As the mass ICE raids began on Friday in Los Angeles, members of the socialist group Tempest participated in rapid response and other protest efforts with mass organisations into the weekend. The Community Self-Defence Coalition, in which Tempest members participate, is a key formation that coordinates LA’s rapid response efforts. Tempest’s LA branch members were actively involved in defence efforts during skirmishes across downtown LA, the pitched battle in the city of Paramount and rapid response efforts to repel ICE in the city of Pasadena. They compiled and recorded their experiences throughout the weekend, covering the first days of mobilisation. All photos are by the Tempest LA branch and friends. This piece was first published at <a href="https://tempestmag.org/">Tempest magazine</a>.
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FRIDAY 6 JUNE
The first day involved nearly a dozen raids near downtown Los Angeles, Sun Valley and North Hollywood neighbourhoods, and LA County suburbs, including Pomona. Emergency rallies were called and converged around the downtown Metropolitan Detention Center. After dispersing protesters there, different law enforcement officers went over to the adjacent district of Chinatown to stage late night around 9pm. There was a lot of contradictory and confusing information spread across different protest chats throughout the night. At first, we were told that they were setting up for a night raid; later, word on the block was that they were setting up for Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan’s press conference at 7am the next morning. Dozens of FBI agents stationed in a parking lot in Chinatown on Hill St., later joined by Border Patrol, LAPD, and Homeland Security. Protesters quickly gathered to monitor and heckle them, soon outnumbering law enforcement, which also reinforced their numbers. Know Your Rights information was blasted on megaphones in English, Spanish, and Cantonese, as protesters informed local residents of their rights.
Things became more intense as armoured personnel carriers and additional law enforcement personnel poured in, although it was still unclear why they were staging in Chinatown. Some protesters, including bikers, tried to block vehicles from entering the lot. Some identified undercover officers and their vehicles on the protesters’ side and successfully heckled them to leave. Others followed various vehicles exiting the lot to figure out where they were going. Soon, law enforcement occupied the whole street beyond the lot to pressure the protesters out. Loud popping sounds started, with some claiming that they were sound cannons being blasted by the police. The pressure from protesters continued into midnight, after which all law enforcement retreated without explanation. There were no further reports of mass raids and Homan’s press conference the next day. (Homan later appeared on television the next afternoon to announce the deployment of the National Guard.)
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-1.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
SATURDAY 7 JUNE
On the second day, rapid responders rushed to the city of Paramount in the morning, located about a half hour drive south of LA, upon reports of an ICE raid at a Home Depot. Paramount developed into a war zone throughout the day. Paramount is a majority low-income and Latinx area, and one of LA’s key industrial regions. The organised left has little presence in this area, but the militancy seen on 7 June demonstrates the spontaneous power of Brown working-class youth in defending their communities. ICE cars were seen burning. Hundreds of law enforcement officers were deployed throughout Paramount, throwing tear gas and flash bombs as protesters fought back and the Home Depot barricaded itself for safety.
As the Paramount battle stretched on, supporters continued to respond to different reports of ICE raids across LA, as some continued to support detainees at the downtown detention centre. More people began gathering back at the detention centre early in the evening. Around 100-150 protesters were there around 7pm. LAPD gathered en masse to use tear gas and shoot pellets at protesters in this area between 8 and 10pm. Most of the street around the detention centre was cleared out and occupied by hundreds of LAPD officers. In the meantime, Homan confirms on national television that he’ll be federalising the California National Guard for deployment in LA, against Governor Gavin Newsom’s dissent. It was unclear that night what this meant or when exactly the Guard would arrive. The day-long battles in Paramount stretched west into the city of Compton, which was one of the last sites where militant mobilisation continued that day.
There were reported ICE sightings at probably six other locations throughout southern California but the majority of protest and state activity occurred primarily in the vicinity of the Home Depot in Paramount and Compton that went into the early morning Sunday, and again at the Downtown LA Metropolitan Detention Center where protesters had been gathered the entire day.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-2.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
SUNDAY 8 JUNE
LOS ANGELES
On 8 June, Angelenos woke to the news that over 2,000 National Guard had been deployed. A protest in the predominantly Latinx working-class Boyle Heights neighbourhood was planned by Centro CSO and other immigrant rights and local groups for the morning. Crowds had also already begun to gather back at the detention centre downtown.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-3.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
Activists gathered at Mariachi Plaza to protest the ICE raids of the previous two days. Speakers included labour movement icon Dolores Huerta. Speakers generally emphasised not only the rights of immigrants but also applauded the courage and rapid response of the activists gathered, as well as the importance of showing the Trump administration that people will continue to fight back against his draconian methods. The gathering mobilised to march down 1st Street for 1.5 miles to the Federal Metropolitan Detention Center on Alameda Street where they met a larger crowd of activists that had been gathering from the previous two days. Within minutes of arrival, the authorities fired upon the crowd of protesters, presumably with only tear gas, and the front of the crowd began to disperse. There did not appear to be any serious injuries, though many seemed unprepared for tear gas, and some were adversely affected. The Centro CSO organisers, worried about crowd safety, encouraged those remaining from the Mariachi Plaza rally to return to Boyle Heights. Many of us stayed to record the events, in particular the fully militarised presence of local, state, and federal authorities, including the National Guard. I left soon afterward when the tear gas became too overwhelming.
