There’s a conventional understanding of what the word means, and it refers to a foreign policy outlook among American advisers and practitioners inside the political elite. And the outlook is one that stresses American unilateral authority to carry out its business as it wishes, unconstrained by institutions that are multilateral, like the United Nations or even institutions like NATO. It stresses American supremacy and the virtues of US power for the rest of the world, and it largely sees American expansion as a force for good, however you define good, and therefore sees constraints on it as either useless or even dangerous.

That’s “neocon.” And neocon is usually identified with the political right. So right now, in the Trump administration, Marco Rubio was thought to be a neocon. Classically, the second Bush administration was thought to be filled with neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Frith and people around them like Richard Perle. This is the classical definition of neocon, and I will use the same definition in this interview.

Now, a couple of questions arise: first, is this ideology real among the American foreign policy elite? And second, can it be identified with one particular sector of the foreign policy establishment?

The answer to the first question is, yeah, it’s very real. There is a substantial chunk of the foreign policy actors who see international law and multilateral institutions as, at best, a nuisance and therefore something to be either ignored or traduced.

The second question is the more interesting one, which is, how confined is it to a small group of people around the Republican Party? The answer to that is, it is not confined at all to the Republican Party. In fact, it is the dominant, I would say near-unanimous, position in both parties.

In the recent past, in the Clinton administration and in the Obama administration, what we would call a unilateral approach to American expansion abroad and the use of American power has been the norm. It hasn’t been the exception; it’s been the normal operating ideology. So on the definition I’ve just provided, which is pretty conventional, then it describes US foreign policy advisers in general, not just the particular people around the Republican Party.

Is there anything that differentiates them? It’s nuance. It’s in particular situations — matters of judgment about the use of force, matters of judgment about the extent to which they should at least get a token agreement from multilateral institutions, but not about matters of principle.

Let me just give you a couple of examples to lay this out. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, it was the ultimate expression of a neoconservative approach to handling Saddam Hussein and handling the American position in the Middle East, because we now know that they also knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction.

But in the lead-up to the war, there was not any significant leader of either party who said that the United States ought to abide by the dictates of the United Nations Security Council or of any other multilateral institution. Both parties agreed that it was time to invade. The disagreements were only about tactics.

In 1998, when Bill Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox, bombing Iraq over the course of several days, he did it as a unilateral expression of American power in the Middle East. And he did this not only without UN backing but on the day that the Security Council was meeting, precisely as a snub to the Security Council to show that he didn’t need it. And when he bombed Serbia, it was under the auspices of NATO, not through the United Nations — once again showing that since the United States has much more control over NATO, it’s the United States’ game and the UN has no place telling the US what to do and when to do it. So “neocon” accurately describes a certain foreign policy orientation, but I don’t think it can be confined to the Republican Party.

It would have been surprising. But his image as a critic was what made him so appealing to so many people, because his campaign was one in which there was a pretty strong element of criticism of this kind of foreign policy. In both of his campaigns, in 2016 and in 2020, Trump kept harping on the stupidity of the foreign wars and how “the blob” has taken over foreign policy and how he’s going to extricate himself and American policy from these warmongers and he’s going to be the president for peace.

So there was reason to think that there might have been some movement in this direction, and there’s no doubt whatsoever that a considerable section of his base was attracted to him precisely for this reason. I think that you could forgive people if they thought this might be the guy who will extricate us. And let’s not forget, in his first administration, he did initiate the process of US withdrawal from Afghanistan. He did do that. And that gave some kind of legitimacy to this notion that he could be steering the ship away from neoconservatism.

But while there was reason to expect him to follow through, I think it would have been surprising. The gravitational pull of decades and decades of American unilateralism, American aggression, overtly imperialistic policies — that pull is awfully strong. And Trump is somebody who’s not ideologically driven. He’s not somebody who has a deep set of moral or political convictions. He has a few, I would call them, notions about this, that, and the other. But ultimately, he’s somebody who really wants to have power for his own personal ambitions.

