SHORTPOD (103) CLOWN MAGA vs. SERIOUS MAGA

Also available on Bitchute and Odysee 

Neokrat editor Colin Liddell scrapes the greasepaint off the clown face of Trump 2.0 to see what lies beneath. Despite the buffoonish antics of Trump, Musk, and Vance, MAGA has become the repository of some quite serious, hard-hitting geopolitical and economic ideas. Can MAGA achieve radical change or will it be doomed by "authoritarian mismatch"?

TAPESCRIPT

Hello, this is Colin Liddell and this is The Short Pod, a brief and succinct podcast commenting on the events and issues of the day. And today it is the 15th of March 2025.

We are now about six or seven weeks into the Trump presidency and it's been a pretty bumpy ride. It's easy to make fun of Trump. He is a ridiculous character. He has no internal filter. He seems to just spout out whatever rubbish comes into his head, without reflecting on it or thinking about it in any serious way. He wears thick orange make-up. He has a vice president who fucks couches and walks around in heavy eye-liner. He has a second “vice president,” Elon Musk, who is an autistic ketamine addict. Almost everybody that he has appointed to important positions is some kind of brain-worm-eaten nutcase. So it's really becoming very, very hard to take this American government, this Trump administration 2.0, seriously.

But there is also, I think, a serious side to the Trump administration. And the MAGA camp has become a kind of repository for certain not entirely unrespectable ideas. And these ideas are in some respects related to greater geopolitical and economic realities. And that's sort of what I want to kind of focus on here, even though it's very, very hard to ignore the clown show that is presenting them. Now, if you dig far enough beneath the grease paint, so to speak, what we're talking about with the MAGA camp is this attempt to reposition America economically and geopolitically. 

Now, why is that even necessary? Well, because the world has changed a lot in the last 30 years. 30 years ago, America was in a very dominant position. Countries like China had not risen up. Russia was still, so to speak, on its knees. India was still an unimportant Third World economy. There was no such thing as BRICS, etc. But since then, especially with the rise of China, the whole global position has greatly altered, and MAGA is a kind of lame-brained recognition of that reality. And so it should at least get points for that. Now, people talk about Trump betraying NATO, Trump betraying Europe… And yeah, it's possible to see things that way. But really what this is all about is America doesn't have enough strength vis-a-vis its main challengers to face in different directions. So Trump is really all about withdrawing American power from Europe, and possibly the Middle East, and refocusing that power on Asia, where America is going head-to-head with China. 

Now, also with America going head to head with China, this reveals lots of deficiencies in American power, especially industrial power. Compared to China, America is a minuscule power in industrial terms. I think China has the capacity to make 200 times as many ships as America. China's steel industry completely dwarfs America's steel industry. So in a long-term battle between these two superpowers, whether in a Cold War or Hot War form, America would be found extremely wanting. So I think the discernible logic of the MAGA position is that America has to kind of turn the clock back. It has to become a great industrial power again. This would explain Donald Trump's apparent love of tariffs. Trump wants to bring back a major steel industry to America. He probably wants to see other industries like shipbuilding return to America, etc., etc. This would create the basis for a long-term industrial, economic, political, and ideological struggle with China. So that's what MAGA are kind of aiming at.

Going along the road that America was already on, which is to outsource production to all these other countries, mainly China, to rely upon the power of the dollar to support mass imports and a massive trade deficit, that was ultimately a self-destructive route. So it's entirely possible to have at least some sympathy with MAGA's big picture vision of change in America.

But the real problem that America has, and that MAGA has, is that they are essentially acting in a radical and therefore an authoritarian way in a country that is not yet an authoritarian system. America is still a consumerist democracy where people are overly concerned about things like inflation, things like living standards, GDP, the stock market, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they're not really ready to make serious sacrifices to radically transform and change the country and to gird its collective loins for a long geopolitical struggle.

So this is the problem that Donald Trump is running into. I think we can probably call this an “authoritarian mismatch.” It's essentially, ‘How does a democratically elected president who relies on polls and popularity and keeping his party on board and in line, how does such a politician manage to navigate a country as large and complex and essentially divided as America towards such goals?’

The kind of radical reform that MAGA is essentially aiming at is something that can only really be done by a Xi Jinping or a Kim Jong-un or a Vladimir Putin or, dare I say, an Adolf Hitler. So I think Elon Musk, in his highly autistic way, intuitively senses that, which is why you see him increasingly channelling Nazi memes and tropes. The inner logic of MAGA-ism, which is based upon changing geopolitical realities and America's very, very profound economic weaknesses, is towards radical transformation that can only be carried out by a non-democratic government, one that can coerce and manipulate the population in quite repressive ways.

America is still very much a democracy, a country where people still have free speech, where they can still vote. And so it's going to be incredibly difficult for Donald Trump and MAGA to follow the path they are now on, simply because of this vast “authoritarian mismatch.” So, at some point MAGA is going to collapse or it's going to completely water down its radical and long-sighted goals. And it's going to start getting a lot of push-back.

Already seen signs of that with the Supreme Court, with various other legal challenges. And with Donald Trump's polls in the toilets, we're going to see a lot of push-back electorally. So I don't think MAGA will succeed under those conditions. And especially not with the clown show that Donald Trump is using to dress up the whole thing for the world's entertainment. Over and out!