The Economist: Trump 2.0: Demolition, restoration, and the real deal revolution

Key topicsTrump’s second term marks the end of the progressive era and rise of populismAmerica’s $7trn budget is failing citizens amid debt, decay, and insecurityTrump targets the entrenched administrative state and activist judiciary.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com© 2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved..The Economist .We might all be able to agree on one thing at least. The past 100 days have been the most consequential in modern American presidential history, save perhaps those of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term. The very idea of 100 days as a presidential metric comes from Roosevelt’s whirlwind enactment of New Deal legislation. The first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term are the appropriate coda to FDR’s. Mr Trump closed the book on FDR’s 90-year progressive era and ushered in the “Golden Age” of populism: out with New Deal and in with the Real Deal. What does it mean to get real? Simply putting America’s interests first. To outsiders, particularly Europeans, anxious to understand what Trump 2.0 portends: remain calm; there is a method here. Mr Trump has embarked upon a great restoration of America. The nation needs first to get back on its feet in order to remain the world’s beacon of freedom and democracy. The system is broken. A builder, Mr Trump knows that the initial phase of any renovation is demolition. Like popcorn ceilings and formica countertops, many of the progressive additions to America’s government are today retrograde and need to be pulled down. How will the American left impede Mr Trump? Recall that FDR threatened court-packing to cajole the judiciary to bless his progressive form of government. Mr Trump’s team must now square off with the votaries of that scheme to undo it. Like FDR, Mr Trump entered the Oval Office with America on a collision course, his only option being to move quickly and forcefully. For those opposed to reform, consider the status quo. The federal budget in 2025 is a $7trn behemoth. More than 40% larger in real terms than it was just ten years ago, today’s budget comes in with a $2.5trn structural deficit and a national debt of $36trn, clicking up another trillion dollars about every 100 days. Annual debt service exceeds the Department of Defence’s budget. But what exactly does the American citizen get for $7trn? A country falling apart and potentially unable to defend itself. Supply shocks from covid-19 underscored the strategic danger of a hollowed-out industrial base in the 21st-century global economy. Next came depletion of weapons stocks during the Ukraine war, raising concerns that we might no longer be able to defend ourselves because we lack productive capacity. America may lead in innovation and intellectual property, but what about good old-fashioned gunpowder? We have a single factory in all of America that produces it. And steel and heavy industry? Following a push under Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, America dismantled many of the coal- and nuclear-power plants required to sustain the electric load needed to power that production. How can a country serve as the arsenal of democracy when it takes seven years to restock the stinger missiles sent to Ukraine? On the home front America is equally troubled: infrastructure crumbles, migrant flows exhaust public resources and stoke violent crime. Each year, in the order of 100,000 Americans perish from fentanyl and other drug overdoses, more than all the American soldiers who died in Vietnam. The list goes on..Read more:.Trump administration: Key picks signal tough “America first” agenda.So let’s get real here. The $7trn is not serving the American people, but rather those who serve themselves from government largesse, including many around the globe. To make America run again, its government needs to be restored to one of, by and for the people, not a cadre of unelected, revolving-door bureaucrats. A renovation of government in accordance with its original constitutional architecture is required. As Elon Musk remarked, Mr Trump is not a threat to democracy, but a threat to bureaucracy. The “threat” posed is the promise of transparency and accountability. America’s constitution envisions three branches of government: legislative, executive and judicial. FDR created a fourth, the administrative state. The constitution provides “[t]he executive Power shall be vested in a President”. The investiture is exclusive to the president, not reposited in a committee of presidents, nor an agency “independent” of presidential control. The buck is supposed to stop on the president’s desk. An agency independent of the president is one independent of the people—that is, unaccountable. That’s not democracy. To thwart Mr Trump and preserve their elite system, progressives are retreating to make their final stand through an activist judiciary. Historically courts preserved their own legitimacy by abstaining from political questions decided by the other two branches of government. District courts have now crossed this red line and stepped into a constitutional minefield, imposing their political views on issues that are clearly the province of the executive. Mr Trump learned the hard way that the activist judiciary is powered by universities and Big Law. Over the past 20 years the American left seized near-complete control of these institutions and systematically hounded out conservatives from their ranks, squelching viewpoints held by a majority of Americans. Ask why Harvard and Columbia do not send their most MAGA professors as emissaries to the White House to plead over grant cuts? Because they have none. Big Law, for its part, abused the legal profession by funnelling its profits into partisan lawfare under the guise of pro bono advocacy. Why don’t the MAGA partners of Big Law stand up in defence of their firms? Same answer: they don’t exist. By confronting these liberal citadels, the Trump administration has wisely cut off the supply lines to the activist judiciary. How does this all play out? Will Mr Trump rebuild an America First skyline or will the malaise of the status quo win out? My bet’s on Trump the builder.

The Economist: Trump 2.0: Demolition, restoration, and the real deal revolution

Key topics

From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com

© 2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

The Economist

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