothing more than two self-seeking political agencies of one and the same “establishment,” committed to the system of their rule rather than to exercising the mandated one — which is vigorous and successful.

Secondly, Trump encounters a power apparatus based on the rule of law with an equally mixed reputation. It owes its good reputation to a strange finding that democratic common sense at some point arrived at: for the citizens governed, what matters about this apparatus of rule is how it behaves towards itself. It is not so important what the rights and duties it decrees are about, what they entail for citizens and their living conditions — all this is overshadowed by the enlightened procedure they come about by. In turn, the main feature of the procedure itself is — another strange idea — that those in power are mainly concerned with checking and balancing each other. So state power being divided into different branches with their respective competences to check each other is good news for those being governed, who of course cannot share in the power. Shared rule is half rule, at most, above all it is totally unbiased and functional because it is double and triple checked. The latter is even not that wrong: a single ruler’s all-powerful whims are no use to a modern capitalist nation. There is too much at stake, especially in America. After all, this is where the world’s most productive competition- and class-based society is supposed to function successfully as the reliable foundation for the most dominant world power in human history. Even in America’s laissez-faire paradise, this requirement entails an extremely diverse range of sovereign regulatory measures to be carried out by a host of soundly functioning executive departments, for the country’s economic power base to work, not according to any plan, but absolutely reliably and productively. The capitalist and world-power undertaking that has to succeed in the short, medium, and long term cannot be decreed by a king-like luminary, no matter how potent he may be — and it must definitely not be disrupted by him. Interestingly, however, this at the same time accounts for the bad reputation the rule of law has in a democracy. Its convoluted procedures hinder the decisive rule that the nation with this same competition so badly needs and that the people have asked for by voting — the pinnacle of civil liberty. From this point of view, such procedures are not curbing rulers’ whims so as to make their rule properly functional, instead a sluggish bureaucracy is keeping those in power from taking action as democrats demand they do. In this way, responsible citizens of a free society acknowledge that they by no means just need an administration but definitely need rule, and that they insist on getting it.

This is precisely what gives the presidency the good reputation that Trump encounters. The holder of this office embodies the need that all Americans have for vigorous rule, which they identify with collectively as a people — head of the state apparatus, commander-in-chief of the greatest military power, and figurehead of the world’s greatest people, all rolled into one. This office — at least according to the established narrative — stands above the squabbling between the competing parties and individual representatives in the rest of government. Its holder represents the whole of what the other elected officials represent only in fragments: the abstraction known as “the American people.” This is something of which US presidents are generally eager to remind their colleagues in other branches of the power apparatus. Trump’s hated predecessor Obama, especially, was certain that all other holders and representatives of state power, especially those in the legislative branch, ultimately had to listen to him because, though they too were elected, they were not elected by the American people. US presidents have traditionally invoked this to legitimize a fullness of power that rubs up against the constraints of their office. And the greater American power becomes, and the more it has at stake in the global competition of powers, and the more this competition becomes a more or less constant state of war, the more urgent the need evidently becomes for an energetic and effective leader. What was lamented half a century ago as an “imperial presidency” that was seizing ever greater authority has long since become the norm thanks to the advances of the imperialism the US president presides over. This exercise of presidential power doesn’t require any special intelligence, but it does require a political icon with a fullness of power that no historic king ever approached.

These three elements of vibrant American democracy have been effortlessly embraced by Trump — as the exceptional figure that all democratically raised disappointed nationalists are always calling for.

III.

He first took on the American two-party system. After years of doubt about which party was the appropriate vehicle for his policy of uncompromising superpower strength, Trump at some point decided to take over the Republicans.^[2] His feelings about the party itself were mixed.

