The History Making Machine

I’ve always wondered if people living through history knew they were living through history.

When I say history, I mean periods of time studied as central to the formation of the world future generations came to exist in.

I mean periods of global time that were contingent on events happening in a certain order in certain places.

Because everything, technically, is history. What the really important stuff is, the contingent stuff, is much harder to pin down.

In the last few years it’s been tempting to think we are living through history: Brexit, Trump 1.0, the pandemic.

But I’ve often thought this was just our egos talking, our subconscious desire to be Important People dictating how we understand the world around us. Our desire to be the ones - the special ones - truly living through history.

The reality is there have always been wars, always been madmen, always been disease, always been political crises, always been economic crises.

Picking out the important wars, madmen, disease and crises, locating history in the swirling of events, is much harder to do.

But after three months of Trump 2.0 I’m calling it: this is history.

These wars, madmen, diseases and crises are for the history books.

If there’s anyone left to study the past, in the future, they will study these times, these events.

And, critically, they will study them in their contingent order.

Trump 1.0 wasn’t history, not really. He was a first in a certain presentational sense, but that didn’t make him a man of history. For the most part he governed as a standard Republican. Rhetorically cruder, but not a great departure from what had come before.

Making him a man of history at that point was lazy.

Trump redux is a different beast.

Trump 2.0 is set to be a central, history book figure.

His will be an era-defining period of governance that will shape the world for decades.

Before we look at why, let’s look at how we got here. What created Trump 2.0? Four main things: Trump 1.0, Covid, Biden, Gaza.

Which is to say, the four-year gap between his first and second victories is absolutely critical.

We wouldn’t have got this Trump if he’d have won in 2020.

Why didn’t he win in 2020? Covid.

One of the things we’ve forgotten in our desperate rush to memory-hole the pandemic is that covid is the reason Biden won. All the polls said so. Trump was viewed as bungling the initial response. It seems unthinkable now, but Trump’s unwillingness to take covid seriously was seen as the main obstacle to a return to the normality most people craved. Biden was the safe pair of hands that could rid America of the coronavirus and get it back to business.

But, in the emergency covid period Biden presided over, attitudes hardened. People—at the elite and regular citizenry level—were radicalised. Elon Musk went from tweeting about rockets and hyping Tesla’s LGBTQ initiatives in 2019 to a self-declared obsession with defeating ‘the woke mind virus’ by 2022. So to this end he bought Twitter and pumped $100 million into getting Trump elected.

Among the citizenry the pandemic created new cultural dividing lines: lockdowns, masks and vaccine mandates. The measures introduced to combat the virus came to symbolise an anti-freedom to which the freedom-loving Donald Trump was the antidote. This was a bizarre turnaround: just a few years earlier Trump had been rejected because his own response to covid was seen as the obstacle to normal and the freedom it implied.

In both moments then, as counterintuitive as it appears, in the election of both Biden and Trump 2.0 we can see the craving for a normal that had somehow slipped out of reach.

In them both we can see the emergence of a coming apart.

Trump also had time, granted to him by defeat, to consider Trump 1.0. His main reflection was that he’d been held back and if he had his time again, he’d go all-out.

Trump’s first administration, despite his drain-the-swamp rhetoric, was staffed largely by Washington normies and insiders. They contained his mercenary instincts and kept him on a standard issue Republican trajectory. In the Biden years Trump spoke often about learning from this and how he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. This time, America really would be great again. Again. Surrounded by absolute fealty and craven loyalists, Fox News hosts and wrestling magnates, his instincts are encouraged, not reined in.

The Biden years also gave us the Gaza genocide.

The refusal of Kamala Harris to break with Biden and his support for Israel’s genocide meant that millions couldn’t, in good conscience, vote for her. According to some polling, 30% of those who voted for Biden in 2019 didn’t vote for Harris in 2023 because of Gaza. Overall, 15 million fewer people voted for Harris than had voted for Biden. Suppressed turnout was key to Trump’s victory.

