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THE TRUMPIAN NIGHTMARE HAS A LONG WAY TO GO BEFORE IT’S OVER  
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C.J. Polychroniou; Alexandra Boutri
December 1, 2025
Common Dreams
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_ Trump’s second term is indeed so much worse than the first, and I
fear that we haven’t seen anything yet _

Federal agents, including members of the Department of Homeland
Security, the Border Patrol, and police, clash with protesters outside
a downtown U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility on
October 04, 2025 in Portland, Oregon., Spencer Platt/Getty Images

 

Does it feel like the Trumpian nightmare has been around forever? How
and when will it end? Does Trump’s second term signify the end of
the neoliberal order? Is his cronyism unique in the history of US
capitalism [[link removed]]? And why is
the wannabe emperor of the world preparing to strike Venezuela
[[link removed]]?

Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J.
Polychroniou takes a crack at these questions posed in the interview
below by the French-Greek independent journalist and writer Alexandra
Boutri.

ALEXANDRA BOUTRI: DONALD TRUMP’S SECOND TERM IN THE WHITE HOUSE
[[link removed]] BEGAN ON JANUARY 20,
2025. YET, ALTHOUGH HE HAS BEEN IN OFFICE FOR A LITTLE OVER 10 MONTHS,
IT ALREADY FEELS LIKE HE’S BEEN THERE FOREVER. DO YOU HAVE THAT SAME
ODD FEELING? IF SO, WHY IS THAT?

C. J. POLYCHRONIOU: Yes, sometimes it does feel like he’s been in
power forever because his actions as President during the relatively
short time since his return to power have been appalling, marked by
depraved cruelty, moral blindness, and unprecedented corruption
[[link removed]]. He has unleashed
something utterly terrifying, chaos by distraction around the world
and terror on the USA. The first tactic is part of his wish to
reassert US dominance in global capitalism. The second tactic is part
of his plan to spread fear and oppress all those who stand on his path
of constructing a neofascist, white Christian America run by
oligarchs. He is not just a pathological liar and the biggest con
artist in US history, traits which the liberal media
[[link removed]] frequently applies to him,
but also a malignant narcissist, a sadistic and tyrannical buffoon who
believes he can do whatever he pleases, that is, operate outside his
legal and constitutional authority, by virtue of the fact that he is
in charge of the world’s most powerful nation. Trump hates democracy
[[link removed]] and the idea of an open
society and detests the rule of law
[[link removed]]. Trump’s second term
is indeed so much worse than the first, and I fear that we haven’t
seen anything yet. The Trumpian nightmare is really just underway, and
it will take a lot more resistance than what has already taken place
to stop the dictator’s attacks against civil society, his
destruction of the environment
[[link removed]], and the acceleration
of the climate crisis
[[link removed]].

ALEXANDRA BOUTRI: TRUMP’S APPROVAL RATINGS ARE SINKING. IS THIS
IMPORTANT? CAN WE SUBSEQUENTLY HOPE TO SEE A SHIFT IN SOME OF HIS
POLICIES ON ACCOUNT OF THE FACT THAT HIS APPROVAL RATING IS DROPPING
EVEN AMONG CORE REPUBLICAN VOTERS?

C. J. POLYCHRONIOU: I have looked closely at the latest data on
Trump’s job approval rating and popularity. According to the most
recent Gallop poll
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Trump’s approval rating was at 36%. However, RealClear Polling
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shows that 42% of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance,
which is utterly shocking considering the horrifying consequences of
his actions. It is something that makes one wonder whether the real
problem is Trump himself or a rather huge chuck of the US electorate.
While I don’t know how important these job approval ratings really
are, it is probably more important to look at Trump’s approval
rating by state. There, we find that Trump’s popularity remains
positive in Republican-dominated states
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although the Gallop poll mentioned earlier also shows that
Republicans’ approval has slipped by eight points. Equally worth
noting is that Trump’s disapproval rating
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(55.3%) is not far off from what it was during his first term (54.9%),
according to statistician and political analyst Nate Silver
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In sum, Trump’s base is still very much with him and the main issue
dividing his MAGA movement appears to be over the Epstein files! I do
not have hopes for a shift in any of his odious and outright evil
policies.

ALEXANDRA BOUTRI: IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT TRUMP’S TURN TO
PROTECTIONISM IS A DEATH BLOW TO NEOLIBERALISM
[[link removed]] AND THAT WHAT BEST
DESCRIBES HIS REGIME IS CRONYIST STATE CAPITALISM. WHAT ARE YOUR OWN
THOUGHTS ON THESE MATTERS? HAS TRUMP ABANDONED NEOLIBERALISM?

C. J. POLYCHRONIOU: Politics and economics aren’t black and white.
Politics is more of an art than science
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definitely not a hard science. As academic disciplines, both politics
and economics are regarded as social sciences. But while hard science
is based on concrete laws, social science, though it can follow the
scientific method, lacks universal laws and subjectivity all too often
enters rather freely into analyses. As Richard Feynman once quipped,
“Social science is an example of a science which is not a
science….They follow the forms…but they don’t get any laws.”