The crowd at the detention centre remained at about 100-300 people for the next two hours and had not yet encountered further violence. Protesters stood off with the ~20 California National Guard members stationed at the rear of the building. Eventually, a squadron of ~15 LAPD cars arrived further down the road, pre-positioned to block one exit along the walled-in road. A large portion of the crowd then moved around the guarded door and went around the corner, escaping a potential kettle. The police formed a line around their vehicles and appeared to fully surround a portion of the protesters, but did not make arrests.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-4.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
Around this time, a rally called by the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) at the city hall nearby began to march toward the detention centre. It was unclear whether the march was part of the original rally plan or if the crowd spontaneously decided to march. This mass contingent arrived just in time to reinforce the surrounded protesters near the detention centre. As they arrived, the police were forced to retreat promptly. Thousands of protesters continued to flood the streets outside the detention centre throughout the afternoon and occupied the nearby intersection at Alameda and Temple. Some remained around the intersection while others continued to march. This contingent went through Little Tokyo back to the Federal Building.
At this point, the crowd was too large to be effectively organised. Some remained at the detention centre, others continued to march, while a smaller group occupied the freeway.
A formation of LAPD officers opposed the crowd of ~200 protesters, who kept a close distance from the line. The police continued to shoot volleys of less-lethal weapons into these different sites, though protesters remained steadfast for hours. Pro-Palestine slogans and clothing were not only ubiquitous, but many of those furthest in the front defending the protests from the police were wearing keffiyehs. We witnessed multiple people around us injured. Street medics helped many protesters tend to their injuries. The police soon declared unlawful assembly but were unable to fully sweep the intersection for hours. At one point, the police declared that they would begin arrests in a minute, but were halted by a protester’s car that slowly rolled through the intersection with a child sitting at the window, raising a Mexican flag with his fist up. The crowd protected them, and the sweeps were delayed for another half an hour.
After another stand-off, the protesters crossed over the median of the freeway, stopping the flow of traffic in the opposite direction. As soon as this happened, the police widened their line and began shooting flash bangs in the sky above the protesters on the freeway. Peaceful protesters were met with disproportionate state violence that increased with time, including being fired on with less-lethal guns from rooftops. Several Waymo automated cars were burned. Significant numbers of protesters remained in the streets at various points around downtown LA into the evening and after nightfall. They were forced off the freeway but continued to march to other locations. As the protesters’ numbers grew thinner, police aggression increased. By sunset, the remaining protesters were forced to construct makeshift barricades using benches and signs.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-5.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
PASADENA
In Pasadena, word got out early in the morning across rapid response chats that ICE and DHS agents were staying at three local hotels: the Westin, Dena Hotel, and the new AC Hotel. There were reports of ICE agents questioning hotel workers who were servicing the rooms. By noon, Unite Here and the National Day Laborers Organizing Network brought out more than one hundred people from Pasadena and Altadena to inquire about and protest ICE’s presence. Faith leaders, community organisations and politicians, including Mayor Victor Gordo, showed up afterwards, and the crowd swelled to several hundred. Speakers at the rally denounced the intimidation and the hotel’s collaboration with ICE as they profit from family separation.
Throughout the day, protesters marched and circled the block, vowing to stay until ICE left. Some of the ICE vehicles’ tires were damaged. The protest served as a rallying point for the community. Community organisations like AUSIIME and the pro-immigrant band Los Jornaleros del Norte kept spirits high throughout the day with chants, cumbia, and anti-ICE songs. After several hours of protests, local politicians who had been intermediating with management announced that ICE had been asked to leave the hotel, and the crowd erupted in jubilation. Still, protesters did not leave until the agents had checked out and continued waiting, anticipating any movement. Since the morning, workers had been informing the rally of potential ICE movements, and everyone anticipated the humiliating exit from the hotel. After fixing their popped tires under the hot sun, ICE agents began to exit swiftly from the parking structure where protesters waited for them at all exits. As vehicles swerved through the parking structure, they were chased out by triumphant protesters who celebrated their victory, chanting “Si se pudo!” (We did it!)
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-6.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
MONDAY 9 JUNE
Early in the morning, families of several workers (mostly women and youth) who were detained in Friday’s mass raid at Ambiance garment factory gathered for a press conference, assisted by the Garment Workers Center and other community organisations. A Tempest member assisted with security. The detained workers were the main providers in their families, and the families shared that they have not been able to hear from them yet. They called on ICE to free them, and to leave our communities. A group of over 100 people gathered to support them, including Palestinian and Palestine solidarity organisations, Indigenous organisations, progressive clergy, and other community nonprofits. The families also shared that Ambiance has still not released the workers’ owed wages to them, and a delegation of them went to the company offices after the press conference to demand these wages. There was no visible police presence or counter-protests, but many of us were informed throughout the event that ICE activity was beginning again in other parts of LA, including in Huntington Park, and the Fashion District again just a mile away from us. Many attendees went directly to the Grand Park rally to support David Huerta and SEIU right after.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-7.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
Later that morning at 11am, there was a rally at Grand Park in downtown led by SEIU in support of SEIU California President David Huerta, who was detained for participating in the protest against the mass raids at the detention centre on Friday. There was a curiously light police presence at first, despite the clashes over the weekend. In addition to SEIU International and various locals, many other major unions were present, including AFSCME, UHW, LULAC, Teamsters, UNITE HERE!, ILWU, LIUNA, IBEW and IATSE. There were also representatives of various civic and community organisations, like Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), LAUSD, CARECEN, UCLA Labor Studies and LA County. The DSA-endorsed City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado was also present and spoke.
