Trump’s 100-day blitz and the stirring of resistance
The shock of Donald Trump’s record 142 executive orders in his first 100 days in office and their devastating impact on the president’s key targets is reverberating around the world, especially with the genocide in Palestine. The effect on Trump’s main domestic targets—centrally, immigrants—has been well documented in the mainstream media as well as liberal and social democratic outlets. But the 100-day marker is also an occasion for activists and socialists to analyse the forces behind Trump and their agendas. The following questions can help frame the discussion.
How has Trump so quickly and radically departed from US political norms?
There is certainly a sweeping, aggressive shift to the right in US politics and an attempt by Trump to imbue the presidency with authoritarian powers. His pardon of the 6 January 2021 rioters—including far-right and fascist activists—legitimised and consolidated the most ultra-right and violent elements of his base, which he is prepared to call forth if needed.
This has, for good reason, led to a debate about whether Trumpism is a new variety of fascism. That debate is now taking place amid a rise in activism. There was a series of large demonstrations in many cities on 5 April, 19 April and May Day, and several important campus protests in solidarity with Palestine, despite violent police crackdowns.
But taking on Trump effectively also requires abandoning the liberal Democratic Party view that Trump is a complete departure from US political traditions. Trump combines the worst, most reactionary trends in a country that’s always called itself a democracy despite the genocide of its indigenous people, and the enslavement of Black people for the first 97 years of the country’s existence and the denial of their democratic rights for most of the century that followed.
Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda is inspired by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and mass deportations to Mexico in the 1950s. Outlawing transgender people’s very existence echoes the anti-gay, pro-family campaigns of the 1950s. Targeted deportations of Palestinian immigrants and other immigrants sympathetic to them are reminiscent of the anti-immigrant, anti-communist raids and deportations of 1919-20 and the anti-Red witch-hunts of the 1950s. The open selling of the government to big business and attacks on workers’ rights are throwbacks to the union-busting Republican administrations of the 1920s and 1980s.
Trump’s ties to far-right and fascist street thugs resemble the decades-long collaboration between southern state politicians and the Ku Klux Klan. Immigrant-hunting federal agents—and the threats to officials and politicians who challenge them—are reminders of the Fugitive Slave Law of the 1850s. The effort to rewrite US history takes inspiration from 1920s conservatives who rehabilitated Confederate generals as noble defenders of southern “states’ rights” rather than slavery. The attack on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is a repackaging of classic American white supremacy.
Trump’s foreign policy shock has its precedents too. Negotiating with Putin’s Russia over the head of Ukraine to end the war is a 21st-century update of the 1945 carve-up of the world by US President Franklin Roosevelt and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. That deal ultimately came at the expense of the US’s main ally, Britain. This time, Washington has dropped the pretence of justifying its imperialist program under the banner of democracy. Instead, Trump publicly haggles with Putin over Russia’s demand to control much of Ukraine’s land, while pressuring Ukraine to sell the US the rare earths that lie beneath the rest.
Further, Trump’s version of the “pivot to China” (which enjoys a bipartisan consensus among Washington politicians) is more militaristic than his predecessors’—a reminder that the US has regarded the Pacific Ocean as an American lake since seizing the Philippines through war with Spain in 1898 under Republican President William McKinley, with US control consolidated by dropping the first atomic bomb on Japan 80 years ago at the close of World War Two. Notably, Trump hails McKinley’s high-tariff policy as a model for his own, and he shares McKinley’s taste for conquest and annexation, this time targeting, with varying degrees of bellicosity and seriousness, Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal and even Gaza.
It can be difficult to see the logic amid the chaos. But if you step back, Trump is presenting himself as the only politician who can cut the Gordian knot of challenges facing the US, most of which are tied to the rise of China as a world power. The post-World War Two Western economic order and its domestic analogue, a welfare state existing within a bipartisan consensus, are now viewed as impediments to a reassertion of US imperial power.
The reactionary political agenda at home is packaged as anti-elitist. Hence the attacks on universities, the expulsion of immigrants and the imposition of high tariffs (ostensibly to save jobs), appealing to workers, mostly white ones, fed up with declining living standards. These populist gestures opened the door to dubious figures such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who parlayed his following as an anti-vaccine activist to now lead the US healthcare system.
