Every day, new horrors emerge from the deportation machine in the United States. 
A man was ripped from his kids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents while <a href="https://www.sfgate.com/centralcoast/article/ice-raids-overwhelm-california-communities-20319412.php">filling up his petrol tank</a> in California. The children were left alone in his truck until a bystander moved it away from the pump and helped them call their older sister to pick them up. 
In Massachusetts, a 12-year-old was abandoned on the street after his father was abducted in front of him. ICE agents then <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/waltham-mass-ice-arrest-boy-left-alone/">harassed and intimidated</a> a neighbourhood volunteer who walked the boy home. 
An Oklahoma family was marched out of their house <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/ice-agents-force-family-underwear-oklahoma-2065984">into the pouring rain wearing only their underwear</a>, while ICE agents ransacked their home, seizing their phones, laptops and cash savings as “evidence”.
Even a <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g8yj2n33yo">four-year-old cancer patient</a> with US citizenship was deported to Honduras—without her medication. The child’s mother had been abducted during a routine immigration hearing and given the choice of abandoning her children or taking them with her. 
Government agents have been so brazen as to arrest the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, for attempting to inspect an immigration facility in his city. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS, responsible for ICE and Customs and Border Protection) then <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/05/after-jailing-of-newark-mayor-dhs-official-warns-of-more-arrests-coming/">threatened to arrest</a> more elected officials. This came after the Trump administration’s so-called border tsar, Tom Homan, threatened to arrest the governor of Wisconsin for advising state employees to obtain legal counsel before collaborating with ICE. 
After migrants are arrested, they are usually sent to squalid immigration prisons. These are filled beyond capacity, and at least <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnvjfOVOu2o">nine people</a> have already died in these for-profit hellholes since January. 
The administration has been fighting to abolish habeas corpus, a person’s legal right to challenge their detention or incarceration. The White House’s justification is that undocumented immigration constitutes an invasion. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has gone further, turning an arrestee’s right into a presidential privilege. “Habeas corpus”, she said, “is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country”.
Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans <a href="https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-venezuelans-deportation-trump-5589f17e0ecd5d33bfb220e15720f88d">lost their immigration status</a> overnight, and hundreds have been sent to a supermax prison in El Salvador, even when many <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/5308025-venezuelan-migrants-el-salvador-prison-legal-migration-cato-institute-southern-border/">followed the law</a> entering the US. 
As with the rest of Trump’s political program, plenty of overt racism is used in this terror campaign. It ties in with his “war on woke”, which aims to wipe away the civil rights gains of the second half of the twentieth century. His administration has blocked virtually all pathways for asylum seekers, except for <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/5/15/theyll-be-back-white-afrikaners-leave-south-africa-to-be-refugees-in-us">white South Africans</a> from the landowning classes. 
But the chaos stretches beyond Trump’s crude racism. For example, a <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-imprisons-danish-dad-of-4-at-citizenship-interview/">Danish man</a> has been imprisoned in an immigration jail for more than a month for alleged paperwork discrepancies. He was ambushed at a regular immigration meeting. 
It is a shock and awe attack, aiming to instil fear in vulnerable communities and increase the scapegoating that has been central to Donald Trump’s political career. Brutality is the purpose, as this regime aims to build a meaner society and maintain legitimacy through relentless anti-migrant campaigns.
While the viciousness and shamelessness of the operations are significant, they have not yet translated into an increase in the total number of people being deported. The blitzkrieg thus far is about the atmospherics: the rate of deportations remains <a href="https://tracreports.org/reports/759/">lower than during the administration of Democrat Joe Biden</a>, and significantly lower than during Barack Obama’s first term, when that president earned the moniker “deporter in chief” from immigrant rights activists. 
Yet it would be a mistake to think that things won’t get worse. In the horrific budget Trump is fighting to get through Congress, massive cuts to welfare are accompanied by <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-unveils-federal-budget-blueprint-2025-05-02/">a 65 percent increase in funding to Homeland Security</a>. The administration has already sent thousands of troops to the border and more than <a href="https://apnews.com/article/287-g-agreements-immigration-law-enforcement-trump-migration-arrests-2a5673cd6c922edd597cb31b532a6b6d">quadrupled</a>
the number of agreements allowing local police to enforce immigration law. 
Yet there have been glimmers of hope. On top of thousands protesting earlier in the year, local resistance has been bubbling up in the face of the anti-immigrant campaign. People have been <a href="https://www.azfamily.com/2025/05/21/immigration-protests-held-outside-federal-courthouse-phoenix/">protesting immigration hearings</a> in Phoenix, Arizona. In Worcester, Massachusetts, locals tried to <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/worcester-ice-arrest-police-response/">block the detention</a> of an immigrant mother by crowding out agents, and the subsequent brutality and arrest have sparked <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/worcester-protest-ice-immigrants/">further protests</a>.
The administration’s shock and awe campaign has disoriented many. But there is a recent history of mass resistance to draw on. If the White House keeps pushing, more resistance will be provoked.