The general theme was that David Huerta’s arrest is also an injury to all of us. It was a demonstration of around 2,000 to 3,000 people that affirmed courage in the face of the federal presence sent by Trump. A band, Las Cafeteras, performed some songs like “La Bamba”, “If I Was President”, “Stand By Me”, which also asked the audience what they would change if they were president for a day. Prominent labour leaders spoke and affirmed labour’s role in the fight against fascism, including SEIU president April Verrett, Dolores Huerta, NAACP president David Johnson (who connected workers’ and civil rights, drawing on the Black struggle). Johnson powerfully declared that the Black struggle has taught him that saying nothing about the oppression of the most vulnerable would be an invitation for more abuses against everyone. Representatives from Justice for Janitors USWW, like Luis Fuentes, spoke about David Huerta’s labour bona fides.
But there was little emphasis on the need to build a resistance outside of the Democratic Party. Dolores Huerta emphasised nonviolence and the need for electoral strategies during the midterms, which was reaffirmed by the SEIU political policy director. Another policy representative spoke about the importance of forming coalitions with allies in other movements, emphasising the need for strength in numbers and solidarity.
Police presence and pressure began to ramp up toward the end of the rally, as a student walkout that morning converged at the nearby Federal Building. Hundreds of students and other community members began to join, and police vehicles from other cities, such as Vernon, Torrance and San Marino, appeared.
The Trump administration announced the deployment of Marines into LA around this time, as mass raids ramped up targeting many cities across Orange County, south of LA.
The situation remains highly fluid, and more protests are sure to occur in the coming days and weeks. There have already been reports of heightened ICE activity for the next 30 days. Tempest LA branch members will continue to participate and report on any resistance activities.
This piece was first published at <a href="https://tempestmag.org/">Tempest magazine</a>.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-8.jpg" alt="" /></figure>

The battle of Los Angeles

The following article is from the <a href="https://www.puntorojomag.org/">Puntorojo magazine</a> editorial collective in North America.
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The scenes of fleeing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicles being pelted with rocks, bricks, and any other makeshift projectiles by lines of people taking aim at the despised migra agents inflicting so much harm and terror in their communities. A burning ICE vehicle in the middle of an intersection, with people setting off fireworks, taking selfies, and even dancing on the burned-out car. Throngs of people on a highway bridge overpass dropping objects onto police in their cars, smashing windshields, and forcing the cops to quickly retreat from the scene with their shields up. Rows of heavily armed cops shooting rubber bullets and tear gas cannisters into crowds of anti-ICE protesters with complete disregard, intending to harm and provoke, while people make shields out of durable objects, trash can lids, and metal chairs. Thousands of people coming out to join the uprising, waving Mexican, Central American, and Palestinian flags, even as the Trump regime has called out National Guard troops to take up positions around the city.
These are some of the scenes from the anti-ICE uprising in Los Angeles in June 2025, emerging street battles and clashes between the most oppressed and exploited sectors of the working class and heavily armed ICE agents—the American Gestapo. 
ICE unleashed in the shadows of imperialist war
ICE was created in 2003 in a period of massive state investment and buildup in military and state repressive capacities in the period after the attacks of 9/11. Then US president, George W. Bush— with broad support from the Democratic Party—launched the invasion (and 20-year occupation) of Afghanistan in October of 2001 known as “Operation Enduring Freedom”. This was followed in early 2002 with Bush declaring at his State of the Union address that the US state was initiating a generational and global “War on Terror”, beginning with intention to attack the “Axis of Evil” nations of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. The US invaded and occupied Iraq on March 20, 2003, under the name “Operation: Iraqi Freedom.” Analysts have since documented that the US has conducted and spread military action—invasion, occupation, airstrikes, drone attacks, special ops, assassinations, and advisory and training roles— into 78 countries that has led to the <a href="https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures">killing</a> of nearly 5 million people.
While the attacks of 9/11 gave a pretext, the US state had already been in the process of preparing for a new phase of an imperial war to re-assert US military hegemony in the Middle East, Asia, and other parts of the world. This was expressed most directly through the influence of a right-wing ruling class think tank known as “The Project for a New American Century” (PNAC), which since 1997 had advocated for a more assertive and interventionist US internationally. PNAC promoted the idea of preemptive war, regime change, and neocolonial occupation to reassert “American primacy” against its rising imperialist rivals and enemies.
