In both his first and second terms, Donald Trump was swept into office partially on the back of an antiwar critique. In his first term, Americans were sick of a global “war on terror” that George W. Bush had initiated, and which Barack Obama had institutionalized; in his second term, Americans were tired of sending weapons and money to foreign countries instead of spending more on problems at home. Yet during both of his terms, Trump, predictably, has proven unwilling to actually attack the sinews of empire themselves. Indeed, in early April, Trump announced that his administration would request a defense budget of $1 trillion.

As this all suggests, and despite what antiwar critics might hope, ours is an era of “imperialist realism” — regardless of what a presidential candidate might say, they are always unwilling to think beyond the empire. This is a significant problem for the Left, as well as those small-c conservatives with whom left-wing anti-imperialists will need to ally if we ever hope to reduce the empire’s footprint. Depressingly, there’s no easy way out of imperialist realism.

Nevertheless, it is becoming ever more obvious that exogenous circumstances and ongoing processes — climate-induced geopolitical transformations; increasing European skepticism that the United States is committed to the continent’s security; and the continuing rise of China — might soon encourage the empire to retract, at least in Europe and East Asia. How this transition will occur, if in fact it does, remains an open question, though in an ideal world, we anti-imperialists will help guide it in a positive direction.

— Daniel Bessner is an associate professor in American foreign policy at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington

Earlier this year, I interviewed an astrophysicist whose space data had vanished in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) bloodletting. “The staffing needed to break something is one person,” she told me. “The personnel needed to fix something is orders of magnitude greater than that.” The story has been repeated thousands of times over in nearly every agency of the federal government and many more subsidiaries that rely on federal funding. The disrepair is intentional: the administration intends to break public institutions, subordinating them to Trump’s whims and carving inroads for privatization that can enrich his fellow billionaires.

There is a silver lining here: Trump’s talent for destruction is rivaled by his indifference to political institution-building. As we cross the second Trump administration’s hundred-day mark, the president’s approval rating sits at 41 percent, the lowest of any president in over seventy years, with only 22 percent of Americans strongly approving of his performance. Barring some major reversal, these numbers will likely translate to midterm losses for the Republicans. Meanwhile, Trump continues to tease the prospect of running for a third term, despite the unpopularity and infeasibility of the idea, especially if the balance of power in the legislature shifts away from his supporters. If it continues, this will prevent anyone from even signaling interest in being his protégé, much less laying groundwork, which Trump would no doubt perceive as a betrayal. Thus, while Trump is actively liquidating dozens of American institutions, he is ossifying one: the GOP. The party he revitalized is now hostage to an unpopular man without a long-term plan.

Even in their disorganized and uninspired form, the Democrats won’t find it difficult to take electoral advantage of this state of affairs. The Left, meanwhile, has an important task: we must effectively argue that a politics predicated on a return to normalcy and decorum is at best only a short-term solution. The overall mood of the electorate remains one of inchoate dissatisfaction with the unequal and unsustainable status quo. Only the reinfusion of Bernie Sanders–style democratic socialist (or at least social democratic) politics can wrest the antiestablishment energy away from the MAGA right and its descendants for good.

— Meagan Day is an editor at Jacobin

Despite Donald Trump’s aggressive assaults on migrants, academic speech, workers’ rights, public services, and even the US-constructed global trade regime, it’s hard to see the administration as politically successful on its own terms. Elon Musk’s DOGE has failed to make a dent in federal spending. Trump has been forced to walk back much of his declared tariff policy in the face of widespread complaints from the corporate class and chaos in financial markets. (Incidentally, the episode appeared to vindicate Marxist theories of the state.) The president and his policies grow more unpopular by the day.

On the other hand, the administration’s “flood the zone” strategy has achieved its stated aim of disorienting the opposition. Democratic Party leadership is as weak and feckless as ever, without a clear message and capable of little more than “very strong” statements and openly declaring that Democrats have no leverage; they seem committed to adopting James Carville’s advised strategy of “playing dead.” So far, the strategy doesn’t look to be paying off. Even as Trump’s approval ratings fall rapidly, Democrats aren’t benefiting: in late March, the party’s approval rating was at a historic low point.

