The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime

John Bellamy Foster

One week after the January 20, 2025, inauguration of Donald Trump in his second stint as U.S. president, Matthew J. Vaeth, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), issued a memorandum to federal departments and agencies ordering a temporary pause of agency, grant and loan, and financial assistance spending throughout the federal government. This was the opening shot in what the right has called the “Cold Civil War.” The order for a general freeze on federal civilian spending was most likely written by the incoming 2025 OMB director, Russell Vought, then awaiting confirmation by Congress. For Vought “the stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country” and that these enemies “already hold the weapons of the government apparatus,” which “they have aimed…at us.” Vought headed the OMB during the first Trump administration and was a key architect of Project 2025, the plan for the transitionto a new absolutist executive, issued in 2022 by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. He wrote the chapter on the “Executive Office of the President of the United States” for Project 2025 and founded the Center for Renewing America, an active branch of Project 2025, which was charged with writing hundreds of executive orders in advance to be implemented immediately on the re-ascendance of Trump to the White House. Project 2025 included plans to close down whole federal departments, massively cut the federal work force, and drastically reduce federal expenditures, forcing states, local governments, universities, and the media to fall in line with the Trump regime’s dictates.

The current mobilisation of the lower-middle class by the right wing of monopoly capital, particularly, the tech, finance, and oil interests, is initially aimed at dismantling the present “administrative state,” replacing it with one more conducive to a neofascist project. Nevertheless, in the process, a widening political gap is already opening up between the billionaire rulers above and their MAGA army below, between different elements within the evangelical movement, and among those supporting a political dictatorship and those wishing to retain liberal-democratic constitutional forms.

In line with all movements in the fascist genus, the current regime will inevitably betray its mass MAGA supporters on the radical right, seeking to relegate them to a more and more subservient and regimented role and negating any policies in fundamental conflict with its capitalist-imperial ends. Nevertheless, a mass of think tanks and influencers has arisen that seek to rationalise the irrational, building on those ideological elements that appeal to a white lower-middle class, but ultimately serving the needs of the billionaire capitalist class. Understanding the basis of this new irrationalism and the forms of class rule associated with it is crucial in the counter-hegemonic struggle for a democratic, egalitarian, and sustainable—and thus socialist—future for humanity as a whole.

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