The overturning of abortion rights—carried out by Trump appointees to the Supreme Court during the Biden administration—consolidated Trump’s base in the Christian right. The attacks on big-name universities are part of a crackdown on the left (including smearing Palestine solidarity activists as “antisemitic”) and an attempt to enforce political and ideological conformity with Trumpism. If Harvard University, with its $50 billion endowment, cannot resist Trump, then few other capitalist institutions will attempt to do so.
Trump’s “populism” glosses over his pro-corporate agenda to make the US economy more competitive through lower labour costs and reduced company taxes. Thus the Make America Great Again slogan does double duty. It encapsulates the far-right domestic agenda while rehabilitating US militarism among a population cynical about the costly and failed US wars of “democracy promotion” and “nation building” in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Does Trump have the support of US capitalists?
Trump’s Inauguration Day photos provided a literal answer. The CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, OpenAI, Tesla and Uber clustered around Trump, while the boss of Oracle popped up at the White House the next day. Some, like Oracle chair Larry Ellison, are longtime Trump allies. Others, like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, previously had strained relationships with the president. But they came to bend the knee, seek a deal and publicly demonstrate their own turn to the right. Their attendance also highlighted the oligarchic trends in US capitalism and the willingness of various factions of US capitalists who, although some may disdain Trump personally or are even dismayed by his policies, see an opportunity to drive through their agenda: a decisive shift in the balance of class forces their favour while reasserting US power globally.
The policy elements that keep capitalists in Trump’s camp include making permanent and deepening the tax cuts of 2017, rebuilding US international supremacy and eliminating decades of regulations that placed at least some restraints on businesses destroying the environment, ripping off consumers and exploiting workers. To these ends, Trump’s proposed budget increases military spending while pushing cuts that hit the poorest the hardest, such as cuts to Medicaid spending that would eviscerate or eliminate health care for millions of low-income people. Meanwhile, the Pentagon budget—about which more below—will soar above US$1 trillion.
Whether they embrace or are queasy about Trump’s social policies, the capitalists view Trump as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to free corporate America from taxation, regulations and pressure from unions and social movements. They were even willing to countenance Trump’s disruptive tariff policies, with JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, the leading voice of bankers, telling fellow bosses to “get over it” and accept import restrictions. Only when the scale of Trump’s all-out trade war became clear and financial markets tanked did Dimon reverse course to successfully lobby Trump to back down, at least for now.
Trump’s immigration policies—from militarised borders to illegal snatch-and-deport-to-El Salvador operations—have alarmed agribusiness and meatpacking industry bosses who rely on low-cost immigrant labour and don’t look too closely at workers’ legal status. And some of his attacks on universities, research programs and health care have stirred opposition from more liberal and pro-science establishment figures.
But the bottom line is that the capitalists estimate that Trump has a sufficient electoral and popular base to provide cover for a smash and grab in which every business fraction can manoeuvre to get what it wants. For some, it means lobbying the Treasury or Commerce secretaries for tax or tariff relief, such as the Apple exemption from tariffs on China. For others, it means investing in Trump’s family grifts, such as his sons’ cryptocurrency ventures or Amazon paying $40 million for a Melania Trump documentary.
US CEOs may be in a tizzy over tariffs that hurt their immediate interests. Yet there has been growing support in the ruling class for US capitalism to contain, if not reverse, China’s rise. They differ only on how to do so. Some favour relatively moderate tariffs, others advocate for radically higher trade barriers, a big-spending program to rebuild the defence industrial base and preparations for a possible war over Taiwan. No prominent US politician has developed a political vehicle to mobilise the US to accomplish this—other than Trump.
Why did Elon Musk become so central to Trump’s operation?
Musk bridges Trump’s far-right populist appeal and pro-corporate agenda. He purchased a place in Trump’s inner circle by pouring $250 million into Trump’s campaign while loudly embracing the global far right. The Tesla and SpaceX boss led the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has slashed federal government budgets and put in motion what could be, if court challenges fail, an estimated 280,000 job cuts. This was the biggest attack on the largely unionised federal workforce since President Ronald Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers in 1981. If anyone missed that point, Trump is attempting to strip 1 million federal workers of their right to bargain collectively through unions.