Brendan Stanton

Trump’s escalating attacks on migrants: cruelty is the point

US President Donald Trump’s historic unpopularity has coincided with the beginnings of an opposition to his many destructive initiatives. While it’s positive that large majorities oppose what Trump is doing, and that hundreds of thousands have protested the administration’s actions, we must reckon with the historic weakness of the forces of opposition on our side.
This article will focus on four sources of opposition to Trump: the “Tesla Takedown” demonstrations against Elon Musk; the large demonstrations called by organisations like Indivisible and 50501; local “know your rights” defence of immigrants; and trade union and working-class resistance. Considering each in turn allows us to draw up a balance sheet of the resistance to Trump 2.0 so far.
Tesla Takedown: This appeared as a genuine grassroots initiative that a few individuals started when they appeared with signs protesting Musk at a Tesla charging station in Waterville, Maine, in early February. <a href="https://www.theverge.com/tesla/618572/tesla-takedown-wants-to-hit-elon-musk-where-it-hurts">Online activist Joan Donovan amplified their efforts</a> with the hashtag #TeslaTakedown on the Bluesky platform. A few days later, documentarian Alex Winter set up a website on which local groups could advertise their own anti-Tesla protests. Since then, <a href="https://www.teslatakedown.com/">hundreds of demonstrations</a> have taken place at Tesla dealerships, charging stations and repair shops.
Tesla Takedown has the distinction of being the first major effort to pull together an opposition to the Trump/Musk rule of ruin. And its work in putting a “tech bro” and Nazi-curious oligarch’s face on the fake populism of the Trump administration can’t be gainsaid. Tesla Takedown might be able to claim some credit for Musk’s subsequent step back from the public limelight and indications that the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/tesla-musk-ceo-search-board-0ce61af9?mod=Searchresults_pos1&amp;page=1">Tesla board was considering cutting</a> him loose. But aside from producing bad press, it’s unclear what more pressure the takedown movement can bring against Trump/Musk.
Tesla’s sales were already declining before Musk’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) started its rampage through the federal government. Tesla’s overseas sales are tanking, and its stock price—the source of much of Musk’s wealth—was due for correction because it is one of the most overvalued stocks traded on the exchanges. It’s possible that the Tesla protests will subside as Musk exercises his influence out of the media spotlight. With his Starlink satellite and SpaceX rocket businesses—sustained on billions in US government contracts—Musk continues to exercise influence exceeding that of some <a href="https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/elon-musk-and-the-the-threat-of-the-over-mighty-subject-part-i">sovereign states.</a>
Days of action: By some measures, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/28/protest-research-trump-musk">the number of anti-Trump demonstrations and the numbers they have mobilised exceed the early days of 2017</a>, when large mobilisations like the women’s marches caught the public imagination. A broad range of groups have organised these, but the core organisers are non-governmental organisations (NGOs) like Indivisible and 50501, a project of the liberal lobbying group MoveOn. Turnouts for the 5 April “Hands Off” rallies at city halls and state capitols from one end of the US to another were impressive. Organisers are looking to replicate (or outstrip) the Hands Off rallies on 14 June, when they are rallying for “No Kings.” 
Two former Democratic congressional staffers founded Indivisible in 2017 with a plan to rally grassroots pressure on Congress against Trump’s initiatives, especially his failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. 50501 emerged from a Reddit forum in early 2025. While it has many local affiliates, Indivisible is more rooted in the professional Washington NGO world, with a staff of media and research experts, and a political action committee that<a href="https://indivisible.org/about">
“channels grassroots energy into electing progressive candidates”.</a> 
<a href="https://www.fiftyfifty.one/">50501 (for “50 protests, 50 states, 1 day”)</a> is a more decentralised organisation that convenes demonstrations through online calls to action. Its political culture reflects the last decade of “Gen Z” (for Generation Z, people born after 1996) organising, including an emphasis on “mutual aid” and “leaderless” organisation. One of its chief constituents is Political Revolution, a PAC that former 2016 Bernie Sanders organisers formed to support progressive candidates, mostly in and around the Democratic Party. Indivisible fits more comfortably into conventional liberal politics. For example, <a href="https://brandfolder.com/s/trktmftbhrcpqjrmcjgk5cxm">one of its 5 April slogans was “Hands Off NATO!”</a>, but there was no “Hands Off Palestine!” 50501 projects a more radical profile, <a href="https://www.fiftyfifty.one/post/american-democracy-is-dead-this-is-the-giant-red-flag">calling Trump a “criminal” and a “traitor”</a> and denouncing billionaire plutocrats and “fascism”. Nevertheless, 50501 collaborates with Indivisible, and has invited Indivisible leaders on its <a href="https://youtu.be/JuQGIgeY-WE">national Zoom organising calls.</a>
 “Know your rights”: Some of the most effective forms of opposition to the Trump agenda have come from local immigrant rights and community groups that have impeded the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) dragnets against immigrants. These groups have been so effective in informing immigrants of their rights that Trump’s “border tsar”, <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-border-czar-rages-about-migrants-being-too-educated-about-rights-in-ice-round-ups">Tom Homan, has called them out.</a> 
In specific circumstances, community groups have organised to pressure DHS, courts and local law enforcement and to win the release of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrestees like <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/04/30/nx-s1-5382306/mohsen-madawi-released-ice-columbia-university-activist-judge">Mohsen Mahdawi</a> and <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/05/09/nx-s1-5393055/tufts-student-rumeysa-ozturk-ordered-freed-from-immigration-detention">Rühmeysa Öztürk.</a> A protest in a <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/04/08/nx-s1-5355128/migrant-family-swept-up-by-ice-allowed-to-return-home">small New York town where Homan has a vacation home freed a family swept</a> up in an ICE raid. There are dozens of stories like this that show that protest can work, and that neither immigrants nor their supporters need to submit to Trump’s thuggish immigration police. 
However, it must be kept in mind that the <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/trumps-war-on-migrants-part-i/">Trump administration has already gotten away with heinous actions</a>, including the expulsion of hundreds of immigrants to gulags in El Salvador and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. And the budget it is pushing through Congress now envisions a multibillion-dollar increase to “scale up” immigrant arrests and deportations at an industrial scale.
Trade union and workplace resistance: It’s no surprise that an administration stuffed with right-wing, anti-union billionaires would take aim at workers’ and trade union rights. The administration’s actions show just how shallow is the claim that the Republican Party has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/opinion/josh-hawley-dont-cut-medicaid.html">become a working-class party.</a> The Trump administration’s attack on the federal workforce with illegal mass lay-offs and abrogating the contracts of up to 1 million workers is a more serious attack than Ronald Reagan’s breaking of the PATCO air traffic controllers strike in 1981.
The best that can be said about the labour response is that there is one. Leading unions like the Service Employees (SEIU) and the national teachers’ unions, along with the AFL-CIO, have endorsed demonstrations such as Hands Off. Sean McGarvey, the president of the normally conservative North American Building Trades Union, called for the return from El Salvador of the illegally kidnapped Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a building trades apprentice in Maryland.
But decades of complacency and political weakness in the labour movement are coming back to haunt it. For decades, the federal unions that are currently being gutted were inactive and dependent on lobbying in Washington. The efforts of relatively new organisations like the Federal Unionists Network are important, <a href="https://hammerandhope.org/article/trump-federal-workers-purge">but they are starting from an exceedingly weak position.</a> Most union officials are hoping that their lawsuits against Trump’s anti-union actions will prevail. But they have no strategy based on any kind of workplace organising if the courts don’t rule in their favour.
When we turn to the private sector, where unions represent only about 6 percent of workers, we can see the bitter fruit of years of political backsliding. The pro-Trump president of the Teamsters union, Sean O’Brien, has <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/teamsters-pave-the-way-for-trump/">legitimised a labour alliance with the far right</a>. As a result, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/30/ups-layoffs-trump-tariffs">O’Brien and the Teamsters have done little since UPS</a> announced 20,000 lay-offs in response to Trump’s planned tariffs. 
The United Autoworkers union, whose 2023 “stand-up” strike inspired millions, has supported Trump’s planned tariffs, even though <a href="https://tempestmag.org/2025/04/nationalism-workers-power-and-the-myth-of-auto-tariffs/">there is no evidence that unfair trade is the cause of the union’s decline.</a> UAW President Shawn Fain has aligned the union with Trump’s tariffs while missing “the real threats to autoworkers and the role the union can play in resisting them”, as <a href="https://tempestmag.org/2025/04/nationalism-workers-power-and-the-myth-of-auto-tariffs/">Andy Sernatinger recently wrote in Tempest magazine.</a>
Any genuine resistance to the Trump agenda is to be welcomed and built on. But we also must “tell no lies” and “claim no easy victories”, as the <a href="https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1965/tnlcnev.htm">Bissau Guinean revolutionary Amilcar Cabral put it in the 1960s</a>. The state of the opposition to Trump is weak now.
The mass protest organisations are still largely operating on a perspective that they implemented in 2017-18. That is, protest now, and push for a Democratic Party-led House of Representatives or Congress in 2026That perspective failed to prevent a return of Trump to the White House. It also put many of the “resistance” organisations from Trump 1.0 into dormancy under Biden.
Grassroots organising in workplaces and communities has been effective in some limited circumstances. But are the unions and community organisations prepared for a quantitative or qualitative increase in Trumpian rampages and repression? Right now, they do not appear to be.
However, right now, US society is opposed to what Trump is doing. And if history is our guide, ordinary people can explode into action at any time. No one predicted—much less expected—the huge outpouring of anti-racist action that took place in the depths of the COVID pandemic after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. We will need that—and much more—to defeat Trump and the authoritarian threat he represents.

