President Trump, Inc. – How Big Business and Neoliberalism Empower Populism and the Far Right (Book Review)

“Donald Trump’s victory is an additional stone in the building of a new world.”

– Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National (France)

Seldom has the right book come along at just the right time to help discerning readers make sense of the US Empire at such a unique moment in world history. T.J. Coles’ President Trump, Inc. is such a book. Instead of embracing Deep State liberal globalist US “news” driven propaganda re: Trump’s grotesque personal peccadilloes, terrifying tweets, or public gaffes, or conservative nationalist US “news” driven drivel re: uncritically defending the POTUS, Coles presents a lucid, thoughtful, and well-researched account contextualizing Trump’s politics and policies in the bigger decades-old picture of neoliberalism, “austerity” economics, and populist politics. The result? An accessible, informative, and (dare we say?) enjoyable read.

In under 200 pages and in 2 parts, Coles presents useful historical background to Trump’s arrival (Part One) on the national and world stage as a faux populist with what he terms “the soul of a rebel.” In his cogent analysis, Coles considers the origins of neoliberalism in the 1970s, the collapsing middle class and the decline of working class unions, the poverty-driven resurgence of the far right as an expression of economic disappointment, and (the game changer!), the arrival of the so-called “alt-right” – billionaire populists like Robert Mercer who quietly backed Trump in 2016 to champion libertarian economic policies that would benefit the billionaire class at the expense of everyone else. In Part Two, Coles goes after what he calls the “Trump Deception,” looking at how Trump is fronting a complete overhaul of US economic policy – privatization uber alles – marked by “reform” of US trade deals, the US tax system, and US foreign policy. “President Trump is what happens when business replaces politics,” he writes in his conclusion. One might quibble with the finer points of Coles’ analysis, pointing out that neoliberal globalists fronted by the Clintons and the Obamas have been doing much the same thing in the name of “austerity” for three decades now, but what makes Coles’ book so valuable is the accessible breadth of his analysis. His book is a useful primer on the past 40 years of US political and economic life, and to his credit, he does not ignore the role of the “Deep State” and other often-overlooked actors in the arrival of what he calls a “Coup d’Trump. Pick up his book, pass it around, and free Vermont!