Richard Wolfe is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

He has a popular YouTube channel, a string of influential books, including most recently understanding capitalism,

and according to the New York Times, he is America's most prominent Marxist economist.

So, Professor Wolf seemed like a great choice to help to get a grip on how Donald

Trump has reshaped capitalism and class struggle in his first 100 days of his second term in the

White House. In the second half of our conversation, we mainly focused on China, including

when and whether. It will take over from the United States as the world's

superpower and how Marxists should understand its phenomenal rise. But I began by asking Richard

for his initial assessment of President Trump's first 100 days. Well, I am impressed, if that's the right word. He has done as he had indicated he might,

make a bigger splash, make a bigger impact, do more things, mostly by executive order than presidents usually do, and he's done that.

He has promised to do very conventional things. It's often missed, very conventional things for the Republican Party, reduce the importance of the federal

government, shift from government to private. He's done that above all by destroying many agencies of the federal government.

He chose a novel method rather than disputing the budget.

He simply fired large numbers of the people who could therefore not carry out the functions.

And then as a byproduct, the budget for these agencies was simply removed.

It was a bit of a trick because typically the Republicans and the Congress deals with the activities of an agency

rather than with the employment details of that activity.

The big surprise has been in economics.

His economic program has been reduced from a variety of tools to one overwhelming tool.

And in that is the only significant departure from conventional Republican Party strategy. So you might say he

has shown himself to be a Republican president on steroids, overdone, overactive, extreme version, something like that. In economics, it has taken

above all the form of an absolute infatuation beyond anything I've ever seen with one particular

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