Resisting authoritarian populism: Trump’s victory and the tasks of the Left
First published at Tempest.
For the last four years, Joe Biden and his anointed but defeated successor, Kamala Harris, attempted to refurbish U.S. capitalism and reassert U.S. hegemony over the world system, particularly against China, but also Russia and a host of regional powers.
Their program of liberal reform at home failed to address the economic grievances of the country’s exploited and oppressed majority. Their militarism abroad, especially their collaboration with Israel in carrying out genocide in Gaza, further undermined their popularity, provoking protest and opposition from Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, as well as their supporters.
With social movements, unions, the Left, and reformist politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rallying people to support Harris, Trump was able to pose as the sole opposition to the Democrats and the wretched status quo. His authoritarian populism tapped into discontent with inequality and militarism and offered reactionary, bigoted solutions to people’s genuine problems.
Trump rode that to victory, but not by a landslide as panicked liberals and the media initially claimed. In reality, he won because Harris’ support dropped by millions compared to Biden did in 2020, particularly among workers, people of color, women, and young people, some of whom flipped to Trump, while many just stayed home.
Trump’s victory in the popular vote was one of the smallest in history and his victory in the electoral college was based on slim margins in the seven battleground states. On top of that, his majority in Congress is only a handful of seats in the Senate and House, and most people do not support his reactionary program.
Trump does not have a mandate but will nonetheless claim one. And, unlike in 2016, he has a united Republican Party, as well as a cabinet in waiting of loyal oligarchs, bigots, crooks, crackpots, alleged sexual abusers, and neoconservative hawks and a far right program in Project 2025, which they are determined to implement in scorched earth fashion.
Faced with this imminent threat, the Left, social movements, and unions cannot rely on the Democrats, who are responsible for Trump’s victory. Instead, we must unite against all the looming attacks, defend migrants and trans people in particular, and build an independent resistance committed to fighting for our own demands.
An organic crisis of global capitalism
How in the world did Trump, one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history, someone convicted of dozens of felonies and who led a far right riot to overturn the 2020 election, win another term in the country’s highest office? After all, Harris was backed by the bulk of the capitalist class, enjoyed the support of the bipartisan political establishment, and ran a far better funded and organized campaign than Trump.
The main reason is capitalism’s profound organic crisis. The Great Recession kicked off a long global slump of stagnant growth and low profitability, which has deepened class and social inequality throughout the world. That has been compounded by several other systemic crises, from inter-imperial rivalry to regional wars, global heating, mass migration, and pandemics.
This organic crisis has destabilized the social order in the United States and nearly every other country. It has stoked opposition to the capitalist establishment, triggered unprecedented waves of struggle, most of which have been tragically defeated, and increased political polarization to the left but — because of our insufficient infrastructures of dissent, the revolutionary Left’s weakness, and incapacity of reformism to deliver — mainly to the right.
In the United States, majorities of people have said the country is headed in the wrong direction for the last 15 years in a row. This year, 65 percent of voters reiterated that view. The same is true in many other nation-states. Such deep discontent has led to unprecedented opposition to regimes in power, whether right-wing ones like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Britain’s Conservative Party, and Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party or establishment one’s like Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble and the Democrats in the United States.
Indeed, The Financial Times reports that “the incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the ParlGov global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records.”
The failure of Bidenomics
While the root of anti-incumbency in popular discontent is similar, each country, as Leo Tolstoy said of families, is unhappy in its own way. In the United States, Harris’ defeat is the direct result of the failure of Joe Biden’s Imperialist Keynesianism, what Adam Tooze has called “MAGA for thinking people,” to provide any real solution to the system’s organic crisis and mass inequality.
As the book The Internationalists documents, Biden and his brain trust did not develop their new program in response to Sanders and other reformists in the Democratic Party, as many on the Left wrongly claim. Instead, they created it in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s defeat at the hands of Trump.
To neutralize the right-wing MAGA threat, they aimed to reassert Washington’s imperial supremacy by grouping together its allies for great power rivalry with China and Russia, implementing an industrial policy of subsidies and tariffs to refurbish the U.S. manufacturing base, especially in high tech, and enacting mild liberal reforms to co-opt resistance from below by workers and the oppressed. Bidenomics failed on all fronts.
Biden’s stimulus packages did restore growth, but most of the benefits went to the capitalist class. Meanwhile the petty bourgeoisie, working class, and poor were hammered by inflation in everything from groceries to housing. As The Wall Street Journal reported, “The Labor Department’s measure of consumer prices was nearly 20 percent higher this September than in January 2021 — the largest increase for a single presidential term since Ronald Reagan’s first four years in office.”
The administration’s liberal reforms designed to redress social inequality were blocked by Congressional opposition, and those that were enacted were either inadequate or, like the child tax credit, were not renewed. As a result, Biden oversaw austerity for his last two years in office.
On top of that, the Republican weaponized the rise of migrants at the border, a fact in large part caused by global capitalism’s climate crises, imperialist wars, and impoverishment of the Global South. They bused tens of thousands of migrants to Democratic cities and states, forcing those governments to pay millions to house and take care of desperate people, while they did little for the rest of the multiracial working class.