So when he comes across resistance from the foreign policy establishment, even though he has an inclination toward steering foreign policy in a different direction, I don’t think it’s a conviction in any way. That being the case, it would have been surprising if he had actually followed through on these airy pronouncements that he was making. And now that he’s initiated a military campaign against Iran, I think that the book is closed on this issue.

Between Iran, between backing the genocide in Gaza and giving Israel a blank check in all of its aggression in the region, Trump has come out as a garden variety — maybe even more aggressive — neocon compared to his predecessors.

It’s funny — when people look back at the first Trump administration, they kind of forget that the way his domestic policy played out in 2016 was in many ways even worse than the way it’s playing out right now with regard to populism. He ran as a populist, but when he governed, very quickly people started labeling him a Paul Ryan–style Republican in his domestic policy.

Remember, Paul Ryan was the archconservative Republican who was Speaker of the House in 2017 and 2018. And he had tremendous power at that time inside the Republican Party. He was the architect of a very regressive tax reform, and he was very, very keen to roll back Obamacare and put in a much more marketized health care plan. When Trump came to power, his tax plan was largely written by Paul Ryan himself. And that tax plan was very regressive. What studies showed at the time was that around 45 percent of all the gains from Trump’s first tax plan went to the top 10 percent of the population.

Trump had promised wage hikes for workers. He delivered on none of them. Trump had promised a better health care plan, and he had promised not to touch Medicaid and Medicare. In fact, he tried to dismantle Medicaid, and it was Congress that stopped him.

When you look back at that presidency, domestically and internationally, what you find is that when Trump comes to power, the only issue on which he really departs from traditional conservative Republicanism is tariffs. Trump did push through a series of low but not insignificant tariffs against China at the time, and that did not raise any hackles.

The Democrats didn’t object to it very much. Hardly any Republicans did. And the reason was that both parties saw China as a looming threat. In a previous podcast, I’ve said that the very idea of a Chinese geopolitical threat is nonsense. There’s no reason at all to think of China as a threat in this way, but they did. And so there wasn’t much objection to the tariffs.

If you take away the tariffs, what else does Trump do? He has a regressive tax plan. He tries to roll back Medicaid. He makes overtures against Medicare. He tries to dismantle Obamacare. He does nothing for workers’ wages, but he does give a huge windfall to corporations who got a massive reduction in corporate taxes. There was a tax reduction for top earners in the United States by something around 2 percent, and he did absolutely nothing for the counties that voted for him, which were the poorest counties. People look back on that era and they say, “I was better off under Trump than I was under Biden.” That’s largely in spite of Trump, not because of him. It’s because the economy was doing well at the time, and they’ve forgotten all the policy initiatives where he actually tried to roll back whatever protections and gains working people had in this country.

There’s only two things, I think, that Trump does in his first administration that warrant calling him antiestablishment in some way. One was the tariffs, which the establishment backed, so there’s no reason to think of them as antiestablishment. The second was initiating the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And truth be told, there was a lot of consensus around that inside the foreign policy world as well. So to my mind, what we see Trump doing now is not a departure from the first Trump administration. It is entirely in line with that administration. It’s just that the historical memory tends to be a little bit skewed on this.

The bill is more or less a gift to the wealthy in the United States. When the bill was debated inside the House, there was a lot of pushback from certain sections of the party. But the pushback, interestingly, was on how awful the bill was going to be for the poor.

The biggest bone of contention was its announced cuts to Medicaid. Now, there’s an interesting nuance to this. Trump had run on the promise that he would not touch Medicare or Medicaid. The reason is, I think, obvious. The voting base of the Republican Party and Trump is now the poorest districts in the United States. This is by now becoming common knowledge within the Left.

That being the case, the Republicans face a problem that they never faced before, which is they are still officially a party that seeks to gain favor from and representation of the American corporate class. The Republicans were always the party of business, right from the 1940s onward. But they’re now saddled with a voting base that’s at the opposite end of the income brackets, which is the poorest people.

So their problem is, how do you balance keeping the voting base and keeping their funders, the corporate community that funds their elections? They haven’t figured that out yet. So there’s a lot of debate and discussion in the party about how they’re going to move forward with these two elements in their political coalition. The outcome of this is, normally, a bill like Trump’s, which wants to give huge gifts to the rich, which wants to reduce taxes on them, which wants to dismantle social programs. Normally, that would be a classic, seamless Republican agenda. Everybody inside Congress, everybody in the House and the Senate from the party, would vote for it happily.

