Donald Trump and the threat for American Democracy

Understanding the rise of a Lumpen Capitalist

Today as Donald Trump tries again to re-enter the White House as the President of the United States, even his most ardent and fanatical supporters still do not fully understand him. And those who shrug off his most dangerous impulses and malapropisms laughingly buy into his carefully crafted bombastic and outlandish persona concluding that “Trump will be Trump.” In fact, I’ve heard Black men who should know better say out loud that “I like that man” but are unable to explain WHAT exactly they like about him outside of his comical stupidity, banal racism, and machismo when it comes to women – all women. I’m not qualified to analyze Trump’s brain and his erratic behavior, lies and misogyny. But I can use historical data to understand the type of person that he is.

First, Donald Trump is a died-in-the-wool capitalist who wants to “drill baby drill” for more and more oil, and who could care less about the negative impact on planet earth just as long he and his cronies fill their pockets with oodles of cash. Maybe the rush to find water on Mars is all about the mega-billionaire classes hedging their bets and who want to be able to bail from earth when climate change becomes too much of an inconvenient hindrance. But Trump is not just any ole capitalist – he’s what Karl Marx call “a lumpen capitalist.” I know, this is a new kind of term for you political science majors. But let me explain.

Writing in Class Struggles in France. 1848–1850, Marx noted that the financial aristocracy of that time “in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the?rebirth of the lumpen proletariat on the heights of bourgeois society.” He was not and did not refer to “finance aristocracy” as part of finance capital that plays an integral role in bourgeois economy, but specifically to the “vultures and raiders” who swing from speculation to swindling and who are the near criminal or extralegal excrescences from the rich just like the “lumpen proletariat” proper are excrescences from the poor.

We have it on good authority that an expert group of American psychiatrists and mental health professionals made a long list of known personality disorders including narcissism, delusional disorder, paranoia, unbridled and extreme present hedonism, and more, shortly after Donald Trump took office in 2017. As I said, I’m in no position to either validate or reject these projections. And I hasten to add that psychological conclusions and designations are not the best way to analyze the Trump Phenomenon. To try and analyze him correctly and to understand his politics at this time in American history, one has to link his character to the dominant socio-economic and political structure of the United States in this 21st century dispensation.

But EXACTLY what is a Lumpen Capitalist?

A lumpen capitalist refers to a type of business owner or entrepreneur who engages in exploitative and/or unethical practices to maximize profits, often operating outside the formal, legal, or ethical boundaries of traditional capitalism. The term combines "lumpen," a word originally used by Karl Marx to describe the "lumpen proletariat" (a socially marginalized underclass with little class consciousness), with "capitalist," indicating someone who owns and controls capital or businesses.

Lumpen capitalists typically engage in activities that exploit vulnerable populations, bypass regulations, or capitalize on economic desperation. Their business models often rely on precarious or informal labor, and they may engage in practices that undermine workers' rights, environmental standards, or public welfare. Indeed, the perfect, textbook definition and characterization of Donald John Trump.

So, let me start by asserting that the foundation and character of Donald Trump’s lumpen capitalism is demonstrated in many ways, starting with his shady, illegal (or bordering on the illegal) financial operations. To be sure, in their daily business activities, ordinary capitalists will often take illegal shortcuts in pursuit of profit — like, for example, avoiding paying taxes, violating or skirting around some government regulations, illegally smashing and discouraging union activities at the workplace — all in the course of managing otherwise “normal” capitalist business operations.

However, for lumpen-capitalists like Trump those shortcuts ARE the principal strategies, tactics and norms for profit-making. They are the modus operandi and stock in trade that form the very foundation of their business operations.

For this group, business skullduggery and borderline thievery is what pervades all financial activities. For ordinary capitalists borrowing money from banks and other financial institutions is routine. They only resort to bankruptcy protections occasionally, and usually as a last resort. Juxtapose this to Donald Trump’s record in business: His businesses have gone into bankruptcy no less than six times, five times for his casinos, and once for New York’s Plaza Hotel.

And consider this: Donald Trump allegedly secretly met with representatives of several big banks to find a way out of his staggering $2 billion in bank debt that included personal liability on guarantees and unsecured loans amounting to $800 million, as well as more than $1 billion in junk bonds on his failed casinos. [According to Gwenda Blair, business historian (1990)]. As Blair explained: in less than 10 years, Trump had become the “Brazil of Manhattan,” with annual interest payments of approximately $350 million exceeding his cash flow. Only two of his assets, his half of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, and the retail component of Trump Tower, had at that time any chance of making a profit.

True to his lumpen predatory character,?Donald Trump has an almost adversarial relationship with both the truth and to government office. As president of the United States, his person and the office of the president were merged and fused into each other, where political office was there only for him to benefit himself and his friends. As such, this abnormal development resulted in Trump’s political conduct becoming an impediment to the most important political function of the capitalist state: acting as a unifier and arbiter of the upper ruling classes.

Trump thus became a chronic breaker of the “normal” rules of political comportment essential to the organized and managed functions of being a trusted and reliable referee to intra-capitalist conflicts. In this context, he refused to publicize his tax returns and place his financial and real estate holdings in a so-called blind trust, routine rules of the system that both Republican and Democratic officeholders have adhered to for many years. Trump ignored many of the set political rules of the game, especially those whose express purpose was to maintain the “civility” regarded as essential to political stability and the harmonious alternation in power between Republican and Democrats – the two sides of the corporate duopoly.

As a lumpen capitalist Trump created and has instilled a bullying atmosphere and environment in politics, often justifying illegality and resorting to mobster language, as when he complained about the practice of “flipping witnesses” to implicate the top bosses in the criminal hierarchies, and when he denied that White House Counsel Don McGahn was “a John Dean style rat.”

True, many “traditional” American capitalists mistrust Donald Trump. But that’s not because they see him as morally lacking; but because they see him as an arbitrary, unpredictable, and unreliable wild-card who does not accept any rules except those that he makes and finds expedient at any given moment. Even though many US capitalists have benefited from his former presidency, they now see him not only as NOT part of them as a class, but also as an outside political actor with whom it is impossible to come to a mutual understanding of what to expect from each other.

Finally, Donald Trump’s quest to win the United States presidency in 2024 is not about making life better for the vast majority of Americans – millions who fanatically support him. It is all about him and the MAGA cult of the personality with him occupying all of the rungs of judge, jury and executioner. He’s successfully hijacked the Republican Party with the alliance of religious conservatism and white nationalism that is more enduring than the Reaganite Republican neoliberal-religious alliance that preceded it. If he’s not stopped this November and becomes the next POTUS, this lumpen capitalist will settle scores, elevate pettiness to the national level, and ruthlessly punish those whom he believes wronged him. This is who Donald John Trump is.

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