On the one hand, its program had numerous good points and on the whole struck the right note. “Business first and the military, too!” had always defined its moral compass. Hence Trump did not need to teach it that the freedom of business and the destructive power of the military cannot be big enough and deserve every bit of government support. The same applies to the principle that those who lose out in competition do not deserve taxpayers’ money, but a lot of law and order instead. And not least thanks to the rise of “Tea Party,”^[3] Republicans seamlessly fused their demand for more freedom for business and tougher measures for losers with an invocation of the nationalist rights of an impoverished industrial workforce. Particularly this group of people with their exemplary morals and material woes had a right to have their hard work serve successful businesses, whose success must therefore not be hindered by social policy. And this group also had the right for this work to be exacted solely from real Americans, i.e., from themselves. This showed Trump what encouraging progress the party was making when it came to “foreigners out!” Republicans were less and less inclined to acknowledge that the availability of a workforce as cheap and willing as basically only illegal immigrants are was regrettably required all over American capitalism. They increasingly saw the presence of such people all over US territory as a criminal danger to the homeland and Americans’ rights. Trump was particularly pleased that the Republicans were increasingly displaying a general, boundless, and boundlessly offended rights-consciousness. To them, America was an essentially invincible nation that was suffering more and more defeats. Its much-vaunted economic dominance had for some time ceased to be reflected in the state of the nation as a business location. The worldwide deployment of its superior military might was destroying a lot abroad as intended, but it was not paying off for America. The nation’s right to economic and military supremacy was not being completely realized, meaning it was being completely botched. In the view of the party, its nation had no real weaknesses in the competition of nations, there were just perfidious traitors at work. And what clinched the love match between Trump and the Republicans was that the party saw this un- and anti-American weakness most clearly embodied in a black president who talked about “Change!” (which was already enough for confusing Obama’s promise with a diminished claim to America’s superiority). At least that clinched it on one hand.

For on the other hand, the party was lagging on all fronts behind the appealingly hostile rhetoric that its supporters and even the party itself were spreading on the country’s right-wing propaganda channels. It was not going far enough in easing the burden on the rich and stopping the losers from whining. When it came to relieving hard-working Americans of the criminal presence of foreigners, its actions by no means matched the alarm it was whipping up. Despite insisting that the US’s overwhelming military supremacy be expanded further and that America knew no higher rule than its own security needs, it was making no discernible attempts to finally get rid of all the parasitic allies and shackling institutions standing in the way of America’s supremacy. And all that was left of the Republicans’ hatred for the liberal culture of weakness and for its black protagonist in the highest office was, according to Trump, unfortunately that they were maintaining an intense fighting stance but failing to deliver the long-overdue real fight. All in all, the fine enemy images the Republicans and their allies in the media were conjuring up in the name of the true American people were not being matched properly by their actions.^[4] Apparently, they did not believe that their hostility toward Democrats and liberalism was actually the real consensus of real Americans, i.e., the only valid one. So they were failing in their task of turning this national consensus into a ruling consensus. The Republicans were evidently still riddled with hypocrites — “RINOs” (Republicans In Name Only) — only claiming to speak for real Americans, and thus merely representing the right wing of the same establishment their Democratic opponents dominated. Trump therefore first had to turn this party into a movement of the American people against the anti-American enemy.

With this consistent will to fight, Trump made a big offer to all right-wing Americans — and indeed to all inclined to turn their dissatisfaction into a need for a leader who would do away with America’s weakness once and for all and unleash America’s sources of power with no holds barred. This meant the party had to break down this or that cordon sanitaire or at least stop paying lip service to such sharp dissociation. After all, white supremacists, anti-government militias, and the wildest right-wing conspiracy theorists all wanted the same thing: to triumph over that self-inflicted national weakness and the liberals who caused it. If there was any difference, it was that the radicals who were previously — by and large — ostracized had an attribute that Trump saw as a clear advantage: they were absolutely serious about acting on their own enemy images.^[5] Whatever the various Republican factions and right-wing movements specifically wanted to fight against, they all needed the mighty avenging angel that Trump was promising to be. In fact, they definitely needed him more than he needed any one of them. So Trump’s offer to the assorted right-wing world involved a commitment on their part. They all had to recognize that the MAGA movement, in which Trump united “traditional” Republicans with their entire right-wing base, was the one movement of the American people. Everyone had to display the unified will of all true Americans, which only truly came alive as a unified will in and through Trump. Seen in this light, Trump’s notoriously rambling speeches with his wild jumps from one bout of self-praise to the next enemy image are quite sober and coherent. They are precisely the — rhetorical — way Trump focuses his supporters on the real connection between all their hates and gripes: their only common denominator is really him. He creates the practical connection by attacking all who dispute, or even just qualify, his claim to be the resolute political will the nation needs and therefore to be entitled to the mighty freedom of action he needs for that purpose.