But now many of the legislators who are Republican are based in the districts that are going to be worst hit through the dismantling of Medicaid. What this tax bill has ended up doing is roiling the party, because there are about twenty-odd Republicans in the House and about five or six in the Senate whose voters depend directly on Medicaid — en masse, they depend on it. So Trump put them in an impossible situation.

What he said was, I’m going to pass this tax bill, which is highly regressive, but I promise I’m not going to touch Medicaid. So they found a ruse. And that ruse is, we’re not going to cut back actual benefits — what we’re going to do is make it harder for people to acquire the benefits.

That’s through all these new rules about having to work a minimum number of hours and claims to fraud and things like that. There’s a big journalistic industry showing that all this stuff is nonsense, that these rules are just a workaround so that he can say, I didn’t actually cut Medicaid — but you end up cutting Medicaid anyway. The end result is exactly what a classical Republican budget would do.

It is a budget that directly hits the poor in order to favor the rich. So in what way is he populist? In what way is this a blow against the American establishment? What every reputable study has shown is that this is the most regressive budget in around half a century or more even. By regressive, what we mean is if you look at the budget’s effect on people’s incomes and people’s take-home pay, it’s the top 20 percent that’s benefited the most — and if you look at the bottom 50 percent of the income brackets, it’s really almost zero benefit to them. So the budget, which is his biggest domestic policy instrument, is one that is the opposite of populist.

Trump’s approach to the conflict has been utterly chaotic. If you follow the reporting and the analysis of Trump’s overtures toward the Middle East over the past four months, it’s in a permanent condition of whiplash. People keep looking for a grand design underneath. And really, I’m coming more and more to the conclusion that there’s no grand design. It’s just Trump kind of making it up as he goes along.

Now, when you make it up as you go along, there’s a very strong bias toward the status quo. That’s why I think you see him coming back toward Israel, even though momentarily it looked like he might be bypassing Israel.

So let me go into this a little bit. What has Trump’s approach to the Middle East been? Well, when he came in, initially he seemed to give a green light to Benjamin Netanyahu to essentially bulldoze Gaza into oblivion and literally expel all the Palestinians. In fact, he made a big show of the fact that he thought Palestinians ought to just leave Gaza altogether and he would take it over and turn it into a resort or something like that. It was shocking, but it seemed to be serious.

Very soon, he pulled back from that. I don’t know why or when. We don’t know what the internal discussions were. Then he starts making overtures toward the Gulf states to revive something like the Abraham Accords. The Abraham Accords were supposed to be an agreement between the Gulf states and Israel to solidify an alliance that would marginalize Iran. But the way he does it now, it seems to be the Gulf states orienting toward Iran, and Israel feeling like it might be marginalized.

But then, the administration does an about-face where, in early June, Trump goes back to Iran and says you have to commit to zero enrichment in your nuclear program, knowing full well that Iran would never agree to this. And it appears to be, if not at the direction of Netanyahu, then at least in consultation with him that he does this. Once you say to Iran you have to commit to zero enrichment, it’s basically saying that we do not want to negotiate with you anymore, because he knew full well Iran would not agree to that.

At that moment, it seems like he’s hitched his wagon to Netanyahu again. Now, these are three very dramatic shifts in policy. It’s hard to see what the logic is behind them other than this man wakes up in the morning and just changes his views. The end result of it is that he’s committed himself basically to backing Israel’s design for regime change inside Iran. But inside the region, it does not seem to me that there’s any grand strategy behind all this. It seems to me that Trump is not entirely sure what he wants out of it, and he’s making it up as he goes along.

I think MAGA supporters are going to be very unhappy on two grounds. One, of course, is that Trump is now the Forever Wars president. He’s no longer the critic of Forever Wars. The campaign in the Middle East against Iran could very well become a long, drawn-out conflict, because if they really do want regime change, I don’t know how they can do it without a massive invasion of the country. But if they do not want regime change, I don’t see how they can get from Iran an agreement to zero enrichment in its nuclear program. And it does seem to me like Israel is committed to regime change.