Lance Selfa

Opposition to Trump can, and must, grow

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 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/29/donald-trump-first-100-days-tracker">mainstream media</a> as well as <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/100-days-trump-chaos/">liberal</a> and <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/04/trump-first-hundred-days-america">social democratic</a> 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 <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-opponents-ready-take-streets-with-nationwide-protests-2025-04-05/">5 April</a>, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/19/us/50501-protests-trump-administration/index.html">19 April</a> and <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/may-day-protesters-across-us-rally-against-trump-policies-urge-rule-law-2025-05-01/">May Day</a>, and several important campus protests in solidarity with Palestine, despite <a href="https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/05/08/brookyn-college-demonstration-palestine-israel-taser-arrests/">violent police crackdowns</a>.
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 <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/01/world/what-we-know-about-trumps-ukraine-mineral-deal-intl">pressuring Ukraine</a> 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 <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2024-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2023-executive-summary.htm">declining living standards</a>. 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 <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-unveils-federal-budget-blueprint-2025-05-02/">proposed budget</a> 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 “<a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/jamie-dimon-says-tariffs-can-positive-national-security-even-inflationary-get-over-it">get over it</a>” and accept import restrictions. Only when the scale of Trump’s all-out trade war became clear and financial markets tanked did Dimon <a href="https://www.afr.com/world/north-america/inside-corporate-america-s-fight-against-trump-s-tariffs-20250506-p5lwv3">reverse course</a> 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 <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/trump-mass-deportation-farms-breaking-point-2064190">agribusiness</a> and <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/12/17/meatpacking-industry-supports-trump-but-braces-for-deportation-fallout">meatpacking industry</a> 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 <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/12/trump-exempts-phones-computers-chips-tariffs-apple-dell.html">Apple exemption</a> from tariffs on China. For others, it means investing in Trump’s family grifts, such as his sons’ cryptocurrency ventures or Amazon paying <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/amazon-forking-40-million-license-161510974.html">$40 million</a> 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 <a href="https://www.challengergray.com/blog/april-2025-job-cuts-plunge-but-doge-drives-2025-layoffs-to-pandemic-era-highs/">280,000 job cuts</a>. 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 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/01/trump-federal-unions-labor-bargaining-rights">attempting to strip</a> 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 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/07/surface-tension-could-the-promised-aukus-nuclear-submarines-simply-never-be-handed-over-to-australia#:~:text=Officially%20at%20least%2C%20Aukus%20remains,first%20of%20these%20in%202032.">centrepiece</a>.
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.

G. Stewart

Trump’s 100-day blitz and the stirring of resistance

The standard media evaluation of the new president’s first 100 days brought little but bad news for Donald Trump. Polls showed support for Trump was <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/trump-poll-numbers-100-days-awful-disapprove-bad/">the lowest of any president at the 100-day mark in almost 80 years</a>, with more people disapproving than approving of his position <a href="https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/the-thermostat-comes-for-trumpism">on just about every major issue</a>. 
But the growing opposition to Trump’s rule of ruin hasn’t provided much good news to the supposed “opposition”, the Democratic Party. Only 29 percent of US adults have a positive view of the Democratic Party—its lowest favourability since 1992, according to a CNN poll. Only 63 percent of self-identified Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents hold a <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/16/politics/cnn-poll-democrats/index.html">favourable view of “their” party</a>. Partisans usually support their “team” at levels of 80 percent or higher.
The same CNN poll found most Democrats wanted the party to fight Trump and the Republicans harder. Analysts suggested <a href="https://split-ticket.org/2025/02/21/the-democratic-disconnect/">the Democrats could be in for a “tea party” moment</a> like the Republicans experienced in 2009-10. Then, a combination of grassroots right-wing energy and support from billionaire donors channelled a conservative backlash to the Obama administration into a radicalisation of the party. In many ways, <a href="https://jacobin.com/2016/03/tea-party-donald-trump-ted-cruz/">the “tea party” of the 2010s laid the groundwork for Trump’s MAGA</a> takeover more recently.
The possibility of a Democratic “tea party” reflects the complete fecklessness of congressional Democratic leaders and other hangers-on who are positioning themselves <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/opinion/democrats-trump-congress.html">as advisers to the party</a>. Some want to accommodate <a href="https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/03/gavin-newsom-agrees-with-maga-activist-trans-athletes-are-deeply-unfair">Trumpian themes like anti-trans</a>
or “anti-woke” messaging. Others say Democrats <a href="https://x.com/ChrisCillizza/status/1912688714033013182">should just focus on “bread and butter”</a> economic issues and downplay Trump’s assaults on immigrants. 
Democratic Party “normie” politicians and leaders think that Trump’s historic level of unpopularity will translate into Democratic gains (and a US House majority) in the 2026 midterm elections. Then, they assume, the Democrats will have a foothold to begin to unravel the damage that Trump and Musk’s DOGE wrecking crew have done.
This is the “everything will be all right” school of thought that was supposed to have vanquished Trump in 2020. Yet you don’t have to assume that Trump will cancel the midterms or declare martial law to avoid that reckoning. As they showed between 2021 and 2024, the Democrats are perfectly <a href="https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/servants-of-the-mafia-state">capable of failing to hold Trump and his minions to account</a>.
This is the context in which we should understand the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour that Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have led. The tour has drawn enormous crowds in Democratic-friendly areas like Denver and Los Angeles and packed arenas in more conservative places like Nampa, Idaho. It has also made sure to hit areas where Democrats think they have a good chance of defeating Republican House incumbents.
In the early days of the Trump administration, when most establishment Democrats were treating Trump as a political colossus and telling their supporters that they couldn’t do much to stop him, the Sanders/AOC road show helped rank-and-file members of the liberal side of US politics to break from feelings of isolation and despair. But Sanders and AOC are engaged in a project that the Reverend Jesse Jackson used to call “keeping hope alive” in the Democratic Party.
“No, we’re not trying to start a third party”, <a href="https://nypost.com/2025/04/27/us-news/bernie-sanders-denies-he-aoc-are-starting-a-third-party-but-scolds-democrats-for-lack-of-vision/">Sanders told NBC’s Meet the Press</a>. “What we’re trying to do is strengthen American democracy, where faith in both the Democratic and Republican parties right now is extremely low ... What Democrats lack right now is a vision for the future. How are we going to provide a decent standard of living for a younger generation, which, everything being equal, will be poorer than their parents?”
Ocasio-Cortez is also explicit about her efforts to reform the Democratic Party, <a href="https://www.leftvoice.org/sanders-rallies-show-a-working-class-ready-to-fight-not-fall-back-into-the-democratic-party/">which she works into her stump speeches in the tour stops:</a> 
“We need a Democratic Party that fights harder for us, too. And that means communities choosing and voting for Democrats and elected officials who know how to stand for the working class ... We need to come together and spend every day for the next year working to educate our neighbours, reach out to them in order to give these Republicans the boot and replace them with brawling Democrats.”
In theory, the Democrats could advocate for more liberal policies than they do without losing their corporate backing. Similar parties in other countries, like the Liberals in Canada, support state-provided health insurance for all, for example. But establishment liberalism in the US is limited in a way that establishment conservatism is not.
Those like Sanders and AOC, and their ideological mouthpieces like the social democratic magazine Jacobin, think they can win the Democrats—or a significant section of them—to support social democratic policies, politicians and politics. But the modern Democratic Party is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise whose large donors support corporate capitalism.
So even when Democratic politicians can muster parliamentary votes in support of, say, single-payer health care, the party’s mainstream makes sure such reforms don’t pass. See <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/165338/california-democrats-calcare-single-payer-health-care">California</a>
or <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/why-vermonts-single-payer-effort-failed-and-what-democrats-can-learn-from-it/2019/04/29/">Vermont</a>, for example. Keeping the health insurance and hospital industrial complex in the Democrats’ “big tent” limits what the Democrats can accomplish.
Right-wing politics, on the other hand, doesn’t face the same constraints. Even if corporate leaders and most wealthy people find Trump and MAGA yahoos like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene distasteful, they know that indulging their far-right politics affords them the opportunity to win policies they really care about: tax cuts, deregulation, hobbling corporate oversight and subsidies to industry.
Consider this thought experiment. The Democrats win a landslide and both houses of the US Congress in 2026. Now they have control of a key branch of government. What will they do?
Will they repeal the Trump tax cuts for the rich, fund the rehiring of federal workers and the restoration of vital programs, or defund Trump’s initiatives? Will they impeach Trump and his law-breaking Cabinet members? Will they pass voting rights and civil rights reforms? Based on their bias to restoring the status quo ante, the answer is “no” to all those questions. You can almost hear the excuses now. No wonder even Democratic Party supporters tell pollsters that they aren’t sure what their own party stands for. 
The rest of us must reckon with the historic weakness of the opposition forces on our side. It’s positive that large majorities oppose what Trump is doing, and that hundreds of thousands have protested the administration’s actions. But organisations like the trade unions are at their weakest in decades, and Democratic Party-aligned non-governmental organisations like Indivisible are capturing much of the “resistance” to Trump.
A future article will take up the state of this opposition to Trump.