Since 2001 military spending has increased dramatically, with the Pentagon <a href="https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/economic/budget/pentagon">spending</a> over $14 trillion dollars to fund expanding war and occupation. This is the context in which the US state simultaneously opened a domestic front in its generational war, with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In 2003, the bipartisan US state developed and merged 22 federal armed enforcement agencies into the Department of Homeland Security as an all-encompassing domestic state-repressive apparatus. ICE was created to repress so-called “national security threats” within US territorial boundaries, with agents given broad license and individual discretion to execute the charge of surveilling, pursuing, detaining, and deporting those deemed by ICE to be “Individuals believed to pose a threat to public safety or national security.”
From the outset, ICE became a distinctive and exceptional type of policing agency, given broad license to act without oversight, accountability, and to conduct its operations with impunity and without fear of repercussion or recrimination. The extralegal nature of ICE has enabled the agency to become deeply politicised, to attract and recruit agents with far right, racist, and violent dispositions; and to be weaponised, operationalised, and unleashed by a reactionary and white supremacist regime for explicitly political purposes. 
ICE as a weapon of class war and political repression
ICE was initially deployed through the “National Fugitive Operations Program” to surveil, target, arrest, and deport undocumented Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern people from over 20 targeted nations who were residing in the US. The focus then shifted towards targeting undocumented workers from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean after the mass immigrant worker mobilisations of 2006, where over 3 million people participated in strikes, marches, boycotts, and walkouts demanding legalisation. Between 2006 and 2007, ICE agents orchestrated hundreds of invasive raids across the country in over 100 cities and towns nationwide that targeted factories, farms, homes, and public community spaces.
ICE was deployed to arrest workers organising union drives, conducting workplace protests, or otherwise participating in class struggle activities in different locations across the country. Numerous undocumented activists were identified and targeted for their political activism and advocacy. Through these fugitive recovery operations and workplace and community raids, over 80,000 people were targeted, arrested, and deported in 2006-7 alone. The state attack using ICE was to “neutralise” the mass immigrant workers’ movement by mass arresting and deporting its most militant, organised, and resistant sectors.
The state-led attack on the migrant and transnational working class has persisted ever since in a bipartisan manner to use the threat of ICE arrest, detention, and deportation to further segregate, terrorise, and render millions of immigrant workers more vulnerable and precarious. Under these conditions, they are made less able to organise and resist, and more susceptible to higher levels of exploitation, and to enable the extraction from their labor of greater amounts of wealth for the capitalist class.
The imperative to contain, control, and instill the permanence of fear in the migrant and transnational working class as a function of the US capitalist system can explain why both the Republicans and Democratic Parties have worked together to build up ICE and detention and deportation capacities through successive administrations. The DHS has since become a massively expanding state repressive apparatus that has seen its size and scale growing exponentially, with an initial <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/publication/securing-homeland-strengthening-nation#:~:text=The%20President's%20Budget%20for%202003,from%20%2419.5%20billion%20in%202002.">budget</a> of $38 billion in 2003 and rising to a <a href="https://www.dhs.govhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/2023-03/DHS%20FY%202024%20BUDGET%20IN%20BRIEF%20%28BIB%29_Remediated.pdf">bloated</a> $103 billion by 2024.
Trump’s currently proposed 2025 budget proposal (his so-called “big beautiful bill”) that recently passed the House of Representatives <a href="https://www.epi.org/blog/house-republican-budget-bill-gives-trump-185-billion-to-carry-out-his-mass-deportation-agenda-while-doing-nothing-for-workers-immigration-enforcement-would-have-80-times-more-funding-than-la/#:~:text=The%20bill%20provides%20$155%20billion,funding%20for%20labor%20standards%20enforcement.">includes</a> $185 billion in new funding for immigration and border law enforcement. If passed, this will dramatically expand the Department of Homeland Security by nearly doubling its current budget. Specifically for ICE, the bill will allocate $45 billion for immigrant detention and $14 billion for deportation operations.
Since the creation of the ICE, the targeting and systematic deportation of “removals” of sections of the undocumented working class has become a permanent feature of the landscape (removals from the interior of the US, not including “expulsions” from within the border region). Under George W. Bush (2000-2008), more than 2 million undocumented workers were arrested and deported; under Barack Obama (2009-2016) over 3 million people were deported, despite him getting elected to president alongside a supermajority of Democrats in Congress on a promise to legalise all undocumented workers; under Trump I (2017-2020), 1.2 million were deported; and under Biden (2021-2025) over 400,000 were deported with millions more expelled from the border region, although he was also elected on a campaign promising to suspend deportations and to pass a general legalisation of the undocumented.
The foundational characteristic of ICE as a state-repressive instrument deployed against labor unionism and political dissidence was recently displayed with ICE agents <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/26/us-universities-students-israel-palestine-protests">targeting</a> and arresting pro-Palestinian activists and sympathisers. High-profile arrests and abductions of Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, both of whom are legal permanent residents in the process of attaining citizenship, show how the state is now expanding the purview of repression of political opponents to go beyond those who are undocumented. Furthermore, more than 1,000 people have had their visas <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/17/us/university-international-student-visas-revoked">revoked</a> or statuses terminated for alleged Pro-Palestinian activism.
