Donald Trump was US president between 2016 and 2020. His term in office was notable for its shambolic administration and constant staff turnover due to his erratic style of operating and the fractious opportunism of his underlings. He repeatedly used a “three-card trick” to confuse opposition to his plans.

Trump’s technique was to loudly draw attention to nonsensical ideas, quickly shuffling from one to another in order to distract notice from his real project. In his ghost-written autobiography, The Art of the Deal he uses the expression “truthful hyperbole” as a euphemism for his lying.

That was Trump 1.0. Trump 2.0 comes to power with a loyal, but no less chaotic apparatus but armed with the gruesome Project 2025, a well-designed and thoroughly reactionary project plan.

Externally, his intention is on re-ordering the world, with little concern for human civilisation. Internally, he is aiming at achieving a massively anti-democratic counter-revolution within the United States that could reinstitute Jim Crow-style apartheid. To cover for this, he has reactivated his three-card trick.

Holocaust 2.0

With breathtaking audacity on February 4, Trump announced that the US would take over the Gaza Strip and transform it into valuable real estate. He said that it would be a “Riviera of the Middle East” after the existing Palestinian residents were expelled. His stated vision is of a resort literally built upon the graves of an exterminated people.

Sitting beside him Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could scarcely control his glee. What was being proclaimed to the world was US endorsement of the next steps of the Zionist far right’s maximum program. That plan was first proclaimed in the 1920s by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the openly fascist wing of the Zionist movement.

Jabotinsky envisaged Zionist Israel controlling a massive segment of the Middle East. Since 1948, Israel has never proclaimed what are its borders. However, shoulder patches that some Israeli soldiers in Gaza are wearing proclaim that “Israel’s Promised Land” stretches from the Nile, up to Turkey, over all of the nation of Jordan, half of Syria and Iraq plus the northern section of Saudi Arabia.

In brazen breach of international law Trump openly called for the removal of Palestinians from Gaza, which supposedly is a task left to the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). In Gaza the IDF has practiced mass murder, starvation and other war crimes. Trump was silent on the continuation of those techniques. However, in a presidential election debate with Joe Biden in July last year Trump said that the US should let Israel “finish the job” in Gaza.

On February 4, Trump said that Egypt and Jordan should accept the expelled Palestinians. There is no direct path from Gaza to Jordan. That statement put the West Bank Palestinians directly in the frame of reference.

The danger is that Palestinians who resist expulsion from either Gaza or the West Bank will be massacred by the IDF, starved or otherwise reduced to desperation. With the exception of gas chambers, this would be a repeat of the Nazi techniques used against Jews and others during the World War II Holocaust. Under Generalplan Ost the Nazis used mass starvation and mass shootings as means of extermination. In the case of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, they used flamethrowers to incinerate Jews, a technique similar to the incendiary bombing of Gaza.

To assist the IDF in its work Trump has authorised the delivery of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, something that Biden found too politically costly to allow. Also, Israel is to receive GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast bombs, the so-called Mother of All Bombs (MOAB). These 22,000-pound monsters have only ever once been used in combat, at Trump’s order in April 2017.

When the US military tested the MOAB in 2003 it created a mushroom cloud that was visible for over 32 kilometres. The military use of such a weapon against Hamas is questionable, but as a weapon of mass terror its appeal is obvious.

This possibly impending Holocaust 2.0 has to be seen as one element of Trump’s overall global agenda for US imperialism. In that, he has a myriad of cards in play in his con game.

Trump’s vision of multipolarity

On January 30, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the US would no longer operate as “the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem.” That is because humanity now lives in “a multipolar world, [with] multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.”

He also specifically referenced “celebrating the 80th anniversary this year of the end of the Second World War”, an event which has surfaced as a possibly significant part of the Trump card shuffle.

Rubio’s comments indicate that a sufficiently large segment of the US ruling class has decided that it is no longer feasible for US imperialism to arrogantly and hypocritically impose its “rules-based order,” which has become threadbare of a moral cover. The ethical humbug is to be ditched and raw, bullying imperialism is the order of the day.

