Montesquieu saw in commerce a school of moderation a pedagogy of peace a subtle mechanism by which interests temper ardor. Adam Smith saw in it a spontaneous order capable of transforming individual selfishness into collective prosperity. An entire Enlightenment tradition conceived the market as an auxiliary of reason. Trump radically inverts this perspective. Where the philosophers imagined balance and proportion, he perceives only massive imbalances abandoned factories emptied cities and sacrificed middle classes. Commerce does not soften it despoils. It does not civilize it dispossesses. The world is no longer a salon illuminated by universal reason but a brutal space where cunning prevails over virtue.
It is here that the shadow of Marx appears unexpected almost improper. For Marx was among the first to ridicule the optimism of the late Enlightenment when it turned economic. He did not believe that the market could moralize anything at all. He saw in it on the contrary a cold rational and implacable apparatus of domination. The globalization of commerce was not for him the culmination of human progress but the planetary extension of a system reducing men to functions and relations to prices. On this precise point Trump joins Marx without intending to by rejecting the enlightened fable of a naturally benevolent market.
Trump speaks of global elites where Marx spoke of the bourgeoisie. He denounces national betrayal where Marx denounced class exploitation. The words differ but the structure of the reasoning remains. Free trade is not neutral. It organizes the victory of a few and the defeat of the many. It produces protected winners and exposed losers. Like Marx Trump rejects the central idea of the economic Enlightenment according to which well understood self- interest would suffice to produce order and justice.
But the irony becomes complete when one observes the divergence of remedies. Marx drew from his diagnosis a radical critique of capitalism itself. Trump does not criticize capital he merely reproaches it for having crossed borders. It is not exploitation that outrages him but its relocation. Where Marx wanted to abolish the logic of the market Trump wishes to bring it back home to fence it in to nationalize it. Capitalism is not to be overcome but to be enclosed within the nation.
Thus there appears a Trump who is Marxian in the diagnosis but violently anti-Marxist in the solution. He shares the distrust of globalized liberalism while rejecting the universalism inherited from the Enlightenment. He speaks in the name of the people without calling into question the system that produces elites. He opposes the global market while sacralizing national profit.
One could say with discreet irony that Trump is a Marx deprived of dialectics a Marx without a theory of history a Marx reduced to raw intuition. Where Marx wrote volumes to dismantle the mechanisms of capital Trump contents himself with a hammered slogan and a tariff. One sought to transform the world. The other wants to renegotiate the contract.
And yet the conclusion remains. By breaking with Montesquieu Trump breaks with an essential part of the Enlightenment legacy that confidence in economic reason and in pacification through exchange.
He reintroduces conflict distrust the primacy of the balance of power realities that Marx had never ceased to take seriously. Whether one regrets it or not Trump appears less as an heir of the Enlightenment than as a symptom of their exhaustion.
Marx would no doubt have smiled with bitterness at this reversal. Montesquieu would probably have remained silent. Gentle commerce is no longer so gentle and even its former defenders now seem to doubt it. History delights in such ironies where the most radical critiques survive precisely where one least expects them.
*Author is a former member of the UN senior staff