What a year, huh?
Captain, it’s February!
When Donald Trump regained office as the 47th President of the United States on January 20, most observers already knew what was about to happen. We have seen Trump during his first presidency between 2017 and 2021. Furthermore, during the presidential race in 2024, entire tomes have been written on the tome that is “Project 2025” from the Heritage Foundation. We knew what was about to come. But it is still … crass.
Donald Trump is not a politician, and he has proven that many times over the past decades. He is a businessman at heart; for whom morals and ethics don’t count, especially not if money is at stake. He has a flexible opinion, bends to what appears to promise the highest ROI.1 And so, when the authors of the study “Project 2025” came to him and sought his proximity, they knew which buttons they had to press. Trump can play king, while his chief of staff and secretaries of the various federal agencies can dismantle the administrative state as we know it.
Yes, we knew what was about to come. But still, seeing it play out in real time definitely hits differently. And I would argue that no theory of International Relations can help us anymore. No knowledge of the world can help us predict what will happen next. In some sense, the new Trump administration really is exciting, solely from a research perspective. It does show the brittleness of social and political norms, and how important the social sciences are in understanding how all of this may play out.
This article is not a full-fledged analysis. For this, I would need much more time, and the Trump admin is running fast through their 100 days2 of whack-a-mole in the federal agencies. But I do want to collect my thoughts in some place to start the reflection process: What just happened? And where do we go from here?
Now follow five sections, each of which dedicated to a thought process that currently unfolds in my head, all of which are unfinished. I begin with an account of how I perceive what has already happened during the first thirty days of the Trump administration. Then, I want to shed light onto three perspectives that I believe will shape the U.S. in the coming four years, and beyond. And lastly, I want to close with some thoughts on what may happen next, even though, as I said, “all bets are off.”
The U.S. Has Fallen: The Dismantling of the Administrative State
So first, what has happened? In a nutshell, it’s quickly explained: Trump got back into office, and shot the legislative branch, the courts, as well as the fifty states, with a flurry of executive orders. The more prominent ones roughly map onto Trump’s distaste for inclusion, homo- and transphobia, which has led to the de facto abolishment of anything he regards “DEI.” There is surely a lot of Christian-fundamentalist thought in there, too, and I believe this to be one of the few common grounds between Trump and the fascists in his government, many of whom co-authored the “Project 2025” playbook.
The second large set of blows that Trump dealt was the dismantlement of dozens of federal agencies. Now, one might argue that the U.S. definitely had a form of agency bloat, as several agencies were constantly stepping on each other’s toes, but the solution is certainly not to lobotomize them all. But that is precisely what has happened. Primarily orchestrated by tech-billionaire and equally-not-a-politician Elon Musk, various agencies are factually abolished, many others left to rot and die. This is again something where the ideologies of Trump and the Project 2025 authors meet: For Trump, it’s a waste of money, for them, it’s the enemy of the autochthonous3 Christian nuclear family.
The third set of blows that Trump dealt are the only ones where it is not 100% clear whether they are unconstitutional: he started to sever ties with basically any ally, estranging those that the U.S. both protected and profited from since World War II. Instead, Trump has once more started to approximate Putin, the Russian authoritarian leader who ordered his country to invade Ukraine almost on the day three years ago. This is one thing where I believe it’s a bit less clear as to how Trump’s and Project 2025’s interests align. I’ll make an attempt in the section on the nationalist perspective.
To keep track of the mess the Trump administration is causing, I recommend looking at project2025.observer, a website designed to document the progress of Project 2025’s aims over time.
Let us now shift gears. Because I believe that we can understand what is happening a bit better with three perspectives, or three ideologies I believe to be prevalent among the current actors of the administration. These are The Business Perspective, The Authoritarian Perspective, and The Nationalist Perspective.
The Business Perspective
A big chunk of what Trump has done primarily on the foreign policy arena can be understood if we think like a businessman. The U.S. indeed is one of the biggest donors on the world, both in terms of developmental aid, and weapons. After the U.K. lost its status as the “world’s police force” with their empire crumbling after World War I, the United States have gained that status after World War II and become the “leader of the free world.” But, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that role was a bit less clear, and countless critics have already called into question the various war efforts in the MENA4 region afterward.
