Are We So Back or Not?
The Case for Cautious Optimism in the Second Trump Administration

1,220 words

Trump’s victory and policy positions continue to divide dissidents. Opinions on the matter have ranged from Trump being the second coming of Christ, to him merely perpetuating the American system or attempting to slow its decline, to even leading the white world into a blissful coma while personally holding a pillow over its face.

All these perspectives can have limited validity, although the point that we wish to emphasise here is that the implications of Trump’s 2^nd term have not yet been written. They can even be largely divorced from the man himself, due to the degree of chaos that Trump often leaves in his wake. Capitalising on this chaos will take some careful conceptual and practical manoeuvring but it is not impossible. Indeed, clever manoeuvring will be integral to making it out on the other side of the second Trump term in the best condition possible for our group. My aim here is to strongly encourage the notion that this is possible and so that we may see a thousand flowers bloom.

It is true that Trump’s own politics could be neatly summarised as “neo-Reaganist-Zionist” and the reasons not to like Trump are innumerable. Our position, however, is that we need to maintain a level-headed approach to whatever happens in the remaining 3.5 years, avoiding both a jubilant worship of Trump as well as apocalyptic pronouncements concerning his real inclinations. Most of all, we need to consistently and diligently look to extract every possible advantage from Trump’s maneuvers, successes, and blunders alike. It is difficult to truly ascertain what the US president desires for the future of the USA and what he wants his own legacy to be. Even then, perhaps his own plans, whatever they are, will end in disaster, as prophesied by the recent Iran nuclear tensions and stock market collapse. For these reasons, it is true that whites should not tie themselves to the mast of the Trump ship. Instead, we should closely follow behind it, scouting the horizon for opportunities as it breaks into previously blocked and impassable sea routes. Not wedding ourselves in any way to Trump’s personal story shall help us achieve this. Indeed, remaining detached from Trump the man is integral, not least due to his poor track record of failing to protect his allies when their usefulness has expired.

But a healthy mistrust of Trump and his Zionist backers should not prevent the wily dissident from capitalizing on the consequences of his initiatives. What Trump brings to the table is a great clearing away of prior cultural debris, even in a somewhat chaotic and unintentional way. True, he is likely to construct equally questionable social edifices on top of this, concentrating on neoliberal economics, Zionist foreign policy, and promoting an ethic of anti-social greed. But all that this really means is that we need to build better, stronger and more lasting cultural edifices of our own, utilising the havoc that Trump, Musk and others leave in their wake. By playing it smart, the wreckage and debris left by Trump and his team (cuts to USAID, DEI reform, etc.) can become building material for something greater, just as the ruins of old Roman buildings were reused to construct medieval castles.

Of course, there is an enormous factor here that I haven’t yet mentioned: that all such strategising is quite difficult to accomplish given the enormous power disparity between some dissidents, political activists and Telegram channel admins and, y’know, the leader of what is still the most powerful country on Earth. While the vanguard of the MAGA movement, which occasionally receives ideological downstream trickles from more radical elements of the right, sometimes has a noticeable impact on the rhetoric and policy of the Trump administration (e.g., South Africa), the greater risk is that Trump leads the right into libertarian, Zionist and neoconservative directions. So far, it seems as if this drift towards an acceptable center-right position has been resisted and should continue to be so. Either way, there is little point in resisting the larger picture. Donald Trump is already the president, Elon Musk has a large amount of influence and many elements of the right will be singing the MAGA tune for a while to come. All that we have power over is how to react to this situation. And it is doubtful if this time is best spent complaining about Trump in lieu of utilising the cultural shift he is bringing to promote a healthier narrative in this gap. 

Interestingly, much of the MAGA-right’s overly optimistic misreading of Trump, which is shared in parallel by many powerful liberal institutions, also works to our advantage. A genuine fear of defunding and dismissal on the part of once-towering NGOs, Alphabet agencies, and universities who take Trump as a more serious man than he really is will go a long way to mitigating their bad behavior. The idea of Trump as vindictive and ideologically committed wannabe dictator ensures that there has been a noticeable retraction of the fangs in recent months. Speaking from personal experience, there is genuine unease and consternation amongst middle-ranking liberals acting within holy institutions based on the belief that Trump is unleashing the forces that they have oppressed over the past decade, and they will not enjoy the unquestionable narrative supremacy that they have been accustomed to all of their lives. 

Again, it will fall to dissidents to profit from these circumstances to the maximum extent possible.

To do so in a practical and intellectually rigorous way is quite difficult, inheriting as we are over half a century of tight-fisted control over the academic institutions and their attendant cultural disruption. We must also consider a future counterpunch. Our rivals are nothing if not petty and spiteful and history moves quickly; in four years time they may be out looking for blood, provided there is not a major war or economic collapse in the meantime that renders the left-right dynamic moot. With that in mind, make hay while the sun shines but also prepare for winter. Indeed, a salient point has been made by some online commentators, and that is that these cultural issues risk being married to what might eventually be a disastrous and wildly unpopular economic paradigm led by Trump and the new techno-libertarian wing of the Republicans. Predictably, the blame will be laid at the feet of the collective heteronormative white phallus (or whatever these people say) and, as before, the actual system of Zio-American late capitalist oligarchy will only be strengthened. This future possibility must also be taken into account.

Nevertheless, I do not share the sentiment expressed by others that we would have been no better under a Harris administration. To circle back to the core thesis, the havoc that Trump is causing to existing neoliberal institutions and geopolitical alliances can only strengthen our position, provided we play well the hand that we are being dealt. From now until 2028, our responsibility is to generate new ideas, spread them in newly receptive institutions, and provide support and guidance to friends and allies, especially to men and boys younger than us who are growing up in a highly unstable and psychologically destructive epoch. We live in times of chaos, and chaos often precedes radical change, of one kind or the other. Let us make it a change in our favor.