The result is a MAGA movement with a cult of leadership of the kind that exists in a free democracy. First, it exists as the ideal of a true unity between people and leader. Secondly, it exists as the opportunistic calculation of those in the movement to make this leadership functional for their own popular cause. Thirdly, it exists in the form of constant disappointment that has to be dealt with when the leader does exactly what he promises, that is, realizes the freedom of his power. Fourthly, it exists as the accusation that the diverse sections of the MAGA following level at each other — of being only out to use the great leader for their own, and not really the people’s cause.^[6] Fifthly — and quite often in recent days — it exists as a direct conflict between the great leader himself and sections of his following as soon as the former fails to live up to his hostile rhetoric and the latter fail to live up to their professions of loyalty. It is no surprise that such conflicts come about, nor that they escalate precisely over issues with a moral quality that wonderfully represents the core of the MAGA mindset.^[7] It is precisely in their respective fundamentalism that these currents have been useful to Trump, insofar as they provide him with total sovereignty over the Republican party now converted to a Trump movement. Trump's own fundamentalism on any specific issue applies to the main thing he embodies: the absolute freedom of might. That is what the protagonists of whatever issue have to see as fulfilling their mission — or making them lose their right.

IV.

This purpose Trump pursues with the MAGA movement is the same he applies to the ruling apparatus based on the rule of law. Its rules and procedures do not apply per se to the representative of the people, who has been empowered precisely to put an end to the politicians’ “business as usual,” because his allies and opponents within the separate parts of the government apparatus are actually the problem. Trump has promised to fight them and their bastions in the power apparatus ruthlessly and without restraint — and this paragon of democracy is keeping his word. So he does not shy away from making the turn toward fascism that every democracy puts on the agenda when the nation’s cause itself is suffering acutely from the restrictions imposed on the nation’s supreme chief. Then the nation needs an anti-establishment Caesar to champion the only true right of the strongest — by ruthlessly cracking down on all who are unruly, removing all the protective walls they are hiding and feeling safe behind. So it is not Trump who has to prove himself against the procedures prescribed by the rule of law, but the other way around. All the elements of the state apparatus organized according to the rule of law have to prove their worth as freely usable instruments serving the power of the people’s president and savior of the nation in a time of crisis:

1. Trump is straightening out the executive branch with all its agencies, which are formally more independent of the president than the various executive departments. He is removing all individuals who are critical of him, as well as entire agencies that do not look like “America first!” — examples being the foreign aid agency USAID and the Department of Education. On the one hand, Trump propagates this as an emergency measure, actually as self-defense: against a “deep state” hiding liberal traitors who are pulling the strings. On the other hand, Trump emphasizes that he is finally restoring the democratic norm that the far-sighted Founding Fathers allegedly always envisaged: a “unitary executive” in which all agencies, their heads, and their supervisors serve “at the pleasure of the President”:

“Only that chain of responsibility ensures that SES [Senior Executive Service] officials are properly accountable to the President and the American people. … My administration will restore a ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’” (Restoring Accountability for Career Senior Executives, Trump Memorandum, January 20, 2025).^[8]

