Year Ender 2025 examines how Donald Trump’s presidency reshaped global politics, race, nationalism and the future of liberal democracy | Representational Image
How will US President Donald J. Trump be depicted in history books 100 years from now? (Yes, there’ll be books, even if there isn’t a USA.) A brutal man, wielding brute force, could have only been elected by brutes (even if his 2024 opponent won by 70.6 lakh votes), thanks to an electoral system designed with foresight for a time when it became the only way a White man could win. Maybe his chapter will be named after Francis Fukuyama’s famous 27-page essay in 1989, in the realist conservative journal The National Interest: “The End of History and the Last Man”. Though his chapter might be modified to “The Last White Man”.
In the 1990s (when his essay became a book), Fukuyama was derided for positing that liberal democracy was politics’ final stage. Today he is experiencing a second renaissance, as the wise old man of Stanford University—traditionally the academic focus of conservatism—who may have had a point in wondering if there was a teleology to the politics of mankind.
Fukuyama still believes that liberal democracy will triumph, if only because, historically, authoritarians can’t run an economy. Or put another way, people who advocate demolishing government cannot, paradoxically, run it.
No one doubts that Trump is nowadays in trouble and was doomed from the start. His achievements will not include long, hard negotiations on war and peace—trying to strongarm Ukraine into surrendering to Russia, or egging Israel on in its genocide of Palestinians, are not negotiations—but will include haggling with India on almonds and corn syrup.
Future generations will marvel at how the world’s most powerful indicted rapist outright robbed oil from another nation. They will be aghast to learn that in the Before Trump (BT) era, unidentifiable uniformed men could not “disappear” ordinary people from the street. They will applaud how this associate of sex traffickers forced media giants to shut down and be sold (with his involvement in the sale). They will scratch their chins at why this man, who cheats at golf, was never awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.
History’s real question will be what Trump will leave behind.
The most obvious Pandora’s Box that Trump opened is the scourge of the world over: racism. It’s a subset of majoritarianism, which is a subset of nationalism. The last time nationalism erupted around the globe, it ended in a world war. Till that happens (if it does), we are condemned to suffer racism. In India this takes a form we are all familiar with (in America, lynchings took place in the 19th century; in India, it still happens).
Trump’s racism isn’t personal (though, anecdotally, it is) but forms a toxic basis for foreign policy. It’s not just, as several accounts of his first term attest, mimicking how Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks, and not just referring to African countries as “shitholes”, but it is in the way Trump hectors Europe, going over the heads of governments to tell people that they face an existential crisis unless they elect demagogues like him to power. Nativists like him are required to stop the entry of coloured people and to throw the ones already here out. Otherwise, he threatens to abandon Europe, an outcome hungrily awaited by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Similarly, Germany’s ruler in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler, used racism as a basis for foreign policy—lebensraum for the expanded Germanic people, and the industrial eradication of European Jews—but that did not end well for the single-testicled, failed painter. (Incidentally, Trump is sensitive about his “small” fingers.)
When Trump’s nationalism project inevitably fails, what happens to Europe? His demographic doomsday scenarios might contain a kernel of truth. Falling birth rates among Whites, coupled with an unstoppable immigration of coloureds, driven out of their homelands by climate change’s devastation of their coasts and economies—Whites claim this devastation isn’t their problem, though it will resurface in a different shape—means that Europe will become browner and browner (but not necessarily in the dystopian manner that Western media likes to depict). No wonder Trump’s supporters in the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement appeal to its Evangelist Christian core to focus on the family and have more babies.
One need not speculate on Europe’s collapse. Samuel Huntington, another conservative who advised the US State Department (and the CIA) on long trends, wrote in a 1992 essay, The Clash of Civilizations (as a response to Fukuyama), that cultural and religious identities would be the basis of future conflict. In the book version, he clearly games out the clashes, and their winners and losers. Read for yourself.
As both essays were written while the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was disintegrating—what an irony that two of its successor states are at war, like the post-Cold War balkanisation of Yugoslavia—one wonders if these scholars’ return to relevance today signals another coming big collapse. (Yes, Donald, we’re talking about your country, not you.) Alex Garland has depicted this in his film Civil War. We do not know if America will finally break, but what is more likely is that Whites become a minority in many countries, save a few like Switzerland and Paraguay.
In that case, whether liberal democracy returns or not, we can don our Hegelian hats and say that for Whites, history is coming to an end—and that Trump is its Last White Man.
The author is a writer living on the outskirts of Delhi.