That being the case, it seems like Trump is dragging the United States into a new war. But then there’s also the domestic front. And when the changes in Medicaid hit Trump’s counties, there’s going to be an open rebellion, because you can package it however you want, you can word-spin it as much as you want. At the end of the day, there are going to be millions of people who are going to lose their benefits in the very counties that the Republicans depend upon. And that’s going to have a seismic effect, I think, on the party.

I expect to see a great deal of discontent inside the MAGA base. The question is, how much does that matter? If this were a different kind of electoral system, maybe a proportional representation system where there was a third or a fourth party, you would see a defection — an ocean of people leaving the Republican Party for another one, at least temporarily.

But in a two-party system with winner-take-all elections, the question is not so much how angry the MAGA base IS and how much it hates Trump. It’s, does it hate the Democrats more? That’s what matters. And that’s just not clear to me.

It could be that they become extremely unhappy with him, but still see no option but to go to him. Much the same as the Democrats took labor for granted for forty-odd years when labor was furious with the Democratic Party for selling it out again and again and again. The Democrats knew that at the end of the day, there’s nowhere else it could go.

Is it the same story with MAGA? It’s possible. It’s possible, especially because the Democrats don’t seem to have anything to offer. There was this gigantic national mobilization called the “No Kings” protests. Can anyone tell you what they stood for? All the protests stand for is “we don’t like Trump; we don’t want a king.” That’s great. But here’s the fact: a lot of people in this country, perhaps even most, would take a king if he came with job security, with health care, and with a decent life for themselves.

It’s not that people want a dictatorship — it’s that people have a whole list of other concerns as well. And in addition to saying “No Kings,” you also have to tell people what you stand for. The Democrats are not doing that, and I just don’t think they’re going to do it. That being the case, yeah, you might see a MAGA temper tantrum, but maybe not a MAGA rebellion or a MAGA defection to the Democratic Party. We’ll have to see about that.

Let’s play this out. Let’s suppose that in 2026, Trump and the Republicans miraculously hold onto power and they’ve retained their majorities inside Congress and are able to therefore glide into the 2028 presidential election. What do we see happening then?

Could this MAGA movement, wherever it is, have a generational successor? It seems to me pretty difficult. And here’s why. Trump’s genius was being able to hold together a coalition of skeptical but willing rich people. Here I’m talking about the very wealthy. If you look at the top 10 percent of the 90th to 99th percentile, they’re pretty happy with Trump, and I think they’ll stick with him.

But when you’re talking about the American corporate class, it is skeptical at best, and it has been willing to go along with him, to see if he’ll give it goodies the way he did in 2017. There’s that. And this is who really matters for elections because that’s where all the money comes from.

So, the top 1 percent and especially the top 0.5 percent, he’s held onto that alongside a really fanatically committed section of the poor electorate. He’s held them together. Whoever is the successor to Trump and MAGA has to be able to do these two things. Who is the successor? Right now, they seem to be anointing J. D. Vance. OK, is J. D. Vance going to be able to carry that forward? Well, he has to be able to tell people what MAGA stands for. The thing about Trump was, Trump said “MAGA stands for me.”

People bought it because he has a magnetic personality. People, for some reason, liked him. People found him to be appealing. I don’t think anybody finds J. D. Vance appealing, not even the people who vote for him. They vote for him anyway because he’s lined up with Trump. But knowing Trump’s no longer there, he has to sell them a certain picture. What’s he going to sell them? Well, they’ve got two presidencies now behind him. And those two presidencies, what they’re going to deliver is traditional, regressive, Republican-style domestic policy. And a flight toward authoritarianism.

While that’s not the highest priority for American voters, for a lot of them, it matters, especially now with these quasi-fascist attacks that ICE is making on immigrant communities. It’s going to matter even for the immigrants who voted for Trump, because they’ve expanded the net to the point where if you’re basically a nonwhite American moving around in any of the coastal cities, you’re a potential target for these guys. That’s going to make a difference.

