Ahundred days after Trump’s second inauguration, the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama published a blistering critique of his rule. The single thread running through all Trump’s policies—‘impossibly large and unpredictable tariffs’, ‘illegally firing thousands of federal employees’, ‘snatching people with legal rights off the streets and deporting them to foreign prisons’, ‘attacking universities and academic research institutions with a meat cleaver’—was his ‘total disregard for law and norms’. Trump’s disregard for legality—and thirst for revenge—meant ‘worse is to come’.footnote¹ For Fukuyama, Trump was trying to consolidate executive power by eroding judicial independence, constraining press freedom and curtailing civil liberties—cornerstones of the liberal democracy that had emerged victorious in the 1990s, though now facing challenges.

This was in stark contrast to the triumphalist narrative propagated by the Trump White House. The key word here was ‘win’. Consider these headlines from the White House website: ‘Monday Morning Wins: Call It the “Trump Effect”’; ‘50 winsin 50 days: President Trump Delivers for Americans’; ‘week 15 wins: President Trump’s 100th Day Marked by More Success’; ‘50 Wins in the One Big Beautiful Bill’; ‘President Trump: “Our soldiers fight, fight, fight, and they win, win, win”’.footnote² The ‘win’ keyword is a linchpin of Trump’s rhetorical strategy, which retroactively frames every policy drawback as a success. These White House headlines sparked a wave of mockery on Chinese social media, where Trump has long been referred to by two nicknames. One is Chuan Jianguo (川建国), meaning ‘Trump the Nation Builder’, though the nation he is inadvertently building is China, not the us. The other is Dong Wang (懂王), or King Know-It-All. Now he is garnering a further reputation, based on jokes about his ‘winnism’ (赢学). But Trump is not the only adept of this art. In The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama famously celebrated liberal democracy as ‘the only competitor’ left standing in the ring, after the other ideologies collapsed.footnote³ Although his tone is nearly always cool and measured, in substance, knock-out victory is Fukuyama’s paradigm, too. Their respective approaches constitute dialectical manifestations of American hegemonic discourse, ostensibly oppositional yet fundamentally serving the same ends.

In one sense, the claim to be winning is an endogenous requirement of hegemony. As Gramsci defined it, this mode of rule comprises both coercion and consent. A famous critique theorized their relationship as analogous to bank reserves (hard power) and paper currency (circulating ideas) in a financial system.footnote⁴ This raises the question of how a sense of reward can be cashed out for supporters, on the basis of this veiled coercion. Victory discourse emerges as an obvious solution. On the international stage, architects of hegemonic rule tend to rely upon a two-part narrative. First, this posits a teleological direction for history, in which the social model of the leading power is not only the best available option but is bound to win. Second, and concomitantly, alignment with the hegemon is the best way to maximize success, while attempts to forge alternative alliances are doomed to failure.

Hegemonic rule has an intrinsic need for winners’ discourse, then. But the narrative designed for one power may not be suitable for another, and even within the same hegemony, epochal shifts may render previously effective paradigms obsolete. Fukuyama, singled out here as perhaps the subtlest of liberal democracy’s analytical proponents, betrays profound discomfort about the prospects for his ideological brand. His clash with Trump prompts two lines of inquiry. First, how contingent is the decline of Fukuyama’s paradigm—might it regain its commanding position? Second, what novel problematics does Trump’s victory discourse introduce and what systemic implications might they carry? I will begin, though, by examining Fukuyama’s diagnosis of liberal democracy’s dilemmas—and the meaning of Trump as their solution.

