Trump’s overreach making the world finally see the Right

The extreme nature of Donald Trump's presidency ought to serve as a wake-up call to Western democracies and those who take them for granted, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.

THE FIRST SEVEN WEEKS of Donald Trump’s second term as President have been a horror show. No matter how bad you expected Trump’s presidency to be, it’s safe to assume your worst fears weren’t as bad as the political, social and economic reality of what America and the world are facing.

But despite it all, I have hope. Call me naively optimistic (it’s a character flaw), but I believe America and the world could benefit from seeing the consequences of Trump in all its horrific reality.

Trump’s daily assaults on the public good are too numerous to list here, but some low-lights give an insight into just how spectacularly bad Trump’s presidency is going to be:

his capitulation to Russian control in bullying the Ukrainian President on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin;
his threats to turn Palestine into a development deal, displacing Palestinians from their homeland;
his gutting of the U.S. public service costing tens of thousands of jobs and destroying public goods including USAID, scientific research and law enforcement agencies, with the education department next to go; and
his economically self-destructive tariffs which are predicted to plunge America into a deep economic recession, turning inflation into stagflation.

To say Trump is a disaster is an understatement.

Ukraine stands defiant against Trump and Putin's aggression

Despite President Trump's bullying tactics and a war that still devastates his nation, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy leads a nation displaying true heroism.

While Americans and the world suffer through this horror, it is important progressives resist the urge to treat Trump like a one-off, like an aberration, like something unimaginably extreme. Because Trump is none of these things. He is just what the Hard-Right would be if they believed they were entirely unaccountable and did not fear an election.

Trump is a long way down the hard-right slippery slope showing us where they would all like to go. Other hard-right politicians, like Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, are no different. They’re on the same slope. They just hide their true intentions better.

In seeing Trump as the natural conclusion of hard-right ideology which currently infects and often dominates the right-wing parties of most Western democracies, you can see how these extremists use the same political means for the same political ends. Their means are always the same — manipulating the public’s economic and social anxieties to ferment division, hatred, fear and resentment.

The political ends of right-wing parties have nothing to do with solving their voters’ economic and social anxieties. Far from it. Their true reason for wanting power is to enrich themselves and their billionaire donors and to destroy the collective public good – the government – so it can no longer regulate the capitalist class on behalf of the people.

As horrible as the Trump II era is, I have hope that his overreach – the speed and aggression of his hard-right assault – will ultimately be his undoing. I hope it will likewise fuel a new awakening of what lies beneath other hard-right propaganda campaigns which are styled on Trump's manipulative means to billionaire ends.

In showing the ugly, hideous reality of the base of the slippery slope, like pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz and seeing a strange little man pulling the strings while he swings a chainsaw around, I hope it’s a case of once you see it, you cannot unsee.

I also hope that voters manipulated into voting for Trump against their interests – like the farmers who have lost out from the cancellation of USAID contracts, the workers losing jobs because tariffs are tanking the economy, public sector workers who never realised when Trump promised to fire public sector workers he was talking about them, and pretty much everyone who isn’t a billionaire – will have a second think before doing something so self-destructive again.

Trump and Putin's 21st Century power struggle

With Donald Trump’s resurgence and Vladimir Putin’s territorial ambitions, a disturbing trend emerges where sovereignty is at the mercy of power politics.

There will likely always be a base of rusted-on MAGAs who cult-like refuse to give up on their messiah, particularly those motivated by Christian nationalism who would ignore their own self-interest to support an anti-abortion candidate. But if this base is only 20 per cent of the population, their electoral danger evaporates.

Indeed, if another MAGA candidate wins the Republican primary at the next election (presuming America has a next election), this would likely help elect a Democrat.

I also hope that the manipulative communication and media strategies Trump, his MAGA Republicans, Elon Musk and his faceless allies (billionaires, in the tech industry, in the fossil fuel industry and Russian oligarchs) propagate are seen for what they are: total bullshit.

People need to learn – clearly, the hard way – that when Trump says he’s doing something positive for you, unless you are a billionaire, he is lying. In fact, when Trump opens his mouth, he is lying. This lesson counts for others cut from Trump’s cloth. Like Peter Dutton, the man who flees Brisbane while it prepares for a cyclone to attend a $25,000-a-head fundraiser, the man who profited from buying bank shares when the Global Financial Crisis hit, selling them at a profit after the Labor Government bailed out banks.

How better for the public to learn how untrustworthy these grifters are than to see the obvious juxtaposition between what Trump promises to do for his voters – to make America great again and what he actually does – completely screws them over to benefit billionaires. Surely, people will wake up to this soon. Surely.

The final hope I have from the Trump abomination is that people living in democracies will start to value them again and will value the public services they deliver. When you’ve grown up in what you assume to be a stable democratic system, it can be easy to take the health of democracy and the services it provides for granted. This is despite experts warning for over a decade the post-truth disinformation media environment threatened democracy.

This is despite constant calls for democracies like the U.S. to address the undemocratic state of Republican voter suppression strategies. This is despite everyone knowing that foreign interference in American elections helped elect Trump in 2016, yet it was allowed to happen again in 2024.

Perhaps the public will finally realise that the Right has been demonising the idea of “government” for decades because government is hugely inconvenient to their unrestrained greed. Maybe the people will remember that the whole point of government is to ensure public wealth belongs to the public and that the public – we the people – have the power to use it to benefit us. One can only hope!