Keep a-hold of Nurse

The Contradictions of Trumpism

Earlier this year, I noted the irony that the Trump economy, supposed to be about returning industrial production to the United States, has been dominated by the growth of care work. A look at the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Projections and Occupational Outlook, released on August 27, confirms this, and then some: of the nearly 6 million jobs the U.S. economy is projected to add over the next decade, about one-third will be in the care sector. The report states it quite clearly:

The private healthcare and social assistance (+9.5 percent) major industry sector is projected to add the most jobs of any sector, over 2.2 million over the projections period, and is projected to be the second fastest growing major industry sector. This strong growth is expected to account for about 37.0 percent of all new jobs projected to be added through 2035. Strong employment growth is expected to stem from both the aging population and the increasing prevalence of chronic health conditions, such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.

You can see it already: In the latest jobs report, for August 2026, healthcare employment was still rising. It added about 13,000 jobs that month, with home health care services alone adding 11,000. Healthcare averaged about 32,000 new jobs per month over the previous 12 months.

Marx, in the Communist Manifesto, wrote that capital was producing its own gravediggers; in point of fact, it’s producing its own nurses.

How should we then account for the hostility of Trumpian ideology towards the principal characteristics of care workers? They are frequently people of color, immigrants, and women. On the level of culture and ideology, this is a disavowal: society depends increasingly on feminized, racialized, migrant care labor, while politically insisting on the restoration of the patriarchal family, native-born sovereignty, and masculine productive labor. This is the fantasy world of an aging population that wants to imagine itself still virile and master in its own house.

Of course, the devaluation of such work and its workers has real benefits on the level of political economy as well: Immigration restriction, precarious legal status, gender hierarchy, and the privatization of care can all help produce a labor force that is cheaper, more dependent, less free, and therefore easier to discipline. It’s an attempt to reverse the dependency of care work: rather than acknowledge its dependence on workers, care workers would depend on the protection and largesse of employers or husbands.

This is where things become truly contradictory rather than merely ironic: Trumpism is attacking those sectors of labor that the actually existing capitalist economy cannot do without. If you make immigrant care workers too precarious, you can suppress wages—but you may also create labor shortages. If you push care back onto women in households, you can reduce public costs—but you may also reduce labor-force participation elsewhere. If you stigmatize feminized care work, you may politically subordinate it—but then have difficulty recruiting enough workers. Not to mention that the Trump economy is producing exactly those kinds of workers that are least politically invested in MAGA: female, credentialed workers.

Trump himself is a dotard, in the immortal phrase of Kim Jong Un, and increasingly under the watchful care of a younger aide. She personifies a kind of filial devotion while his own children, like those in King Lear, have ambitions and dynastic projects of their own. But she is not his Cordelia; she’s an employee. Feudal dependency has not returned. Even in Trump’s attempt to construct a personal regime—a “sultanate,” as the historian Ervand Abrahamian recently called it—he cannot escape wages. The sovereign patriarch ends, like everyone else, dependent on the paid labor of another.