My interview for "Marianne" as "C,A" is published in French — Branko Milanovic

...Trump rules the United State the way that he was managing his companies. When people ridicule him for not knowing the US constitution and the like, they also make a total mistake. Trump does not see the difference between a company and the state. This is the best indicator that it is the neoliberal economics that has already been spreading to a number of areas and is now in the process of taking over the state as well....

This is pretty close to Italian fascism — Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, The Doctrine of Fascism (1932) — as corporate statism. "Exceptionalism" adds the element of German fascism, and the push for permanent global hegemony brings in totalitarianism. The whole package — neoliberalism, neo-imperialism and neocolonialism.

In my view, while Trump exhibits fascist tendencies, this trend did not emerge either from him or with him. It is a consequence of the US "inheriting" the British Empire after WWII. It was and is a political choice. Nor did it appear out of nowhere post-WWII. It was some time in the making prior to that.

The difference between the US and China is that in the US, the corporate world controls the state, whereas in China the state controls the corporate world. But both systems reduce to types of corporate statism. While this is consistent with the views of the founding fathers that established the US as bourgeois liberal state, Mao is probably rolling over in his grave at developments in China that he would view as betraying the revolution and the state as he established and guided it.

Global Inequality
My interview for "Marianne" as "C,A" is published in French
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-economic Inequality, senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace