The US political world can today be divided not only between left and right, but along another axis: Trump maximalists and Trump minimalists. Maximalists are inclined to view Trump as an agent or conduit of a sudden historical rupture, whether the transformation of the party system, the destruction of American democracy or the implosion of the liberal world order. Minimalists see Trump not as a fundamental break but rather as a lurid symbol of longer-running developments, or a symptom of crises that lie elsewhere – a black hole detracting attention from real political problems. 

This is not a cleanly partisan or ideological distinction, which is one of the things that makes it interesting. There are many familiar liberal maximalists, of course – some of them have recently decamped to Canada in fear of or in protest at the tyrannical regime; and there are conservative maximalists too, mostly right-leaning newspaper columnists who have mobilized few votes but left an outsize impact on the texture and tenor of anti-Trump politics. Despite some disagreement, liberal and conservative maximalists unite in seeing the President himself as the chief and often the only issue in national politics; both have also leapt to enlist in the ‘fascism wars’, often brandishing the F-word as a cudgel to discipline the left at elections, and elsewhere.  

Yet there is also a countervailing minimalism of the centre. This was articulated by James Carville, who in February advised the Democrats to ‘roll over and play dead’ – they are good at that, as it turns out – because the Trump administration would ‘collapse’ in the next thirty days. The Senate Democratic Caucus also appears to contain its fair share of minimalists. In their view, Trump is his own worst political enemy, and in any case does not represent a real break from politics usual; Democrats simply need to lay low and prepare for a sweeping victory in the 2026 midterms.

Left maximalists largely fall into two camps. There are those who have celebrated Trump for taking a wrecking ball to the neoliberal order, casting the reality-TV president as a historical figure of major significance – ‘the world-soul riding a golden escalator’, as the Aufhebunga Bunga podcast put it last November. Then there are ‘national emergency’ leftists who see Trump’s assault on student activists, undocumented immigration and civil rights as an urgent crisis that overrides other layers of analysis and demands an immediate response. 

Both these maximalist camps regard Trump as offering an opportunity for the left. For the first, the fallout presents the chance to pick up some of the fragments of discontent in the now shattered neoliberal system, opening the possibility of some kind of realignment with the working-class revolt against the Democrats. For the second, it is an occasion for a broad popular front against Trump in the name of a form of antifascism that will allow the left to exercise some influence alongside liberal allies. Here, however, I want to make a case for a – critical and qualified – left minimalism, focusing for brevity’s sake on just a handful of key issues during Trump’s first months in office.

First, the tariffs. On ‘Liberation Day,’ Trump appeared to deliver the international economic demolition job that many maximalists feared and some hoped for. Yet at the first sign of bond market jitters, he switched course from global trade realignment to simple trade war on China – and then, a few weeks later, pulled back from that, too. Significant duties on China remain in force, and further tariff shenanigans remain likely, but transformational change appears to be off the table. On Wall Street, what the Financial Times has dubbed ‘the Taco trade’ – based on the theory that Trump Always Chickens Out – has sent markets roaring back to their pre-tariff levels.

Second, DOGE. With Elon Musk officially stepping down from the project, it is not too soon to survey its impact. According to the NYT tracker, over 58,000 federal employees have been fired and another 149,000 jobs scheduled for reduction (I would put the employees who have accepted buyouts in a somewhat different category). That amounts to a termination of about 7% of what was a 3-million strong federal civilian workforce; 7%, maybe not coincidentally, happens to match the increase in the federal workforce in the post-Covid era, between 2019 and 2023.

This is not a simple return to Trump 1.0. DOGE has destroyed USAID beyond judicial revival, half-strangled federal science funding, and left a trail of chaos, dysfunction and suffering all across the civil service. But I suggest we take seriously the verdict of the hardcore ideological proponents of government cuts, such as the Manhattan Institute’s Jessica Riedl, who have been clear all along that this is political theatre rather than a real attempt to reorganize the federal workforce, never mind shrink the state. Its most meaningful achievement has been the successful traumatization of liberal federal employees. To the extent that it had any rationale at all, beyond the ego gratification of a major donor, DOGE served as a way for Trump to hit soft targets, enrage Democrats and then say to his base, and to the ideological parts of his coalition: ‘We don’t have to do all these cuts legislatively – we won’t be able to – because we are doing DOGE instead.’ Even if the numbers are small, the feelings aren’t.  

