The First Three Weeks of Trump’s Ultra-Reactionary Presidency

Editorial Board

Within days of the right-wing extremist Donald Trump’s second term as chief mob boss of US imperialism, the masses, and most especially the deepest and most profound segment of the working class, have taken to the streets in growing protest movements. The Worker seeks to provide clarity on the growing contradictions in the US springing from its increasing political, economic, and cultural reactionization in order to give impulse to mass activity through our coverage and editorials.

The Inter-Imperialist Contradiction Means Increased Attack on the People of the Oppressed Nations

The US imperialist ruling class acts out of absolute depraved desperation to secure itself a little longer as the world’s sole-hegemonic imperialist superpower. In order to do this, it must concentrate power around the executive, leading to presidential absolutism. This is a trend that has been developing far longer than Trump’s entry into politics, but has taken on grotesque forms now that, for a second time, the majority of the imperialists have rallied under his black banner. Trump aims to make good on all of his threats, and treats the running of the country in an arbitrary and hostile manner fitting his class background, that of a monopolist real estate baron and veritable slumlord. His approach is to invoke maximum terror against the population of the US, the colluding and contending imperialist countries, and especially the masses of the countries oppressed by imperialism. Within this, all manner of threats and bullying culminate in genocidal plans following the general trend toward world imperialist war.

Trump has launched tariffs against China, Mexico and Canada; already, the two latter countries capitulated to Trump and postponed a 25% tariff after threatening a “trade war”. While Trump has every intention of implementing such hostile measures, he acts against congress to do it, and does not have the full backing of the imperialist class he was elected to represent. Such tariffs would have a serious affect on the US consumer market, leading to temporary financial losses among many finance capitalists. This, combined with the fact that the spineless and subservient leaders of Mexico and Canada agreed to Trump’s demands—which prove his methods effective—allow the president to focus his policy toward containment of Chinese social-imperialism, a continuation of US foreign policy.

These tariffs have much further-reaching consequences throughout the world, effecting both the inter-imperialist contradiction and the contradiction which is principal in the world today, that between imperialism and the oppressed nations. VND Peru highlighted the “plans of Yankee imperialism as the sole hegemonic imperialist superpower to divide the European imperialist alliance under German hegemony and subdue the different countries that make it up, a Yankee imperialist plan that with Trump takes a sharper and more belligerent form.” The comrades further indicated that it is not the personality of Trump which is behind it all, but the interests of the US imperialists behind him, and that Trump is but the embodiment of the reactionary US imperialist state.

Trump’s executive orders on import taxes, his threats and bullying are directly connected to his other policies, specifically immigration, with a focus on Latin America, which the US and European imperialists have not lost interest in—on the contrary, their interests have increased.

Deportations Under Trump

While still not reaching even half the average number of deportations carried out under Democratic mafioso former President Joe Biden, Trump’s method and style of carrying out this reactionary and criminal attack against the working people is designed and executed differently, in a way to provoke the masses and drive them to live in fear and hopelessness. Trump has directed his fascistic armed forces in the form of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as other federal and local police agencies to not only disregard social decorum, but to go against good sense by invading schools and churches and targeting children and undocumented people without criminal records.

The vast majority of those under deportation threats are lower-waged workers, those from Latin America who are subjected to the most dangerous work-sites and conditions, paid less for it, and worked exceedingly long hours in trades that bypass government regulations. Crimes against this section of the class appear to those backward workers who align with the boss to be a sigh of relief, and benefit the labor aristocracy who jumps to share in Trump’s reactionary agenda, but in reality they are crimes against the class as a whole.