One hundred days of Democratic Party failure

The Trump administration announced enormous tariff hikes on 2 April, taking them to the highest level in a century. These are a threat to the working class and a weapon in America’s hands as it prepares for a military confrontation with China.
Donald Trump’s tariff announcement caused financial panic, with stock markets crashing as investors pulled their money out, fearing that world trade would tank. When the bond markets moved in, threatening to force up interest rates on debt held by corporations, governments and mortgage holders, Trump was compelled to pull back, implementing a 10 percent tariff on most countries and pausing the higher rates for 90 days. Nonetheless, even at 10 percent tariffs are at their highest for decades. Given Trump’s erratic moves in the past few weeks, anything might happen in three months.
Trump’s main motive is to punish countries with which the US runs big trade deficits. He says that US trading partners have ripped off the US for years and he is going to fix this by making imports from those countries more expensive. That was why in the original plan, tariffs were highest on countries with which the US ran the biggest deficit. 
Trump also sees tariffs as a way to encourage companies that have offshored production to bring it “home” to the US and to force overseas companies to invest and produce in the US. In particular, the president wants to rebuild the US manufacturing base in the service of military preparedness. Former President Joe Biden tried to do that with big subsidies. That had only limited success. Trump is using tariffs to try to force US business to invest more at home.
Trump is also promoting tariffs to generate a federal revenue stream that will allow his administration to eliminate capital gains tax and pay for the renewal of regressive income tax cuts due to lapse in 2027.
Many economic commentators and mainstream politicians have attacked Trump’s tariffs, saying they will harm American capitalism and the interests of the American state. But this means nothing for the working class. These figures just want to patch up the existing trade system in the hope that the capitalists maintain their fortunes. 
Much more important is the devastating impact these tariffs will have on the working class.
First, they exacerbate the cost-of-living crisis. Tariffs make workers poorer by increasing the price of imported goods, most obviously Chinese-made goods, that many low-income households depend on. They also give US producers the opportunity to immediately raise prices on their goods, as they will be under less pressure from imports.
Trump’s tariffs will shift the burden of taxation from the rich to the working class by taxing consumption and lowering taxes on investment incomes. Poorer households spend all their income (and more) and have no or few investments, so are the worst affected.
Trump’s tariffs plan feeds into a right-wing conspiracy that blames scheming foreigners, rather than America’s own billionaires, for US economic problems and the loss of blue-collar jobs. 
Many trade union leaders representing blue-collar workers unfortunately buy into this argument. They argue that workers must form a bloc with American capitalists to lock out imports through tariffs and quotas, a strategy known as protectionism.
Protectionism leads the labour movement in the wrong direction. Rather than fighting the capitalists by striking and occupying their factories to protect jobs, the union leaders jump into bed with the bosses, selling their members out in the name of “saving the industry”.
If “saving the industry” involves cost-cutting, as it invariably does in the cut-throat capitalist world, the union leaders will line up with the bosses to demand workers’ pay this price. This has been the long and sordid history of protectionism in some of the few industries where American unions still have a foothold—auto, steel, chemicals, rubber—and the workers have seen their jobs sold down the river. Far easier for the union bureaucrats to join company delegations to Washington to lobby for tariffs than to mount a fight for jobs.
The tariff trap is alive today. Shawn Fain, the leader of the US United Auto Workers, who appears at anti-Trump rallies condemning the president’s attacks on trade unions and public sector jobs, has applauded Trump’s tariffs as “a major step in the right direction for autoworkers and blue-collar communities across the country”. How are workers meant to fight Trump’s attacks if their leaders are at the same time praising their enemy?
Protectionism also contributes to the kind of nationalist tub thumping that very easily translates from economic competition to military competition. This is increasingly obvious with Trump’s announcement that wound back initially very steep tariffs on Washington’s allies while ratcheting them up on China, which now faces a tariff of 145 percent. The Chinese ruling class is responding in kind. Tariffs are just one element of a broader military build-up by the US against its imperialist rival and contribute to growing racism towards Chinese Americans at home.
This is why socialists oppose all the demands to Buy American, Buy Canadian or Buy Australian so beloved of trade union leaders. It leads us into class collaboration and jingoistic nationalism rather than class struggle and international working-class solidarity.
But if we oppose these tariffs as an attack on the working class and increasing imperialist tensions, this does not mean we support free trade. Free trade and protectionism are simply two different strategies the capitalists use to advance their interests, sometimes leaning towards one, at other times to the other.
If tariffs are currently being introduced by the US to give it an edge in its competition with China, so did the US use free trade for decades to help American companies make money and to advance US power far beyond its borders. Free trade was the flag flown by American gunboats—and British and French gunboats before them—to force open new markets in Africa and Asia. Free trade was the banner flown by the US when it created the post-World War II international financial system that has favoured its capitalists and crushed poorer countries for decades. 
Contrary to what Trump says, the US has not been a victim of free trade but its architect and major beneficiary. It was American multinationals and American governments that offshored production to low-wage countries to boost their fortunes starting in the 1980s. The job losses that resulted were not the responsibility of cheating foreigners but America’s own capitalist class. The US is a victim of no-one. 
It is only now when it faces a growing threat from China, whose economic take-off it initially sponsored, that the US is retreating from free trade. 
Business and governments never have our interests in mind when they choose between free trade and protectionism, only their own.
The working class cannot rely on any scheme capitalist governments devise to protect their interests but must fight against all capitalists and governments, free traders and protectionists alike.
The recent chaos emanating from the White House and New York financial markets demonstrates how much control capitalists and governments have over our lives and how little we have. 
The world is being held to ransom by an increasingly authoritarian US president and the big financial institutions that run the bond markets. Whether or not we have a trade war, whether the world economy tips into recession, what happens to unemployment, whether inflation escalates and whether mortgage rates go up or down, are all decided by tiny numbers of people. Trump is nominally elected but with the political system in America so beholden to big financial interests the democratic process is totally compromised. The financiers are elected by no-one but work herd-like to punish or reward governments as they see fit. 
Recent developments have made clear that you can have democracy, or you can have capitalism, but you can’t have both.