Next, Congress – compliant, quiescent, almost pathetic. Yet what Congress has not done is significant. Compared with the first hundred days of FDR, Reagan, even Obama in 2009, there was virtually zero Congressional action. Republicans ostensibly have a governing trifecta, but the Trump blitzkrieg has happened almost entirely via executive order – a sign of weakness, not strength. The ‘One, Big, Beautiful Bill’ that stumbled through the House this week probably represents the summit, if not the sum total, of Trump’s first-term legislative agenda. It is an ugly mess, but also an exceedingly familiar one. Vast giveaways to corporations and the rich, symbolic stocking-stuffers for the working many, and cruel cuts for the poor, paid for with a debt explosion and draped in the language of patriotism: this is not a historic rupture, but the predictable pattern of Republican governance for over a half a century.

By far the largest element in the bill is the simple $3.8 trillion extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, itself a commentary on the administration’s lack of substantial new priorities. Other provisions, like an endowment tax aimed at the ‘woke elites’ of the Ivy League, are politically symbolic rather than materially transformative. The harshest feature of the House bill, cuts to Medicaid that could deny health care coverage to millions, may or may not survive in the Senate. But even this direct assault on the poor and the sick is not an artifact of Trumpism, but the ferocious anti-welfarism that has ruled the GOP right since the era of Newt Gingrich. If there is a notable ideological realignment on offer in 2025, it would only come in the form of a successful MAGA rebellion against the Medicaid cuts.

Finally, there are the special elections that took place in April. The Democrats have become a party that thrives on special elections: the lower the turnout the better. On this occasion, it seemed possible that after all the hype and the millions Musk poured into Wisconsin, the dynamics might be different – that there might be a popular swell of support for what Trump has been up to. But while the Republicans did manage to generate higher turnout, there was also higher turnout for Democrats – which meant that virtually all of Trump’s margins, including in Florida, were cut in half. In this regard, anyway, Chuck Schumer and the evident minimalists of the Democratic Senate are correct: the laws of political gravity appear to remain the same as they were in 2022 and 2018. According to the betting markets, the odds of the Democrats retaking the House in 2026 are now approximately 80%.

In thinking through the Trump phenomenon, I have been reminded of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997). The film begins with a jazz musician living in an antiseptic, ultra-modern version of California. He lacks a deep connection with his wife and can’t perform in the bedroom. The film’s atmosphere is heavy, its pace leaden. It is an oppressively slow, suffocating series of sequences in which the hero cannot overcome this internal blockage. And then, midway through, with Lynchian surrealism, he is transformed without any explanation into another character, a young car mechanic who is thrust into a classic noir plot, including a love triangle. His wife is reincarnated as a femme fatale who is desperately in love with him. He has no problem satisfying her, but he is menaced by a ferocious gangster, a chaotic, snarling villain who is after him at every turn.  

Slavoj Žižek, who wrote a whole book about Lost Highway, views this transformation as a kind of displacement, the gangster a projection of the inhibitions and anxieties that haunted the jazz musician. His failure to act, to be an agent in the world, has been transposed onto this odious criminal. This is the function that Trump serves for many today, not just in the liberal world but among some left maximalists too. Trump embodies action, power, movement, excitement: an incitement to open insurgency against the fascists, perhaps, or at the very least a symptom of the breakdown of liberalism. But this may be ultimately an attractive and convenient way of externalizing an internal blockage: the deep, dispiriting rift between the historical left and the historical working class. That is the main story of American and rich world politics since the 1970s – a bleak, long-running drama in which Trump does not star. The monstrous spectacle of Trumpism, which has already managed to breathe life into the dead objects of the Canadian and Australian centre, certainly offers political opportunities of a sort. Yet to seize them we must acknowledge and confront this deeper ebb tide within. 

Read on: Matt Karp, ‘Trump Redux’, NLR 150.