On Donald Trump & the U.S. Ruling Class: Bonapartism in America?

Samuel Farber

THE RISE OF Donald Trump’s extreme right-wing authoritarianism, particularly during his second presidential term, has given rise to a multitude of interpretations of the social and political nature of his rule. This is especially the case among those who have claimed that Trump’s regime represents a variety of fascism.

While this debate regarding Trump and Fascism has, in my view, largely run its course, there are other interpretations that might be worth examining. One of these sees Trump as an American version of “Bonapartism” (a degree of “state autonomy” to be further defined below).

This is the interpretation that this article will critically dissect. While much less widespread, the “Bonapartism” perspective offers a useful opportunity to analyze several important related issues such as the relationship between the U.S. ruling class and the federal government. (The accompanying box provides some references to the discussion.)

Background: What is Bonapartism?

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was the nephew of the “great” Napoleon and ruled France from his first election as President of the Republic on December 10, 1848, and through the December 1851 Coup, which led to his self-proclamation as emperor in 1852. He retained that title until he was deposed in 1870.

There are some parallels between him and Trump in their clearly authoritarian and corrupt rule. Most of all, Louis Bonaparte and so far to a lesser extent Trump, adopted many measures to engage in what Hal Draper called the “autonomization” of the state, balancing above the main contending class forces and institutions in society. (See Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution. State and Bureaucracy, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977, 467-8).

In the case of Trump, this autonomization has included his tendency to take over as many political and social processes as he can get away with, and subordinate everything to himself. This can be clearly seen in Trump’s preventing even the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and the Senate from exercizing their Constitutionally mandated legislative authority, including on tariffs.

This seizure of executive power has been vigorously supported by House Speaker Mike Johnson in refusing, during the government shutdown in the fall of 2025, to conduct any House business, including his refusal at the time to swear in Adelina Grijalva, a newly elected Arizona woman of Latin American descent.

Along the same authoritarian lines, Trump has conducted widespread assaults on the independent agencies lawfully approved by Congress, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; fired thousands of Federal public employees, ignoring the rules normally governing such government actions; attempted media censorship of critics including comedians; and withdrawn federal grants in order to coerce institutions of higher education.

Further, he has deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to engage in massive and illegal deportations, terrorizing the communities in which immigrants live; illegally and arbitrarily bombed boats and killed their occupants supposedly engaged in drug trafficking in the Caribbean and in the Pacific Ocean; nakedly used the Justice Department to prosecute Trump’s political enemies; and generally instituted a climate of lawlessness emerging from Trump’s violation of laws he does not like.

It is important to note in this context that Trump has been supported by, and in return covered up, extreme rightwing groups as manifested in the January 6, 2021 rioting to prevent Congress from ratifying the results of the November 2020 presidential election of Joe Biden.

Several people were killed and many injured during that attack, but that did not stop Trump, after regaining office in 2025, from pardoning all those who had been found guilty by the courts for their January 6 actions.

Louis Bonaparte for his part went even farther than Trump (so far), and among other acts of repression destroyed the revolutionary press, placed public meetings under police supervision, disbanded the democratic National Guard, imposed a state of siege, supplanted juries by military commissions, and subjected public education to the Catholic clergy.

Louis Napoleon’s rule was corrupt as was especially the case with the urban renewal of Paris led by Baron Georges-Eugéne Haussman, which was full of financial mismanagement and bold profiteering.

As Marx pointed out in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the French ruler counted on the support of the lumpenproletariat, with the chief of the Society of December 10 (the date of Bonaparte’s election as president) at the head of the lumpen elements. Louis Bonaparte, along with his retinue and powerful members of the government and his army, belonged to that society and as such themselves benefitted from their access to the state treasury.

For his part Trump, especially in his second term, has used his power to sponsor all sorts of financial deals made by family members especially in the Gulf countries, and also used his position as president to promote highly volatile cryptocurrencies. This includes granting a pardon to convicted felon Chang Peng Zhao, the founder of the firm Crypto Exchange Binance.

Besides the capricious demolition of part of the White House to pursue his love of gigantic ballrooms, Trump has also used it as a base for his unlicensed retail operations such as the sale of merchandise including Trump watches and even Trump Bibles. Thus the presidency as well as the White House has lost much of its vaunted dignity as it has been converted into a vulgar retail outlet.

Moreover, major figures in his administration have illegally used their positions for private gain, such as his border czar Tom Homan — whom FBI agents once arrested as he accepted $50,000 in cash in exchange for his promise to promote certain government policy decisions.