The use of ICE as a state weapon against the working class, while simultaneously used against the political opponents of US imperialism, Zionism, and Palestinian genocide—reveal the scale of the political crisis of legitimacy in the US state. It also reveals the scale of violence to which the state is willing to deploy against broad segments of the population to quell dissent and opposition to the economic and imperialist objectives of the US capitalist class. 
Towards mass resistance—and the abolition of ICE
Increased ICE activities targeting migrant workers and political activists has been increasing over the last decade. Since the Obama Administration, ICE has become increasingly <a href="https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/major-city-police-leaders-join-ice-discuss-partnership">integrated</a> into national policing efforts to participate in a wide array of enforcement activities, including efforts to repress political protest and social unrest. For instance, DHS and ICE agents were also deployed in cities across the country to surveil, disrupt, and repress the <a href="https://www.aclu.org/news/racial-justice/government-watching-blacklivesmatter-and-its-not-okay">Black Lives Matters</a> protest movements of 2014 to 2021. In some cases, like that in Portland, Oregon, DHS agents used unmarked vehicles to track, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-use-unmarked-vehicles-to-grab-protesters-in-portland">abduct</a>, and incarcerate protest participants over the course of the protests. 
Rising anger and active opposition to ICE has taken shape in recent years. In 2017-18, a nationwide movement called “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/03/occupy-ice-protests-immigration-families">Occupy ICE</a>” was organised to block and disrupt operations at ICE facilities across of the country. This movement advanced the demand of “abolish ICE” in very practical terms: disrupt their activities and make it impossible for them to operate. This impact and popularity of the movement, under Trump’s first administration, even compelled some <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/02/politics/abolish-ice-democrats-list">Democratic Party</a> candidates to mouth support. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, and others stepped forward and feigned support for the abolition of ICE—only to quickly walk it back and reverse course after the election cycle. 
During the election cycle of 2024, both Democrats and Republicans ramped up their support for an immigration crackdown and the unleashing of ICE. Having no alternative to offer amid the recurring crises of capitalism and imperial decline, both capitalist parties <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/07/30/nx-s1-5055670/harris-trump-border-immigration-georgia">converged</a> in a full-throated attack on immigrants, refugees, and transnational workers. The complicity of Democrats in <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/-border-broken-democrats-solidify-shift-tougher-migration-stance-conve-rcna167638">shifting</a> the political terrain against immigrants enabled the racist and reactionary Trump to scale up his fascist rhetoric, mobilise his base of support (including in <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/immigration-customs-enforcement-union-endorses-trump-228664">ICE</a> and the <a href="https://thehill.com/latino/4932425-trump-border-patrol-union-endorsement/">Border Patrol</a>), and declare a war on immigrants as the main onslaught of his second term—with the Democratic Party in complicity or silence.
The last few weeks and days show the potential for a movement of militant mass resistance to ICE, the Trump regime, and the whole state-repressive apparatus that underpins the US capitalist system. There have been several community-based confrontations against ICE raids in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE3VYMkb-Po">Worcester</a>, Massachusetts, <a href="https://www.puntorojomag.org/2025/06/10/the-people-vs-ice-an-uprising-against-state-terror/in%20defense%20of%20migrant%20workers">San Diego</a>, California, <a href="https://youtu.be/fx9GAblcGtU">Minneapolis</a>, Minnesota, and in several other <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/52yVGaNZ63M">parts</a> of the country. The current <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mgdny2YW3Y">uprising</a> in Los Angeles shows that we have the numbers, power, and capacity to disrupt and defeat ICE operations and drive these invaders out of our communities.
For the struggle against ICE to grow, advance, and inflict more setbacks and defeats on ICE, there will need to be more coordinated acts of confrontation and disruption across more cities with the militancy now being witnessed in Los Angeles. This will necessitate higher levels of organisation, planning, and involvement. To build a mass movement capable of defeating ICE, it is also necessary to understand, strategize, and organise for the complete abolition of the agency. Acts of mass disruption can weaken ICE operations, and with radical organisation and orientation, can potentially inspire more sectors to join in the resistance. Most importantly, a mass movement against ICE can spread into the workplaces with strikes that can disrupt the capitalist economy and thereby its very capacity to function. Working-class power to shut down capitalist production is its greatest potential power. A <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/flight-attendant-union-labor-trump-shutdown-sara-nelson-strike">threatened</a> general strike in the airline industry in 2019 forced Trump to back down and cave during a federal government shutdown to force congressional funding for the expansion of the border wall. 
As an instrumentalised weapon of class war used openly against the working class, the very existence and ongoing terror operations of ICE are directly connected to the needs of the capitalist class to subjugate the most resistant segments of the working class and make them vulnerable to super-exploitation to enrich the capitalists. ICE is also a weapon that is increasingly used to repress political dissidents and outspoken critics of the sitting regime, so it can continue in its imperialist war efforts and to conduct the genocide in Gaza. If we can unite and build movements of mass resistance to ICE, we will not only realise our potential to disrupt and stop ICE but can also become aware of our potential and ability to defeat and overturn the capitalist system itself—that which has spawned the monstrosities of ICE terror, Trump, US imperialism, endless war, and genocide.

The people vs. ICE: an uprising against state terror

The end of the Trump-Musk “bromance” was as predictable as the sun rising in the east.