Mass deportations of workers are framed by the petty-bourgeois class often as a tragic loss of the cheap labor they rely on; they are moved by the financial concern of having to pay US-born workers a higher wage, emphasizing that it is bad for the economy. For the working class, however, such attacks target the workers’ ability to work; they are designed to cull large sections of the working class and cast them out of employment. This colludes with mass layoffs in other industries, automation, and job loss, to force more native-born workers to compete for these low-paying jobs, while their brothers and sisters are kicked out of the country for no other reason than that the capitalist considers workers disposable in the first place. This has an overall depressing effect on wages and the morale and fighting capability of the class as a whole.

“Patriotism,” great-nation chauvinism, and jingoist hatred of foreign-born workers are a real danger; when this is spread among working people all their efforts and conquering their daily demands for better conditions and better wages are forfeited. This plays into the hands of the big bosses, the finance capitalists whose empire is built on millions of workers’ corpses. The ideology manifests in the masses and their movements, the sick and dangerous idea that America is “great,” along with the common appearance of nationalist flags and sentiments to combat the ultra-reactionary nationalism of Trump. “Immigrants Make America Great” seeks only to include foreign born workers in the schemes of genocidal US imperialism, and these ideas arise not simply from the backwardness of the people, but from the calculating minds of the Democratic Mafia. Just as slavery did not “Make America Great”, the superexploitation of migrants for the benefit of the imperialists should not be celebrated.

The Democrats, despite deporting approximately twice as many people as Trump in a two-week average, used their grassroots influencers to cull protest movements during the Biden years and have deployed their agents once again now that the government bureaucracy has fallen into the hands of their rivals. We see large demonstrations in every state, and the people being swayed by the rotten politics of liberal-imperialist chauvinism. For this we do not blame the masses, but the Left, who have not risen to provide leadership to the spontaneous mass movement, who would rather tail behind them rather than direct their justified rebellion against imperialism and all manifestations of its ideology that rip the teeth out of the people’s struggles. The Left is still too infantile and feeble to guide the masses in dropping their old rags and taking up the New Flag. It comes down to which class leads the people’s struggles: the imperialist factions, the petty bourgeoisie, or the proletariat. To seize conquests and hold onto them, and, even more so, to combine the daily struggles of the masses with the struggle for political power requires revolutionary proletarian leadership able to prevent both the class enemy and class allies from assuming leadership.

Only with proletarian leadership can the essential organizations and networks be generated, those required not only to protest the mass deportations, but to actually fight against them by all means, offering security to our working class siblings.

Shock and Awe vs Low-Intensity Warfare

It is clear that Donald Trump and his collaborators, including the world’s richest man and most vile imperialist Elon Musk, prefer the tactic of shock and awe, and this is why sections of this administration like Musk openly idealize and flirt with fascism. This is both an affront to and a pure expression of bourgeois sensibility. It is one which comes into contradiction with the other aspect of the imperialist ruling class, which maintains its control and domination through low-intensity war when it can. Politics is war by other means, and these two tactics of war manifest in the politics of the imperialists.

Trump’s foreign policy is based on bombast, genocide, and endless threats. The Trump administration is interested in scaring into submission whereas the other section of imperialists want to force submission just as much, but prefer to do so with swindle and bribery. This difference lies behind the controversy around the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which since implemented by former President Kennedy in the 1960s has been a major asset to US imperialism and its ability to force collusion and undermine national liberation struggles. With enough money the imperialist dreams of purchasing collusion and has done so all over the world.

One of the primary functions of USAID is to distribute its funds to the forces it finds most amicable and malleable to US imperialist interests. On top of this, it takes on managerial governmental roles anywhere the US military invades and occupies. It is meant to “make friends” among the peoples of the oppressed nations to undermine their national liberation struggles. It sees to it that goods are sourced from “US vendors”, meaning that through war the US imperialist ruling class gets government-funded assistance and money in foisting their cheap goods upon oppressed people. Through these mechanisms, US imperialists seek long-lasting control and influence over its colonies and semi-colonies, extending to all aspects of social, economic, and political life. It is like a parasite which worms its way into the host draining it over many years. Although a highly effective low-intensity warfare strategy, it is not preferable in the current bloated form to Donald Trump, who prefers naked terror and a bolstering of militarization, brute force, and occupation. The difference is reflected in his comments on owning Gaza most recently.

