Can Trump Save the Dollar?

Trump’s victory in the election has set the United States on a path where, with continued pressure from the Workers under an anti-imperialist united front, we stand a fair chance at avoiding a world war in the immediate future. One of the few areas where Trump genuinely does himself credit is his anti-war bent; while he is rhetorically bellicose, he much prefers conomic leverage and trade wars over open, armed conflicts. This doesn’t mean the militaristic nature of the United States’ foreign relations has changed, it means that Trump’s prefered tools are less likely to provoke a direct confrontation with other Great Powers like Russia and China, or regional powers like Iran. Though even here Trump has already compromised with the Deep State.

While the threat of a major war is lessened, a significant portion of the workers still believe Trump is capable of beating the Imperialist Financial interests that currently control the State, and set the country on a path to genuine prosperity. Many still think that he can “drain the swamp” and defeat the Deep State. They believe that Trump and the faction he represents are capable of turning back the tide and reversing the decline in American living standards that have occured over the last 50 years, and which began rapidly accelerating after the 2008 Great Recession. They still believe that Trump can save them, and they are wrong.

The problem lies in the fundamental causes of our economic decline; while the Democrats and the Imperialists they represent have exacerbated these problems, they as individuals, nor even as a collevtive group, were ever the root cause of them. The three largest issues immediately facing the United States are its deindustrialization, its financial policy, and its foreign economic relations, all of which circle around the disenfranchisement of the Masses from actual control of the State. All of which are systemic issues spanning decades, which Trump is powerless to fundamentally alter.

First is deindustrialization; despite attempts in recent years to expand production, manufacturing in the United States is a shadow of what it once was, especially once we compare it to the population and total demand for resources. In 1973 steel output peaked at 111 million tons annual for a population of 215 million; in 2023 production stood at 89.7 million tons for a population of 343 million. In comparison, China’s exports alone exceeded 77 million tons in 2023, with a total production of over 1 billion tons. Manufacturing of all kind, including construction, accounted for only 14.7% of the economy in 2023. In other words, only 15% of the United States’s economy is backed up by any kind of real, physical object of tangible value and use. Even as early as 2001 the crisis was becoming apparent within the US defense sector, where in a span of 20 years, the number of major aerospace contractors had declined by 94%.

Financially, we can see that this closely conforms to the ratio of hard currency to GDP. In 2023 the total hard currency supply was 2.25 trillion, and generously using the Q4 velocity of 1.83, we reach a total of 4.11 trillion worth of total currency transactions, which accounted for 14.9% of the 2023 GDP. The issue at hand is that, even though all money including hard currency is loaned into existence under the US monetary system, anything above this hard currency reserve in essence constitutes a loan using debt itself as collateral, where hard currency is at least secured by labor power. This is identical to the “speculative investing” that was a major factor in the 1929 Stock Market Crash, where investors paid as little as 10% of the price and borrowed the remainder with the stock itself being used as collateral. Worse yet is the degree of Financialization, accounting for fully 20% of the nominal US GDP, where the value consists almost entirely of hypothetical money secured by a meager backing of physical assets. Its these very types of companies that drive a further 13% of the GDP in professional and buisness services.

We can consider the US economy to be significanlty ‘overvalued’ in the sense that much of it’s actual, tangible value is purely hypothetical in nature; as much as 33% of the total GDP is dependent on this purely hypothetical value. What Marx called “fictitious Capital”. For example, the information industry is primarily valued on the basis of expected, but yet unrealized, profit from its services to other industires. If those profits never materialize, the valuation of the information industry declines relative to the actual labor performed in delivering those services. The AI Bubble is a perfect example occuring in real time; despite enormous costs associated with the production and operation of Generative AI, there is little evidence that it has translated to a genuine increase in production of any tangible wealth. Like currency, without something tangible anchoring it, its value is purely speculative in nature; the more we work without actually producing anything, the less real wealth there is to pay with when the bills come due.

Finally we have the United States’ foreign relations. These have overwhelmingly been dominated by the US’s explicit doctrine of attemping to maintain its position as the sole global power, which is fundamentally tied to the economics of military power. A precondition of staying in the US’s favor has been facilitating their global geopolitical objectives through both trade and military power, regardless of the independent interests of these countries. And the United States has not hesistated to support internal conflict as a deterent against and punishment for cooperation with China.

The problem is that China is simply able to offer a better deal. Even purely in terms of trade, China’s advances in manufacturing has allowed it to offer comparable products at lower prices across the board; Huawei phone of comparable specs to an Iphone 16 can be had for about $900 USD compared to $1300 for the iphone. China’s ability to out-price western companies has been a notable point of contention, with the United States wringing their hands over Chinese “overcapacity”. China’s loan rates stand at an average of 3.68%, and even dips as low as 2% to nations like the Phillipines which China allegedly wants to subjugate. This stands in stark contrast to IMF loans to countries such as Argentina which will be charged 7.3% in interest and fees in the year 2025. Ukriane, who has become the second most heavily indebted country to the IMF is now being charged 6%. Theres is simply no area where the West is competetive against China, and no reason for any country that does not already sit atop the United States’ global order to cooperate in maintaining it. This has been central to the rise of BRICS, and the ongoing de-dollarization of the global economy.