There are signs of life on the Left, however, from rank-and-file federal workers organizing protests against DOGE cuts, to efforts to protect migrants from wrongful prosecution, to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies that have been drawing record crowds. The question is whether and how such promising shoots can grow into an effective movement to stop Trumpism’s forward momentum and, ideally, propose a compelling political alternative.

Sanders’s call for more working-class independents to run for office suggests a potential path forward. Whether an infusion of independent energy in the electoral arena does help build a real anti-MAGA bulwark will no doubt depend on labor taking a more militant stance, and on left-wing forces cohering a popular organization that takes initiative independently of the sclerotic Democrats.

— Nick French is an editor at Jacobin

The lesson of Trump 2.0 thus far is that things can always get worse. Shocking even fellow conservatives by imprisoning people for disagreeable political speech, the Trump regime outdid itself in pure authoritarian sadism this week by, among many other horrors, deporting a four-year-old with stage 4 cancer who is a US citizen. That’s the bad news. The good news? Millions of us agree that it’s bad.

Trump’s popular support is very low. In one recent survey, more respondents gave his first hundred days an “F” than any other grade. Protests have been flooding the streets all over the country.

The Trump actions drawing the most protest — construction worker Kilmar Abrego García’s deportation, with no due process, to a horrific Salvadoran prison; the evisceration of scientific and medical research; allowing Elon Musk to destroy cherished institutions — are especially unpopular, according to polls.

What political form can all this opposition take? The Democratic Party leadership is enfeebled. But the Left is not without leaders. Socialist lawmakers Bernie Sanders and AOC drew crowds of tens of thousands in their “Fighting Oligarchy Tour” through red America. Zohran Mamdani’s socialist campaign for mayor of New York City is winning over more New Yorkers every week. And some who don’t even share our Jacobin politics — including governors, congresspeople, and judges — are refusing to comply with Trumpism.

It’s time to build. As the late Jane McAlevey pointed out during the first Trump administration: defeating the Republican attack on Obamacare took both the Left and the relevant corporate interests. The capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union had to work together to defeat the Nazis during World War II. The Left can’t beat these oligarchs alone. Neither can the center. We need everyone.

— Liza Featherstone is a columnist for Jacobin and the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was left without quorum after the illegal firing of board member Gwynne Wilcox (briefly reinstated but removed again a few days later), and the bargaining rights of 67 percent of the entire federal workforce were threatened by executive order (now temporarily blocked). Meanwhile, Sean O’Brien and the Teamsters celebrated the appointment of Lori Chavez-DeRemer, daughter of a Teamster, as labor secretary, and Shawn Fain and the United Auto Workers gave partial, though strong, praise to Trump’s tariffs as indicating “the beginning of the end of [the North American Free Trade Agreement] and the ‘free-trade’ disaster.” Such are the contradictory happenings in the labor world during Trump’s first hundred days.

Action-packed as these first couple months have been, it’s difficult to escape the feeling that the big news is yet to come. The so-called “Coalition for a Democratic Workplace,” an anti-union employers association, is pushing for Attorney General Pam Bondi to invalidate fifteen NLRB decisions, effectively overriding the labor relations regime that has been in place since the 1930s. The past two months have seen a dip in the number of NLRB elections — too early to be called a trend, but perhaps an early indication of labor drawing back.

In this situation, it would be unsurprising for unions to grow more cautious and defensive. But with Amazon outpacing the United Parcel Service (UPS) in terms of package volume, the Teamsters are staring down difficult contract negotiations with UPS in 2028. A round of concessionary bargaining for the largest union contract in the country would ripple throughout the entire labor movement. This and other changing dynamics for labor indicate that defense alone won’t cut it. It’s time for unions to break open their war chests and meet Trump II with massive new organizing expenditures. Labor must be ascendant to find its political voice in 2028.

— Benjamin Y. Fong is associate director of the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University and author of Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Bing

John Maynard Keynes once remarked that economists should aspire to be humble, competent people, like dentists. When economists become celebrities, the world is in trouble. I think a similar analogy could be made with tariffs and toothbrushes: they are a minor tool, useful for some rather specific jobs. But when they become the object of sustained attention and debate, something has gone wrong.