To be more specific, there is no such thing as a “free market” and
no such thing as a “pure” capitalist system. Neoliberalism, which
relies heavily on free-markets and advocates privatization
[[link removed]] and marketization,
has always depended on the state to carry out its anti-social agenda.
The state not only shapes and enforces rules for markets but most of
the major technological developments and innovations have been fueled
by the federal government. Global neoliberalism itself has been a
state-driven enterprise. It was initiated by the United States
[[link removed]] sometime around the
mid-1970s and revolved around a regime of an unimpeded movement of
capital, good and services. The global economy itself was regulated by
global governance institutions such as the International Monetary Fund
(IMF [[link removed]]), the World Bank
[[link removed]], and the World Trade
[[link removed]] Organization (WTO
[[link removed]]) although the United States
itself played a significant role in enforcing the rules of global
neoliberalism. The new political order in global economic affairs
served quite well the United States on account of its financial
hegemony [[link removed]], but China’s
full integration into the global capitalist economy saw the rise of a
new imperial power and its emergence as something of a model for the
developing world. China’s growth over the past four decades was many
times over that of the US. Eventually, China
[[link removed]] would displace the US and
become the “manufacturing workshop of the world
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and overtake the US to become the top trading partner
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to more than 140 countries.

Enter Trump. Since coming to power, Trump has been obsessed with the
idea of bringing manufacturing back to the US and reducing the trade
deficit. To do so, he inaugurated a new protectionist age, which is in
full swing during his second term in office. Trump’s protectionist
economic policies, which we should file under the label “economics
nationalism,” represent a strategy for restoring US supremacy (and
thus profitability) in global economics affairs and reindustrializing
the United States. In practical terms, this means not only enforcing
“reciprocal tariffs” on all countries exporting goods to the
United States but using military force to regain hegemonic control
over Latin America [[link removed]]
and the Pacific and threatening China into submission. I believe all
these policies are destined to fail, rather miserably, while causing
in the process a lot of pain and suffering to a lot of people.

Does Trump’s approach to global economic affairs represent the end
of the neoliberal order? I don’t think so. What he is trying to do
is “Make American Corporations Great Again.” He is trying to
change the relation between state, corporations, and the world
economy, not the nature of the global capitalist system. The main
dynamic and contradiction will remain between capital and labor,
exploitation and oppression. Other states will be even more inclined
than before to resort to even more extreme forms of neoliberal
capitalist exploitation for the benefit of their own capital bosses.
Indeed, workers’ rights are collapsing across the world, according
to the 2025 Global Rights Index
[[link removed]] published by
the International Trade Union Confederation. On the domestic front,
Trump’s policies are unmistakably neoliberal. In fact, he has gone
beyond deregulation and liberalization by embarking on the grand
project of making workers [[link removed]]
even more vulnerable to abuse by eliminating key workplace protections
and making it even more difficult for them to form a union. And his
whole approach to the environment is as neoliberal as it can get.

I have a rather similar line of analysis regarding the debate between
crony capitalism (describing an economy of close relationship between
businesspeople and government officials) and neoliberalism. First,
capitalism coexists and connects with greed and corruption. In fact,
cronyism is inherent
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to capitalism. Capitalism tends to oligopoly, which strengthens the
relationship between key government officials and business people. The
US has had a crony oligarchy
[[link removed]] all along. People speak
today of Trump’s cronyism as if it is a new phenomenon in American
capitalism when the reality is that it has been around for a very long
time. The George W. Bush administration
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was accused in fact of taking cronyism to a new level. Now of course
we can say with certainty that Trump has not only taken cronyism to a
new level but is actually using the presidency for self-enrichment.
But let’s not fool ourselves by thinking that cronyism has somehow
surfaced in the US because of Donald Trump
[[link removed]]. As far as
neoliberalism specifically is concerned, research
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has shown that the neoliberal policies promoted by the IMF in the
developing world foster crony capitalism. In sum, I do not accept the
distinction between cronyism and (neo)liberal capitalism.

ALEXANDRA BOUTRI: WHY IS TRUMP PREPARING TO STRIKE VENEZUELA?

C. J. POLYCHRONIOU: I can think of a number of reasons. One is because
of his need to manufacture crises in order to draw attention away from
his domestic crimes and shenanigans. He also wants to bring down the
Maduro regime because of its close ties to China and Russia. I think
geopolitical calculations figure large in Trump’s plan to strike
Venezuela and it’s part of a new strategy in Latin America with the
intent being to reassert US dominance over a region that Washington
[[link removed]] used to control not long
ago. The US military [[link removed]]
build-up in the Caribbean is not to fight drugs. Of course, don’t
expect Trump to seek the authorization of Congress
[[link removed]] to wage war against
Venezuela. And he won’t be the first president not to do so. Many
presidents have acted without Congress declaring war. The imperial
presidency was established long before Trump, although the orange man
is bent on being both “imperial president at home and emperor
abroad.
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C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has
taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in
Europe and the United States. His latest books are The Precipice:
Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (A
collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky; Haymarket Books, 2021),
and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists
(Verso, 2021).

 

Alexandra Boutri is a freelance journalist and writer.

* Donald Trump; Authoritarianism; Neoliberalism; Capitalism;
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