Tom Bramble

Trump’s tariffs an attack on the working class

As Wall Street plummeted, shedding more than US$6 trillion in the days after Donald Trump’s 2 April “reciprocal” tariff announcements, the president posted on social media: “ONLY THE WEAK WILL FAIL!”
But equity markets refused to settle from their wild paroxysms. The treasury market, which underwrites the US government and the global financial system, also showed signs of stress. 
Yesterday, Trump relented, blaming investors who were “getting a little bit yippy; a little bit afraid”. At least for now, an all-out global trade war has been averted. Trump took on the world and the financial markets and came off second best. But this will not be the end of the matter. “Nothing’s over”, he insisted. 
Internationally, Trump’s crash-or-crash-through strategy is to extract as many concessions as possible for US capitalism. Poor country, rich country, ally or adversary—all states have been put on notice. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-commerce-secretary-howard-lutnick-on-face-the-nation-with-margaret-brennan-april-6-2025/">speaking on the CBS News program </a><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-commerce-secretary-howard-lutnick-on-face-the-nation-with-margaret-brennan-april-6-2025/"></a><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-commerce-secretary-howard-lutnick-on-face-the-nation-with-margaret-brennan-april-6-2025/">Face the Nation</a><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-commerce-secretary-howard-lutnick-on-face-the-nation-with-margaret-brennan-april-6-2025/"></a> on 6 April, outlined what the administration believes to be the stakes:
“You’ve got to realise this is a national security issue. I mean, we don't make medicine in this country any more. We don't make ships. We don't have enough steel and aluminium to fight a battle, right? All our semiconductors are made overseas ... [T]he point is, you need to reset the power of the United States of America and reset it against all our allies and our enemies alike.”
“Why would he treat even our allies like this?”, ask so many US commentators. Maybe it’s because, as <a href="https://nymag.com/article/tom-wolfe-ultimate-power-seeing-em-jump.html">Tom Wolfe noted long ago</a>, the ultimate power is just seeing them jump. 
The primary target, though, remains China, which faces a 125 percent tariff until further notice. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91, US administrations have had one overarching national security priority: to prevent a peer-competitor state from emerging. They failed. 
China has developed the most extensive and efficient industrial economy the world has ever seen. It extended its global trade network despite the first Trump administration’s and the subsequent Biden administration’s attempts to undermine it. It has rapidly modernised its military, become a leader in high-tech engineering and AI applications and transformed into a state with global reach and interests—a diplomatic powerhouse.
Trump believes he has the remedy. Yet this week’s gyrations are not simply a matter of geopolitics and trade.
Domestically, the tariffs are an attack on the working class—raising prices and taxing consumption to give the government the budgetary space to proceed with corporate tax cuts. While blaming foreign countries for purportedly destroying the US economy and the lives of millions of workers, Trump is gutting the Department of Labor and attacking agencies that protect workers’ rights. 
He is attempting to purge <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-asks-us-supreme-court-let-him-remove-democratic-members-labor-boards-now-2025-04-09/">National Labor Relations Board</a> members viewed as sympathetic to unions. (The NLRB enforces labour laws protecting the right to join a union and organise in the workplace.) Last month, the president issued an executive order to <a href="https://chcoc.gov/content/guidance-executive-order-exclusions-federal-labor-management-programs">end collective bargaining rights</a> for up to 1 million federal workers.
All this is part of a broader wave of “deregulation” designed to empower US capitalists and weaken the working class’s capacity to defend itself—a prerequisite for both corporate profitability at home and force projection abroad.
Indeed, Trump is waging war on anyone perceived to be an obstacle to his reactionary, ultranationalist agenda. From student anti-war activists to liberal law firms, from national security staff deemed disloyal to the president to universities and schools teaching the real history of America, from anti-discrimination laws to the union movement—Trump is taking a wrecking ball to US civil society and purging the state of all opposition to his program.
Some of this is purely ideological—like the anti-science irrationalism at the heart of the administration. Yet the international and domestic agendas dovetail with the far-right promise of national renewal: the veneration of hierarchy, be it the US at the top of the world, men as patriarchs in the family or bosses as rulers in the workplace; the valorisation of military service, both as individual submission to the state and as a contribution to the projection of national power; the perverse attacks on “communism” in the federal government and the school system, which identify the enemy abroad and depict a culturally corrupting fifth column within; the war on perceived weakness, understood as anything short of hyper-masculine blue-collar value creator at home or soldier of fortune at the front.
“Imperialism ... introduce[s] everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom”, Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin wrote more than 100 years ago. “Whatever the political system, the result of these tendencies is everywhere reaction and an extreme intensification of hostilities.”
Well, we are seeing the intensification of hostilities. The last week was a staring competition between the world’s major powers. Trump may have blinked, but any temporary easing of international tensions might result only in him refocusing on the domestic war and shoring up support for the next confrontation.

Ben Hillier

The logic of Trump’s reactionary agenda

As the Trump administration tears through the US, deporting, sacking and ripping up decades of social progress, the Democratic Party has been playing dead. This is no exaggeration—in a New York Times piece published in late February, longtime Democratic strategist James Carville argues: “With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political manoeuvre in the history of our party: roll over”. Essentially, Democrats shouldn’t lift a finger to obstruct Trump’s agenda, and simply wait until he runs out of steam. Tough luck if you’re one of the people Trump plans on running down before the next election. 
The Democrats have been displaying more weaponised incompetence than a dud husband. In a moment that symbolised the party’s stance, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries threw his hands in the air at a February press conference and asked, “What leverage do we have? ...They control the House, the Senate and the presidency; it's their government”. For a party that has spent the last decade staking its legitimacy on being the only viable bulwark against Trumpism, this has not been a good look. 
A recent survey by polling firm Data for Progress showed that 70 percent of Democratic voters gave the party’s response to Trump a “C” grade or below, 21 percent assigning a failing grade. Another from the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini shows that nearly 80 percent of Democrats want the party to take a more combative approach to the president. No wonder they’ve enjoyed <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/16/politics/cnn-poll-democrats/index.html">record low</a> approval ratings, even as Trump’s popularity dips. 
But now Democrats are starting to look alive as the Trump administration hits bumpy roads. One leading elected official is taking calls from the party’s supporters to stand up to Trump literally—last week, Cory Booker stood to excoriate Trump for 25 hours straight, in the longest speech ever delivered to Congress. Booker has been widely praised for this political stunt. In the words of one supporter, a small business owner quoted in the New York Times, “The Democrats have been acting like it’s OK what Trump is doing, and it’s not OK ... Now, there’s finally some fire”. 
Democrats have drawn encouragement from their victory in a race for a vacant Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin—a campaign into which Musk unsuccessfully ploughed $25 million of his own money. Two special elections in Florida returned Republicans to Congress, but with drastically reduced margins. On the left flank of the party, “Fight the oligarchy” rallies headed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are drawing enormous crowds that dwarf Trump’s 2024 campaign rallies. The “Hands Off” protests against Trump and Musk on 5 April, which mobilised millions across more than 1,200 locations, were used as a platform by Democrat representatives keen to relate to the anti-Trump feeling. 
It’s good that there is more push back against Trump. This can help cut through the climate of intimidation the administration is seeking to create, and give people more confidence to stand up. But the Democrats don’t offer an alternative worth getting behind. 
The Democrats agree with many of the worst aspects of Trump’s politics. In 25 hours of speechifying against Trump, Booker declined to mention the administration’s support for the resumption of genocide in Gaza since Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire deal in March. This is because Booker, like the overwhelming majority of Democrat representatives, is a loyal supporter of Israel’s offensive against the Palestinians. While denouncing Trump’s disregard for the “rule of law”, he happily poses for photographs with former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who is subject to an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including using starvation as a method of warfare. 
Booker’s speech neglected to mention the violation of the legal rights of student activists like Mahmoud Khalil, who has been kidnapped by ICE and faces deportation for protesting. When the Palestinian American representative Rashida Tlaib initiated an open letter demanding the release of Khalil, a legal permanent resident who has not had any charges filed against him, only 14 of 213 Democrats in the House were willing to sign it. 
Democratic accordance with Trump’s agenda goes beyond the party’s support for Israel. Trump’s very first anti-migrant bill, giving ICE more powers to detain and deport, was passed with Democrat votes. On the campaign trail, Kamala Harris attacked Trump for failing to support a Democrat-backed bill to hire 1,500 more border cops. 
Post-election soul-searching among Democrats has resulted in a variety of different conclusions. Democrats lost to an unpopular candidate whose last term ended in chaos and embarrassment. Many are envious of the enthusiasm Trump inspires, while Harris lost 6.8 million votes compared to Biden’s 2020 result. 
Unwilling to break with the pro-business and anti-worker policies that have steadily undermined their support, leading Democrats have decided to pin blame for their loss on the left. According to Democrat strategist Stuart Malec’s implausible account, the problem is: “In the name of keeping the peace internally, we have allowed politicians and activist groups from our left-most flank to seize an outsized role in defining the party’s national brand”. He argues Democrats have been shamed out of proudly trumpeting Biden’s many achievements, such as massively expanding fossil fuel extraction and deporting record numbers of migrants. Talking tough against the tiny US left is a lot easier than standing up to Trump or the billionaires. 
Following this line of argument, many leading Democrats are now championing the Trumpist claim that “wokeness” has gone too far. Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has recently complained that “We’ve gone through five years where people became way too permissive as a culture”. In an <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-03-28/newsom-podcast-democrats-toxic">interview with the LA Times</a>, California Governor Gavin Newsom said his party’s brand had become “toxic”. “People don’t think we make any damn sense”, he said. <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/democrats-blame-partys-position-transgender-rights-part-harris-loss-rcna179370">Rep. Tom Suozzi</a> of New York slammed Democrats for “pandering to the far left” on trans rights. 
Democrats who argue the party has gone too far in supporting social justice frequently frame this retreat as a turn back to “bread and butter” issues. But the same Democrats who urge this back-to-basics approach are hostile to workers’ rights and the welfare state. Emanuel, for instance, spent his time as Chicago mayor attempting to crush teachers’ unions and close public schools. 
Democrats can comfortably agree with war, deportations, bigotry and austerity. Their fundamental problem with Trump is that he’s an unreliable and erratic enforcer of the interests of American capitalism. The Democrats’ criticism of Trump is tied to the growing chorus of capitalists who are concerned he is doing irreparable damage to their system. Wall Street billionaires are infuriated by Trump’s tariff gambit: Bill Ackman said the US is “heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter”. Boaz Weinstein predicted the “avalanche has really just started”. And Jamie Dimon warned it “may be disastrous in the long run”. 
This chorus also includes sections of the US imperialist establishment, like ex-Pentagon chief Leon Panetta, who are concerned Trump’s crude and blustering approach to foreign policy risks undermining US imperialist influence. This explains the furore around
“Signalgate”, when Trump’s team accidentally added an Atlantic journalist to their group chat discussing military strikes on Yemen. Democrats condemned Trump, not for bombing a poor country and slaughtering civilians, but for letting the world know about it. Traditionalists through and through, the Democratic Party prefer US war crimes to be kept secret. 
This is why their dominant strategy for “resisting” Trump thus far has been an endless series of legal challenges. The balance sheet of this strategy has been dismal. While court cases may temporarily halt some of Trump’s agenda, the administration is intimidating judges and moving rapidly toward defying their orders. This strategy does nothing to mobilise people to resist attacks or provide people with a coherent political argument against the right.
The huge turnouts at anti-Trump demonstrations on 5 April show that millions are looking for a way to resist Trump’s agenda effectively. While many are frustrated with the Democrats’ leadership, the party isn’t going anywhere. The Democrats hold on because of the strength of “lesser-evilism”, the pull for people to rally around the Democrats because they’re the only viable electoral alternative. Many accept a pathetic and pro-capitalist “resistance” to Trumpism even when they would prefer something better. So Democrats were able to front the 5 April demonstrations to begin rebuilding their credibility after a bruising few months. They were also able to exert influence through the party-aligned NGOs that organised the marches to exclude “controversial” issues like Palestine from the platform. 
The popularity of the “Fight the oligarchy” campaign led by Sanders and AOC shows that many support the idea of a left-wing resistance to Trump’s agenda. Their rally in Denver on 21 March drew 34,000 people and connected Trump’s reactionary social agenda to his war on workers. “People are starting to put the pieces together. The same billionaires who are taking a wrecking ball to our country derive their power from dividing working people apart”, said Ocasio-Cortez. “The last thing they want is for us to realize that the real division and the real harm in this country is how endless greed is costing the lives of everyone else.”
This is a good starting point for a socialist opposition to Trumpism. But it needs to be connected to a strategy that can actually build the power of workers and the oppressed. While they talk about fighting the oligarchy, AOC and Bernie urge support for the Democratic Party, an irredeemably oligarchic organisation. 
The alternative to this is to build grassroots organisations that can mobilise opposition to Trump and involve people in political action, to build working class power at the point of production and to cohere a political force that has an orientation to the power workers and the oppressed have when they act together.