The Biden years also gave us Ukraine.

When Trump says the Ukraine war probably wouldn’t have happened if he’d been elected in 2020, because of his relationship with Putin, I believe him. And now, due to Trump’s desire to end a war that likely wouldn’t need ending in a different historical timeline, Europe is splitting from the US.

And now, sweeping tariffs. A global trade war.

This is where we have to start seriously considering the idea of history in the making.

Because, coming so soon after his shift on Ukraine, Trump’s tariffs are giving some European leaders serious reason to reconsider their reliance on, and alliance with, the US. The soft weakening of a military alliance is one thing. The hard breaking of an economic alliance is another thing altogether.

Tariffs are forcing European countries to really consider the shape of the west for the first time in a long time.

It was just announced that a delegation of European leaders including Emanuel Macron and Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s socialist party leader (who incidentally is presiding over the strongest economy in Europe right now), will soon meet with China’s Xi to discuss deepening economic cooperation.

In this we can start to see the contingencies of history.

Trump is blowing up the global neoliberal trade system that has stood unchallenged for the best part of fifty years because of China. In going global with country tariffs, the US is attempting to reassert global economic hegemony. When I wrote about the tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China a couple of months ago, I tried to understand them logically. Now, with them having gone global with the approach, I get it more clearly. They are a blunt message to the entire world: you can’t survive without us. Get in line. Do as we say. Give us cheaper access to your markets. Let us get even richer off you.

The US is betting countries can’t, or won’t, do business without them. Trump’s betting they’ll get in line.

Some might. Many won’t.

And the ones that won’t get in line won’t do so because of China.

China gives the world options that didn’t exist before. China is no longer just a place where things get made. It’s also a place where you can sell things to the biggest and fastest growing consumer economy in the world.

It’s an alternative pole.

From this point of view, America’s trade war against China is twenty years too late.

China, where, via a lab leak or a cave, a pandemic virus emerged that helped significantly to lay the ground for Trump 2.0.

Contingencies.

Of course America’s economy can’t be fully replaced by anyone. It is still the biggest economy, still the richest country. The dollar is still dominant.

And it is these tensions that will force history on us.

Empires don’t just lie down.

When America doesn’t get what it wants, when countries don’t fall into line, when it doesn’t reassert dominance, Trump isn’t going to give up.

And a world in economic crisis, which is what these tariffs will deliver, will give America, as the primary antagonist, nothing to lose.

They will lash out and chase their losses.

For this reason a US invasion and annexation of Greenland within the next couple of years is likely.

Israel, after cleansing Gaza and annexing the West Bank, will take advantage of global chaos and attack Iran with full US support and weaponry.

War, in some capacity, limited or full blown, between the US and China, shouldn’t surprise anyone.

The Gaza genocide has already put the concept of international law on life support. We stand primed for its full disintegration.

Conflict with China wouldn’t just be on Trump. Every US administration for the last thirty years has been war gaming it. Money has flowed easily to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and the military-industrial complex by invoking the threat from a country that, unlike the US, has no track record of military invasions.

In the meantime the US will ramp up the disappearance and deportation of non-citizens who dare to criticise genocide.

With war plans in motion, they’ll then move on to American citizens and broader critics of empire.

Germany is already following America’s lead and deporting those who oppose genocide.

Others in Europe will follow.

With the loss of the US as an anchoring presence, European bifurcation will speed up. Some countries will cling to the US, others will reorientate to China.

This bifurcation will come in the context of massive rearmament on a continent that historically has seeded the world’s major wars.

All of this as our planet burns and floods.

When we read about crises in history aren’t we always left with that nagging question: how did they let it get to that?

Couldn’t they see what was going to happen?

Why didn’t someone do something?

Like we study them, they will study us.

They will ask how.

But the future should know we are already tortured by the same question.

How did we let it get to this?