In the growing desperation of those imperialists who prefer the “low-intensity” approach, their representatives have laid out the imperialist role of USAID clearly in the opinion columns of The New York Times. In a guest essay published on February 6^th, Samantha Power, the former administrator of USAID under Biden, writes: “U.S.A.I.D. has become America’s superpower in a world defined by threats that cross borders and amid growing strategic competition” and among its roles, the agency works to “reduce vulnerability to radicalization” in the Greater Middle East. “In fact, U.S.A.I.D. has generated vast stores of political capital in the more than 100 countries where it works, making it more likely that when the United States makes hard requests of their leaders — for example, to send peacekeepers to a war zone, to help a U.S. company enter a new market, or to extradite a criminal to the United States — they say yes,” the former administrator writes.

The problem the imperialists are running into with the old tried-and-true method of low-intensity warfare—which they have not given up on completely and will continue, using the skeleton crew of what remains of USAID—is that it ultimately does not work and they are desperate for any type of victory. For example, the billions of dollars spent on securing US imperialist interests in the semi-colonial domination over Afghanistan and Iraq have fundamentally accomplished nothing, the running dogs and puppet governments purchased have been crushed at every turn, as US imperialism stumbles from defeat to defeat across the Middle East at the hands of the people. Out of this desperation comes the growing voice of one section of imperialists who wishes to cast aside this method of securing puppets in exchange for a more naked approach to regime change. The reactionaries’ mask slips most amid crisis.

The Attacks on the Public Sector

Trump and his biggest ally Musk seek to gut necessary public infrastructure in the interests of overcoming the economic crisis through the bolstering of cheap labor in the domestic workforce. They use the most corrupted form of imperialist patriotism and severe individualism to accomplish this. They utilize the bourgeois ideology of meritocracy and family or parents’ “rights” to justify slashing public schools and forcing through state patronage, with all education to follow a strictly private business model. This is a naked degenerative form of the way public education has been carried out in the US historically.

Capitalist society must educate its workforce at a minimum in order for it to carry out production. Historically, the state saw to educating the classes according to their functions by school zoning—in wealthy areas students are prepared for college education and for roles in social management; in poor areas the education at worst prepares one for becoming fodder in the military or for low-paying jobs, and at best apprenticeships or trade school.

Trump’s plan on ending public education is combined with using Biden-era bipartisan legislation of destroying the tax status of all who oppose his rhetoric (labeling them sympathizers of “terrorism”), combined to ensure that the future of education is controlled by right-wing businesses. This is an attempt to force the superstructure of imperialism into alignment with its economic base. The society rising from the mode of production begins to reflect contention on how to serve production. Exploitation itself is the contradiction between classes which provokes the rise of new culture and new ideas, and it is these which Trump seeks to curtail by draconian methods of ultra-reactionary K-12 education.

Such a system would result in businesses oriented toward each class and their strata, benefiting the monopolies while further restricting the education working class children receive. Of course, such a model debases the already-threatened middle strata, and this poses a great danger since they are so numerous and typically align with the interests of finance capital. The eradication of public education represents the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and the mass accumulation of poverty.

While public education—and for that matter all social welfare programs—serve the reproduction of the capitalist society, they provide services necessary to the masses of working people. Schools alone cover the cost of childcare for 8 hours a day, hours which are necessary for workers to obtain time away from the home. Privatizing all schools (with government vouchers) opens an entire market which is not available to monopolists, and simultaneously provides big money incentive. This is similar to private prisons: even if they are not profitable from the standpoint of what they produce versus what they cost to run, the massive government funding for them makes a handful of monopolists exceedingly rich, and they too provide a certain type of coercive education in service of the dictatorship of finance capital.