Rubio’s comments have been followed by a dizzying rush of US strategic realignments.

The New York Times reported on February 12 that US Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth told a meeting of countries supporting Ukraine that a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is “an unrealistic objective” and an “illusionary goal” and would not be objectives of a Trumpian peace deal.

Essentially, this is a realistic appraisal of the facts on the ground in Ukraine. The US and European Union cannot militarily overwhelm Russia in Ukraine and so the proxy war gambit has run its course.

On February 14, Trump’s vice-president, JD Vance gave a speech to the Munich Security Conference in Germany in which he said that in Washington “there is a new sheriff in town,” and the time has come for “a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine”.

Vance went on to castigate European governments for retreating from their declared values and ignoring voter concerns on migration and free speech. One free speech item he highlighted was the propagation of the claim that the Covid virus was manufactured in a Chinese clinic.

The Lowy Institute’s Michael Fullilove, who was at the event told ABC Radio National’s Global Roaming program said that Vance’s address was met by stunned silence. On February 21, the right-wing regional Australian newspaper, the West Australian editorialised that Trump’s manoeuvres bring Australia’s security relationship with the USA into question.

Such an editorial in a city far from the centres of power may appear irrelevant. However, the HMAS Stirling naval base south of Perth is critical to the AUKUS anti-China military alliance. That the mouthpiece of Western Australia’s oligarchy has raised doubts shows that Trump’s diplomacy is unsettling many sectors.

US and Russian delegations met in the Saudi Arabian city of Riyadh on February 18 and began the process of thrashing out a peace settlement for the Ukraine war. The talks are not transparent, but it appears that a broader set of security guarantees could be on the table.

On February 12, Trump put another card into play. He told reporters that he wants to discuss halving the amount of US, Russian and Chinese military spending.

Vladimir Putin has invited Trump to Moscow to attend the 80^th anniversary of the Red Army triumph over Nazi Germany on May 8. This resonates with Marco Rubio’s seemingly odd reference to the anniversary in his January 30 statement. Chinese president Xi Jin Ping will be there too, creating a perfect opportunity for discussions about military disarmament.

When speaking on February 12, Trump said this could be done once the US and Russia “straighten it all out” in the Middle East and Ukraine. How the Middle East is to be straightened out if Israel has been authorised and armed to commit a holocaust was not addressed. Or is one of the players in Trump’s card game meant to be disappointed?

In these brutal displays of realpolitik Trump is essentially demonstrating brazenly what has been the mainstay of US for decades: at any time of its choosing the USA can simply walk away from any mess its war mongering creates and leave others to clean up the mess.

Jim Crow 2.0

Parallel to all these machinations is Trump’s counter-revolutionary assault on democratic rights in the USA in line with Project 2025 and especially its 180-Day Playbook.

Project 2025 summarises its objectives as:

• Secure the border, finish building the wall, and deport illegal aliens
• De-weaponize the Federal Government by increasing accountability and oversight of the FBI and DOJ
• Unleash American energy production to reduce energy prices
• Cut the growth of government spending to reduce inflation
• Make federal bureaucrats more accountable to the democratically elected President and Congress
• Improve education by moving control and funding of education from DC bureaucrats directly to parents and state and local governments
• Ban biological males from competing in women’ s sports

The Project’s Playbook is a program “of actions to be taken in the first 180 days of the new Administration to bring quick relief to Americans suffering from the Left’s devastating policies.” Elon Musk’s audacious intervention into the mechanism of the US bureaucracy using the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is a direct expression of the Playbook.

Musk has dispatched six young IT professionals on raiding missions to obtain vast amounts of government data, in the name of achieving “mass headcount reductions across the federal bureaucracy”. Exact figures of the numbers of workers who have lost their jobs have yet to be revealed, but it is believed to be in the hundreds of thousands.

