Trump is overturning the 80-year world order in which America has actually been great. (Reuters: Leah Millis)
It took a month of Donald Trump's chilling revolution for the stock market to start sneezing.
The main New York share index — the S&P 500 — began falling on February 19, 29 days after Trump's inauguration.
It has now dropped a bit more than 6 per cent while the more volatile Nasdaq is near a technical correction of minus 10 per cent.
That investors are rattled by the uncertainty over tariffs and looming trade wars is hardly surprising. But a lot of economists are now predicting an economic slowdown — if not recession — in the United States, and US shares are priced for endless growth, so they're vulnerable.
But it was Trump's reaction to the stock market slump that was really telling.
When asked if it was his tariffs that caused the market to fall, the president said it was "globalists".
"Well, a lot of them are globalist countries and companies that won't be doing as well, because we're taking back things that have been taken from us many years ago. I think it's globalists that see how rich our country's going to be, and they don't like it," he said, using the word many times in an hour-long press conference in the Oval Office.
It's unclear whether the globalists are the investors or the companies, or whether he was using the word in the way that the American Jewish Committee has described it, that is as "a coded word for Jews who are seen as international elites conspiring to weaken or dismantle "Western" society, using their international connections and control over big corporations".
In any case, what's most important for Australia — and the entire Western world — is that America has fallen to anti-globalists, and they are carrying out a deep regime change in the style of an autocratic takeover.
Overturning the world order
The irony is that in the name of making America great again, Trump is overturning the 80-year world order in which America has actually been great.
The US convened the conference in 1944 at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, that established the international financial order after WW2, which was run by the US with the US dollar at its core.
And then in 1949, it led the establishment of NATO, the alliance that ensured peace in Europe and eventually ended the Cold War.
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To make America great, Trump is now undoing its greatness.
He spent a lot of his first term railing against globalism, but the foreign policy establishment held during those four years and nothing much changed. Then America's leading role in the world continued under Joe Biden.
This time Trump is copying Victor Orban's playbook in Hungary to purge and control the government bureaucracy and at the same time "de-globalise" it.
Three ways Trump is following Orban
In an interview with economist Paul Krugman published over the weekend, Kim Lane Scheppele — a constitutional academic at Princeton and expert on Hungary — described the three things that Orban did that Trump is emulating.
First, he "moved very quickly to capture the Constitutional Court which was the referee of the whole process. And if you capture the refs you can do all kinds of unconstitutional things and there's no one around to tell you".
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Trump captured the US Supreme Court in his first term, and then on July 1 last year, the court ruled in a 6-3 decision that presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed as president.
Orban's second step, according to Scheppele, was to purge the bureaucracy and "replace them with all your cronies so that the state is completely responsive to what you order from the top. That was crucial. And along with that came a massive centralisation of the executive branch".
Trump is installing loyalists throughout the US government, while at the same time campaigning ferociously against DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) in favour of merit-based recruiting.
He may not be doing DEI, but his appointments have definitely not been based on merit, only loyalty.
And finally Orban used the power of money: "He looked at every single place where the state budget was supporting the people who might oppose him. And he just cut their funding," Schappele said.
Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — run by the world's richest man — Elon Musk, is doing that.
But unlike Hungary, America has been the most important funder of many global institutions like the World Health Organisation and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), not to mention global humanity through the US Agency for International Development (USAID). America's support for these things is also being dumped, along with funding for domestic liberal organisations, like universities.
Science v common sense
There are two immediate questions: first, will the Trump revolution collapse from its own incompetence?
And second, will an effective opposition/resistance emerge and blunt it?
The incompetence comes from "common sense".
In his speech to Congress last week, Trump described what he is doing as a "common-sense revolution that is now — because of us — sweeping the entire world".
Who can argue against common sense? Sounds fine, right?
Well, yes, except that in practice it means decisions and executive orders are not based on data, inquiries or science, but simply what Trump thinks.
For example, there was no Treasury inquiry and report into the impact of 25 per cent tariffs on Mexico and Canada, with the result — among other things — that General Motors told him they'd be bankrupt in three months, so its parts had to be exempted.
In fact, the whole tariff venture has become a complete mess of U-turns and exemptions, because it was based on common sense and not thought through. It's also the main reason the US economy is in danger of a big slowdown.
And of course the abandonment of efforts to reduce fossil fuels and combat climate change — in favour of "drill, baby, drill" — are not based on science, but simply his "common sense", along with that of other people on the right, that the energy transition is expensive and pointless.
The result is going to be what science predicts, which won't be good.
Future rests on a single question
As for effective opposition, the Democrats are not providing any. In fact, from this distance it seems the official opposition in the US is the New York Times, but there is a limit to what it can or should do.
There are 110 lawsuits currently in play attempting to block government actions.
But as this guest essay in the New York Times by Erwin Chemerinsky — the Dean of the Berkeley School of Law at the University of California — asks: "If Trump Defies the Courts, Then What?"
Chermerinsky says it is not hyperbole to say that the future of American constitutional democracy now rests on that single question.
"The hard truth for those looking to the courts to rein in the Trump administration is that the constitution gives judges no power to compel compliance with their rulings — it is the executive branch that ultimately enforces judicial orders. If a president decides to ignore a judicial ruling, the courts are likely rendered impotent."
Whether financial markets join the resistance is unclear at this stage. Last week's stockmarket action was not dramatic enough, and the so-called "bond vigilantes" have so far stayed on the sidelines in the US — although they are flexing their muscles in Europe with big rises in German long term interest rates.
But a stockmarket crash, or a stampede out of US bonds resulting in a big rise in interest rates, might be harder to ignore than the courts.
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Is a Trump third term possible?
Perhaps the bigger question is what happens in four years.
Victor Orban has been in power for 15 years this time. He is only 61 and there is no sign of him going anywhere — he controls both the government and the information getting to the electorate.
Trump frequently talks about standing for a third term. But he'll be 82 in 2028, and while you can't count him out, he probably won't take on the constitution to that extent at that age.
But by then his administration should be in full control of the electoral machinery, as well as social media. So Trump will able to install a successor — maybe JD Vance, or perhaps start an imperial dynasty: Donald Trump Jnr, followed by the now 18-year-old Barron.
Alan Kohler is finance presenter on ABC News and also writes for Intelligent Investor.