2. He governs largely by “executive orders” — a governmental instrument that the framers of the Constitution intended for exceptional situations in which the usual legislative procedures are too slow and consensus-seeking. Trump claims that, on the one hand, there is just such an emergency that he does not have sufficient control over Congress to deal with despite a Republican majority in both chambers. On the other hand, his orders are obviously nothing like stopgaps. His childlike glee at signing the thick folders reveals instead the clear conscience of a ruler who is finally fulfilling the democratic ideal of the US president the nation is expecting vigorous governing from. For Trump, this is the only method of rule that complies with the American people’s right to an endless number of strong deals around the world. The fact that his orders do not have the lasting effectiveness of laws — passed in proper form by the legislature — and can therefore be just as easily undone by order of the next president, is for Trump at worst a problem for another day, when another order may be needed anyway if the situation changes. So, to Trump, the freedom to impose obligations on everyone else without binding himself to anything is not only justified in times of crisis but is the only way of exercising power that is worthy of the world’s strongest nation. What applies to the power of this nation applies for exactly this reason to Trump himself as well: either his power is free or it is no real power. Vis-à-vis the legislature, he does not have to comply with procedures that give it a say; all he owes it is a successful outcome, its duty being to step out of his way and provide the required funding. This way of governing does not make all congressional Republicans friends of Trump’s, but it evidently makes a big impression on them. Republican lawmakers on the whole prove willing to let the freedom of the “America first!” president take full effect. They, too, know how free patriots want their leadership to perform.

The effects of this freedom are immediately felt by the opposition Democrats, the mirror-image opposite of the one popular movement that Trump has transformed and expanded the Republicans into. In Washington, Democrats are treated at best as the defeated minority they are, i.e., they are simply bypassed. They are removed or hounded out of the government and administrative apparatus wherever possible, and are constantly under rhetorical assault. This exposes them once and for all as enemies of the people who need to be removed from power, possibly imprisoned, or even strung up.^[9] The same applies to the Democrats who govern various states and big cities. That they are criminals becomes clear for instance when they declare their cities “safe havens” for illegal immigrants and are unwilling to cooperate in militantly performing the widespread deportation raids the Trump administration has ordered there. Or when they fail to treat protests against these raids as revolts by enemies of the state and thus neglect their duty to crush them by force. Every such refusal shows Trump that there are criminal elements needing to be eradicated not just among the population in Democrat-governed cities, but within the local governments themselves. So Trump is all the more certain that America’s major cities need a MAGA occupying force. Along with deploying the National Guard — so far on a trial basis in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.^[10] — as troops for protecting and escorting the big deportation offensive and fighting violent crime and protests in the big cities, he is setting about building up a separate armed force under his direct command so he can maintain order as he sees fit any time.^[11] With every protest by the particular governors and mayors, with every judicial blockade, and especially in the wake of the assassination of MAGA hero and hopeful Charlie Kirk, the phrase “the enemy within” loses its purely metaphorical character. According to Trump’s chief advisor for all contingencies, Stephen Miller, “The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” Or even more clearly:

“The issue before us now is very simple and clear. There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks” (Chief Advisor Stephen Miller on X, October 4, 2025).

In the wake of this, the Trump administration is becoming increasingly convinced that the nation basically needs martial law to be able to fight the Democrats and their supporters with the necessary resolve at last:

“President Donald Trump has repeatedly signaled he is open to invoking the Insurrection Act, a law from 1807 that allows the president to deploy the military in the United States. In October, Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he is "allowed" to use it if courts deny his efforts to send the National Guard to U.S. cities. ‘Everybody agrees you're allowed to use that and there is no more court cases, there is no more anything,’ Trump said. ‘We're trying to do it in a nicer manner, but we can always use the Insurrection Act if we want’” (pbs.org, October 27, 2025).

Meanwhile, Trump is chummily co-opting the entire leadership of the various US armed forces for MAGA’s enemy images and strategic scenarios:

“… we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military…We're under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don't wear uniforms...This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room because it's the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control” (Address to military leadership, September 30, 2025).