Astonishingly, caught up in the dragnet have been key nuclear safety workers at the National Nuclear Security Administration. Musk then scrambled to rehire them when he realised how dangerous his actions were.

It is believed that Musk’s IT crew are feeding vast amounts of government employee information through AI systems to identify any who have been hired or promoted in connection with Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) policies. DEI has emerged as the pet hate of the Trump 2.0 administration.

It could be that all those workers may be targeted for elimination as DOGE proceeds on its wrecking mission. This amounts to an assault on the broadening of democratic rights hard-won by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and the succeeding waves of the women’s, LGBTI and disabled peoples’ liberation movements.

A particular focus of DOGE attacks has been medical research and service delivery. It has targeted the Department of Health and Human Services, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the National Institutes of Health, among others. Thousands of workers have lost their jobs.

A possible cause of the hostility to this particular sector is the role that health research plays in funding US universities. Smashing university funding is part of the Playbook’s plan to “promote educational opportunities outside the woke-dominated system of public schools and universities, including trade schools, apprenticeship programs, and student-loan alternatives that fund students’ dreams instead of Marxist academics.”

The Playbook says bluntly “the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” It dreams of abolishing “a higher education establishment captured by woke ‘diversicrats’.

It names particular federal laws that it says are the source of the problem. Among them are the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Higher Education Act of 1965, which were part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty program. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act are also in the crosshairs.

If these laws are eliminated or otherwise negated, the USA is headed backwards towards the era of Jim Crow apartheid, either de facto or de jure.

Breadth of classes suffering and “the mother of all bubbles”

Also victimised by DOGE’s sweeping actions have been small businesses that have already delivered services to the government under contract. These contracts, mostly for low-cost support services such as computer systems and workforce training supposedly total $US 8.5 billion. Their legal payments have simply been stopped.

The political reaction to all of this from the Democratic Party establishment has been rhetorical but passive. The Democrats leader in the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries said on February 12 that the party has “no leverage” because the Republicans control both houses of Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court.

However, National Public Radio reports that there is a “a disconnect between Democratic lawmakers and many of their constituents. House Democrats say the phones in their offices have been ringing off the hook with constituents and grassroots supporters demanding action.”

Another factor that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats dare mention is the increasing fragility of US capitalism. As the Marxist economist, Michael Roberts, points out, there is presently an earnings boom in US corporations, but that is driven “by the banking sector which is making good profits from high interest rates and corporate borrowing deals.”

The corporations are running to the banks for loans because they are in trouble. Roberts says, “for the vast majority of US companies, those outside the burgeoning banking, social media and tech, things are not so great.” In fact, US corporate bankruptcies have hit their highest level since the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis.

The US stock market is booming, but that is restricted to the “Magnificent 7” of high-tech companies that are promising a profits bonanza from artificial intelligence. Roberts quotes Ruchir Sharma, chair of Rockefeller International as saying that the US stock market boom is currently “the mother of all bubbles”.

Sharma went on to say that US stocks are “over-owned, overvalued and overhyped to a degree never seen before. As with all bubbles, it is hard to know when this one will deflate, or what will trigger its decline.”

Taken together, there is the raw material for a mass movement of struggle against Trump that the Democratic Party elite is terrified to mobilise.

There are hundreds of thousands of workers licking their wounds after being roughly thrown out of their jobs, uncounted numbers of petite bourgeois contractors counting the cost of blocked payments, thousands of intellectuals driven out of research institutions and millions of people affected by the counter-revolutionary wave against the 1960s liberation era.

On February 17, which was President’s Day in the USA, a holiday celebrated federally and in 24 states, thousands of protesters took to the streets in the first wave of opposition to Trump’s agenda. The actions were sparked by the newly organised 50501 Movement, which coordinates by using Instagram.

As the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) put it on January 22: “We won’t retreat in the face of Trump and the billionaires’ war on our rights. The power of the people organised is stronger than the people in power.” Such a mass movement could be the biggest and most important card in play.