But the speed of the collapse and the vitriol unleashed were something to behold. The world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man—both billionaire narcissists and egomaniacs—attacking each other like scorpions in a bottle.
In the early days of online flame wars, “Godwin’s Law” tracked the toxicity of exchanges by how soon one flamer called the other “Hitler” or compared them to a Nazi. Among the MAGA set, those insults don’t carry the same weight. Some might even consider them compliments. So Musk went in a different direction, accusing Trump of covering up his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the child sex trafficker to the rich and famous.
Throughout the day on 5 June, official Washington watched in various states of amazement as the <a href="https://apnews.com/article/trump-musk-tax-bill-6e7845081259c34db785182c51569c0c">online fight escalated</a>, and Tesla’s stock crashed. By the end of the day, <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/06/tesla-already-had-big-problems-then-musk-went-to-battle-with-trump.html">Tesla had lost $150 billion in market capitalisation</a> and Musk had lost about one-tenth of his net worth.
For opponents of Trump and Musk, it’s satisfying to watch the two chief clowns in the MAGA circus savage each other. But we need to step back and ask what this may mean.
The first question is whether the Trump-Musk break-up is real or just another episode in the reality TV White House. There’s always a possibility that this cage match will end, and Musk will return to the fold. If erstwhile opponents of Trump are willing to grovel and debase themselves, Trump can welcome them back to the team. Ask “Little Marco” Rubio, who called Trump a “con artist”, or J.D. Vance, who once called Trump “America’s Hitler”. As secretary of state and vice president, Rubio and Vance are now chief enablers in the Trump regime.
Whether that’s Musk’s future or not, just how and why the current situation developed is a key question.
From the Trump side, Musk was “wearing thin” his welcome, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/06/05/nx-s1-5424686/donald-trump-elon-musk-bromance-breakup">as the president put it in one of his Truth Social posts</a>. In the early days of the regime, when Musk and his crew of twenty-something acolytes were rampaging through federal agencies, Musk appeared as co-president. This caused friction with Trump and with cabinet officials like Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/us/politics/trump-musk-doge-power.html">There was no love lost between Trump’s appointees and Musk.</a>
Musk came into Trump’s orbit promising his “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) would root out $2 trillion in government “waste, fraud and abuse”. Instead, after DOGE marauded through one department after another, stealing their data, ordering the liquidation of whole agencies and the firings of thousands of government workers, it could only document, at most, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doge-cuts-cost-135-billion-analysis-elon-musk-department-of-government-efficiency/">$160 billion in “savings”</a>. Most of those will vanish as DOGE’s errors turn out to cost the government more to fix. 
DOGE was therefore a failure in its own terms, but is serving Trump’s interests in other ways: illegally terminating programs and terrorising thousands of workers. And putting the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in the “woodchipper” (Musk’s words) was both a sop to the xenophobic MAGA base and an end to the agency’s investigation of <a href="https://www.epi.org/blog/corruption-in-plain-sight-how-elon-musk-has-benefited-from-the-first-100-days-of-the-trump-administration/">Musk’s corruption in seeking deals for his Starlink satellite firm</a>.
There is plenty to criticise about <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/02/26/with-aid-agencies-like-this-who-needs-enemies/">USAID’s service to US imperialism</a>, but Musk and Trump aren’t concerned about that. Meanwhile, the destruction of its food aid and vaccination programs will cost the lives of thousands. <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2025/05/08/bill-gates-will-close-gates-foundation-in-2045-after-donating-99-of-his-fortune/">As Musk’s fellow billionaire Bill Gates</a> put it, “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one”.
In a very short time—and due largely to the grassroots <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/the-grassroots-opposition-to-trump-can-and-must-grow/">“Tesla takedown” protests</a> that started in February—Musk became a political liability to Trump. Musk’s “chainsawing” of the federal workforce and essential services, along with his embrace of far-right politics, transformed him into one of the most hated figures in global politics.
Moreover, Musk’s association with Trump and his predations under DOGE had immolated the Tesla brand with its main customer base: affluent liberals. When Tesla Takedown protests regularly took to the streets of affluent suburbs like Walnut Creek, California, and Golden Valley, Minnesota, the Tesla board took notice. Tesla’s declining sales throughout Europe and the US even led the company’s board to consider replacing Musk.
All of these, and more, reasons could explain why Trump and Musk were going to part ways. But the amiable 30 May retirement press conference, when Trump presented Musk with a golden key, gave way to threats and insults after Musk took to X to denounce Trump’s “<a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/the-big-beautiful-bill/">big beautiful bill</a>” moving through Congress as “<a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-slams-trump-one-big-beautiful-bill-as-disgusting-abomination/">disgusting” and a “pork-filled” “abomination</a>”.
Of course, Musk did not object to the multi-trillion-dollar package of tax cuts because it threatens to throw tens of millions from health insurance or food assistance. He claims, along with other right-wingers in Congress, to be concerned with the bill’s addition of more than US$2 trillion to the long-term national debt. But Musk’s concern for the deficit may be cover for more prosaic—and nakedly self-interested—objections to Trump’s (and the Republican Party’s) only domestic policy agenda. 