As one would expect considering Trump’s usual lawlessness, charges against Homan were dropped once Trump became president for the second time. More recently, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was reported to have ordered the Coast Guard to buy two private jets, costing 172 million dollars, for her use and that of her staff.

Social and Political Bases

Yet despite these tempting similarities between their actions, the political and social situations that played decisive roles in the rise and holding on to power of Donald Trump and Louis Bonaparte could not have been more different.

Louis Bonaparte rose to power on the wake of the defeat of the French and Europe-wide 1848 revolutions, which signified a major shift in the political standing of the bourgeoisie in western and central Europe.

As Marx and Engels explained, it became clear during the 1848 events that the bourgeoisie was no longer playing a revolutionary role, especially in the case of France.

In that country, what happened that year greatly reinforced the fear of the working class that the French bourgeoisie had developed. This fear had a major conservatizing effect on their own political and social behavior, becoming the principal reason for their unconditional support for Louis Bonaparte.

As far as the peasantry was concerned, their association of Louis Bonaparte with the memory of his uncle Napoleon — who was perceived as a defender of the peasants’ right to their plot of land — and their fear of urban revolts, which might potentially endanger their economic security and welfare, constituted the principal source of peasant support for the emperor.

This was a conservative small landholding peasantry that Marx famously saw as both being and not being a class. According to Marx, they were a class because they shared objective conditions common to all French peasants, but yet not a class as they were isolated from each other and thus unable to act in concert.

It was thus the combination of a very recently defeated working class, a politically cowardly bourgeoisie, and an atomized peasantry that allowed Louis Napoleon to rule for over 20 years. For different reasons none of these classes were able to achieve political hegemony and power on their own, thus allowing Louis Napoleon to rise and politically maneuver above the class deadlock created by the specific French political circumstances of the 1850s.

But as Hal Draper argued, the existence of a class equilibrium was not itself the distinguishing feature of Bonapartism. The crux of Bonapartism, rather, was the utilization of this condition to maximize the autonomous position of the state with respect to the classes — an autonomization organized under a “personal one-man rule,” a one-man who moreover was not functioning as the chairman of any class’s “executive committee.” (Hal Draper, op. cit, 426)

The U.S. Scene

Quite in contrast to the French political situation in the 1850s, the United States has had an economically very strong and powerful bourgeoisie, possibly the most powerful in the world, that has enjoyed vast economic power for a very long time in the United States and the world at large.

Moreover, this bourgeoisie has so far had little reason to worry about a serious power threat from an overwhelmingly non-organized working class, although localized working-class struggles have continued to take place.

Even major crises such as the Great Recession (following the 2007-2009 housing bubble collapse and financial crisis) were “resolved” on very favorable terms for the capitalist class with only minor concessions extracted by the government from the banks, which in any case are now less important as private equity and other sources of unregulated capital formation have grown in importance.

Finally, the American capitalist class has not been part of a class deadlock with the working class or any other class or group that would have allowed a “Bonaparte” the opportunity to rise above that deadlock and seize power.

Most important of all, quite unlike Louis Napoleon’s ascent to power in 1848, Trump’s success in the 2016 and 2024 general elections was not a response to any major social breakdown and crisis in American society. The USA of the first quarter of the twenty first century has not been like the Europe of 1848, nor for that matter the German Weimar period during the late 1920s.

Most sections of the American bourgeoisie did not see Trump as a solution to an extreme social and political situation. It is also worth noting that in none of the general elections in 2016, 2020 and 2024 did Trump obtain the financial and political support of most of the capitalist class, although he did obtain substantial support from small sections of capital that had been pushing a much more aggressive war on the welfare state and the Obama/Biden legacy.

Of course, none of this denies major problems in the American economy and society, with the substantial popular discontent that has resulted from them. In the relatively short term, there exist serious concerns about the falling dollar, rising inflation much of it provoked by Trump’s new tariffs, and the growing economic and political threat from China.

In addition, the current Wall Street boom is highly unbalanced since it is based on the value of seven generally high technology and artificial intelligence equities. As of December 2025, the P/E (Price to Earnings) ratio for the broad S&P stock index has been quite high, suggesting a possibly out of control speculative wave.

Over the longer run, the United States (as well as major European economic powers) have failed to address the ongoing prospect of economic stagnation, and have been far from escaping the very major consequences of the deindustrialization that has been taking place for many decades.

This has had powerful negative effects on the organized American working class, as shown by studies such as that of Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol on the dramatic decline of the United Steel Workers union and its formerly pervasive social and political influence in the greater Pittsburgh area. (See Rust Belt Union Blues. Why Working-Class Voters Are Turning Away from the Democratic Party, New York: Columbia University Press, 2023.)