From a business perspective, shutting off international contracts and agreements only makes sense. Nothing of that brings any immediate monetary incentive, and Trump really is leading the U.S. as if it were a big corporation. We can leave aside the fact that a state is not a company for a moment, and just focus on what he does. Because what he does makes absolute sense from a perspective.
Additionally, it is not too far-fetched to see where this comes from. Specifically, corporations were modeled after the most prominent image of the state in the 19th century — the Republic. Until today, many properties of big, trade-exchanged corporations are relatively similar to what we know from republics. They have a CEO with wide-ranging powers to steer the company, a board that serves a control-function on the CEO, and various functions not too dissimilar from modern democracies. But, and here is the issue, in the time since, the old republics have gained a few political norms as to how conduct is to be performed. We have come to expect a few things of modern democracies that republics in the 19th century were lacking. Universal suffrage, for example. And a higher accountability of representatives to their electorate. But none of this is all that important in the mind of Trump. For him, the U.S. should be run similar to a company, that is, a 19th century republic. And that does indeed involve some form of heightened authority for the CEO, or president.
The Authoritarian Perspective
The authoritarian perspective is where the influence of Trump weakens and the influence of the Christian fundamentalists increases. While Trump absolutely does have some authoritarian allures (just today he apparently called himself “King” on his own social media channel), he isn’t fully committed to it. If it helps the company, he’s happy to share authority, as is crystal clear in his relationship to Elon Musk, whom he happily ceded the authority to go snip-snap on the federal agencies.
But who definitely has more authoritarian tendencies are the authors of Project 2025. In their work (which I didn’t read in its entirety, just to be clear), they weave together reactionary ideas with authoritarianism. The primary legal theory they seem to follow is the “unitary executive theory,” which posits that the president should have the power over the entire executive branch. Which wouldn’t be a problem, if there were some checks and balances built in. But, unlike Germany, for example, in which the executive is part of the legislative and as such inherently under parliamentary control, the U.S. president is a few streets removed from Congress. This means that if he has full control over the executive, that’s it — he has full control over the executive. That includes federal police, agencies, and the military.
And it is very apparent, as many observers have predicted last year, that this applies. Donald Trump has absolute power, and Congress and the courts are damned to observe from the sidelines. Since a lot of authoritarian ideas coincide with reducing federal spending, I imagine that discussions in the White House are pretty straightforward. Trump wants numbers to go down, the secretaries want to shift the power of the government to more punitive measures, so both are happy. Especially, since they don’t need to bloat up military spending anymore. Since they are primarily interested in remodeling the US from the inside—enforcing their own ideas onto the population—they need police and compliance from states more than the military, which is only useful externally. And, since Trump has cut ties with most of the US’s allies anyhow, they can safely reduce their foreign military spending.
That, I believe, is also primarily the reason behind the estranged behavior towards Ukraine. Which leads me to a third thought.
The Nationalist Perspective
I believe that all members of the White House are inherently inward-oriented. Trump, because he believes the U.S. first needs to get back on its feet (“Make America Great Again”), his advisors because they believe they need to completely overhaul the form of government to align better with their ideas.
This may then explain the strange behavior the U.S. has exhibited on the international theater. Cutting ties with every country except the Russians, insulting Ukrainian president Zelenskiy as a dictator, withdrawing military aid, and exiting WHO and, possibly, NATO, all are signs of this. A country that is in the process of dealing with domestic issues usually becomes quieter on the international floor. The only reason this seems so weird right now is that we have experienced this often in the past when failed states gained a new government—Syria comes to mind as the most recent example. While in the process of nation building, it is often difficult to maintain diplomatic ties at the same time. The U.S. is, jokes aside, not a failed state, so they perform this becoming-quiet from the other side. And furthermore, since the U.S. has been the “leader of the free world” for much of the past century, the impact of them not sitting at a table in some negotiations is stronger than otherwise.
