Stephen Miran, the intensifying internal war economy of Trump 2.0, and the new architecture of coercion

Abstract

This paper examines policy papers by the Trump administration organic intellectual Stephen Miran, whose work reframes trade, fiscal and monetary policy as national-security levers, promotes expanded Executive authority, and advocates a programme of militarized reindustrialization. These interventions offer a window into Trumpian political economy. Drawing on the political sociology of William Robinson, particularly his concept of the ‘global police state’, and Mark Neocleous’ argument that security is a logic of exclusion in which police power and war power are inseparable, the paper develops the concept of an ‘internal war economy’ and situates it within the broader dynamics of the US permanent war economy. This framework shows how Miran’s proposals might indirectly enhance and extend repressive social control and contribute to a shift in the structural position of what Robinson terms ‘surplus humanity’, from being excluded from circuits of production to reintegrated as objects of security labour (i.e. ‘security substrates’) within an emerging regime of ‘accumulation by repression’.