But again, these real and serious problems of the working class and American society had not yet risen to the level of the massive social breakdown that preceded the rise of Louis Napoleon in France, or of Nazism and Fascism — the most extreme form of Bonapartist rule — in Europe.

Behind the Rise of Donald Trump

The rise of Donald Trump, then, was more the product of the U.S. political system than of any great economic and social crisis. Trump was able to take advantage of the Democratic Party’s predictable failure to offer real, substantial solutions to the serious problems facing the U.S. working class.

Even so-called Keynesian economic measures were not up to the task to fundamentally resolve the crisis provoked by deindustrialization. In addition, the Democratic Party largely abandoned the working class to instead concentrate on the more educated middle- and upper-class suburban voters.

As Senate Democratic minority leader Charles Schumer asserted in July 2016, “for every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two, three moderate Republican in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

In the same year, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton condescendingly described half of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.”

Trump also benefited greatly by the persistent gerrymandering and overrepresentation of rural areas and of the most conservative states in the political system, as well as from U.S. Supreme Court actions.

Aside from banning affirmative action, the Supreme Court ruled that sections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act were unconstitutional and is currently threatening to emasculate if not altogether eliminate what remains of that landmark law, thereby eliminating the protection that the Black electorate has had against racist attacks on its voting rights. The Court also eliminated many controls on campaign spending.

Yet Trump still got substantially fewer popular votes than his opponents Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden did in 2016 and 2020. As a newcomer to electoral politics, Trump took advantage of the primary system (and continues to do so as a mechanism to purge Republican critics) that has become predominant in the USA since the early 1970s.

For most Democratic and Republican candidates this meant even greater domination of money in electoral campaigns. As a relatively fluid resource compared with the much thicker walls of the established party organizations, heavy reliance on major donors’ money can make an established party apparatus more vulnerable to well-financed upsurges from outside its domain.

This was the role assumed by CREEP (Committee to Reelect the President) under Nixon in the 1970s and by Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the 1990s. demanding contribution quotas from congressional Republicans, thereby bypassing the official Republican organizational structures.

But although Trump managed to raise important sums from a relatively small number of capitalists and from small donations to his campaigns, he was also able to use his fame and ability to manipulate the media, getting free exposure and publicity without having to spend anywhere as much money as his Republican and Democratic competitors — since in fact he has generally tended to raise less money for his presidential campaigns than the Democratic Party.

This was how the ascendancy of primaries more generally meant the significant loss of power and influence of party machines and structures such as the Tammany-type urban Democratic machines, although these had already been declining for other reasons such as the rise and consolidation of the welfare state.

Be that as it may, these party structures acted as an effective filter against anti-systemic movements, whether from the right or even more so from the left. Witness the effective work of the Tammany machines to stop or diminish the strength of the Socialist Party in New York City at the turn of the 20th century — even though this was not the principal reason for the creation and survival of political machines and other party organizations for many decades.

If we consider Trump’s relative weakness inside the Republican Party organizational apparatus in the past, the primary system was critical to his success by allowing him to directly appeal to the rightwing base and to those workers and others disenchanted with a Democratic Party that ignored their grievances.

Thus, it has been estimated that 11-15 percent of Trump voters in the 2016 elections had previously voted for Obama, much of that vote concentrated in Pennsylvania and several industrialized midwestern states.

New Layers of Support

Trump’s political success was also in great part due to his ability to electorally mobilize new layers of people, and to bring together almost all rightwing political currents. He generally succeeded in this political effort except for the neoconservative political tendency represented by such people as William Kristol.

Interestingly, even though Trump was a former supporter of abortion rights and a man who had been married several times, let alone a blatant sexist and sexual harasser, he managed to attract the support of the evangelical movement.

Substantial sections of religious evangelicals and anti-abortion forces had several decades earlier become politicized in reaction to what they viewed as the immoral 1960s, adding their considerable political muscle to the American right.

Until then the Right had been relatively limited to the issues of anti-Communism (e.g. the John Birch Society) and opposition to “big government” and to much of the welfare state. Although evangelicals may not have had illusions about Trump’s personal life, they did realize that he could serve their cause — as indeed he did, notably in his nominations to the Supreme Court that eventually annulled the Roe v. Wade 1973 decision that had established a nationwide right to abortion.

Although personally a capitalist, or what I called a “lumpen capitalist” in an essay published seven years ago (“Donald Trump, Lumpen Capitalist,” Jacobin, October 19, 2018) Trump was not a political product of the ruling class or even had a history of close political association with it.