They’re going to be in these forever wars. And a big chunk of their voting base is going to find their benefits disappearing under the dismantling of Medicaid.

I do not see how someone like Vance overcomes this. Maybe Trump could have talked his way out of it. I don’t know how Vance does this.

The biggest problem for MAGA now is going to be, it has eight years of a track record that you can point to as being anything but antiestablishment, anything but populist, both on the domestic front and on the international front. It does not have anything like a magnetic leader the way Trump was. And finally, when you put all of your marbles into a certain personality, i.e., Trump, and say that this is what MAGA is, then when that personality is gone, you’re left kind of like that Roadrunner cartoon, suspended in midair for a second before you start falling to the ground. They’re going to have to come up with a program.

And that program, if it pretends to be an antiestablishment, populist program, is going to have to contend with the fact of these last eight years and what they actually did. Now, the final nail in the coffin, to my mind, is I don’t think the American ruling class is going to give them another shot.

I don’t see it, because the chaos in economic policy, both domestically and internationally — that chaos is not something that the corporate community wants. Trump had a chance. He had a chance with people like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. They could have been his bridge to some of the faster-growing sectors of the American business class with tech, with microchips, with the more high-end industries. But he seems to be blowing it with all of them. So now it also doesn’t have a foot inside the corporate community.

Therefore, I would not be surprised even if they make it through 2026. My expectation is that the next presidential election could be very difficult — not just for the MAGA movement, which is probably going to die, but for the party itself.

Not right now. There’s absolutely no sign that they are on either front. I said earlier, as far as this thing about neocons goes and that vision of foreign policy that’s associated with neoconservatism — that’s just a mistake. It’s bipartisan. The Democrats have exactly the same view of American power internationally as do the Republicans. The only difference is the Democrats say, let’s try to rhetorically carry international multilateral institutions with us. Try, but do not be constrained by it. The Republicans say, screw the multilateral institutions. Democrats have always said, if they get in your way, ignore them. And the Republicans have said, why even worry about having them get in your way?

So that’s not much of a difference. Concretely, on the Middle East, what is the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans right now? The Republicans are saying we don’t want to go back to the JCPOA [the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear deal of 2015] with Iran. And the Democrats are saying, you should go back to it, but under the right conditions. And there isn’t a whole lot of groundswell against Trump saying zero enrichment. I haven’t seen any significant section of the Democratic Party saying, “This is insane. Why would they ever agree to zero enrichment?”

On Israel, Joe Biden was ideologically more committed to Israel than Donald Trump is. And there is still zero sign that anybody in the Democratic leadership is going to try to dealign from Israel or to move away from the decades-long occupation and now the genocide against the Palestinians. I don’t see that happening.

On domestic policy, there is a section of the Democratic Party that is redistributive, that wants to see a Bernie Sanders–style domestic tax policy and economic policy, but it’s weak. It’s very, very weak. And we’ve seen now across two elections that the rest of the party, the centrists, view Sanders as a bigger threat than Trump. And I think they will do everything they can to push [the Sanders wing] out.

In any case, without Sanders, I don’t know who is there to take up the mantle. Zohran Mamdani is making a huge splash, but we have to see how it plays out. What I see is the most likely scenario is that the Democrats just hope that voter anger is sufficient to drive enough people back into the party while they offer them nothing in return. This is the problem with the winner-take-all system. The 2028 election is going to be one where the Republicans are in big trouble, but it doesn’t mean that the Democrats are going to swing back to power. And even if they do — since they are not trying to build a durable, lasting coalition around real goals — it might just be a one-and-done where in 2032, you see the Republicans coming back to power. I’m not optimistic about that at all.

It’s true that Trump has dominated political discourse the last ten years in a way that I don’t think any president has since Ronald Reagan. That is, I think, what makes it attractive to say that we’re in the age of Trump.

In that sense, it’s true, precisely because he has defined the issues and he’s defined the parameters of debate. He set the agenda in a way that very few people have in the last sixty, eighty years. But if the standard we’re using is the previous ages, like the age of Reagan or the age of Roosevelt, then this one doesn’t even begin to compare.