Winning deductions of political philosophy

Fukuyama first engaged with the question of what Donald Trump might represent as far back as 1992. The current us President is mentioned twice in The End of History and the Last Man, as Fukuyama lays out his philosophy of history. The book famously had its origins in a 1989 essay, ‘The End of History?’, published in The National Interest. Here Fukuyama deployed the Hegelian idea of the quest for recognition as the motor of history, reading it through the lens of Alexandre Kojève, whose work he had studied under Allan Bloom at Cornell.footnote⁵ The twentieth century was ending with ‘the unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism’, he wrote. ‘The triumph of the West, of the Western idea’ was evident in the exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives. The world was witnessing ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’ Following Kojève, Fukuyama posited that liberal democracy’s institutionalization of mutual recognition, through equal rights and citizenship, would constitute the ultimate resolution of the struggle for recognition, thereby bringing about ‘the end of history’. Crucially, this ‘end’ denoted not temporal cessation but rather the ‘goal’ of history’s recognition struggles.footnote⁶

This intervention predated the concatenation of geopolitical ruptures that began in the autumn of 1989—the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the ‘Velvet Revolution’ in Czechoslovakia, the dissolution of the Soviet Union—which even American intelligence circles had hardly anticipated. The Cold War victory of the us seemingly validated Fukuyama’s ‘End of History?’ prognosis, catapulting him to intellectual prominence. Three years later in the much-revised book-length version, The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama reworked the ‘struggle for recognition’ argument by tracing it back to the social psychology of Plato’s Republic and Socrates’s hypothesization of the tripartite structure of the soul. Between ‘reason’ (νοῦς) and ‘appetite’ (ἐπιθυμία) lay the quality of thymos (θυμός), which Fukuyama translated as ‘spirit’ or ‘heart’. Thymos, in this reading, expressed the need to place value on things, starting with one’s self, and hence the struggle for recognition.footnote⁷

However, Fukuyama now pointed out, liberal-democratic institutionalization might create new problems for the drive for recognition. These could arise from radical egalitarian impulses (isothymia), dissatisfied with the residual inequalities of the capitalist division of labour, but also from excessive superiority drives (megalothymia). This is where Fukuyama’s prescient critiques of Trump were introduced. The competition for wealth and fame could provide a productive outlet for megalothymic personalities within liberal democracies, The End of History noted. But they might still be targets for egalitarian resentment: ‘the passion for equal recognition—isothymia—does not necessarily diminish with the achievement of greater de facto equality and material abundance, but may actually be stimulated by it.’ As Tocqueville saw, love of equality could be a deeper and more abiding passion than love of liberty. The ‘arrogant display’ of ‘unbridled megalothymia’ by real-estate dealer Trump, for example, was highly visible and could provoke egalitarian isothymic resentment among the masses.footnote⁸

Fukuyama also tackled Nietzsche’s argument that the demand for universal recognition arose from the weak and mediocre and that the end of history, with liberal democracy’s triumph, would also be the era of the ‘last men’, who put their own safety and comfort first and would never strive for new heights. ‘Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same; whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse’, Fukuyama quoted Thus SpokeZarathustra, acknowledging the force of the critique. But as well as the risk of becoming last men, devoid of thymotic energy, he pointed out that there was an opposite danger. Trump appeared again in the final chapter of TheEnd of History, where Fukuyama argued that ‘the absence of regular and constructive outlets for megalothymia’ under liberal democracy could lead to ‘its later resurgence in an extreme and pathological form’. One might become ‘a developer like Donald Trump’, or a ‘politician like George Bush’, but for all the recognition they received, the horizon of possibilities that their lives defined would not be ultimately satisfying; humanity’s ‘reservoirs of idealism’ would be left untouched.footnote⁹ Here Trump represented the failure of megalothymia in a liberal-democratic context, and thus a paradigmatic risk to the system.

Fukuyama’s analysis of the human passions formed the theoretical core of his victory discourse in The End of History. He argued that the liberal-democratic system represented by the us came closest to fulfilling Plato’s criteria of a regime that satisfied all three parts of the soul—reason, appetite and thymos ideally under reason’s guidance—and thus was the most legitimate political type.footnote¹⁰The End of History became a global best-seller, but its impact was paradoxical. Fukuyama’s painstaking elaboration of the philosophical tradition in which he was writing—Kant, Hegel, Kojève—did little to allay the philistine reaction to his title among Western intelligentsias, who generally dismissed ‘history ending’ as arrant nonsense. At the same time, Fukuyama’s cognitive cartography did much to inform an understanding of the world with which the same intellectuals were firmly aligned.