The reason the White House is so nationalist is caused by two different perspectives, however. Trump, as a business person, is not inherently against international agreements, as long as they make money. His aides, however, are. Because what Project 2025 fundamentally boils down to is the end of the culture wars that have ravaged U.S. politics since the 1960s. Ever since the civil rights movement, we have had a core of Republican actors who despise universal suffrage and the inclusion of LGBTQI* people in everyday activities. And this rift goes through the United States for much longer than the 1960s.
If you compare a map of the 2024 election results, a map of the population density, and a map of the confederate states during the U.S. civil war, it becomes clear that, aside of a few outliers, the divisions are essentially the same as back then. If you ignore the sparsely populated midwestern states, who voted for Trump was primarily the Southern States and—newly added—the economically ravaged Rust Belt.
From this perspective, the heavy nationalist slant of the current administration is far from surprising. The Southern bible belt states still hold a grudge against the Democratic coastal states with their high GDP, but also their pagan, cosmopolitan culture. The Rust Belt probably holds more of a grudge simply due to economic suffering they endured during the 1970s and 1980s. What we see here is likely an amalgamation of animosities that have started sometime in the 19th century, and have transformed into a mix of nationalist, fundamentalist, and introspective feelings with a sprinkle of revenge that direct the White House to give back—culturally—the reign to the Southern States.
Ways Forward or a cul-de-sac?
Where do we go from here? I essentially see three scenarios. Again, all of these are vague ideas that are floating in my mind. I personally strongly believe in possibility three, but I worry that the chances of scenarios one and two are not zero.
First: Trump proceeds to help the Project 2025 authors implement their agenda while keeping the books out of the red to the fullest extent. Then, there likely won’t be an election in 2028—at least not one where any Democratic candidate has a chance, because four years is a long time to change a country’s institutions in such a way that resembles the Iranian state. There, too, only rubber-stamped candidates even have a chance of winning the presidency. There is a chance that this, too, happens in the U.S. If that is the case, we likely won’t see a return of the U.S. to fully democratic norms in the next few decades. The biggest mistake we can make here is to underestimate the current White House staff.
Second: Trump tries to implement Project 2025, but after maybe three quarters of a year the administration crumbles because of economic pressure from the outside and civil protests from the inside. They have to start slowing their progress down as they are bombarded with lawsuits, and judges start pushing back against the White House’s power grab. Then, in the end of 2026, a new Congress is elected, which might feature severe losses for the Republicans. Then, there are essentially two options: either there is a peaceful transition, or the White House goes full authoritarian and deploys the national guard in an attempt to reign in civil unrest, to which the military has to react, which wholly depends on the allegiance of the military at that time.
Third: As Trump tries to implement Project 2025, the White House estranges many of the non-fundamentalist Republicans who—right now—are not affected by any of the changes, but begin to question the sanity of the administration. With a potential party split,5 we see a growing coalition against Trump and Project 2025, which succeeds in regaining legislative power, can scale back the damages, and the culture war ebbs as folks realize how much the constant tug-of-war between Christian ideals and economic power cannot be sustained for all eternity. Then, once the current administration is out of office, in a very brief moment of bipartisan consensus, the U.S. constitution is again amended to prevent this from happening ever again.
What is happening in the U.S. is devastating me. For the past five years, I have focused intensely on policymaking in the U.S., and it breaks my heart to see the powerlessness of the one institution I poured so much work into to understand and analyze. I sincerely question my career choices some of these days, and I wish I would be living in a time when all of this would not happen. But here we are, and the only productive thing I can do—we can do—is to put our knowledge to productive uses to hopefully be a tiny part in fixing what appears right now to be unfixable.
1 Return on Investment.
2 Or 180, if you follow the Heritage Foundation’s count.
3 I have selected this word carefully.
4 Middle East and North Africa.
5 This is absolutely not unprecedented, and may happen again. And it is much more likely to happen with the Republican Party than the Democrats. The reasons are a bit too complex for this article. If you’re interested, I can share another