Trump Is Waging War on the Future

Opinion|The MAGA Movement’s Empty Vision of the Future

It’s fitting that a political movement whose slogan is the backward-looking “Make America Great Again” — and whose tribune, Donald Trump, appears to live in an eternal 1990 of his own mind — is waging war on the American future.

This war has four theaters of conflict. In the first, Trump is waging war on constitutional government, with a full-spectrum attack on the idea of the United States as a nation of laws and not men. He hopes to make it a government of one man: himself, unbound by anything other than his singular will. Should the president win his campaign against self-government, future Americans won’t be citizens of a republic as much as subjects of a personalist autocracy.

In the second theater of conflict, the MAGA movement is waging war on the nation’s economic future, rejecting two generations of integration and interdependency with the rest of the world in favor of American autarky, of effectively closing our borders to goods and people from around the world so that the United States might make itself into an impenetrable fortress — a garrison state with the power to dictate the terms of the global order, especially in its own hemisphere. In this new world, Americans will abandon service-sector work in favor of manufacturing and heavy industry.

“This is the new model,” the secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, said in an interview with CNBC last month, “where you work in these kind of plants for the rest of your life and your kids work here and your grandkids work here.” The reality is that this particular campaign — this effort to de-skill the working population of the United States — is more likely to immiserate the country and impoverish its residents than it is to inaugurate a golden age of prosperity.

Not content to leave Americans without a meaningful democratic future or one of broad economic prosperity, the White House is also fighting a pitched battle against a sustainable climate future.

In the same way that Trump and his allies have rejected the obligation to pass the nation’s tradition of self-governance on to the next generation, they have also rejected the obligation to pass a living planet on to those who will inherit the earth. Theirs, instead, is an agenda of unlimited resource extraction, with little regard for the consequences. Upon taking office, the president issued an executive order directing federal agencies to allow drilling in formerly protected areas. This, despite the fact that American energy production is at an all-time high — and the United States is now a net exporter of oil and gas.