In this view, the world was divided into the West and the Rest: an ‘enlightened’ zone of countries that had already achieved liberal democracy, or were at least struggling to reach it, and other regions that remained mired in history, obdurately refusing enlightenment, or perhaps incapable of it. It was in this broader sense that TheEnd of History served as ideological support for the victory narrative of American hegemony. While existing liberal-democratic systems might be imperfect, the possibility of non-Western polities developing alternative political architectures was out of the question.

Winnism’s empiricist bulwarks

The success of The End of History propelled Fukuyama to the highest levels of American para-state intellectual life, with prestigious posts at apex scholarly institutions (gmu, jhu, Stanford) as well as rand, the us State Department and World Bank, and a hand in steering a succession of high-powered intellectual journals: The National Interest, The American Interest, American Purpose, Persuasion. Closer engagement in us foreign-policy debates involved some significant shifts and buttressed his political philosophy with empirical insights. A hawkish supporter of regime change in Iraq from 1997, Fukuyama distanced himself from its outcomes.footnote¹¹ Nevertheless, the American military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq provided living laboratories for experiments in state-building and Fukuyama was keen to draw their lessons.

These were crystallized in his 2004 treatise, State-Building, which argued that the end of the Cold War had left ‘a band of failed and weak states’, stretching from the Balkans through the Caucasus to the Middle East and Central Asia.footnote¹² In 1968, Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies had theorized us tutelage over Latin American, African and Southeast Asian states, backing ‘authoritarian modernization’ or, indeed, military dictatorship as needed.footnote¹³ Fukuyama sought to update his teacher’s advice for the twenty-first century. Where Huntington distinguished between ‘form’ and ‘degree’ of government, Fukuyama contrasted ‘scope of state activity’ and ‘strength of state power’. At issue, he argued, was whether the institutions and values of the liberal West were really universal, or—as Huntington now claimed in The Clash of Civilizations—merely an outgrowth of the cultural habits of northern Europe.footnote¹⁴

This epistemic shift—taking the state as the direct object of study—marked a new stage in the evolution of Fukuyama’s thinking; from victory discourse 1.0 to 2.0, we might say. This approach culminated in the 2010s with the publication of two door-stopper volumes, The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay, indebted to imperial strategist Huntington rather than continental theorist Bloom.footnote¹⁵ If The End of History had rested on political-philosophical deductions, the Political Order duo represented a transition to comparative history and political sociology, relying on more empirical methods. Intellectually, the approach was cruder: human nature was now deduced from the behaviour of chimpanzees, with their kin-based sociability and capacity for intra-species violence, rather than the Hegelian quest for recognition; the development of political forms was analogized to Darwinian evolution, rather than the master–slave dialectic.

Long-run history cast the emergence of the modern liberal-democratic order in a more contingent light. Fukuyama grappled with two questions. First, how had the centralized ‘impersonal’ state ever arisen, given the human propensity to favour kith and kin? The vast majority of early political forms were patrimonial, in Weber’s sense: structured around the ‘big man’ and his kin. Second, how stable was it—how prone to regression or what Huntington had defined as ‘political decay’?footnote¹⁶ To explain the tendency of post-colonial administrations to collapse into disorder, Huntington had drawn from the Marxism he was fighting the idea that economic development produced new social forces that would challenge the existing political order—and set out to devise a winning policy for capitalism within it. If incumbent elites and their institutions were flexible and responsive enough, they could strengthen their own position by incorporating these newly mobilized groups within the existing order. The inability of elites and institutions to adapt to changing circumstances—their rigidification—was a sign of political decay.footnote¹⁷