At the beginning of October (2025), the Democrats in Washington put the brakes on. They refused to give their necessary approval for passing the federal budget, bringing about a government shutdown.^[12] This was firstly supposed to force Trump and the congressional Republicans to recognize the Democrats as an opposition that has to be negotiated with, rather than simply treated as an enemy without any power. Secondly, it was supposed to discredit the Republicans before the people as a bunch more interested in fighting the Democrats than in the health of their people, who would thereby identify the Democrats’ plight with their own.^[13] Of course, this maneuver had one small and one big contradiction to it. The small one was that the Democrats’ hypocrisy was not just easy to see through but was as easy as pie to turn around. This the Republicans promptly did, saying the Democrats’ irrational hatred of Trump was evidently stronger than their love for the suffering people! The much bigger contradiction was that the Republicans, who this refusal was supposed to be forcing to negotiate, did not feel it was damaging them so they felt no pressure. On the contrary, they actually saw the shutdown as a double opportunity — to push ahead with dismantling a number of federal agencies, which they wanted to do anyway, making the jobs of civil servants even more unbearable; and to damage the Democrats’ particular concerns and clientele.^[14] So the Democrats’ entire coercive maneuver presupposed on the part of the other party what the functioning of a constitutional state altogether presupposes: a fundamental consensus on the path to national success and a corresponding willingness to cooperate, something the Republicans not only don’t have but instead consider their main mandate to terminate. The Republicans’ immunity to the Democrats’ attempt at coercion and, not least, the Republicans’ threat to resort to the “nuclear option” and abolish the so-called ‘filibuster’ prompted eight Democratic senators to admit defeat after six weeks and agree to the resumption of government operations. They appealed to their Democratic colleagues in Congress to save their statesmanlike credibility by displaying the kind of responsibility for the national interest that would distinguish them from power-mad Republicans, and to admit that they simply could not coerce Republicans by inflicting a harm on them that they considered a benefit. Their colleagues responded with an indignation that spoke to the other side of the Democrats’ dilemma. By canceling the shutdown, the party was failing to exercise its responsibility as a rule-of-law bulwark against Trump’s authoritarian offensive, thereby damaging its credibility as the leader of an anti-Trump resistance, and instead merely admitting it was powerless.^[15]

3. The judiciary has a very clear-cut task in times like these. It is already clear that Trump can do anything he wants:

"…I’m not a dictator…I have the right to do anything I want to do. I'm the president of the United States. If I think our country is in danger, and it is in danger…I can do it" (cabinet meeting, August 26, 2025 democrats.senate.gov).

Accordingly, rather than proposing changes to the law, Trump uses his many executive orders to create faits accomplis that are not guided by the existing legal framework. On the other hand, Trump does not consider the judgments of the judiciary to be at all superfluous. Though he insists that he is right per se, he also insists that this be adjudicated. To this end — to have the freedom of his power officially certified — Trump is happy to go to court, doing so with all the competitive means at his disposal:

“‘[Moderator:]…don't you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?'…‘I don't know,’ Trump replied, ‘I have to respond by saying, again, that I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said’” (Interview with NBC News, May 4, 2025).

