Trump was a decoloniser all along The empire is being dismantled

When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 2023, the Teen Vogue writer Najma Sharif notoriously posted in defence of the violence: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.” Loosely translated, this means that the only way to do political “radicalism” without costing someone something is by not actually doing it. Vibes and papers are just vibes and papers; once translated to the living physical interpersonal world, there is always a cost.  

In a similar vein, anyone even vaguely Trump-sympathetic outside the United States might now be asking themselves: “What did we think America First meant?” Having grown accustomed to leaders who make conservative noises while governing for the financier class, the Right probably expected Trump to be more of the same. But it would seem not: his tariff regime has already triggered the worst fall in the stock markets since 2008. It is a wholly avoidable disaster for global finance, and one that has left millions bewildered and furious. In short: considerably more than vibes and papers. And while the losers are legion, it’s not at all clear yet who the winners will be.

It’s reasonable to assume that Trump himself believes the answer to be: Americans. What indeed did we think “America First” meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? For decades, the American policy was to pursue American interests within a wrapper of neutrality and universalism. Trump is now re-deploying all the power America accumulated within that wrapper to dismantle that system — to, he hopes, American benefit. 

All of this means taking on Big Finance. For it has long been American economic policy to guard the dollar’s status as global reserve currency: a value that, since the abandonment of the gold standard, hasn’t been tied to anything material. This floating dollar, and the Federal Reserve’s power to print more money at will, have enabled the Land of the Free to run ballooning trade deficits for decades, to the immense benefit of Wall Street. 

Meanwhile, there’s a longstanding tradition of opposing this settlement on the American Right. Ever since Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard in 1933, conservatives have argued for its restoration, from Murray Rothbard and Alan Greenspan in the Sixties to Steve Bannon today. Among this contemporary New Right a consensus has been growing for some time that this America of floating currency has interests structurally opposed to those of America the place and polity. The unique role of the Federal Reserve in the global economy, the argument goes, has allowed America to keep the value of the dollar artificially high, which is good news for finance but bad for people who make physical stuff and pay wages in dollars. In turn, the downstream effect of this has been, over the decades of dollar hegemony, the slow hollowing-out of Main Street in the interests of Wall Street. 

In the New Right version of modern history, this financialisation of everything has been shored up by a “rules-based international order” with American hard power as its ultimate backstop. This order is thus parasitic on American prosperity, and the sacrifice of American soldiers, even as its beneficiaries are drawn increasingly from a deracinated, international class that displays little more than contempt for ordinary American people. This is, in a nutshell, the MAGA grievance narrative. A core element in Trump’s electoral base comprises those who were dispossessed in that hollowing-out of American manufacturing and small-town prosperity, who watched their districts sink into opiate addiction and despair, even as coastal elites prospered and sneered.

Voters in these bleak hinterlands may not have theorised this all the way through, but they elected Trump to rewire the system away from this version of normal and back toward their interests. In turn, Trumpian economic nationalists such as Bannon argue that in order to deliver this re-ordering, dollar hegemony must end. So, too, must the Nato-powered America-led international order that serves as its ultimate backstop. In other words: re-orientating “America First” to the home nation necessitates radical and possibly terminal surgery to America the empire. 

It’s not unusual to hear Trumpists voice meme-versions of this ideological stance, such as “America is not an economic zone”. It’s less common, at least in public, to hear the meme followed all the way through to dollar hegemony and Nato, with all the shockwaves such a programme would inevitably produce. And yet looking at recent headlines, either the Trump administration is completely fruitcake and spitting out edicts at random, or he’s actually trying to perform this radical surgery. 

Seen in a Bannonist light, the tariff programme looks like brutal shock therapy to the deficit-based global American empire of dollar hegemony, ultimately ordered to rebalancing American trade worldwide, such that more production can and does return to America. I’ve no idea whether it’ll work, but no doubt Main Street would be pleased if it did — even, or perhaps especially, if this came at the expense of Wall Street. Elsewhere, we are already seeing the pivot in foreign policy. Formerly, America was the purportedly neutral guarantor of global rules and supply chains; now it is a transactional actor in an anarchic system. Again, it is a pivot consistent with ending America’s obligation to uphold the rules-based order at the expense of her citizens. So, too, is the seeming attempt to subject American public spending to so brutal a DOGE-inflicted haircut. Someone pursuing the Bannonist programme of ending dollar hegemony would, in the process, end America’s bottomless ability to borrow herself out of debt by simply printing more money — meaning Washington would suddenly need to balance the books. 

Taken all together, then, it may turn out that the real “woke” political horseshoe was not culture wars, nor cancel culture, but decolonisation. For the Bannonist programme is, in effect, precisely such a programme. It sets out to dismantle the global American empire that flew under the cover of “globalism”, including its (as Trump himself has put it) imperial rule over America herself, in favour of a return to American economic nationalism. And, as Sharif said, what did we think decolonisation meant: vibes, papers, essays? 

Reasonable people can (and already do) disagree on whether pursuing this programme is wise, or even possible. But events thus far seem at least plausibly to suggest that Trump has decided to try. And whatever the eventual outcome, this will mean the unilateral rewiring of the vastly complex, interconnected set of systems that has comprised the settled order for decades. The dismantling will thus have global consequences, and global costs. As attested by the pandemonium across geopolitics and finance, the costs and consequences have already begun. 

In this context, we are going to have to get used to some fundamental changes — not least the fact that there is nowhere to stand now that isn’t partisan. The “rules-based” global thing at least pretended it was possible to conduct a neutral public exchange between states or people with divergent interests. But if the world we live in now is one of anarchic geopolitics and national-interest economics, we can expect even sensible media discourse that once served as a platform for that kind of purported neutrality — however partial it always was, in practice — to be now brazenly hijacked for propaganda of all shades. 

This is the context in which we should read Trump’s recent claim that, for decades now, every other country on the planet has been maliciously taking advantage of America by selling her stuff, and not buying anything in return. I’m sorry: what? American experts have been vigorously defending dollar hegemony all this time, and now it’s everyone else’s fault that this has drawbacks? And yet the best way to take Trumpian assertions is seriously, but not literally. I’d bet good money that Trump and his advisers alike know perfectly well how egregious a distortion this is of the historical and economic record. But the grievance narrative plays well to a domestic audience, especially those hurt by decades of dollar hegemony. And if Trump really is going for radical surgery, it makes sense from his perspective to tell a story where the economic pain is every other country’s fault — not least because his decision to crash the stock market will inflict a fair amount of pain on at least some of his own voters. 

As for the rest of us: once the dust settles, everywhere outside America the nation will need urgently to re-learn how to think in terms of national interest, or else to form blocs capable of doing so. And those on the Right who support the Trump project, but don’t live in America, will need to understand that Trump is only on their side in a very qualified way. “America First” means America first. I expect the Trump regime to root for Right-wing movements overseas, but to intervene on their part only where doing so aligns with American interests. 

Once you step out of the world of vibes and papers, there are winners and losers. The decolonial Left grasped this some time ago; now, perhaps, the decolonial Right is joining them. It is anyone’s guess how this round of anti-globalist rewiring will work out, but I think we can expect pushback. Let us hope the disagreement escalates no further than policy and public debate.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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