Fukuyama took the idea of economic growth mobilizing new social forces who would fight for political representation and used it as a measure of liberal-democratic flourishing in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. The modern ‘impersonal’ state depended upon an enormous concentration of power, in order to defend a territory, keep the peace and supply public goods. To prevent that power degenerating into a personalist order of nepotism and corruption required binding norms that applied even to the most powerful—what Fukuyama termed the rule of law. Accountability to newly mobilized populations represented another constraint on overweening state power, ensuring it was used in a controlled and consensual manner. The three factors could exist in varying combinations: a powerful state without checks was a dictatorship; a weak state, checked by a multitude of subordinate political forces, would be ineffective and unstable. ‘By contrast’, Fukuyama wrote, ‘a politically developed liberal democracy includes all three sets of institutions—the state, rule of law and procedural accountability—in some kind of balance.’ Denmark was the name of such a society—‘prosperous, democratic, secure and well-governed’—and European history was jokingly reframed as an asynchronous process of ‘getting to Denmark’.footnote¹⁸

The first volume, Origins of Political Order, tracked the world-historical emergence of these three factors, from prehistory to the American and French Revolutions.footnote¹⁹ The second, Political Order and Political Decay, traced the dynamics of their interaction from the early nineteenth century to the present, across Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, examining the processes of adaptability and decay at work. ‘All political orders are prone to decay over time’, Fukuyama noted.footnote²⁰ As well as institutional rigidity, he identified the regression into personalism—clientelism, nepotism—as the main form of political decay. The us was not immune. Its institutions were regarded as unreformable, resulting in ‘a dysfunctional political equilibrium’—a ‘vetocracy’, in which change could easily be blocked by powerful interest groups. Progressive Era reforms had eliminated the old patronage regime, but it had been replaced by the lobby system, under which economic power bought political influence. In a sign that decay was intellectual as well as political, there was no agenda for fixing either rigidity or corruption.footnote²¹

Writing in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Fukuyama acknowledged a profound liberal-democratic malaise—not only in the us and Europe, but across many of the former authoritarian states that had constituted democracy’s ‘third wave’. Still, was there a viable alternative model of prosperity, legitimacy and stability? In Fukuyama’s eyes, China posed the ‘most serious challenge’, with its long tradition of centralized government, constrained by Confucian morality. Rules-based behaviour had spread since 1978 and citizens could sue the lower levels of government. But whether the Chinese regime could incorporate the demands for recognition and participation of the new middle classes that the Reform Era had produced remained to be seen.footnote²²

In the meantime, ‘For better or worse, there is no alternative to a modern, impersonal state as guarantor of order and security, and as a source of necessary public goods.’ Liberal democracy could not be described as a political universal, Fukuyama concluded, since it had emerged only in the last two hundred years. But nor was it merely a reflection of Western cultural preferences. Since the industrial revolution, the balance between the three pillars represented by liberal democracy had become a functional prerequisite for sustaining economic expansion and market efficiency—a structural imperative. This was the victory narrative 2.0—qualified, empirical, but still ‘winning’.

Symptoms of political decay

Trump’s victory in the 2016 election came as a huge shock to Fukuyama. In his response, Identity, he downplayed this somewhat, admitting only that he was ‘surprised’ by the outcome and ‘troubled by its implications for the United States and the world’.footnote²³ Little did he suspect, he wrote, when he singled Trump out in TheEnd of History as an example—for better and for worse—of megalothymia under liberal democracy, that he ‘would go into politics and get elected president’. But, Fukuyama went on, Trump’s rise was not inconsistent with his own general argument about ‘potential future threats to liberal democracy and the central problem of thymos in a liberal society’.footnote²⁴ In Identity, he returned to the demand for recognition, calling it ‘the master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today’. The thymos that helped to bring about the liberal-democratic ‘end’ of history had now become an internally destabilizing factor. Hegel’s solution of universal recognition was the right one; Fukuyama recognized the need to ‘work our way back to a more universal understanding of human dignity’. He viewed the rise of ‘tribal’ identity politics across the political spectrum in the 2010s with great unease—yet found it understandable. The triumph of liberal democracy had coincided with a period of rising inequality and the disruptive social change associated with globalization. The 2008 crisis and its aftermath in the us and Europe—financiers bailed out at the expense of the masses—had damaged liberal democracy’s reputation.