Instead, he was an external agent who, as an extreme right-wing politician, supported and put into effect an across-the-board reactionary program. Although a run of the mill big businessman (with numerous bankruptcies to his credit) he started his career with money he got from his wealthy father.

Donald Trump always relished, unlike most capitalists, public exposure and celebration. And he got a lot of that attention, money and popular success with his television program “The Apprentice” that he ran, starting in 2004, for 14 seasons.

Before then, his craving for popular attention and racism led him to buy big ads in four New York City newspapers in 1989 to condemn and ask for the death penalty for five young Black people who had been accused of raping and injuring a while woman jogger in Central Park.

Although years later, the convicted men were exonerated through DNA analysis and the confession of the real culprit, Trump did not apologize and continued to insist on their guilt.

Trump’s racism, manifested in his presidential apologies for slavery, his open support for extreme right wing white South Africans, and his fury against DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) programs, also followed on the steps of his father who, with Donald’s assistance, discriminated against potential Black tenants as Queens real estate magnates.

What About the Ruling Class?

The U.S. capitalist class for the most part has not developed a class consciousness particularly focused on what is and is not in the best longterm class interest for the American capitalist system as a whole.

There are many reasons for this tendency, starting with the fact that in capitalist democracies there is typically a division  — although not an impermeable wall — between political and economic decision makers.

This division presents a problem for how the economically ruling class can ensure that the government of the day responds effectively to their long-term interests, particularly protecting the stability and durability necessary for a capitalist democracy — even though in the case of the United States, a comparatively less democratic system than most of the capitalist democracies in Europe and elsewhere.

Most of all, the division between the economic and political realms constitutes a structural obstacle to the capacity of the ruling class to perceive and think of social reality as a whole. That does not mean that the U.S. ruling class has lacked class instincts, by which I mean a generally acute knowledge of what immediate specific measures and government actions they should support or oppose.

The lack or absence of mechanisms assuring governmental acquiescence in response to class-wide, ruling-class demands is further explained by the fact that the ruling class is no monolith, at least in times of relative social peace, and is structurally divided among different sectors and industries whose interests may and do often collide or change over time.

Thus, for example a likely majority of the Silicon Valley wing of U.S. capital, traditionally associated with the Democratic Party, seems to have jumped on the Trump bandwagon since he took office for a second time in January of 2025. This is notably the case of the ruthless and opportunistic Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta Platforms Inc., of which Facebook is a central element.

Of course, the submissive conduct towards the Trump government by sections of the ruling class can also be attributed to a fear of retribution — among for example those capitalists who are subject to government regulations, such as obtaining federal government permission to buy other companies as in the case of the Paramount corporation, the owners of CBS.

Paramount could not merge with the Skydance Corporation to form the Paramount Skydance corporation without government approval. To achieve their desired merger, CBS was not only forced to agree to pay compensation to Donald Trump to settle a lawsuit that most legal analysts agreed had no merit, but far more importantly agree that CBS will for at least two years appoint an Ombudsman to hear complaints about its news coverage.

This in other words is a thinly disguised censorship, particularly when the person appointed as Ombudsman was Kenneth Weinstein, head of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. More recently, noted rightwinger Bari Weiss was also selected as the new head of the storied CBS news division. It did not take long for Ms. Weiss to carry out her Trumpian mandate when she censored a story about Venezuelans deported from the United States last December.

In the United States, as many Marxists and Marxist-influenced analysts recognize, the absence of a politically united, clear and coherent ruling class is dialectically related to the absence of the significant long-term presence of a strong left and socialist movement, especially in the working class.

Such a strong and long-lasting movement would have obliged the ruling class to respond with some kind of alternative to counteract the obvious danger of the left wing and socialist forces becoming politically and culturally hegemonic.

But fewer analysts look further into this matter to realize how the immense and often brutally forceful strength of American capitalism, in a major way, helped to prevent the left from posing a continuous danger — even if open acts of repression had to be carried out to stifle the labor movement and the left.

This was certainly the case for the numerous acts of repression of labor struggles and Black resistance that surged in the second half of the nineteenth century. But perhaps the most important example of such repression was the Red Scare of 1919-1920 when Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer conducted the infamous Palmer raids that resulted in the arrest of thousands and deportation of hundreds of foreign-born American radicals and socialists, especially those sympathetic to revolutionary Russia.

Of course, since the end of the Civil War the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations had carried out a relentless attack on African Americans, contributing in a major way to the defeat of civil rights struggles and of major unionizing efforts, not only in the South but even in northern states such as Indiana.