Trump withdrew the nomination of a Musk ally as National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) administrator. Musk had expected his buddy at NASA to favour his SpaceX and Starlink companies. Trump sidelined Musk when other tech oligarchs accompanied him on his recent trip to the Gulf monarchies. And the “big beautiful bill” <a href="https://braddelong.substack.com/p/the-oddest-man-out-among-our-hundred">cuts tax subsidies to electric vehicle manufacturers that helped to prop up Tesla when its sales slumped</a>.
One of Musk’s social media posts recounted that he spent more than $250 million to aid Trump’s election and that Trump was showing “ingratitude”. It’s doubtful that Musk’s money was the key element that swung the election for Trump. But the naked quid pro quo he implied shows how open is the corruption of government in the Trump era. It’s as if Musk was telling Trump, “Hey, bro, I spent a quarter of a billion dollars on you, and I expect the return on my investment”.
Musk got plenty from his West Wing sojourn, including the neutering of federal investigations into his corruption, and even the State Department’s <a href="https://newrepublic.com/post/195297/elon-musk-state-department-force-country-starlink">open strongarming of foreign governments</a> to sign contracts with him. But as a huge federal contractor, Musk could find himself in a similar position as Harvard and Columbia universities if Trump decides to cut billions in contracts with Starlink or SpaceX.
Musk certainly has his own cards to play. He threatened to decommission one of his SpaceX rockets, which could impede the US government’s ability to launch satellites and other payloads into space. But when evaluating threats like this, we should remember two of Karl Marx’s insights: first, that the capitalist class is a band of “hostile brothers” and second, that the “executive of the capitalist state” is merely a “committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie”. This means that Musk may not have the running room he thinks he has.
First, his tech brethren like Amazon’s/Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos and Open AI’s Sam Altman or Palantir’s Peter Thiel will be happy to screw Elon if Trump decides to invest in Blue Origin as an alternative to SpaceX or Open AI or Palantir as an alternative to Musk’s Grok or xAI. Second, the state (especially under a vindictive boss like Trump) still has many levers of power to bring Musk to heel.
The Trump-Musk alliance was the most public manifestation of the “<a href="https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/maga-feeding-frenzy-has-caused-a">shotgun marriage</a>” that is the Trump regime: an alliance of “America First” MAGA nativists, Christian nationalist reactionaries and tech oligarchs who don’t always see eye-to-eye. <a href="https://talkingpointsmemo.com/where-things-stand/who-got-duped-maga-activists-worry-that-nativism-and-tech-oligarchy-may-not-go-hand-in-hand">Recall that Trumpworld erupted in controversy even before Trump took office</a>. Then, the tech faction, including Musk and his then-DOGE sidekick Vivek Ramaswamy, fought with MAGA nativists over restrictions on H1B visas for highly skilled immigrants. Against the MAGA racists who want to keep brown people out of the US, the Silicon Valley oligarchs are happy to encourage temporary visas for software engineers from Asia binding them to their employers.
There are many crosscutting interests among the main factions of the Trump regime. For example, the Wall Street and Silicon Valley oligarchs hate Trump’s tariffs, but these are gospel to the America Firsters. For now, though, these factions remain mostly united. And that’s mostly because they hate the same people: trans people, pro-Palestine activists, government workers, “woke” liberals and the like. And while they are, in the argot of Silicon Valley, “moving fast and breaking things”, they seem to be a juggernaut.
If there is to be a reverberation of the Trump-Musk fight in the broader Trump project, the bill moving its way through Congress could feel it. It’s a monstrous bill in terms of its impacts on ordinary people, but it’s a Frankenstein’s monster assembled to keep all of Trump’s legislative enablers on board. The Christian reactionaries get Medicaid bans on gender-affirming care. The tech oligarchs get bans on state-level regulation of artificial intelligence. And the MAGA nativists get a huge expansion in the deportation industrial complex.
But the congressional majorities Trump needs to pass it are paper-thin, so any defection of any part of his base could sink it. Recognising this, Trump and his lackeys in Congress have jammed their entire agenda into this one bill. They want to make support for it a single up-or-down vote on the full Trump agenda. For that reason, it’s still likely to pass with most of its worst provisions preserved.
But could Musk and his money cause Republicans heartburn as they try to pass the mega bill? Possibly, if he chose to mount a campaign. But if he’s true to what he says, Musk might approve of the bill if it became even more of a handout to the rich and a punishment to the poor. That’s why it’s beyond pathetic that at <a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/06/06/2025/khanna-steps-up-his-work-to-pull-musk-toward-democrats">least one leading Democrat</a> (and a prominent past Bernie Sanders supporter) is trying to move Musk and his chequebook over to the Democratic side. Now, that’s the way to revive the Democratic “brand”: ally with the most hated oligarch in the world!
The Trump-Musk feud is exhibit #1 of the rottenness at the core of US politics.

Lance Selfa

Trump-Musk shit show displays how much US politics stinks

If satirists tried to produce a caricature of legislation designed to steal from the poor to give to the rich, they couldn’t have done much better than the “big, beautiful bill” that the US House of Representatives passed by one vote on 22 May.