But, Identity argued, economic grievances were felt more acutely when a group also experienced the indignity of thwarted recognition. It was in this period that black Americans rose up against police killings, women against sexual harassment, trans people against denial of their rights, the less educated against coastal elites and their mainstream media, native workers against what they saw as over-favoured immigrants. Thymos could also be felt vicariously: Fukuyama cited the example of Osama bin Laden’s mother finding him, at fourteen, watching the idf’s treatment of the Palestinians on tv, tears streaming down his face.footnote²⁵

Liberal norms placed an intrinsic value on one’s true inner self, over and against the outer social world, in a way that traditional cultures did not. But in practice, Fukuyama noted, the procedural mechanisms of liberal democracy offered only formal—‘minimal’—recognition through suffrage, individual liberties, etc. It condoned the unequal rewards of ‘market society’; it couldn’t guarantee that historically marginalized groups would be given equal respect, and many types of discrimination would persist.footnote²⁶ In these respects, isothymic problems had worsened with liberal democracy’s triumph. Moreover, the decay gripping the us political order left Americans yearning for a leader who would shake up the ‘vetocracy’—drain the swamp—and render the state functional again. Trump was a product of liberal democracy’s political decay, which offered him the chance to fuse his megalothymia with the isothymia of the masses in the maga movement. Fukuyama analogized Trump to Caesar, Hitler and Perón: ‘such figures latched onto the resentments of ordinary people who felt that their nation or religion or way of life was being disrespected.’footnote²⁷ This synthesis of megalothymia and isothymia—of individual superiority drive with egalitarian demands—provided the explanatory matrix for Trump’s success.

Heartland discontents

With the Democrats’ return to office in 2020, liberal-democratic normalcy seemed to be restored; but Fukuyama was uneasy. In his next book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, he acknowledged that liberal democracy’s cyclical vulnerabilities might cast doubt on its permanence, even within its American bastion. He had always insisted that liberalism and democracy were analytically distinct—respectively, the second and third pillars of political order. At stake in the 2020s was not a crisis of democracy but one of liberalism itself. This was unlikely to be fatal; though it might now appear as ‘an old and worn-out ideology’, liberalism had faced constant attack since it emerged as a living ideology in the wake of the French Revolution: the Romantics had assailed it as a calculating and sterile worldview, nationalists and communists had rejected it; but it had survived (and mutated), again and again, to become ‘the dominant organizing principle of world politics’ by the end of the twentieth century.footnote²⁸

In Liberalism and Its Discontents, Fukuyama diagnosed the problem as one of good ideas taken to extremes. Liberals were generally right about private property, but neo-liberalism’s market fundamentalism, reducing societal issues to efficiency calculations, had induced wealth polarization and exacerbated economic inequalities. Liberals had correctly emphasized the value of personal autonomy, but ran the risk of promoting it over all other values. Progressives pointing to continuing racial and gender discrimination were right to charge that liberal societies were not living up to their own ideals, but insisting on group rights undermined the universalism of liberalism itself. By mobilizing the courts, the universities and the mainstream media to advance its agenda, while marginalizing broader socio-economic concerns, ‘woke liberalism’ helped to stir a conservative revolt. Voters’ resentment towards both neo- and ‘woke’ liberalism had contributed to Trump’s victory.