Tariffs have their ​u​ses — protecting infant industries, providing temporary relief to vulnerable sectors during a downturn, or shielding sectors necessary for national security — but in general, they’re only ​effective as a part of an overall plan, whose other elements are generally more important. Donald Trump’s first hundred days have seen him take the toothbrush, sharpen it into a shiv, and hold the whole world hostage with it. These are actions borne out of desperation rather than strategy. Already they have undermined, perhaps irreparably, trust in America’s economic institutions. They may yet help to forge a new world order without US hegemony.

— Nic Johnson teaches in the Law, Letters, and Society program at the University of Chicago

America is under attack — this has been the tenor of Trump’s second term so far. And “reciprocal tariffs” are the weapons to which it has resorted to defend itself. The result has been a spectacular display of policy incoherence: frequent reversals, suspensions of unclear duration, repeated confused press reports (including those of the White House), and hallucinatory phone calls with Beijing officials. Nothing in these first hundred days complies with the definition of responsible statecraft. The Trump administration’s actions are also hopelessly at variance with its stated objective of national industrial renewal. With malignant precision, it has further taken aim at other foundations of American exceptionalism, notably its attractiveness to global talent and its centers of scientific research. The brutality of its border policy and assault on the university system undermine both.

The primary victim of America’s war against the world, then, is America. But every war produces collateral damage. In this case it is a gestating debt crisis in developing economies, which now might include both the Global South and the United States itself, whose currency and debt has recently exhibited cardinal symptoms of developing market distress. Looking ahead, however, the Sino-American “decoupling” will be felt by the countries that had ridden on the bow wave of Chinese demand for raw materials, and, by extension, of US demand for consumer goods.

The realist response to a post-American world is geoeconomic bloc formation. Indeed, some strange allegiances are already forming. Postmortems of the international politics of trade are therefore premature. After all, Trump’s ideas are not of a recent vintage. In the nineteenth century, the open-economy forces of globalization created winners and losers. Then, as now, tariffs and immigration restrictions figured prominently in the latter’s response. Then, too, the worm in the systemic apple was the inability of capitalist nations to absorb the negative externalities of global trade and financial integration.

That system ended in the conflagration of 1914–1918. What persisted, however, was what historians Michael Geyer and Charles Bright have termed “the global condition”: a self-reflexive, contested sphere of global politics. The current rupture, too, far from foreclosing on this system, poses with new force the question of the relationship between the global economy and this sphere. It is the task of the prospective heirs of American hegemony to reshape this relationship. Global South development and, above all, the rapid coordination of green investment cannot afford to become collateral damage.

— Dominik A. Leusder is an economist and writer based in London

The first hundred days of the second Trump administration have been a prolonged act of shock-and-awe-style psychological warfare on America’s NATO allies. The pact is now facing its greatest existential crisis since the end of the Cold War. Faith in the durability of the “trans-Atlantic partnership” has never been so shaken. It could survive an errant Charles de Gaulle, but now the threat is emanating from Washington, whose very interests the alliance was created to defend. In his first trip to Europe, J. D. Vance’s belligerence shocked the somnambulant audience at the Munich Security Conference out of their Joe Biden–induced stupor. If there was any doubt remaining that we were in unchartered waters, the clash between Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office (which the American president deemed “great television”) drove the point home: this time it’s for real. The first Trump administration was not an aberration. There would be no going back.

Drastic measures have been taken. Europe is rapidly rearming itself. Rheinmetall, Europe’s preeminent ammunition producer, is converting German automotive plants into factories for defense equipment. But the frenzied remilitarization will come at a cost: to protect the European way of life from foreign threats, some of the most cherished features of that way of life, chief among them the welfare state, will likely be sacrificed on Mars’ altar.