Luca Tavan

Don’t trust the Democrats, we need real resistance to Trump

The disclosure of the deliberations over a military strike on Yemen among top Trump administration officials—only known because National Security Adviser Mike Waltz added journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to the group chat on the Signal app—gave the foreign policy establishment an opening to slam Trump’s amateurish foreign policy. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/opinion/trump-hegseth-signal-chat.html">New York Times op-ed</a> summed up this view. “How much dumber can this get?” Clinton asked.
Of course, Clinton has no objection to the US using its military power to attack another nation <a href="https://theintercept.com/2025/03/26/signal-chat-yemen-strike/">in a raid that killed dozens of civilians</a>. It’s that she and the foreign policy establishment she represents prefer smart people like themselves to carry them out. For liberals and establishment types, “Signalgate” exposes Trump’s foreign policy as the province of people in way over their heads, and whose actions threaten to unravel the US’s position as the main world superpower.
That assessment may be true, but it’s also shot through with a conceit that Trump and his administration have no strategy or theory behind what they are doing. Trump’s foreign policy plays are seen simply as the whims of a fool interested in his own personal aggrandisement.
Even if Trump tends to see US foreign policy as little more than an extension of his reality TV persona, the changes that his administration are initiating are momentous.
In the traditional mainstream understanding that Clinton encapsulates, US foreign policy is the summation of three main prongs: its external economic policy, its “hard power” (expressed through its military and political clout) and its “soft power,” or its ideological and cultural influence.
Since the end of Second World War, the US has achieved most of its goals through the construction of—and US dominance over—an array of global institutions, such as the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, to name a few. Since the end of the Cold War and the establishment of the US’s “unipolar moment”, the US has projected its military, economic and political hegemony under the guise of maintaining the “rules-based international order” ostensibly dedicated to promoting democracy and human rights.
This self-projection of US aims was always more rhetorical than real. The US never allowed international political institutions to constrain its unilateral actions. And it continues to spend more on its military than the rest of the world combined. US promotion of global economic trade and US corporate expansion around the world always relied on US “hard power”, to back it up, as the famous quip from the New York Times’ <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/damato/2001/04/imp-state.html">muse of empire, Thomas Friedman</a>, put it:
“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technology is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”
The wars in Gaza and Ukraine exposed the utter hypocrisy of US dedication to the “rules-based international order”. US leaders, from President Joe Biden on down, denounced Russian bombings of Ukrainian hospitals and schools as “crimes against humanity”, while providing Israel with the weapons and political cover it used to carry out identical atrocities in Gaza.
For 80 years, the existing alliances and institutions of global politics have served US imperial policy well. Now, we are faced with what appears to be the unprecedented situation in which the “hegemonic power” has become the main “revisionist power” in the world system, <a href="https://inflectionpointpodcast.substack.com/p/when-the-clock-broke-starring-john">as New Left Review contributor Dylan Riley put it</a>. In other words, it appears than the US, the global “hegemon” who has benefited so richly from the existing framework of international politics, is, paradoxically, the main actor (the “revisionist power” in the language of international relations) seeking to overturn that order.
The question is why. The answer lies in the challenge, emerging dramatically in the last twenty years, that China now poses to US economic and political leadership in the world.
By most mainstream accounts the US maintains military superiority over China for now. But it is rapidly losing its economic and technological edge to China, where more scientific research is now published than in the US. The January stock market panic over the announced success of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek suggested that the US is on the way to come in second to China on the cutting-edge technology of the 21st century.
These challenges, combined with US-led disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq that weakened the US, punctured the “unipolar moment”, leading to a more fragmented and multipolar world. The results have been increased nationalism and protectionism, and the ratcheting up of military budgets across the globe. On these indices, Biden built off initial moves in these directions under the first Trump administration. For example, Biden did not lift tariffs on Chinese manufactured goods that Trump imposed in 2018. Now, Trump appears to want to blow up the whole system.
Following the Greek left Keynesian economist <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms5-Z7sqiww">Yanis Varofakis</a>, let’s take Trump’s tariff obsession seriously to find a method in Trump’s apparent madness. Trump’s critique of the postwar global order starts with the observations that the US has extended its nuclear and security umbrella over its NATO allies and has acted as the “importer of last resort” for the global trade system. US corporations have offshored and downsized their productive capacity. In exchange, and because the US dollar is the world exchange current, other leading powers finance the US’s debt and allow it to run huge deficits and maintain a military machine that would bankrupt any other country.
<a href="https://gilbert-achcar.net/america-first">While this system has benefited the US enormously</a>, Trump argues instead that “other countries are ripping off” the US. Trump wants to see the US dollar depreciate—to encourage US exports and cut US trade and government deficits—while maintaining the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency. He uses tariffs and threats to withdraw US military protection to get other countries to accept those terms. Using various trade carrots and sticks, Trump thinks he can make multiple deals with individual countries or groups of countries. He rejects global institutions and multilateral “grand bargains” because he thinks he can win better terms with fewer constraints on US actions.
Whether this is a correct diagnosis of the US’s standing in the global political economy or a correct prescription for what the US should do is beside the point. The WTO has been largely non-functional since the first Trump term <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-launches-wto-dispute-over-trump-tariffs-2025-02-05/">as both the Trump and Biden administrations have refused</a> to appoint US representatives to appeals boards that are supposed to resolve trade disputes between the two countries. The current obsession of <a href="https://www.rand.org/nsrd/projects/NDS-commission.html">the US ruling class with a coming conflict with China</a> has augured in an era of protectionism in economic affairs and greater political competition and conflict between the leading powers.
In this environment, Trump’s “America First” and “US against the world” outlook will be tested. Liberals tag him with the 1930s epithet of “isolationist”. But he’s less committed to disengaging with the rest of the world, as he is prepared to throw around the US’s weight to advance its own interests. He has more of a “gunboat diplomacy” nineteenth-century colonial/imperial mentality. 
So, if he thinks that Greenland contains minerals the US wants, or its possession will allow the US to dominate the Arctic, other nations will be wary of the US, even if annexing the island appears to be a Trump fantasy. Historically, the “America First” strain of US politics has considered the land mass between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, from pole to pole, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/21/opinion/trump-american-empire-panama.html">as being fair game for US hemispheric domination</a>.
Consolidating a US-dominated sphere of influence in the region supports “America Firsters’” aggressive posture against other spheres, such as Europe or Asia. This is the twisted logic behind Trump’s pressure on Mexico and Canada, as well as his threats to Panama and Greenland. Trump’s sabre rattling against Panama has already produced the sale of the canal’s operational contract from the Hong Kong-based CK Hutchinson to a Blackrock-led consortium. Beyond this, Trump has allies among the Latin American far right, from Argentina’s Milei to Brazil’s Bolsonaro to El Salvador’s Bukele.
The most shocking development to the foreign policy establishment has been the Trump regime’s shift on Ukraine to an essentially pro-Putin position in enforcing a ceasefire in the war. In February, the US cast an amazing vote alongside such champions of democracy as North Korea and Belarus against a UN resolution identifying Russia as the aggressor in the Ukraine war.
How to explain this? Trump and his MAGA allies promised this, so it didn’t come out of blue. It is part of a piece with Trump’s break with global alliances such as NATO and seeing the EU as more of a competitor than an ally. Trump certainly has more affinity with petrostate dictators like Putin or Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin-Salman than he has with the US’s traditional allies. The administration’s antagonism to Europe appears deep-seated, as Signalgate’s revelations of <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/03/26/vance-anti-europe-obsession">Vice President Vance’s anti-EU comments showed</a>.
It also appears to fit with Trumpism’s nineteenth-century view that great powers have their “spheres of influence” that they carve up between them. So, Russia gets Ukraine. China gets Taiwan. And the US gets Greenland.
Whether this Trumpian shift in US foreign policy will produce the “golden age” that Trump promises is doubtful. But what we can predict is that world politics is entering a much more dangerous and unstable time in which wars, conflict and repression will be more on the order of the day than they have been for decades.
First published at the <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/">International Socialism Project</a>. Lance Selfa is the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Democrats-Critical-History-Updated/dp/1608461920" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Democrats: A Critical History</a> and editor of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/US-Politics-Age-Uncertainty-Reality/dp/1608468534" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality</a>.

