Photo: Nov. 4 Trump campaign rally in Pittsburgh, PA. Credit — Designism/Wikimedia Commons
Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election ushers in a new phase in U.S. politics that threatens profound attacks on the basic rights of workers and oppressed communities – but also presents an opportunity to build a united working class movement that can finally overcome the disastrous misdirection of the liberal wing of the ruling class that has failed so miserably to stop the advance of the far right. In this moment, our tasks are to organize working people to both fight back against the offensive that Trump is preparing to carry out, and to build the socialist movement fighting to overturn the rule of the billionaires.
For either to be successful, these two tasks have to be linked. The fight against Trump’s ultra-reactionary initiatives will not succeed if it is carried out as a defense of the status quo. There needs to be a larger vision for the transformation of society underpinning the struggle ahead.
What happened on election day
The election results should first and foremost be understood as a total failure of the Democratic Party. There will be no shortage of narratives blaming one or another section of the population for the outcome. But in truth, the Democratic Party elite and the entire centrist/liberal wing of the ruling class have no one to blame but themselves.
The key issue of the election was the economy, and in particular the high cost of living. Trump would frequently start his rallies by asking if those in attendance were better or worse off than they were four years ago, and for huge numbers of people, the answer was that they were now in a worse position. In the first 15 months of the Biden administration, weekly wages fell by nearly 4% when inflation is taken into account. Although wages mostly recovered later in Biden’s term, there was no substantial program put forward to address the decline and stagnation working people have experienced for years.
Biden came into office promising the largest expansion of social programs since the 1960s – the “build back better” agenda. Not only did he abandon this program in the face of resistance from senators within his own party, he presided over the expiration of all of the emergency relief programs enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the year leading up to the election, he spent $27 billion backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza while people’s basic needs went unmet.
Beyond material conditions, the bumbling political missteps of the Democratic Party leadership played a significant role. Kamala Harris was only the candidate for slightly over 100 days. Biden insisted on running for office until his meltdown on the debate stage forced him out of the race. At that point, he had also become rightfully hated by millions for his participation in the ruthless genocide against the Palestinian people – a genocide that Harris pledged she would continue to back with limitless weapons supplies. And Biden was only the candidate to begin with essentially because he was in the right place at the right time to defeat Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary. And despite all this, Harris refused to distance herself from Biden, embracing his record while building an empty personal brand around “joy” and “hopefulness.”
Any attempt to blame the victory of Trump on one demographic group or another falls flat. For instance, one line of attack from liberals has been to accuse Black men of supporting Trump in record numbers. There is no evidence whatsoever that this materialized on election day – exit polls found that Trump enjoyed 20% support among Black male voters compared to Harris’ 78%, essentially unchanged from the total in 2020. Likewise, the idea that there was a surge in misogynist sentiment in society overall does not align with the decisive victories for abortion rights referenda across the country. In 10 states where abortion rights were on the ballot, clear majorities were in favor in eight of them – with the only defeats in conservative-dominated Nebraska and South Dakota.
Exit polls did reflect significant growth in support for Trump among Latinos. Harris won 53 percent of the Latino vote, compared to 45 percent for Trump – a 13 percentage point increase. That Trump achieved this feat while intensifying his racist rhetoric against Mexicans, Venezuelans, Puerto Ricans and people of other Latin American nationalities is a reflection of how deep disgust is with the Democratic Party over its failure to address profound economic hardships.
Incumbent governments around the globe are facing serious headwinds. Long-dominant parties of many different ideological stripes have faced severe electoral setbacks in the face of a world situation characterized by high inflation, deepening geopolitical conflict and skyrocketing inequality. This proved true in the United States as well, multiplied by the incompetence and egoism of Democratic Party politicians.
Defeating the coming war on immigrants
Trump has vowed to carry out a massive police state crackdown on immigrants, pledging to round up millions of undocumented people in militarized raids that would take place in every part of the country. He has whipped up support for this mass deportation campaign using the most vile, racist rhetoric that slanders immigrants as violent criminals.
The Democratic Party has reacted to this by essentially adopting Trump’s anti-immigrant program, but without his demonizing language. Harris touted her plan to vastly expand Border Patrol, and emphasized the support of the Border Patrol officers’ association for her policy. She presented herself as a “tough on crime” prosecutor ready to take on “the border.” Even more, they have totally ignored laws like the Alien Enemies Act and the Insurrection Act that Trump is using as legal cover for his offensive. They preferred to wax poetic about Nazi Germany, while ignoring the authoritarian structures of the US government facilitating many of Trump’s proposals.
Some groups that are traditionally in the Democratic Party orbit have advanced a narrative in defense of immigrants, but its presentation as a single issue isolated from the other pressing matters on the minds of working people has failed to galvanize a sufficient mass of people. The non-profit model of organization lends itself exactly to this kind of error, and also gives credence to the false right wing narrative that ultra-rich individuals (who do in fact provide the grant money that fuels non-profits) are conspiring to “replace” the native-born population with people born in other parts of the world.
A movement capable of defeating the war on immigrants needs to have at its core the idea of working class solidarity that applies to all people regardless of place of birth or legal status. Deporting millions of undocumented people will not lower the rent, or make the price of groceries go down. Immigrants did not decide to close down factories and devastate communities – corporate executives did that. Immigrants want the exact same thing as U.S.-born workers: the ability to live a life with dignity and provide for their families. Oftentimes, they are fleeing war and poverty created by the very same corporations and politicians responsible for the injustices that people experience here in the United States.
Exposing the class nature of Trump’s program
Despite his hollow rhetoric about standing up for the “working man and woman”, Trump’s agenda is actually premised on the destruction of the rights of the working class for the benefit of billionaires and big corporations. He swept back into power thanks to the support of some of the richest people on the planet, like Elon Musk, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, Marc Andreessen, and many others. Their ultimate goal is to eviscerate the economic and political rights won during the New Deal of the 1930s and the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s.