Biden-era rhetoric about a grand civilizational struggle between democracies and autocracies is being discarded, and even erstwhile hawks like European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen are changing their tune on China, stressing the need for a constructive, “transactional” foreign policy toward Beijing. Indeed, Trump’s tariffs are pushing China and the EU closer together: EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles imposed last year are being reevaluated, and China is looking at removing sanctions on members of the European parliament. Meanwhile, Italy’s Leonardo and Turkey’s drone behemoth Baykar have just signed a deal that will give Europe’s anemic UAV industry a boost.

“Geopolitical Europe” — a Europe that has “learned to speak the language of power” — is likely to replace “Social Europe.” But while the jilted continent seems close to an administrative solution to its security woes, Europeans remain hopelessly wedded to Washington and unable to conceive of a foreign policy of their own.

— Lily Lynch is a foreign affairs writer currently based in Istanbul

Donald Trump rattled his sword in the direction of Canada, Greenland, and Panama. But he ordered Israel not to strike Iran (while allowing the cease-fire in Gaza for which he took credit to melt down), and pushed Russia and especially Ukraine toward some version of peace in what he gleefully described as “sleepy Joe Biden’s war.” DOGE reached the Department of Defense — and Pete Hegseth, embarrassing and embattled Pentagon steward, cut contracts there to the tune of almost $6 billion. Trump hardly matched the high standard he set out in calling for his administration to be judged “not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” On the other hand, while no isolationist and talking loudly and still carrying a big stick, Trump has not acted on his worst instincts yet. But his enmity toward China, continued by his predecessor, has ramped up with punishing tariffs.

The damage of his first hundred days is greater in domestic policy, where Trump has learned from his lackluster first-term performance to staff his administration with toadies and to fight resistance inside and outside government. The downsizing of the federal government will hamper it for years. He passed no legislation though — so everything he has done, especially when it involves illegally refusing to spend Congress’s money, is open to just as rapid change by a future successor. Elon Musk is slinking back to Tesla, which took a hit in spite of Trump’s largesse. His immigration restrictionism is already back — but then, it has become a bipartisan priority. There will be high drama over the next year when the budget is formulated. The highest goal, renewing the tax reductions for the wealthy of his first term, will be costly enough to make welfare entitlements tempting to cut. Those steps could permanently change the American state, and turn out to be Trump’s most toxic legacy.

— Samuel Moyn is a professor of law and history at Yale University and the author of Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times

Across a hundred days, Tom Homan’s been frustrated. “We need to increase the arrests,” he begged Trump. Since then, Homan has deported a sick ten-year-old, a four-year-old. . .  “We deport the mother,” he says; the citizen children choose to go along. The regime’s logo is a boot kicking the weak; its sound effect, a wail. All but the institutions of violence are precarious. On Medicaid’s fate hang the fates of one in five Americans. On SNAP’s, the chances that forty million people eat. Many of the latter live on military bases; twenty-four million live in MAGA states, many with Ag economies subsidized by the poverty of hungry people. The billion already cut in food aid has struck school lunch programs, day care centers, food banks, and local farmers. Shuttering the Education Department declares disabled kids, trans kids, expendable. Undermining Social Security threatens every family with a suffering child, every disabled worker, and most old people, for whom suicide is a contingency plan.

Only DOGE’s speedy hacks into the “plumbing” of the administrative state truly surprise. Cruelty was promised. Maybe not outsourcing to El Salvador, but what symmetry in the choice! Ronald Reagan gave “Make America Great” its first trot around the paddock firing workers, doubling homelessness, staying mute as 46,134 mostly gay men died of AIDS, and making Central America scream. With Trump, grift was presumed — as was flouting the judiciary. One doesn’t sue for impunity and hold back. Homan’s ire was touching. He seemed not to understand that thuggery is an instrument toward a goal, not the goal itself. The Right has organized sixty years for this moment. “Laying siege to the institutions,” as Christopher Rufo advocates, aims to dismember the welfare state, the ’60s’ legacy, the Left — a turn on McCarthyism, which attacked the Left to kneecap liberalism. What people don’t appreciate, the left strategist Eric Mann once said, is “the Right refuses to lose.”

— JoAnn Wypijewski is the author, most recently, of What We Don’t Talk About: Sex and the Mess of Life