Trump’s foreign policy: the method behind the madness

US President Donald Trump’s first reign ended in flailing catastrophe. He was like a bad comic being booed off the stage. He was beaten fair and square by a demented, basement-dwelling Biden. His attempted self-coup was a discrediting farce: he was supported by no army divisions, but only the QAnon shaman. His cultural legacy was enormous yet seemed to leave little structural trace. 
He is back now, and different. He has already created a climate of fear. Political opponents have been disappeared off the streets, and he has hundreds of victims in a Salvadoran gulag. Universities have rolled over. Big law firms have pledged to give pro bono advice to help him repress the enemy within. His sadistic cuts to state programs aim to call into question the legitimacy of any regulation, any redistribution or any orderly administration of a big bourgeois state. How far can it go? Where can it end? What limits exist to this process?
In some ways, Trump’s first term concealed his true nature. The radical demagogue, who inspired the world’s fascists, was almost immediately bound by circumstance. When he came to power, his own party tried to constrain and control him. Throughout his first months in office, appointees rebelled, or he fired them. Scaramucci, Spicer, Flynn, Bolton—the whole gamut from ultra-Trump spivs to neocon fossils—came and went in a laughable whirlwind. The Democrats took back the Congress. Black Lives Matter was simply too big to repress; it meant that Trump’s first term was defined by a progressive movement of astonishing breadth and persistence, with enormous immediate cultural impact. 
“Trump’s famously sharp instincts, the ones that won him the presidency, have been subverted at every level”, Tucker Carlson complained when Black Lives Matter left Trump and the Republicans passive and irrelevant. COVID exposed Trump’s sheer personal stupidity. He was publicly mocked and deflated by his own scientists. The need for state intervention into the economy was made screechingly obvious. Trumpism appeared to have been refuted by reality.
Yet all this concealed an inner development. On another level, Trump was gaining in power—and radicalising.
Trump didn’t win in 2016 by accident. He had proved himself a campaigner of some genius. He could take power and give it to allies. Over time, more and more ambitious politicians came over to his faction. In 2016, he had few reliable, sophisticated allies; now, he controls the entire Republican Party at every level. In Project 2025, top policy minds provided a program and tactical outline for a radicalised reactionary presidency. Trump showed how a president could win while breaking the rules and defying the norms; for right-wingers, that opened up new and exciting possibilities.
Black Lives Matter made Trump seem weak while the protests were at their peak. But they also inspired a deep, violent racist reaction. In the same screed in which he bemoaned the failure of Trump’s instincts, Carlson explained to his audience of millions: “Our leaders are weak. Predators know it. That’s why this is happening”. What was needed? “American citizens are forced to defend themselves. They have no choice. No-one else is going to defend them.”
At the time, Trump was asking Defense Secretary Mark Esper if the army could be ordered to fire into the crowds. The answer was no. But the idea was there. Soon, the killer Kyle Rittenhouse would become a Republican hero, to be joined by Daniel Penny and even Derek Chauvin, the man who choked George Floyd, and for whom Elon Musk now wants a pardon. The protests at elite universities in solidarity with Palestine gave further drive to this current: use terror to crush anti-racist ideology, or future State Departmentemployees will sympathise with the enemy. Internal repression and imperial violence could come together—just like at the peak of the Cold War.
The pandemic had made Trump seem weak, but that radicalised his movement as well. Huge swathes of capitalists—not just Americans, but throughout the world—lived their worst nightmare: their system was paused to save people’s lives. For many, not least Elon Musk, the lesson was clear. Whatever it took—whatever mad ideas, whatever political alliances, whatever cost in human lives—regulation in general, and disease control in particular, had to be crushed.
The way that COVID radicalised capitalists has been too little discussed. Centre-left parties are embarrassed to mention it, and right-wing ones have largely embraced the insanity. When Trump ran for re-election, he had the support of a business community that had consciously decided to embrace far-right conspiracies and kill by disease if it meant they could wind back regulations and reduce taxes.
Here is the domestic program of Trump 2.0: repress dissent, merge state violence with mob rule and shift the class struggle in favour of the bosses. These factors coalesce against a Democratic Party with little to offer. Trump is not coasting; he is not just kicking the can down the road for another few years. He wants to change the world.
And he has what he needs to do it. He represents a section of the capitalist class that is willing to fight. He has thousands of trained, confident and energetic activists, inspired by a worldview and a vision of the future. He has a political party—though a strange one, in the American model—through which he can coordinate and implement his program. What, then, can stop it?
Don’t look to America’s great traditions. Trump is a radical, but he is also a traditionalist. His terroristic internal program, and the forces that drive it, have deep roots in US political structures—deeper, in many ways, than Biden’s bumbling liberalism. The history of the USA is, in large part, a history of violent state terror meted out at Blacks, immigrants, leftists and the poor. Some of the methods were direct state power: executions, deportations and mass imprisonment. 
The first Red Scare deported hundreds of radical “aliens” from the country in the years following World War One. The Smith Act of 1940 made radical politics a crime, and socialists were jailed under it. A follow-up, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, allowed radicals to be deprived of their residency rights and deported—just as Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are doing now. 
Showpiece executions—like that of the Rosenbergs in 1953—created an aura of dread that could pervade society. In the early Cold War, “loyalty boards” investigated, disciplined and blacklisted employees suspected of radical ideas or simply of supporting the free speech and civil rights of radicals.
However, repression in the USA is traditionally decentralised. Employers and intellectuals can see which way the wind is blowing and play along. Joseph McCarthy’s public hearings could imprison victims if they didn’t provide testimony. But they also gave a signal to private employers about who they should blacklist, and how they should terrorise their own workers. The state “loyalty boards” gave legitimacy to bosses purging “disloyal” or rebellious employees. Anyone who caused trouble—organising a union, denouncing McCarthy or opposing racism—could be denounced for their radicalism and sacked. 
It was a very effective way to crush the trade unions and enforce the bosses’ domination over the working class. In shipyards, dock workers were purged and blacklisted for failing to give correct answers to questions like, “What do you think of the Italian situation?” or “Does your wife go to church regularly?” The purge of the ports was particularly intense: any active trade union militant was a suspect. In another pernicious US tradition, anti-communist union bureaucrats enthusiastically helped management drive out unruly workers, collaborating in investigations and helping to pick targets.
Binding the public and private repression is the US tradition of the private death squad. The roots go deep, at least back to the Klan in the period after the Civil War. It’s familiar to most from the civil rights struggle: the lynchings, the church bombings, the kidnap and torture of Freedom Riders. Racism almost always helped justify the murders, beatings and bombings, even when the victims were white—because white subversives were disloyal to the race. Private killers often knew the state would turn a blind eye. These private killers overlapped with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which for decades was run as an internal political police—blackmailing, brutalising and in some cases probably assassinating subversives beyond any regular legal framework.
For much of the twentieth century, the US was a deeply authoritarian society. In parts of the country, it was a one-party state. Many of its policies were inspirational to European fascist regimes. Yet it was all established and maintained without any open coup, any apparent “revolution”, or any Nazi-style party in uniforms: it always called itself democracy, not totalitarianism. The American authoritarian tradition, on which Trump draws, operated through a patchwork collaboration of state institutions, bosses, right-wing union officials and private thugs.
Trump draws on that tradition, but it’s unclear if he can completely re-establish it. It’s one thing to maintain a violent and authoritarian society that has existed for decades; it’s another to recreate and reimpose it once it has been largely vanquished. Resistance is likely, and Trump’s institutional capacity to hold the line is unknown.
But the authoritarian history of the US shows that faith in the “democratic resilience” of the US or its liberal institutions is misguided. For most of its history, the country has been nominally democratic but substantially authoritarian. In times of repression, liberal institutions caved, or joined in, seeking their own advantage. Trump’s project is serious. He has a vision, he has activists, he has organisation and he has the backing of an aggressive class that wants to fight. To resist his attacks, our side needs the same.