This puts Trump up against numerous federal judges who find his executive orders to be pretty unconstitutional and respond by issuing injunctions.^[16] Trump in turn considers their objections to be unconstitutional and against the interests of the people. He threatens to prosecute the judges, prosecutors, and plaintiffs, and to disregard the judgments themselves, invoking his all-encompassing right to do so. For now, however, he just maintains this threatening posture while continuing to pursue the legal process combatively in order to obtain the certification he demands for his all-encompassing right — all the way up to the Supreme Court, which he wants an approving opinion from. Here he faces a conservative majority of judges who he himself has made sure of and who — in numerous individual cases and in general — have confirmed his freedom to pursue his government agenda by executive order undisturbed by injunctions. They have suspended the judgments of the lower courts on a broad front, largely via the “shadow docket,” i.e., with no explicit explanation.^[17] In addition, with a landmark ruling in the case of “Trump v. CASA, Inc.,” they have quite generally restricted the judiciary’s power to block executive orders immediately and nationwide until the head of the judiciary makes a final ruling on their constitutionality.^[18] The court has thus expanded the executive branch’s freedom to govern by decree, but reserves the power to decide on the decrees’ final validity alone and at its own discretion and on its own schedule — at least until a new president might reverse the decrees. Contrary to the interested judgment of disappointed Democrats, this does not reveal a submissive willingness to become Trump’s compliant instrument, but rather the will or at least hopeful calculation to instrumentalize Trump’s anti-liberal will to fight. It is quite a unique opportunity in light of the clear majority of conservatives over liberals on the Supreme Court (6 to 3). It is for this purpose that the very stable conservative majority on the Supreme Court concentrates judicial power largely in its own hands. Trump is under no illusions about the calculating, instrumental way the conservative judiciary treats him; it only bothers him when they do not function as his instrument in practice, i.e., do not uphold his decrees. Then it bothers him tremendously.^[19] Soon to come are a whole series of Supreme Court rulings on the substance of the many contested decrees; then Trump will see whether and to what extent he will have to resort to other means to bring the judiciary into line.

4. Trump considers the fourth estate — the so-called “court of public opinion”— to be, on the one hand, a “fake news” machine that needs to be shut down.^[20] He likes to avoid the so-called mainstream channels altogether and maintains direct contact with his movement via “Truth Social.” On the other hand, he is notoriously greedy for good reviews of his exploits as a ruler, especially from the liberal press he hates and has declared an “enemy of the people.” This is definitely not just a psychological quirk, but another example of his radical political claim. Trump wants to see the press fulfill its role — as a voluntary echo chamber for the direct communications from the people’s president. Trump insists on approval, on certification of the freedom he takes for himself — and comes up against some defiant indignation and no small amount of commercial and intellectual opportunism.^[21]

*

What Trump is demanding of the rule-of-law apparatus is basically its Gleichschaltung, that it be brought into line. This term is, of course, first and foremost known as a politico-moral epithet for evil: a fascist crime against the democratic constitutional state, so the absolute opposite of good. Its actual political substance is far more prosaic and not nearly as foreign to the constitutional state as these Manichean moral categories are to each other. Trump is insisting on the function that the legal system and a state apparatus based on the separation of powers fulfill for the government program — for financing and implementing it, certifying it as lawful, justifying it as serving the people — and disregarding, or even dismissing, the way they are supposed to function. Trump is not creating a new state apparatus, nor is he giving himself a new sovereign title; he wants the democratic government apparatus based on the rule of law to definitely fulfill its tasks — the ones he sets for it. Thus, Trump’s stance on procedures following the rule of law and on the attendant competition between the branches of state is exactly the same as America’s stance on the world of states as a whole should be: that of a successful monopolist. He is not abolishing this political competition between democratic and constitutional institutions; he is instead insisting that he has already won them for his agenda. His absolute right as the winner of the power contest is the starting point and fixed point of the whole legal-constitutional competitive circus. To Trump, even when dealing with his own ruling apparatus, competition is not a process with an open outcome but the imperative to succeed. What counts is the result that the procedure yields for power; that alone determines the quality of the form of governance.

V.

1. The established liberal self-image of the US that Trump is fighting against is an idealized reflection of the actually existing American world order.

First of all, the US is the immigration country par excellence. No other national capitalism has such extensive and successful access to the world’s human resources. It is home to them at all levels of the economic hierarchy: from key positions and command posts in the industries and institutions responsible for the nation’s economic and military superiority, down to jobs that can only be seen to be fulfilling the ‘American dream’ when compared to the misery abroad.