The solution to liberalism’s discontents, Fukuyama argued, was to cultivate a new sense of public purpose; to raise the quality of government, in order to restore trust in it. Inequalities should not be too extreme; social protections should be set at a sustainable level. Public policy should avoid hardening group identities. Individual autonomy should be respected, but within accepted norms.footnote²⁹ His hope was that the Democrats would follow these prescriptions. If this sounded like wishful thinking, his fall-back position was that liberal democracy was still preferable to any existing alternatives. In a 2022 article, Fukuyama pointed out that Putin’s handling of the Ukraine crisis demonstrated a broader trend in which authoritarian states were increasingly sliding into one-man rule.footnote³⁰ The war for Ukraine rekindled Fukuyama’s political passion. Positioning himself in the liberal-democratic vanguard, in the ‘global fight’ against authoritarianism, he exhorted Atlantic readers to battle alongside the Ukrainians: ‘By resisting Russian imperialism, the Ukrainians are demonstrating the grievous weaknesses that exist at the core of an apparently strong state. They understand the true value of freedom and are fighting a larger battle on our behalf.’ The excitement brought back some of the triumphalism of his victory discourse 1.0, predicting that Ukraine was on the verge of reconquering Crimea.footnote³¹

Saviour or symptom?

The liberal-democratic restoration Fukuyama had longed for proved short-lived. In January 2025, Trump returned to the White House and dramatically reversed the Biden Administration’s policy on Ukraine.footnote³² This epistemic crisis forced reconsideration. How deep was America’s political decay? Was history’s liberal-democratic endpoint merely undergoing temporary difficulties, or was it being undermined from within—the teleological premise of victory perhaps fatally flawed? That Fukuyama’s certainties had been shaken by Trump’s second win was apparent from his uncharacteristically emotional response. In April 2025, he lashed out at Trump as an example of Nietzschean ressentiment, suffering from wounded pride and fears of inadequacy.footnote³³

If these vacillations expose the fragility of thymos-centric analytical frameworks, they also pose a theoretical question: does a politics of recognition rooted in passion constitute historical agency per se, or does it mediate deeper forces? In Plato’s tripartite structure, thymos can act independently, but it often serves as an intermediary, relaying the influences of reason and appetite. If passion acts as a mediator, we need to explore the forces driving it—especially the relationship between thymos and epithumia. This is precisely the mission of political economy.

The phenomenon of Trump’s ascendancy poses a fundamental challenge to liberal theorists. Fukuyama’s explanatory framework—positing liberal democracy’s inherent superiority, whatever its day-to-day problems, while attributing electoral outcomes to misdirected popular passions married to elite ambition—attempts a social-psychological analysis. But by conceptualizing markets as mere outlets for megalothymia, without interrogating capitalism’s structural transformations, this approach fails to elucidate why multitudes of American voters perceived themselves as victims, despite the record of nominal gdp growth—becoming disengaged observers of America’s global hegemony.

In fact, the most critical blow to liberal democracy’s winning streak has come from contemporary capitalism itself. As Fukuyama tacitly acknowledged in Political Order and Political Decay, the development of capitalist social relations preceded the emergence of an effective federal state in the us. The American government was always effectively at capital’s service, channelling enormous resources to the biggest firms and banks; in other words, America never got to Denmark.footnote³⁴ During the high Cold War, us capital came under pressure to make concessions to the masses, to prevent any advance for the left. However, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc led to arrogant complacency among American capitalists and the governing class, for which Fukuyama’s End of History provided the theoretical underpinning.

As the Communist threat receded, capital’s search for higher returns abroad had the full backing of the us government and its imperial machinery. The imf and World Bank strong-armed states to deregulate, privatize and lift all barriers to capital flows—a key component of liberalism’s ‘triumph’. At home, New Deal constraints were systematically dismantled. With shareholders demanding larger dividends, multinationals cut costs by relocating production to cheaper labour markets overseas. This was facilitated by finance capital’s unfettered expansion and the dollar’s global hegemony, which enabled the us to run a chronic trade deficit, purchasing goods assembled in other countries and at the same time, attracting their dollar savings. Manufacturing in the us became even less necessary for American capital.