D. Taylor

Trump 2.0 is reviving America’s worst traditions. How far can it go?

The Canadian response to US President Donald Trump’s trade war is a case study of how nationalism can deflect criticism from the local ruling classes and paper over some of society’s class tensions. The overall result is a more right-wing environment in which dissatisfaction with the cost of living has collapsed into support for Canadian nationalism.
Trump’s America First plan is to realign international economic and political relations to benefit the US. In the Canadian context, Trump is using the country’s reliance on the US economy to extract political and economic concessions.
The tit-for-tat tariff war began in late January with the announcement of 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Trump’s deceptive justification for the tariffs, laid out in a White House Press release, was to crack down on undocumented migration and fentanyl smuggling. In response, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau beefed up border security and used the situation to deflect anger at the cost-of-living crisis away from the government. 
Trump’s moves have provoked a wave of nationalist sentiment. 
Formerly despised politicians are now lauded as national heroes. Just before Trump took office, Trudeau, a major advocate for austerity, had an approval rating of just 20 percent, according to a Guardian poll—down from a high of 65 percent. Pierre Poilievre, leader of the re-branded far-right Conservative Party of Canada, who was often dubbed “Trump Lite”, was leading in the same poll with 45 percent support. 
Now, their fortunes have reversed—the Conservatives are trailing in the polls after previously being considered shoo-ins to win the next election. And according to a new survey, published by Nanos in March, “dealing with US President Trump” is the most important issue for Canadian voters, ahead of the economy. That is also a shift—previously, the cost of living was front and centre as the most important issue.
Although Trudeau stepped down from the leadership of the Liberal Party shortly into the Trump presidency, his public perception has also turned around because of his vocal opposition to the tariffs. His successor, Mark Carney, a former investment banker, is capitalising on the shift in fortunes and has called a snap election. 
Formerly pilloried corporations have received a similar public rehabilitation. The “Buy Canadian Instead” campaign, for instance, was launched and backed by the grocery store mega-conglomerate Loblaws, which until recently was most known for having to pay a $50 million fine for price fixing. The Buy Canada campaign has proved lucrative: in the first week of February, CEO Per Bank told analysts that there had been a 10 percent uplift in sales of Canadian products.
This hasn’t done anything to solve the cost-of-living crisis, of course. But it gave the bosses an opportunity to pull the unions into a joint campaign to protect the interests of Canadian capitalists.
A press release from the Business Council of Canada announced the newly formed Canada-US Trade Council, which brings together “industry, unions and experts” to “secure [a] competitive business environment for our future”.
Even the supposedly social democratic New Democratic Party couldn’t sit out the nationalistic festivities. Party leader Jagmeet Singh has announced a plan to re-shore the production of F-35 fighter jets and new investments in “arctic sovereignty and defence”.
Fourteen CEOs representing Canada’s largest oil, gas and pipeline companies have petitioned the government to scrap certain environmental protections. They cite the urgent need to expand the energy sector to protect Canadian national sovereignty. 
In the global environment of increased economic and national competition, nationalism spins a narrative that workers and companies share common interests. 
It’s a scam to distract people from domestic inequality and exploitation, and will do nothing to ease living costs. Consumer prices, already under significant inflationary pressures, will continue to rise for working-class people, and the new intensely competitive environment will put more pressure on the Canadian ruling class to hammer through austerity, ramp up military spending and destroy existing environmental and workplace regulations.
The trade war is not about defending the standards of working-class people in each country; it’s about which national group of bosses will come out on top. Socialists should build solidarity across borders and oppose all attempts to impose the costs of the trade war on workers.

Trump’s escalating attacks on migrants: cruelty is the point

Opposition to Trump can, and must, grow

Trump’s 100-day blitz and the stirring of resistance

One hundred days of Democratic Party failure

Trump’s tariffs an attack on the working class

The logic of Trump’s reactionary agenda

Don’t trust the Democrats, we need real resistance to Trump

Trump’s foreign policy: the method behind the madness

Trump 2.0 is reviving America’s worst traditions. How far can it go?

Trade war spurs nationalism in Canada

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