There looks to be a lot of truth to this take:
🚨 ALERT: What the new US Administration is doing is very clear and strategic: it is called psychological overwhelming. Hitting us every day with XXL doses of baffling rhetoric and erratic policies serves to "control the script", distracting and dishorienting us, normalising the… pic.twitter.com/QfHbMZozAf
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) February 26, 2025
So I’d like to make an attempt to cut through a lot of the noise and take a closer look at a question many seem to still be wrestling with: does the Trump 2.0 administration represent anything other than a rebranding of empire?
I do not believe it does, and that’s what I’ll argue here.
The larger rebrand underway is seeing elite “reconciliation” under Trump and plutocrats line up behind the repackaging from a “woke” empire to a more old-fashioned version focused on race, religion and more brazen exploitation. In the interests of keeping this post manageable, I’ll look at this on Wednesday and focus here solely on the transition form Biden’s “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class” to America First, how they complement one another, and how these narratives are nothing more than just that: stories used obfuscate the fact that policies are only concerned with further enriching American oligarchs and extending their ability to extract rent to every corner of the globe.
America’s “Enemies” Are the Reason You Can’t Pay the Bills
In many ways the Biden administration’s Foreign Policy for the Middle Class (FPMC) and Trump’s America First are similar. They both seek to present a veneer of solidarity with the US working class through the scapegoating of foreign bogeymen for Americans’ ever declining standards of living. In reality those bogeymen have little to nothing to do with your $100,000 medical bill but they do always happen to be the enemies of American oligarchs.
While Team Biden still paid lip service to the human rights-democracy-feminism-LGTBQ tools of empire, they’ve largely worn out their usefulness. Trump discards these subtleties. Both are a might-is-right approach, but the latter is just the empire at its most honest.
Regardless, both are involved in the generation of narratives intended to obscure the fact that these evil countries are branded so because they resist the same oligarchic forces bleeding Americans dry. (This isn’t meant to romanticize these nations as they have their own issues with neoliberalism and oligarchy.)
Let’s start with Biden’s FPMC. National security advisor Jake Sullivan, largely credited with being the brain behind the failed tech war against China, also was the chief architect behind the narrative that wed a rebuilding of the American middle class with the Biden foreign policy. Here’s Politico back in 2020 describing Sullivan’s philosophy:
…the strength of U.S. foreign policy and national security lies primarily in a thriving American middle class, whose prosperity is endangered by the very transnational threats the Trump administration has sought to downplay or ignore.
That term “middle class” was a red flag from the start, as it has always been part of a project of making the working class disappear.
But it did try to lay blame for struggles of the aggrieved working class on nefarious foreign forces. Not decades of neoliberalism, not Biden yanking away Covid assistance, not the fact American life is a marketplace as opposed to a society. No, of course not. The real culprits are Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran and all those who refuse to bend the knee to Washington. If you must be angry at your lot in life, be angry with them, was the message of FPMC.
The two political parties in the US, which are unwilling to take on the plutocrats, are therefore forced to contrive these hackneyed sales pitches to the public, but the real campaigning is going on behind the scenes involving ideas on how the administration will expand the reach of American capital. This is evident in the actions of the Biden administration and the direction America First is already taking.
Let’s quickly review what Collective Biden did for the “middle class.”
A proxy war against Russia coupled with an effort to strangle China’s tech sector, thereby making sure the US reigned supreme. After yanking away Covid assistance, Team Biden passed the CHIPS Act, which subsidizes semiconductor manufacturing in the US, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes billions for clean energy tech. And they threw in a genocide in Palestine for good measure. What were the results?
The end of Covid assistance decimated the working class. Project Ukraine has successfully walled off Europe from Russia but it’s been a military disaster for Ukraine and NATO. Russia has turned eastwards and looks to be only strengthened by the empire’s efforts to cripple it. China’s tech sector is doing fine and in the absence of Western imports it used to rely on is learning to make its own.
The IRA+CHIPS has invested $388 billion so far which has reportedly helped support 135,800 jobs in the US. That’s a small blip on the radar when considering the 3.7 million jobs sent to China from 2001 to 2018.
