Clinton Democrats, British Thatcherites and German social democrats embraced austerity in a misguided bid to contain public debt. But U.S. Republicans never truly sought to curb deficits even when they sang austerity’s praises and pledged to shrink the State. To them, government spending cuts were always about reducing support for the working class within budgets that intentionally ballooned the deficit on behalf of the ruling class.

From Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, U.S. Republicans campaigned railing against ‘big government’. But, once in government, they reliably inflated deficits with tax cuts for the wealthy and massive new military expenditures. Though unburdened by any residue of Germanic deficit phobia, their goal remained austerian at its moral core: to ‘starve the beast’ of America’s social welfare system while, at once, borrowing more further to enrich the wealthy.

In this light Donald Trump is the quintessential post-war Republican. Leveraging Big Tech’s alure, stablecoins, low corporation taxes, the threat of tariffs and, like every one of this predecessors, the dollar’s unrivalled power to attract foreign capital, he bet that supercharging the deficit would accomplish a time-honoured Republican objective: whip up enough austerian frenzy within Congress to gut Social Security and Medicaid.

Even by the pugilistic standards of Republican class politics, President Trump’s latest budget was extraordinary. Reading his Big Beautiful Bill, confirms how the old pretexts for austerity (‘fiscal responsibility,’ ‘debt reduction’) were, once again, sacrificed on the altar of the true aim: dismantling state support for the many while enriching the few. However, that’s where the comparisons with previous Republican Presidents run out of steam.

Ronald Reagan’s Democrats, who like Margaret Thatcher’s blue-labour supporters kept the Right in power throughout the 1980s and beyond, were working class people who did well in the midst of an unemployment surge, taking advantage of increasing average earnings for workers lucky enough to retain their jobs in the midst of massive job losses, thus escaping an ignominious demotion to the precariat.

Following the 2008 financial collapse, US capitalism changed forever. While the banks were being bailed out, American society was witnessing the steady demolition of the Great Wall that used to divide its working classes between the majority of workers with secure, unionised, high quality jobs and the untouchables scrounging for a living in the killing fields of the market for precarious labour. Where Reagan and the Bushes won elections because the secure proletarians voted for them and the untouchables were too disheartened to vote at all, Trump won by rallying the untouchables and, in so doing, attracting enough of the increasingly insecure hitherto secure proletarians.

Against the backdrop of the Clintons’ open romancing of Wall Street, Barack Obama’s outrageous banker bailouts, and the Biden administration’s suicidal strategy of telling the suffering masses that they should rejoice for the ‘excellent’ economy the Democrats had delivered to them, Trump tapped in the accumulated working class rage. All it took was his mumbled musings on ‘broken America’ and on the ‘carnage’ that they faced wherever they looked in their fly-over communities.

Democrats hope and pray that just as the working class abandoned them, once the pain from Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill begins to bite, they will abandon him too. Trump’s budget has been, unquestionably, the nastiest instrument of class war since the Reagan-Thatcher-George W. Bush years. Bidding for the title of the ultimate inverted Robin Hood, Trump weaponised the mandate he received by poorer Americans savagely to cut their social and medical services while delivering vast handouts to the rich.

I too hope and pray that the MAGA base will rebel against a President who so readily sold his blue-collar voters down the river. However, I suspect they might not. The American working class did not rebel against Reagan when their collective prospects tanked while the fat cats got richer courtesy of federal borrowing. The reason? They were sold two interlocking dreams: The dream of capital gains on their homes, driven by the debt-fuelled bubble of Reagonomics, which ultimately burst with devastating effects in 2008. And the dream of a resurgent, globally dominant America that, finally, shed the albatross of Vietnam from around its neck.

Today, Trump is also peddling two interlocking dreams. One is the dream of new riches from the crypto bubble, reflecting a novel assault on the common good that Reagan and the Bushes lacked the technology even to imagine. Weaponising cryptocurrencies, stablecoins in particular, it amounts to a campaign to privatise the dollar. Coupled with the AI frenzy, this has set off a fresh optimism amongst the MAGA working class base and, more tangibly, a bonanza in Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Blind to the enormous risks of this new variant of the something-for-nothing mentality, which prevailed in the 1980s and led to the subprime mortgage debacle, a significant segment of the MAGA movement dreams of future non-wage sources of income. In their eyes, Trump may be robbing them of tangible sources of help (food stamps, Medicaid) but he is the conjuror of new magical forms of wealth that come with the added bonus of an ‘anti-systemic’, ‘decentralised’ aura.

The second dream is the Trumpian equivalent of Reagan’s triumph against the Soviet Union. In a Fox television interview, Scott Bessent, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, was interviewed on the recent US-EU trade deal which, amongst other pointedly one-sided concessions to the US President, included the absurd commitment by the European Union to invest in the United States $600billion by 2029. Asked whether this amounted to ‘offshore appropriation’, Mr Bessent diplomatically agreed: “Well Larry, I think a good framing of that is [that] other countries in essence are providing us with a sovereign wealth fund.”

Taken together, the promise of a crypto money tree and the thought that their President is making the rest of the world pay for America’s rebirth may be enough to shield Trump from the wrath of his betrayed working class base for a decade or so. If it does, the question becomes: Who will harvest the grapes of wrath after Trump’s con job is, eventually, found out and the accumulated rage demands a new populist narrative?

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