There was also of course the rise in McCarthyism in the late 1940s and early ’50s. The Cold War had broken out not too long after the burst of labor militancy as World War II was coming to an end, and created a hostile political climate that negatively affected the labor movement and the left in all its political variants, particularly the Communist Party and people associated with it.

The effects of McCarthyism can still be felt today, such as for example in the absence of a conscious militant minority in the unions. During this later period, a reborn KKK and the ostensibly more “respectable” White Citizens Councils continued to carry out their terroristic activities against Black people and their white allies, which of course included targeting union organizing.

The Ruling Class and Trump

While recognizing that the American business class has tended to be less politicized and class conscious than their equivalents in other developed capitalist countries, Paul Heideman (Rogue Elephant, How Republicans Went from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos, Verso, 2025) argues that because the capitalist class succeeded in getting much of what it wanted during the eight years of the Reagan presidency in the 1980s, it subsequently became very disorganized.

The disappearance or at least weakening of organizations such as the Business Roundtable, the Committee for Economic Development, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in turn weakened the Republican Party establishment, thereby allowing the entry and growing power of hard-right groups and individuals inside its ranks such as the Koch brothers.

According to Heideman’s analysis, It was such a weakened Republican Party that facilitated Trump’s unprecedented total domination throughout the whole country. Nonetheless, the reaction of elements of the U.S. ruling class varied somewhat during Donald Trump’s first presidential period.

In August 2017, only a few months after Trump was sworn the first time into office, there was widespread criticism after a rally of the extreme right in Charlottesville, Virginia, which included the killing of Heather Heyer, a young woman protestor, as well as the display of outright, explicit antisemitism, when Trump commented that there were “very good people — on both sides.”

This provoked an intense reaction and criticism of Trump that included several chiefs of major corporations such as Walmart, Under Armour and Merck. In addition, top corporate executives withdrew from Trump’s Business Advisory Councils.

Perhaps paradoxically, the far more numerous incidents and outrageous and antidemocratic conduct in the first months of Trump’s second term in office has failed to elicit any comparable protest among members of the capitalist ruling class.

This time around, what has been far more noticeable is the craven tolerance if not support of many big capitalists for Trump, while the rest keep silent about the dramatic rise of authoritarianism in the United States.

This political attitude has been undoubtedly fueled by Trump’s tax giveaway to the wealthiest Americans, deregulatory zeal, hands off approach to deal making, and as I previously mentioned, the Wall Street boom.

The Economist (October 25, 2025) cites analysts’ estimates that big business net profits grew for the ninth straight quarter, and that the S&P index of blue-chip stocks has risen by 14 percent from January to October of 2025, creating a $8 trillion increase in shareholder value.

Be that as it may, it remains difficult to understand how important sectors of the business ruling class, which without a doubt have been very negatively affected by Trump’s policies on tariffs and especially immigration in such vitally important sectors as agriculture, hospitality and construction, have not openly and vigorously opposed his policies.

It is here that we also must consider fear as an important factor explaining their behavior, particularly fear of the vengeful behavior of Trump and its acolytes, reminiscent in content and even verbal style of the Mafia.

I specifically mean fear of retribution through the possible use of the IRS tax enforcement mechanisms, let alone judicial indictments by the most partisan U.S. Justice Department in history as revealed in cases such as the attempted indictment of New York’s Attorney General Letitia James, and the withdrawal of federal aid and contracts.

As we have seen, the willingness of many districts and even appeal courts judges to overrule Trump has been negated by the Supreme Court’s repeated protection, or at least delay and evasion, regarding Trump’s out-of-control presidential discretion.

In many cases, the big business fear of Trumpian radical reactions has been accompanied by the hope of gaining access and sectoral favors from his presidency.

A Broader Perspective

Viewed from a broad historical perspective, the combination of avarice, fear and opportunism on the part of most capitalists should not be surprising and is further proof that capitalism, full of internal divisions and often concerned with short-term interests and goals, needs the state as its de facto political organizer.

That is one major reason why capitalists and capitalism can and do live with or without democracy, whether this takes place in Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa or in the United States. In this country, a fully authoritarian system would be unlikely to take the form of Bonapartism for the reasons discussed above, but rather that of a Hungarian type of regime under Viktor Orban, where the content of political democracy has been entirely emptied out and only the outer shell or appearance remains.

Whether that could happen without sharp conflicts and even violent struggles in the United States is another vital question that deserves to be analyzed at length.

March-April 2026, ATC 241