These changes had profound socio-structural effects. America’s dwindling share of global manufacturing represented a major transformation of the us capitalist model. Trump’s ‘winning’ trade programme scapegoats China as a wealth extractor, but iPhone assembly factories in China earn a tiny profit, while the real gains are reaped by Apple Inc. The profits earned by American multinationals are not converted into fiscal revenue for the us government and very little goes to improve the living standards of ordinary Americans. Meanwhile, Fukuyama was not wrong to emphasize that the American focus on identity politics lacks a coherent redistributive programme; if anything, its objective function has served to divert attention away from the uneven distribution of the benefits of globalization among different classes.

Thus the optimism of the ‘end of history’, celebrating liberal democracy’s constraining effects on state power, led to the removal of all restrictions on capital itself. In pursuit of excess profits, an unrestrained capitalism abandoned the traditional working class. Americans who felt their interests were harmed by globalization may, objectively, have benefited more from it than workers in China or Southeast Asia. But their sense of relative deprivation was transformed into political energy and Trump became the chosen spokesperson for their discontents. In this sense, Fukuyama’s paradigm contributed to Trump’s rise as the ‘unintended consequence’ of history.

Winnism’s prospects

Fundamentally, both Fukuyama and Trump want the us to keep winning. However, Fukuyama predicates this on a ‘global fight’ for liberal-democratic principles, while understating the costs of such commitments. He epitomizes the ‘globalism’ that maga vilifies: spending American resources on state-building programmes to promote the spread of liberal democracy and sustain the us-led system; pressuring nations still ‘caught in history’ to move towards its specified end. Yet this hegemonic commitment has required formidable material underpinnings—and these are now starting to erode.

The scale of us sovereign debt provides an indication of the crisis. By 2024, federal debt had reached $34.5 trillion, or 125 per cent of gdp, and interest payments on it are running at $1 trillion per year, surpassing discretionary defence spending and approaching Social Security outlays. Persistently high interest rates create a debt-snowball effect and diminish capacities for crisis response. Unprecedentedly, the us Treasury Secretary has had to reassure the markets about the creditworthiness of fresh us government debt.footnote³⁵ Ultimately, however, this depends upon the capacity of a robust real economy to serve as a tax base. Although nominal usgdp figures continue to rise, its real economy encompasses a hollowed-out manufacturing sector, crumbling infrastructure and declining consumer-spending power. The us faces intensifying competition as developing countries move up the value chain, challenging high-end sectors such as semiconductors and ai. Meanwhile, the overall decline of heavy industry has potentially grave implications for us military capability, which ultimately depends on the American shipbuilding industry to update the us Navy’s fleet and on Boeing’s production capacity for the us Air Force.

Trump’s policies—however crude—respond to a real problem of hegemonic overextension. Trump’s attacks on ‘globalism’ seem exaggerated, but they may reflect the fact that the us no longer has the economic capacity to sustain a global hegemonic system at any price. At some point a certain degree of strategic retrenchment will be inevitable, with the us choosing to act in certain areas, on certain issues, and refraining from doing so in others—reducing support for Ukraine and demanding that the Europeans step up, while extracting a quid-pro-quo mineral agreement from Kyiv, for example. Trump’s tweets about annexing Greenland, not to mention Canada and the Panama Canal, were widely derided. Yet there may be a coherent calculation of national interest behind his ‘neo-Monroe Doctrine’, based on consolidating America’s status as a hegemon over its three neighbouring oceans, thereby laying the groundwork for a reconfiguration of America’s hegemonic modality.