Trump has pledged to appoint Elon Musk to lead a new “government efficiency commission” that would be given a broad mandate to reshape the federal government. Musk certainly will not be focused on making sure the government more efficiently provides healthcare, quality education, or disaster relief to people. His mandate will be to conduct massive layoffs of public sector workers – which would also constitute a historic attack on unions – and to slash any vital social program that helps working people survive. This could take the form of the wholesale elimination of programs like the Affordable Care Act, or through the imposition of bureaucratic “means testing” designed to make qualifying for benefits next to impossible.
Workers involved in the enforcement of environmental regulations will certainly be among the top targets, as would the regulations themselves. Trump wants to make sure that there are no restrictions to how much corporations can pollute the air, dump toxic chemicals into our water, or subject our communities to cancer-causing hazards. And he has pledged to dramatically expand the use of fossil fuels that deepen the climate crisis that already causes such huge suffering, like the death and destruction in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
One of the first items on the Republican legislative agenda next year will be the extension of the 2017 tax cuts that Trump pushed through in his first term in office. This was a $2 trillion dollar giveaway to the rich and the corporations they own, starving the government of revenue that could otherwise be put to use for the common good. Even if Trump follows through on some of the tax-related pledges he made on the campaign trail like eliminating taxes on tips or overtime, that will not change the pro-billionaire, pro-corporate essence of Trump’s tax policy.
Trump claims that he will make up for that revenue by the imposition of tariffs on goods that are imported from other countries. For decades, “free trade” has been the consensus position of the ruling class. But that has not always been the case. For long periods of time in the United States, tariffs were a preferred tool to promote “national industry” and guard the market share of U.S.-based capitalists. Tariff policy was also used as a political tool to convince certain sections of the working class that their well-being was bound up with the prosperity of their bosses. It is not inconceivable that in some industries, high tariffs would result in the creation of a not insignificant number of new jobs as enterprises are forced to move production to the United States. But the overall effect on the working class would be to drive up prices and bring the inflation crisis roaring back. To rebuild communities shattered by deindustrialization, we need to seize the stolen wealth of the billionaire class and redistribute it, not tinker with tax policy to incentivize corporations to exploit people “at home” instead of abroad.
The new Trump administration is likely to pursue policies that would be hugely detrimental to public health. Trump has indicated he would appoint Robert F Kennedy Jr. to an important post in this area – giving him the chance to enact his bizarre “Make America Healthy Again” agenda that includes hostility to life-saving vaccines. Kennedy couches this in rhetoric about big pharma and the greed of the medical industry. But the country saw during the COVID pandemic that when common-sense public health measures are rejected, it is frontline workers and the most oppressed communities in society who suffer the most. Science is a powerful tool to save the lives and better the livelihoods of working people, it has to be defended from men like Kennedy who were born into unimaginable wealth and are searching for an outlet for their conspiratorial fantasies.
Trump’s claim that he is a lover of peace who refuses to start new wars is ridiculous. He is an outspoken advocate of funneling more and more of our taxpayer dollars into the war machine. He wants to step up aid to Israel so it can “finish the job” in its genocide against Palestinians and aggression across the region. During his time in office, he took the country even further down the road towards a devastating conflict with China, and nearly started a war with Iran by carrying out a brazenly illegal assassination of a top Iranian leader. And he imposed cruel blockades and attempted to orchestrate regime change in countries like Venezuela and Cuba that want nothing more than the right to pursue their own independent social projects.
Who will be sent to fight the wars that Trump may start? Certainly not the children of the politicians in Washington or the executives in the boardroom of Lockheed Martin, Boeing or other war profiteers. It will be working class young people who are sent to kill and die on behalf of millionaires and billionaires who view their lives as completely disposable.
Fighting Trump, fighting for socialism
Although Trump ran a campaign pitting one section of the working class against another, there are in fact many things workers are broadly united around. Most workers support universal healthcare, universal childcare, union rights, the cancellation of student debt, and an end to the endless wars. And beyond that, people are highly receptive to a radical critique that gets to the core of the system. A recent New York Times opinion poll found that 69% of respondents stated that the U.S. economy needs either “major change” or that the system needs to be “entirely torn down.”
The experience of the PSL’s Vote Socialist campaign, running Claudia De la Cruz for president and Karina Garcia for Vice-President, is further proof of this. Many votes are still being counted, but already we know that this ticket secured a historic vote total for socialist candidates. For over a year, thousands of PSL members and volunteers across the country worked tirelessly to spread the radical message of the campaign and explain the urgent need to “end capitalism before it ends us.”
Central to this program was the demand to seize the top 100 corporations and turn them into public property. This would be the basis to provide healthcare, education, housing, and a job with a living wage to everyone as guaranteed constitutional rights. Reclaiming the stolen wealth of the billionaire class would also make it possible to take the decisive action necessary to save the planet from the climate crisis.
The complete bankruptcy of the Democratic Party and its inability to stop the far right has never been clearer. It is time once and for all to jettison its misleadership and build an independent movement accountable to no one other than the working class.
Inevitably, there will be many moments of defensive struggle, where Trump has the initiative and it is up to the people to stop him. But a movement capable of defeating Trump will also have to put forward a positive program that speaks to the deep crises working people are facing. And the progressive measures we demand should not be presented as bandaids to address this or that problem. They are stepping stones as we build towards the socialist transformation of society. This will be a tremendous task, but it is the only way that the people can defeat Trump and keep the fight for justice moving forward until the entire political and economic elite is swept away, never to return.