Trump is not singularly responsible for crafting State policy, despite the Liberal tendency to reduce a State’s actions to the whims of its current leader. In order to meaningfully alter the course of US policy, Trump would need to not only find an entire Administrations worth of people who’s interests are opposed to the present course, but also sway the House and the Senate, both are still dominated by the Financial Bourgeoise.

The reality is that the single largest sector of US economy is Finance, and while not a majority of the economy, it is undobutely the single strongest section of the economy in terms of the total Capital it can command. While anyone with enough money can buy a Senator, its the Financial Bourgeoise who have the greatest means of doing so; here we see that the Lobby Industry is dominanted by industries whos total valuation is based primarily on hypothetical money, such as Big Pharma, Insurance, Tech, Finance and Investment, and Real Estate. The Financial Bourgeoise also directly control much of the Informational Infrastructure in the United States, which is used in maintaining and legitimizing their effective control of the State. The same people and industries that have benefited from the present course of action are the same people with the greatest influence over the State.

Solving these problems would not be an easy or a quick process, and Trump has four years to create the structures and organizations necessary to strategically defeat the Deep State and cripple the Financial Bourgeoise’s hold over the State apparatus. He so far appears up a creek without a paddle, and objectively has few prospects of even assembling an entire administration that is fundamentally opposed to the Imperialists and their control over the United States, and has already been compromised in a way that threatens the workers who actively support anti-imperialism.

A full reindustrialization would require Trillions in investment and the full benefits would take decades to be realized. It also faces certian challenges such the cost of manufacturing. Fully reindustrializing the country to the point where a majority of its production in all areas is sourced within the United States itself inherently faces the prospects of either reducing profits for the owners, or reducing the wages of the workers. Real material wealth is not subjective in nature; if we consider housing, people may value certain aspects of different houses or apartments differently, but actually building it requires a definite amount of materials, a definite amount of labor time, and under socially average standards of living, imposes a definite and known cost.

We may denominate the value in currency however we like; whether it costs $100 or $1 million, the real tangible wealth is an exact reflection of the total labor put into the production of materials and final assembly. If costs in labor, and thus materials as well, increase then either the price must go up, and wages and profit remain the same, or if the price is to reamain the same, either wages or profit must go down. There is no magically enlarging the pie, no matter how we choose to divide it. The end result is that either the owning class must take a relative cut to their share, or the workers must take relative cut; even accounting for economic growth, the real wealth only grows in direct proportion to what we actually produce. There is fundamentally nothing Trump can do to alter this relationship, nor is it even necessarily limited to Captialism; Socialism too is limited by the laws of material economy.

The same holds true of Financialization of the economy as well. If we attempt to reduce the proportion of this hypothetical wealth, we’re forced to reckon with the fact that it is implcitly debt that is paying for millions of jobs. If it were to somehow occur overnight, most white collar jobs would dissapear, as there is almost no real production of tangible things securing their wages. We could simply sieze assets from the Financial Bourgeoise to pay for part of that debt, but Trump will never resort to forcible wealth redistribution, nor would either faction of the Bourgeoise allow this despite the fact that it would only make up a drop in the bucket. Definancializing the US economy without a collapse or revolution would take decades, something Trump doesn’t have, and which the dominant faction of the ruling class is opposed to. And even then, most of these bullshit jobs would still disappear, with the job sector shrinking to more closely reflect its actual production, and already productive workers competing against millions of newly unemployed.

Lastly, US foreign relations are central in the financialized economy. This hypothetical wealth doesn’t exclusively regard potential profits within the US, but also includes overseas investment. Most large companies are multinational, and rely on overseas production and predatory lending for a large proportion of their wealth, real or hypothetical. The whole structure of the “rules-based world order”, including its military aspects, were built by the ruling class to create this globalized system of exploitation; what we call Imperialism.

The exploitation of the other nations of the world is inseperable from the Financial Bourgeoise’s control over the US State, and the globals system of Imperialism helps backstop their control within the US. But it is exactly the nature of this system that is undermining the Imperialists; the exploitation has driven much of the Global South into the Anti-Imperialist camp centered on China. Its use of armed force to secure its interests are driving wedges between their allies such as Germany, as they are asked to sacrifice their own independent interests for the United States.

Trump, more likely than not, will make headway on some fronts while failing on others. He continues to express willingness to negotiate an end to the war with Russia, but we are likely to remain with Israel tied to our leg, which leaves a lingering possibility of global war and alienates us from much of the world. His view of the problems the United States faces as a cultural problem, and his willingness to cooperate with elements of the Deep State to fight the Culture War sabotages his own ability to support the Masses. His confrontational view of economic relations works to harm the Workering Class. Trump cannot defeat the Deep State and bring prosperity to the United States, but his election has put the Imperialists on the back foot, and gives the Workers the opportunity to do this job ourselves.