A very large proportion of Americans — at the top and bottom and across party lines — give themselves a great deal of credit for having such access to the world’s population: as their nation’s recipe for success and as a mark of superior moral standing. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” — this grand slogan on the Statue of Liberty serves the nation above all to honor how good it is at harnessing this longing for freedom, for America’s wealth and might and for the reproduction of its human basis. Many Americans are proud enough of how useful foreigners are to see the typically nationalistic skepticism toward immigrants as, firstly, counterproductive and, secondly, morally offensive. They consider it a sort of nationalism that does this nation no good. And their openness to useful foreigners from no matter where is by no means limited to those the US government has officially accepted into the national community, temporarily or permanently. It also extends to the millions who are residing illegally on American territory but have long since found their home in the American way of life, usually in its very large and productive lowest compartment. Quite a few righteous US patriots even occasionally go so far as to say the American passport — probably the most coveted ID in world history — is actually “just a piece of paper” that in no way reflects the real identity and the truly unifying bond of this people. Such patriots find these two elements — identity and bond — in another piece of paper that stands for a much more substantial affiliation, that being possession of the economic power that determines their real lives from A to Z. It is the shared interest in dollars, which all members of the community need to procure regardless of their origin, that such Americans see as revealing a unifying love of the freedom that goes hand in hand with free competition for this money. That is why probably the great majority of them think the question of whether foreigners belong has, in a way, long been decided: wherever they look in the world beyond the borders, they see themselves — everywhere the same active will to succeed in competing for money. This makes cosmopolitanism a fairly easy task for them, even a moral given. However receptive liberal America may be to specific foreigners, it sees itself as the “universal nation” that does justice to human beings as such because it recognizes no other justice than that of free and equal competition for money. That is exactly what they take for granted as being the fulfillment of every mortal’s dreams. And that is exactly what makes this ‘American dream’ so realistic: it corresponds to a world order that is in fact set up for this American way of life.

Of course, this American self-love is not entirely unbroken — precisely among those liberals who most ardently adhere to the idea that America and its competitive society are just right for human nature. Such critics, after all, find numerous reasons in the United States’ past and present — the eradication of the Native Americans, the enslavement of Blacks, and the long history of racist utilization and segregation of the population — to doubt the moral quality of America’s free society. Not because it subsumes all people under competition for money, not because of the considerable differences that free and equal competition brings about, but because it is not just this criterion alone that sorts the many competitors into different ranks of the hierarchy. Instead of Americans really only distinguishing themselves in free competition, they get sorted according to irrelevant criteria: skin color, ethnic group, gender, sexuality, etc. This is the issue that America has to be harshly self-critical about — by finally waking up, becoming “woke.” Americans have to admit that without a sweeping system of solidarity — ethnic, gender, etc. — there can be no truly free and equal competition. All institutions of society — from private companies to the military — have to implement DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) programs to make sure they reflect and celebrate the colorful mix of competitors. So the “universal nation” of private competitors still has to be perfected.

2. This liberal version of the conviction that America has a mission is, in Trump’s eyes, the opposite: a hatred of America and an explicit rejection of competitive strength as the identity of all true Americans. The “woke” moral offensive at universities and on social media — which the moral offensive of right-wing propaganda channels upgrades to the status of a wave of revolutionary terror — makes clear to Trump once and for all what such efforts for DEI and the many refugees and other illegal immigrants in the country actually stand for. They are not aimed at perfecting a competitive nation and productively absorbing the world’s misery, but at deliberately weakening America’s competitiveness, maybe even replacing proud Americans with submissive foreigners who are much more likely to put up with liberal oppression.

