There are moments when history advances and, with simple strokes, shows the fundamental trends of a nascent historical era. This is what happened in the USA on Saturday, July 13, with the attack on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. The attack historically merged with the defiant response of the former president who, with his fist raised and his face bloodied, called on his supporters to fight three times, and did so instantly in front of the public of the world’s first superpower.
From that moment on, as Mike Johnson, “president” of the House of Representatives, highlighted, Donald Trump’s candidacy in the November 5 elections became “absolutely unstoppable”.
This amounts to a change of era for the US and the world, and means that the world’s leading superpower is regaining the political power it lost over the last four years, even with the power vacuum in the White House.
This change in the power equation in the world forces all countries, without exception, to adapt their behavior to the new reality.
Everything indicates that Donald Trump’s nomination of Senator JD Vance as US vice-presidential candidate at the Republican convention implies a fundamental strategic choice. It means, mainly, the deepening of “Trumpism” as an expression of industrial workers and the impoverished and uprooted middle class of the Midwest and Appalachians, the mountain range that stretches like a backbone of poverty through the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
The basic proposal of JD Vance, intellectual, former Marine and author of one of the biggest publishing successes in the USA – “Hillbilly Elegy” – consists of the need to obtain high wages for American workers, reversing the trend of the last 40 years, in which the extraordinary leap in productivity of the American economy turned almost exclusively into a phenomenal accumulation of capital, while neglecting a wage increase for the workforce.
This had immediate and serious social consequences, with the rupture of the “American dream”, of an always better future for all Americans and their descendants.
That is why JD Vance’s militant “Trumpism” rejects illegal immigration – and also legal immigration – to the extent that it becomes synonymous with low domestic wages.
International trade in the era of globalization, Vance argues, is based on a low labor cost structure in the emerging world. The truly archetypal historical example of this situation is the extraordinary expansion of the Chinese economy, which for more than 40 years grew at an average accumulated rate of 9.9% per year (the longest period with the highest levels of expansion in the history of capitalism ). And, correlatively, in the USA, the brutally paradoxical phenomenon of an exceptional increase in productivity combined with a systematic fall in workers’ real income (relative impoverishment).
Donald Trump and Vance’s vision is exactly the opposite, high wages in the domestic market and also in international trade.
The most notable example of this proposal is the new NAFTA (USMCA), promoted by Donald Trump in 2019, which allows exports to the US only if Mexican workers reach the wage level of American workers.
In the view of Trump/Vance, and with the mediation of Elon Musk, who today embodies the revolutionary and innovative spirit of Silicon Valley, this is combined with the complete deregulation of Artificial Intelligence, with the elimination of Washington’s bureaucratic tangle, and with the new and drastic tax reduction.
This is what will be happening in the US with a new administration of Donald Trump and JD Vance, if they win the November 5th election.
The last point – and in historical terms, the decisive one – is the strategic agreement between the USA and China, which will only be possible when the American superpower, under Trump’s presidency, manages to recover all its political and economic vigor, through of the Artificial Intelligence revolution, which is already in full development.
On the other hand, China, having completed the process of absorbing the workforce of its 900 million workers into an extensive, cheap and industrial-type economy, now finds itself in a higher phase of qualitative transformation, guided by a “ digital economy” that aspires to cover 100% of its product by 2035.
This set of forces, which shows the extreme vigor of the two superpowers, makes it possible to predict a strategic agreement of a global nature, which would, without a doubt, be the main event of the 21st century.
All of these traits of US and world history, along with those of its convergence with China’s “Middle Empire,” appeared prominently on Saturday, July 13, the unforgettable day on which the tragic event in Butler, Pennsylvania, occurred.