More generally, Musk seeks to demonstrate to US capitalists that AI is sufficiently developed to wipe out millions of white-collar jobs, placing himself at the vanguard of tech billionaires and private equity bosses leading an employers’ offensive. While a growing anti-Musk backlash may force him to retreat from the limelight, that program will continue. Vice President J.D. Vance, whose career was funded by right-wing Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, will tend to those interests in domestic politics. And, like Musk, he’s enthusiastically embraced the international far right, most notably the fascist Alternative for Germany party.
What does all this mean for the wider program of US imperialism?
Trump’s team wants to dispense with alliances it views as financially and militarily burdensome in its effort to confront China, with an exception for Israel—although this, too, has some limits. Rather than organise its power based mainly on big Cold War-era alliances like NATO, Trump wants a kind of hub-and-spoke system in which the US makes multiple economic, political and military deals that guarantee Washington’s primacy.
The US is unlikely to pull out of NATO, which anchors the US in the world’s biggest market and provides an outlet for US military exports. But Trump is acting on a longstanding US complaint about Europe not spending more on its militaries and has made it clear that European governments will have to pay their way to deter Russia. The US could also assert control of Greenland, an autonomous region of NATO ally Denmark. And Washington is fortifying the old Five Eyes intelligence sharing program and the Australia-UK-US alliance as an effort to counter China, with the nuclear submarine program a centrepiece.
Trump’s tariffs and military programs converge here, the US playing off countries against one another for economic access as well as political and military support. It’s unclear whether and how Washington will reach different deals with practically every trading partner. But part of the effort will be an attempt to create an anti-China trade bloc in the Pacific that resembles, ironically, an Obama-era deal that Trump rejected and rendered politically impossible for the Biden administration to pursue.
The US military, meanwhile, is in chaos under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Most secretaries of defense were former generals, elected officials, bankers or corporate bosses. Hegseth was a mid-ranking officer turned conservative TV show host on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. An exponent of far-right politics, Hegseth is Trump’s tool to purge the military of the sorts of figures who frustrated his attempts to militarise a crackdown on Black Lives Matter protests and refused to back his efforts to remain in office after the 2020 elections.
While his incompetence may well cut short his tenure, Hegseth also represents a hard-right current in the armed forces who resent the general staff that rose up the ranks despite US military failures. Trump’s goal is to create a loyal military capable of ratcheting up pressure on China, using the big expansion of military spending to consolidate a new echelon of leaders, whether that takes place under Hegseth or someone else.
What are the prospects for opposition and the left?
While it’s impossible to know precisely the scale of the protests against Trump and his policies, at least hundreds of thousands, if not a few million, participated in the April and May mobilisations. Most have been broad but loosely organised, with liberals shying away from, if not shunning, the Palestine question. Fears over Trump’s threat to democracy have been a key driver of protests, along with cuts to jobs and social programs. And even after years of bipartisan consensus on immigration, widespread disgust over Trump’s immigration policies has generated sympathy for those vulnerable to deportation and other penalties.
National union leaders have said many of the right things—Palestine aside—although Trump’s tariffs have driven a wedge into the movement by gaining support from major industrial unions, whose leaders buy at least some of Trump’s outlandish claims that his program will re-industrialise the US. However, liberal and more left-wing local unions turned out strongly in many cities for the May Day protests, as a new generation rediscovers US labour history. The strikes and labour activism of recent years have helped to create a bridge between the left and social movements. These are important developments.
The radical and socialist left, however, must rebuild to meet this challenge. The largest organised current remains in the Democratic Socialists of America, which has activists but is politically oriented on working within the Democratic Party, whose leaders are mostly disoriented by Trump or are knuckling under to him. The far left is divided between neo-Stalinists, small revolutionary groups with broadly Trotskyist origins and other groupings that emerged in the Black Lives Matter protests several years ago. The task now is to rebuild the tradition and organisations focused on socialism from below and find ways to collaborate, with the immediate priority of defending immigrants and organising against fascists and the far right.
G. Stewart is a veteran activist and socialist based in the US.