Trump Claims Ceasefire While Calling to “clean out” Gaza

With all the nauseating bombast he is so well-known for, Trump announced his genocidal plan to evict Palestinians from Gaza, calling it the “Riviera of the Middle East,” to the applause of the Zionists in attendance including Israeli fascists and some representatives of the Democratic mafia. In the words of Brazilian democratic and revolutionary newspaper A Nova Democracia, “he will have to try his luck.”

The Biden administration along with its lackeys in the Israeli state and armed forces were unable to meet their basic objective of “destroying Hamas” or decapitating the Palestinian people’s national liberation struggle, facts that prove the Palestinian masses and their armed forces and leaders will not relent. Further incursion by the US would increasingly unite the region against US imperialism and all its running dogs, a grave mistake the US imperialists are unlikely to make.

The Flood of the Free continues as nearly two thousands Palestinian prisoners are set free and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians return to northern Gaza amid the full-scale retreat of Israeli positions they have spent over a year trying to secure. While Trump takes credit for the ceasefire with his usual vitriolic arrogance, the fact that his administration and its lackeys in Israel are forced to negotiate with the very same organization that launched the heroic Operation Al-Aqsa Flood demonstrates who has the upper hand in this situation despite all the pomp of the imperialists.

Is Trump a Fascist? Imperialism and Revisionism Traffic with the Masses

In a predictable maneuver, the old-guard Democratic mafia and its grassroots have been stimulated again, and in collusion with their organizationally-inferior revisionist counterparts and social-democrats, seek to traffic in the justified struggles of the people. Do not be deceived—it is nothing but a ploy to raise the specter of fascism in order to compel participation in the coming electoral farce.

In this street pageant nothing is known about fascism and the label itself is utilized to call for a national front rallied behind the Democrats in which they can draw “critical” support to “stop Trump.” We have Trump to contend with, but the Democrats to thank for him. Far from being anti-fascist, the Democrats, revisionists, and social democrats secure the field for actual fascists: first, because they push their dogmas on legalism and respecting the old-state’s rules and agendas; second, because they cannot fight jingoism but only seek to pass their national chauvinism off with a friendlier face; and third, because they are anti-communists. They were quick to label Trump a fascist, then turn around to call for a smooth and peaceful transition.

Today’s utterances of fascism amount to the same: the creation of false differences between the imperialist parties to conceal the fact that the old-society and the old-state at its helm are morally and politically bankrupt while in the throes of a severe economic crisis. These are the conditions which give rise to fascism, the desperation, brutality, and deception of the imperialists. The Democrats and their allies fit in the shoes of fascism just as well as the Republican mafia does.

There are in fact many good observable reasons why the regenerating mass movement is primed to label Trump and his cronies as fascist: the presence of a fictitious enemy to blame for everything, the complete disregard for the legal system resulting in the capricious and arbitrary rule of an armed gang in service to the most vicious imperialists, the withering away of democratic rights or outright abolition of them, the naked and gross subservience to the cult of the corporation, and of course reactionary white terror on a large scale.

The problem is none of these things are unique to Donald Trump or his special packaging of US imperialism. In fact, the trend of things becoming more reactionary is an inevitable part of the process of the decomposition of imperialism, a response to its crisis and its desperate life-saving measure. Power to the executive and presidential absolutism increased under the previous—supposedly non-fascist—government as well, and it has all gotten more extreme under Trump since his last go around as the butcher-in-chief. This is not enough to suggest that we are dealing with anything other than an increasingly reactionary liberal bourgeois democracy, that this is the governmental form in which the most brutal imperialist state bases itself.

We observe the fact that the US ruling class is still currently able to maintain its rule over the masses by the old method of democracy, no matter how farcical it is and has always been. Simply put, the ruling class even in the extreme crisis we currently observe does not need fascism.

Even Trump’s aggression against the oppressed nations and rival imperialists is still far too restrained to qualify as fascism. The democratic rights of the people have always been restricted and stamped upon, but not to the degree of the fascist system of government. Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.