Trump describes as “beautiful” a 1,100-page plan that incorporates the Republican Party’s wish list of tax cuts for wealthy Americans while raising costs and imperilling the health and education of millions of working-class Americans. Simultaneously, it calls for a military budget of more than $1 trillion and a vast expansion of the deportation apparatus that is the core of Trump’s program. It would also increase the budget deficit by US$4 trillion over the next decade.
Just how tilted to the rich is the “big, beautiful bill”? The non-partisan <a href="https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-05/61422-Reconciliation-Distributional-Analysis.pdf">Congressional Budget Office</a> estimates that it would decrease the household incomes of the poorest tenth of Americans by up to 4 percent annually, while increasing those of the richest tenth by the same amount. In dollar terms, the poorest 40 percent of the population would lose money while the richest 0.1 percent would gain about $390,000.
The administration wants tax cuts skewed toward the upper end of the income distribution, and the slashing of government-provided health insurance for the poor and disabled (Medicaid) and the food program for low-income individuals (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP). Cuts to these two essential programs amount to more than $1.2 trillion over a decade. Data journalist G. Elliott Morris <a href="https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/republicans-want-you-to-pay-more">summed it up</a>: “The Republicans want you to pay more for less”.
Along with Social Security payments to the elderly and disabled, Medicare, the government medical insurance program for the elderly, is popular with many Republican and Democratic voters—so popular that it is usually considered “safe” from cuts. Yet if Trump’s bill passes the Senate, there will also be mandatory cuts of up to <a href="https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-05/61422-Reconciliation-Distributional-Analysis.pdf">$500 billion to Medicare</a>. For this possibility, we can thank Democratic President Barack Obama and the 2010 Democratic-majority Congress, led by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They pushed through the Pay As You Go Act, which makes cuts to these programs mandatory if the federal deficit exceeds certain levels.
The bill’s effects will be devastating in a country where <a href="https://fortune.com/2023/05/23/inflation-economy-consumer-finances-americans-cant-cover-emergency-expense-federal-reserve/">four out of ten people can’t find $400</a> in case of an emergency, and where almost 80 percent report <a href="https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-to-paycheck-statistics-2024/">living “paycheque to paycheque”</a>. Analysts predict that as many as 15 million people could lose health coverage as the federal government imposes stricter eligibility requirements for entitlements, and states are unable to fill the resulting gaps. 
Medicaid is not just a program for the poorest Americans. Through the 1997 Children’s Health Insurance Act and the 2010 Affordable Care Act, it now provides health insurance assistance to almost 80 million Americans. In fact, it covers more people than Medicare. 
So, in many ways that aren’t entirely apparent, Medicaid is a crucial support for the working class. It is the leading funder of nursing homes and home care for the elderly and disabled. In many parts of urban and rural America, it supports the public health infrastructure. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that 65 percent of people—either themselves, family members or close friends—have benefited from Medicaid. 
These cuts are not popular. In none of the country’s 435 congressional districts do more than 15 percent of voters support cuts to <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/dataforprogress.org/post/3lprjnqlnqk27">the SNAP food assistance program.</a> Even Trump’s far-right adviser Steve Bannon warned Republicans against cutting Medicaid. But they did anyway. <a href="https://www.aha.org/news/headline/2025-04-16-dozen-house-republicans-send-letter-opposing-medicaid-cuts">House Republicans who swore they wouldn’t</a> support a bill that cut Medicaid voted for it. They will now spend months playing word games trying to explain that their vote wasn’t for a “cut” but for something else.
In another attack on working people, the bill would also slash education grants that help low-income students afford college. <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/winners-and-losers-in-the-new-student-loan-bill">As many as 4 million students could be affected.</a> New provisions applying to student loans would increase payments and lengthen the debt repayment period for most borrowers.
Cuts to medical care, food assistance and education support are only part of the story. But they should demonstrate how laughable it is that some people call Trump’s Republican Party a “working-class party”.
The rest of the bill is a <a href="https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-05-23-ten-sneaky-sleeper-provisions-trumps-big-beautiful-bill/">Trumpian wish list</a>, including: a thirteen-fold increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s carceral system; allowing the administration to terminate the tax-exempt status of any non-profit it deems politically unacceptable; barring state regulation of artificial intelligence technology; even crippling plaintiffs’ ability to seek court injunctions blocking administration actions.
The bill now goes to the Senate, where some <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5315185-trump-big-beautiful-bill-senate-gop/">Republicans have vowed not to support it,</a> have called for large-scale changes to it, and so on. Don’t believe them. Most of the critics don’t think it cuts spending enough. Republican Senator Josh Hawley’s plea of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/opinion/josh-hawley-dont-cut-medicaid.html">“Don’t Cut Medicaid”</a> in a New York Times op ed owes more to political theatre than to political conviction.
The bill represents the entirety of the Trump/Republican domestic policy agenda. And even though the Senate might make some cosmetic changes, it will pass the Congress largely intact. By the northern autumn, the US working class will begin to experience the most serious legislative assault on it in more than half a century.

Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ attack on the working class

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.

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.

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Trump’s tariffs an attack on the working class

The logic of Trump’s reactionary agenda

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