One thing the Trump administration is doing to counter this is to purge all the country’s public and private institutions of DEI programs, of their associated personnel — skin color can be enough — and even of the mere mention of such viewpoints as justifying some kind of leniency or actually being a reason for the nation to be self-critical. People who want to live in a morally perfect nation should start with themselves and consider the nation perfect that already exists. If there is anything the nation has to wake up to, it is its already real greatness. This is the ethos guiding the Trump administration to carry out a purge in the US education and museum landscape that is so thorough it must awe the most fanatical supporters of left-wing liberal “cancel culture.” Another measure the Trump administration has adopted is to conduct a special moral offensive to accompany its expulsion of illegal — and undesired legal — migrants. It is staging the violent removal of migrants not only as revenge for their violating the rights of law-abiding Americans, but also as a revival of “manifest destiny,” as a retaking of the continent from uncivilized savages and for God’s own people. America having its roots in a brutal “settler colonialism” is not at all slander when woke critics speak of it, it is something to be proud of. This is welcome rhetoric to the numerous “white supremacists” in the MAGA movement, but their government does not intend it to be interpreted as so racist and exclusionary. What matters is not the mental journey, but the destination: reclaiming the self-conceit of a successful master race. That is what the nation should still be proud of today; that still makes it perfect today.

Some MAGA intellectuals — e.g., Vice President JD Vance — question the very idea of America as a “creedal nation” defined by universal principles of competition:

“…if you were to ask yourself in 2025 what an American is, I hate to say it, very few of our leaders actually have a good answer. Is it purely agreement with the creedal principles of America? I know the Claremont Institute is dedicated to the founding vision of the United States of America. It's a beautiful and wonderful founding vision, but it's not enough by itself. If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let's say, of the Declaration of Independence, that's a definition that is way overinclusive and underinclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you. But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL [Anti-Defamation League, an NGO against antisemitism] would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it's absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying you don't belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong...And by the way, when we went to the moon, when we built the great future of the post-war era, we did it with our fellow citizens. And we should reject whether it's Democrat politicians or corporate oligarchs who say that we can only build the future by importing millions and millions of low-wage serfs. We can do it with American citizens. We've just got to have the will to actually try. Lastly, I'd say citizenship must mean recognizing the unique relationship, but also the obligations that we all share with our fellow Americans. You cannot swap ten million people from anywhere else in the world and expect for America to remain unchanged. In the same way, you can't export the Constitution, the written words on a piece of paper, to some random country and expect the same kind of government to take hold. That's not something to lament or be sad about. It's something to take pride in. That this is a distinctive moment in time with a distinctive place and a distinctive people. (JD Vance, Claremont Institute, July 5, 2025, YouTube transcript)

This line of argument may be ludicrous and full of straw men, but that doesn’t make the message less clear. Americans have to see themselves as a special “tribe,” as other MAGA intellectuals have put it. While this idea, too, is applauded by the aforementioned “white supremacists” and “Christian nationalists” in the MAGA movement, it does not have to be construed directly in racist or religious terms. Functional equivalents are welcome as long as the result is right: Americans must identify their own nature absolutely with their national ‘second nature’ — as a community united to fight others. Although MAGA intellectuals sometimes dust off very old self-images of America as the land of white Christian pioneers, there is nothing old-fashioned about such a position. A community united to fight, which they are finding old national narratives to support, is quite in keeping with the world that has now emerged from the liberal American world order, and with the mission that follows for American patriots of all stripes: either America secures its supremacy or it stops being America. And this mission no longer consists in creating a whole world that obeys the principles and standards of American capitalism. That definitely does not put an end to the associated narrative of the “universal nation,” which (as is no coincidence) only became established as the Americans’ self-image during the Cold War and decolonization, but it does take away its previous basis. Today, America faces the task of asserting its supremacy against rivals of the same ilk; that firmly anchors the narrative of a ruthless people winning over subhuman foreigners. It may be ironic, but it fits: precisely because the world of states has so completely adopted America’s political economy, American nationalists faced with the global competition defined by America feel compelled to define themselves as a people anew — and at the same time in a pretty old way, namely, as conquerors, as the agents of the violence that is the basis for America’s success.

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