Trump’s mission of industrial rejuvenation constitutes a formidable challenge. The path to it—the tariff-based strategy to coerce trade-deficit reductions and manufacturing repatriation—remains obscured by systemic contradictions. It is predicated on three assumptions: first, that exporting nations cannot overcome their dependence on us markets; second, that American consumers will tolerate inflationary pressure; third, that domestic capacities—not least: skilled engineers—will be able to sustain manufacturing resurgence and supply-chain reintegration. China’s refusal to capitulate to Trump’s tariff demands demonstrated the asymmetry of the relationship—American reliance on Chinese goods exceeding Chinese dependency on American markets. Federal incentives may attract initial manufacturing investment, but systemic impediments—policy volatility, fragmented industrial eco-systems, chronic shortages of skilled and assembly-line labour—persist. The us government cannot pledge to subsidize the huge increase in payroll costs that real reshoring would entail. In any case, despite Trumpism’s protectionist tendencies, there is no real alternative to neo-liberalism on offer. The Big Beautiful Bill leads with tax cuts for the rich. Trump is neither willing nor able to challenge the mechanisms of wealth distribution in the us.

Fukuyama’s indignation at Trump’s consolidation of power by undermining key ‘rule of law’ norms—judicial independence, press freedom, civil liberties—fails to address Trumpism’s deeper problem for his paradigm.footnote³⁶ For Trump has succeeded in shaking up America’s rigid political institutions, strengthening executive power and breaking the gridlock that plagued Clinton, Obama, Bush and Biden. But he has done so by deepening the system’s patrimonial tendencies, through his own highly unconventional political behaviour and his family’s blatant profiteering. Moreover, while weakening—indeed, assailing—the norms of liberal-democratic rule, Fukuyama’s second pillar, at home and abroad, he has arguably been more responsive to popular pressure, the third pillar, than recent Democratic Administrations.

Trump has so far largely succeeded in aligning American foreign policy with the perceptions of those who feel they are losing from globalization. Through a sovereignty-centric redefinition of us interests, he has re-categorized previous assets of the American imperium like usaid as external impositions. Liberal-democratic international institutions, constructed over decades, have become dispensable burdens, unless delivering tangible benefits. Economic concessions extracted from traditional allies—forcibly rewriting their domestic spending plans—get reframed as ‘wins’. Trump’s ‘repatrimonialization’ of foreign policy, to use Fukuyama’s term, relies on the exaggeration of American advantage over other countries through one-man public diplomacy, conducted in highly personalist terms, through face-to-face talks or social media barrages.

Trumpism’s victory discourse operates as a permanent confrontation with America’s liberal-democratic status quo—rolling the dice, pocketing the ‘wins’ and shrugging off the losses. Its operational algorithm systematically amplifies marginal gains while obfuscating costs—whether inflationary impacts or systemic uncertainties. This selective victory narrative intertwines with an escalating personality cult. Trump functions as the nexus connecting all the factions of his fractious base: Republican traditionalists, tech-right ideologues, the maga movement. His persona thus becomes the symbolic banner for this inherently contradictory coalition, revealing how personality cults emerge not merely from individual grandiosity but from the inherent logic of populist politics.

Will Trump’s victory narrative eclipse Fukuyamian liberalism, or is it more likely that the latter will undergo some sort of resurgence? The unstated truth of the ‘end of history’ paradigm was that liberal democracy’s triumph relied upon the hard power of the us—crucial for imposing its Cold War victory—as much as its ideological attraction. Fukuyama’s teleology remains dependent upon us global primacy. Yet the price of its hegemonic architecture is becoming unsustainable, compelling structural transformation—with Trump as its provisional agent. Should Trump succeed in renewing the economic foundations of American hegemony while preserving its institutional structures, the notion of an Anglophone liberal-capitalist ‘end of history’ may take on a new lease of life.

Conversely, failure might raise the question of whether American hegemony can perpetuate its ‘winning’ status under either paradigm. Though facing real systemic challenges, Trump’s responses have been rash and hasty, constituting a high-stakes political gamble. The repatrimonialization of government has suggested unpredictability rather than strength. Its main message is that countries need to rely on themselves. In that sense, Trump’s wager may end by accelerating multi-polarization. If so, we may expect a proliferation of colourful victory narratives, as Trump inspires other nations to develop their own ‘winning’ brands. Amid the hubbub of voices, perhaps a discourse serving the working class will find room to grow.