Bill Mullen discusses the threat of a new Trump presidency and how he and his band of billionaires can be resisted.
Within 24 hours of Donald inauguration the following events occurred:
American Nazis and Neo-Nazis who took part in the January 6th, 2021, right-wing riot in Washington D.C. were released onto the streets of the U.S.
Elon Musk, uber billionaire, media mogul, and part of Donald Trump’s shadow cabinet twice gave a Nazi salute at a Trump rally.
The new President signed executive orders sending U.S. troops to the Mexico border, declared an immigration ‘emergency,’ and attempted to rescind the birth right of children born to immigrants to the U.S.
As Trump revoked a Biden Administration directive against West Bank settlers attacking Palestinians, settlers set fire to Palestinian homes and property in the West Bank, launching a new phase of the genocide.
Trump withdrew the U.S. (again) from the Paris climate agreement, ordered more fossil fuel drilling, and gashed efforts to promote the use of electric cars.
Trump withdrew protections for transgender employees and declared that there are only two sexes, male and female.
Immigrant communities in Chicago stayed away from church and school services after threats of mass deportation raids in that city on the first day of Trump’s presidency.
Rosa Luxemburg’s timeless warning that capitalism and imperialism must conclude in either Barbarism or Socialism has never seemed more urgent. Many of the biggest dogs of capitalist war came to heel at Trump’s inauguration: tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Musk (Tesla) and Tim Cook (Apple) ready to squeeze more blood from the lives of working-class Americans and ordinary people around the world who not only aren’t invited to the Trump table but cannot even survive on its crumbs.
It will take a massive resistance the likes of which the U.S. has not seen for nearly a century to challenge and overturn this new American order. The need for a new, large revolutionary socialist party has never been clearer, nor are the implications of failing to generate one.
What are the chances for this to happen? The answer is contradictory.
The ascension of Trump 2.0 represents the apex of American liberalism’s complicity and collapse. The Democratic Party not only held open the door for Trump and his ruling class cronies but ushered them in. Biden and Harris’s most recent campaign was nearly indistinguishably pro-war, anti-immigrant, and pro-imperialism from not only Trumpism but traditional Republicanism. Biden and Harris’s full-throated support for and arming of the Israeli genocide was cited as the number one reason for defection among the nearly six million votes lost to the Democrats in 2024. One result of this right-wing Democratic surge is that almost the same number of Democratic voters as Republicans now support Trump’s plan to deport “illegal” immigrants with criminal records.
Liberalism has also made peace with the most authoritarian aspects of the Trump regime. Biden and Harris both denounced Trump as a “fascist” while emulating many of his policies: Biden resurrected Trump’s plans to seal and wall off the border as a last-ditch effort to attract “conversative” votes to the Democratic Party. Biden also undermined any credibility to stigmatize Trump as an autocrat by pardoning his own son Hunter Biden, convicted of crimes in an American court. His actions convinced many voters that both ruling class parties feed from the same trough.
As a result, many people who might have been logical candidates for “resistance” to Trump are now living lives of quiet desperation, confusion, and abandonment. Black and Brown communities already feeling betrayed by a duopoly which has done nothing for their material lives now will become the first targets of revanchist immigration and social welfare policies: the poor and working-class will literally and figuratively pay for the gains of the rich. Women who marched en masse after Trump’s 2016 are traumatized by the loss of federal abortion rights protections and the return to office of a man with a public history of sexually assaulting and demeaning women. Queer and transgender communities know they will have enormous targets on their backs as both the federal government, state governments, and employers cave in to Trumpism and rescind or erase civil rights gains.
Meanwhile, the major axes of the state ideological apparatus have all moved in the direction of Trumpism under threat of discipline or in hopes of capital accumulation. These would include not just the high-profile high-tech sector but major corporations, university administrations, and media. Since Trump’s election several prominent American newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post have taken editorial positions clearly intended to appease the new boss. Trump has also packed the courts—including the Supreme Court—with appointees liable to make an authoritarian path to power both more lawful and legitimate. (Here Trump is following the playbook of figures like Orban in Hungary and Modi in India who have manipulated the judiciary into carrying out the equivalent of legal pogroms.)
Internationally, Trump seeks to expand America’s political footprint through territorial acquisition or annexation (Greenland, the Panama Canal), tariff bullying, rogue disobedience with multilateralism, and favored nation status for countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia who offer political and economic footholds over vital, resource-rich regions of the world, not to mention over dispossessed populations (like the Palestinians). Trump’s legal and rhetorical demonizing of immigrants to the U.S., of activists, transgender people, political opponents and enemies has created an axes of the vulnerable whose own chances for resistance are preemptively foreclosed by the precarity of mere political survival.
Where does this leave then the prospects for U.S. resistance? The millions of people who chose not to vote Democrat this year constitute one of the largest blocs of disorganized political defectors in American history. They join the masses who every year fail to vote in American elections because of the bankruptcy of both major parties when it comes to filling their human needs. These sets of people in combination need a clear line of socialist vision that fills the holes in their stomachs and yearning in their hearts.
There are also deep residual streams of resisters lingering in the wake of movements like Black Lives Matter and the Palestinian encampment protests. Many of these younger activists are the leading edge of awareness of the brutal failures of America’s domestic and international empires. Many are self-described socialists with no organizational experience save perhaps for affiliation with a group like the Democratic Socialists of America (whose own membership has dropped precipitously since its 2016 peak). They need and deserve a better Socialism.
There are also glimmerings of resistance in the American labor movement. Strikes last year by the Teamsters and United Auto Workers, though of differing scales and effectiveness, earned important popular support. Health care and airline workers also held meaningful workplace actions: Flash strikes over this year’s Christmas holidays by Amazon and Starbucks workers—though again of insufficient scope and duration—nevertheless indicate a return of strike consciousness that needs nurturing and watering by strong Socialist organizations. Other sectors of the workforce, like teachers’ unions, are slowly building membership, buffeted by years of attacks, austerity, political interference and erosion of public investment. New formations like Higher Education Labor United in the U.S. have also returned an ethos of labor militancy to an often quietist profession.
But these are threads that need weaving into a tapestry, and here Socialism must provide the hands. There are myriad small Socialist groupings in the U.S. right now, some of them more active than others. There are differences in their character, trajectory, and orientation. Some of them have overlapping memberships and interests. What they lack is a clear path towards alignment and reformation. A combination of under confidence, lack of start-up resources, geographical dispersal, and ambivalence about the prospects for successful regroupment have held back the potential of a new, substantial revolutionary current.
Trumpism will rain challenges and opportunities onto this dispersed revolutionary Left like never before. The spectre of barbarism is a runaway train with Trump’s name on it. Millions of people who soon be feeling the boot print of Trumpism.
The revolutionary left cannot afford to be a spectator at this carnival of the political grotesque. We must move.
