Could Donald Trump’s legacy trump Donald Trump’s immediacy?

^{Ilustration: Stable Diffusion of Grant Woods and S. Brovkin.}

Winston Churchill reportedly claimed that the Americans always gets it right…after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives. Let’s hope that the recent election will exhaust the last alternative, so that the country can finally get it right, for the sake of survival.

Anger, affluence, and angst—this is America today. Donald Trump was elected by a tacit alliance of the angry, for whatever reason, with the beleaguered, for good reason, bankrolled by the wealthy, for the wrong reason—to reduce taxes and regulations, which will further squeeze the beleaguered, who struggle to pay inflating expenses with lagging incomes. Trump won by tapping into their angst.

Economists claim that the economy is doing great. Whose economy? That of the wealthy, to be sure, also of the comfortable who serve that wealth—executives, lawyers, accountants, consultants, and others—plus university professors who are funded by that wealth. Included among the latter are economists who promise that a rising tide lifts all boats, rich and poor alike, also that wealth trickles down, from the wealthy to the rest. Go tell that to the poor and the rest, who, in turn, can tell the economists a thing or two about rising tides: they don’t trickle down, instead they swamp the dinghies anchored below, while the yachts sail merrily along. Put differently, the win-win liberal democracy that was America has been replaced by a zero-sum America driven by the insatiable greed of the hyper wealthy.

Hence, the recent election was not about the economy, stupid. It was about the distribution of wealth in the economy, manifested in the price of eggs, the cost of mortgages, the plight of maintaining health insurance. Those people on the short end of this stick voted for a different deal; can they be blamed for asking why, with so much wealth in the country, they are struggling to make ends meet? They are citizens, after all, human beings who are fed up with being the “human resources” of the affluent.

This tacit alliance of the anger, affluence, and angst may have worked to put Donald Trump into office, but can it hold together once he is in office? There, he will be beholden to the affluent who funded his campaign, some of whom will be surrounding him there. What will happen when his policies to serve the wealthy hit the fan—for example, tariffs that could revive inflation and gutted public services on which the beleaguered depend?

Donald Trump won the election because he managed to brand himself as the champion of these people. In two years, they will get another shot at electing the House and some of the Senate. By then, a president who may like to rant with the angry and cavort with the wealthy will have to deliver to the beleaguered—to address a society that is disastrously out of balance, not unlike the imbalance that brought down the Soviet Union, just on the other side of the political spectrum—in favor of private sector wealth instead of public sector authority.

Post World War II, America was much closer to balance. It levied substantial taxes on the wealthy and provided generous welfare programs for those in need (in Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”), while the economy boomed. That was win-win America.

Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which took with it the balance that had been serving so many Americans. Pundits had a ready explanation for the fall of that wall: that capitalism had triumphed. They were dead wrong. Balanced had triumphed. While America was experiencing relative balance, the communist regimes of Eastern Europe were brought down by the dead weight of their own governments. As a consequence of this misunderstanding, however, capitalism has been triumphing in America ever since, especially after the Supreme Court legalized bribery in 2010, by opening the floodgates of public elections to private donations. Rather than trickling down, wealth in America has been gushing up ever since. This is zero-sum America. It needs radical renewal—balance restored.

If Donald Trump’s tacit alliance does split, which way would he go? It may seem evident that he will go with the angry, in a frontal attack on the establishment, except, of course, the wealthy, but unwittingly including the beleaguered. But this needn’t be necessarily so, not with a guy who has shown himself to turn on a dime, and turn on his benefactors too—ultimately beholden to no-one, including his previous self. What might happen when he finds out that exacerbating the imbalance could be catastrophic, for his own future as well as that of the country? In other words, facing failure that he so mortally fears, might Donald Trump finally deliver to those in need by moving the country toward the restoration of balance?

Ironically, Donald Trump could be just the person for the job. For two years, he will have rather extraordinary power across all three branches of the American government. Moreover, radical renewal will require a radical in the Oval Office. As Brent Stephens put it in a recent New York Times column (16 December), “Trump is a disruptor in a system that needs a lot of disruption.” Is there an electable Democrat who could do this, in what has significantly become the party of the comfortable, many of whom benefit from the imbalance?

Don’t discount one other factor. This guy is about to reach 80—wake-up time for many of the wealthy after a lifetime of shenanigans. Could Donald Trump’s legacy finally trump Donald Trump’s immediacy, his obsession with the here and now? What better capstone on a lifetime of serving self?

Twice before, in the 1860s and the 1930s, a divided America was saved from itself, first by a Republican president and then by a Democratic one. Both were statesmen who did what was right for the disadvantaged of America. You might wonder who can possibly imagine Donald Trump’ s legacy as a statesman? Donald Trump.

Imagine payback time for the sake of balance, say by establishing a livable minimum wage, and ridding the financial markets of their own immediacy—day trading, quarterly earnings reports, and financial schemes that drive corporations to exploit their human resources instead of exploring their people’s human resourcefulness. Surely this would make perfectly good sense, indeed should be obvious in a country that ceases to be dumbed down by its own imbalance.

On the day after the election, CNN ran a story under the heading  “Markets close at record highs as Trump is re-elected”, likewise in the New York Times , “Trump’s Victory Is a Major Win for Elon Musk and Big-Money Politics.” Here was business as usual. Except that going back to business as usual is the worst possible alternative for an America that has run out of alternatives. For the sake of survival, Americans will finally have to get it right.

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© Henry Mintzberg 2025, with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.