There’s an important point in highlighting this. We are in a sense in the age of Trump, in the way I said, which is that he’s been the central figure and he’s defined the issues in a way that nobody else has. But when Reagan dominated the scene and, before him, Franklin D. Roosevelt dominated the scene, they shifted the political economy in dramatic ways. What I mean by that is they shifted the distribution of power, and the distribution of income and wealth, in a way that the people before and after them did not.

Roosevelt marked the onset of the American welfare state and American social democracy, however weak it might be compared to other countries. It was real. It was a dramatic departure from the whole period from the 1890s to the 1920s, let’s say.

When Reagan comes to power, it inaugurates and accelerates the dismantling of the welfare state, the attack on labor, and a shift back toward the power of capital. That’s a dramatic change in the balance of power — then of course in the distribution of income, because this was when the gains by the poor stopped dead in their tracks for about forty years.

Trump is different, right? While rhetorically he’s managed to dominate the scene, what’s he done in the actual distribution of power and the distribution of income? Zilch, zippo, nothing. Trump, in fact, has no alternative economic or political model to present to the American people. And there’s a reason for that.

Think of it this way — Trump has been spit out from the bowels of the American establishment. He’s a multibillionaire, a failed entrepreneur, which basically makes him typical. He hates the poor. He loves power and wealth. He’s rich. This is not somebody you would expect to be a harbinger of change. This is somebody who you would expect to represent all the worst aspects of the era. And he does. And what did this person actually implement when he had power? It was a whole bunch of “more of the same.”

The only antiestablishment thing you could say he’s done is trying to dismantle the state, if you think the bureaucracy is the establishment. To any intelligent person, the bureaucracy isn’t the establishment. It’s just the servants of the establishment. He substituted attacking the state for attacking the actual holders of power. Why does all this matter? It matters because you have to ask the question, how did this become the age of Trump when Trump himself has nothing to offer? The reason is people invested in him all the hopes and all the anger that they had toward the system.

What he delivered was a big nothing-burger as far as change goes. If you had an actual left in this country, if you had an actual organized presence of a labor party, of trade unions that had real influence and were actually mobilizing, this would be the biggest opportunity the Left has had probably in a hundred years. It would be the biggest opportunity to actually install and put into place visionary programs, because Trump represents the utter and total bankruptcy of the neoliberal agenda.

The reason he got power was that the American political establishment does not know how to handle an electoral rebellion against neoliberalism. Since 2016, what we’ve seen is that the American electorate has basically said to its masters, we’re sick and tired of this. We’re sick of the last fifty years of governance, of the way you’ve lorded over us, of all the hatred you show toward us, whether you’re a Democrat or Republican. We’re sick of being insecure, and we’re sick of not having jobs and wages.

Trump took rhetorical advantage of that and said, “I’m your man. I’m anti– this, that, and the other. I hate the blob. I hate the state. I hate the rich.” He said all that. What he delivered to them was nothing. That anger is still there.

That insistence, that demand for somebody who actually gives a shit about everyday people, is still there. What Donald Trump has shown is that neither party has anything to offer right now. The Democrats will continue with their “I’m not him” campaigns, and the Republicans will continue with their “fear the immigrants and fear the world” campaigns, but that’s gonna deliver nothing.

The Achilles’ heel of the ruling elites in Europe and in the United States today is that even though they’re presiding over the political crisis of neoliberalism, the legitimacy crisis of neoliberalism, they’re thoroughly wedded to the regime. They have nothing else to offer. The plight of working people, the impossible situation that they’re in on both sides of the Atlantic, is that while they don’t want this package, there’s nobody on the scene credible who’s offering them an alternative.

So yeah, we’re in the age of Trump — but Trump himself has done nothing to deserve that moniker. What we can do on our part is keep doing the best we can to try to construct an organizational and political alternative. Until there’s a political organization, until there’s a family of political institutions and organizations bringing poor people together and presenting them with a positive vision — not just “we hate Trump,” not just “we hate dictatorship,” but a positive vision of what we’re willing to fight for — you might stay in the age of Trump for a very, very long time, even though everyone hates him.