One must have with it an understanding of the modern bourgeois state, and its resulting crisis of democracy. The bourgeois state acts as the armed administrative wing of the bourgeoisie and this fact does not change whether democratic or fascist. The state uses terror, unbridled terror for fascism or terror with a democratic facade which offers certain restraint and formal rights for those who can afford them. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is always reliant on reactionary white terror, but it seeks, like social democracy and the bourgeois trade unions, to be a mediator in the class conflict erupting between the owners of industry and finance on one hand, and labor on the other. With fascism, the state loses all semblance of mediation.

The bitter fights between the two imperialist parties come down not to the distinction between liberal democratic bourgeoisie on the one hand and fascists on the other, but between two factions of the same class, acting in the same interests with more or less the same policies passed off differently, but whose blood feud has erupted on the basis of who controls the extensive governmental bureaucracy. While fascist and social fascist elements simmer behind the banners of both parties, these forces are still relatively weak, as weak as the communist movement in the US. It is in pitched moments of contention which the weaker forces will seek to grow larger and stronger, and workers must be educated on fascism to impede the growth of the fascists and social-fascists (socialist and democratic in name only, corporativist in essence, such as the DSA and various revisionist groups).

Fascism is the negation of bourgeois democracy, a complete rejection of the principles of the French Revolution; it is also the remolding of society and the state based on corporations, aiming to negate class struggle through representatives within one body of cooperation: the church, the bosses, the workers and students, all delegating representatives coming together in assemblies negating bourgeois governmental norms. The idea of fascism is that these groups have common “national” interests and that there are no real antagonisms between the classes. In an imperialist country such as ours, this model leads to a policy of forced monopolization in the interests of the “nation” in which all the monopolies are concentrated by the state (regardless of whether they remain privately owned) rather than market forces. Such a process of corporativization is not preferable for the ruling class, except when the crisis makes its desperation bad enough.

The only manner in which the people can identify and fight the very real tendencies toward fascism is to understand it, to be mobilized and united on an internationalist and anti-imperialist basis under the leadership of the working class, in the interests of socialist revolution. Everything else nurtures fascism’s gestation. In the final analysis, anti-fascism is a military question—as history has proven, there is no other way to destroy the threat it poses except through war.

Trump does not seek to converge every divergent interest into a single state. Fascism, unlike Trump, recognizes why the broad masses want socialism and acts on this to divert them by forcing employers and workers to cooperate within the state. Trump’s brand of ultra-reactionary and right-wing extremist liberalism favors the restriction of democratic rights to suppress union activity and reduce social infrastructure to a minimum. It is the continuation of deepening austerity measures and the corresponding limitation of democratic rights.

Conclusion

The first three weeks of Trump’s second term indicate the coming years of mass rebellion, which is likely to outrun the straight-jacket imposed by the Democrats in their interests. Revolutionaries must march shoulder to shoulder with the masses, educating them in the spirit of internationalism and anti-imperialism, assisting them in every way to go further than what is deemed permissible to the sentiments of the ruling class.

In this conflict, every effort must be taken to combine the struggle for daily demands—be they increased wages, safer working conditions, defense of immigrants, the demands of solidarity movements, or basic civil and democratic rights—with the question of political power for the working class. In this furnace, the revolutionary is forged and tempered to help organize the people into stable bodies capable of enhancing the fight. Ideologically, the revolutionaries must struggle to unite under Maoism in the service of reconstituting the Party of the working class which is a prerequisite necessary to accomplishing the goal of a free and equal society without rich and poor.

As the conditions of increased misery force many into social-political activity for the first time, and repression increases resistance, it is the duty of all to combat the ideology of the ruling class which seeps down into the righteous masses and threatens their rebellion from the beginning. This means grasping the contradictions and acting on them.

Photo taken by Gage Skidmore.

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