The Republicans exploited the predictable resentment to blame immigrants and the Democrats for supposedly being unwilling to impose repressive border policies, despite the fact that Biden imposed brutal crackdowns on the southern border and throughout the region. As a result of these economic grievances, Biden’s approval ratings plummeted into the low 40s and remained there for the last three years of his presidency.
Biden’s reassertion of US imperial supremacy fared little better. He stumbled out of the gate with his shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan, ending Washington’s longest war in defeat with the return of the Taliban to power in Kabul. He revived his fortunes by rallying U.S. allies to support Ukraine against Russian imperialism’s attempt to carry out regime change and impose semi-colonial rule over the country.
But Biden squandered those gains by collaborating with Israel in a joint genocidal war in Gaza that has spread to the West Bank, Yemen, Lebanon, and most ominously Iran. In the process, the United States lost all credible claims to be defending the so-called rules based international order as it vetoed United Nations resolutions, opposed the International Criminal Court, and violated its own Leahy Law, which prohibits providing aid to countries violating human rights with impunity.
In reality, Biden turned the United States into a “revisionist state” carrying out what Tooze calls the “controlled demolition of the 90’s post–cold war order.” In place of superintending neoliberal globalization, he attempted to establish geopolitical, economic, and military alliances committed to great power competition with China and Russia.
Harris: Paid agent of capital and empire
As the senile embodiment of a despised capitalist establishment, Biden was doomed to defeat at the hands of Trump even before his disastrous debate. After that, the party donors and leadership carried out a palace coup to install Harris as their selected, not elected, candidate.
Shackled with her administration’s high disapproval ratings, Harris faced a daunting and in the end losing battle against Trump. She and her handlers judged her best bet was to run as a “joyful” version of Biden, defend his record of Imperialist Keynesianism, offer modest reforms for workers and the oppressed, and, in full knowledge that this was an unconvincing appeal, turn to the right to win over moderate swing voters in the hopes of winning a tight election.
The bipartisan capitalist establishment rewarded Harris, plowing $1 billion into her campaign’s war chest, not counting all its affiliated PACs. That figure was more than double that of the Trump campaign, which relied on a handful of oligarchs like Elon Musk and their PACs to make the race for cash close.
Toward the end of the contest, Harris stretched her fundraising lead, raising five times what Trump did in last minute big donors. Indeed, Harris solidified the Democrat’s claim to be the main party of U.S. capitalism and imperialism and bulwark against Trump.
As such, she ran a center right campaign. She promised to maintain “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” attacked Trump for blocking a Republican anti-migrant bill, touted her record as a law and order prosecutor, announced that she, as a gun owner, was willing shoot anyone who dared break into her house, and even removed opposition to the death penalty from the party platform. Harris touted the endorsement of a host of neoconservatives, including war criminal Dick Cheney, and toured the pivotal battleground states with his daughter, the arch reactionary Liz Cheney.
Harris offered workers and the oppressed little beyond tax credits for the poor and subsidies for first time home buyers. The sole exception was her promise to enshrine Roe v. Wade as the law of the land, a reform the Democrats refused to enact when they controlled the White House and Congress and something she would have been hard pressed to achieve without big majorities in both houses of Congress.
She downplayed almost any commitment to oppressed groups targeted by Trump, especially trans people. And when she did make appeals to the oppressed, they were downright laughable, such as promises to Black men to legalize weed and provide them loans to start cryptocurrency companies.
Harris pledged to continue with Biden’s project of reasserting U.S. hegemony against China and Russia. And on the signal issue of Palestine, she adopted her boss’s tactic of crying crocodile tears over Israel’s slaughter of people in Gaza and calling for a ceasefire, while promising to fund and arm Tel Aviv to carry out genocide.
Like the rest of the imperial establishment, she remained steadfast in their shared commitment to using Israel as Washington’s proxy to destroy the so-called Axis of Resistance, from Hamas to Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran, to ensure that the United States and its allies, not China and Russia, control the Middle East’s spigot of oil. In pursuit of this aim, Harris’ campaign was willing to forgo the support of Arabs, Palestinians, and Muslims, including in the pivotal swing state of Michigan.
While she platformed eight Republicans at her party’s convention, Harris denied Palestinians a speaker and had the gall and cluelessness to boast a campaign of “joy” as her administration carried out genocide. She added insult to injury by dispatching Bill Clinton to Michigan, where he justified Israel’s mass slaughter as a just war.
Trump’s authoritarian populist campaign
By contrast, Trump positioned himself as an anti-establishment candidate opposed to the Democratic Party and the wretched order they defend. After easily trouncing a weak field of primary opponents, he united the Republican Party behind his project of authoritarian populism and drove what remained of traditional conservatives to its margins or out of it entirely.
In the process, he has transformed the GOP into a new far-right party, backed and bankrolled by renegade oligarchs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, with an electoral base in mostly white sections of the petty bourgeoisie and working class. He has assembled a network of think tanks and a deep bench of right-wing politicians, ideologues, campaign managers, social media influencers, and fringe celebrities.
The think tanks and ideologues have given programmatic coherence to Trump’s authoritarian populism, most clearly expressed in Project 2025 and summarized in capital letters in the Republican Party Platform. These lay out Trump’s economic, social, and imperial strategy in stark terms.
To spur growth, he promised to implement tariffs, cut taxes on corporations and the rich, and deregulate the economy, claiming that U.S. capital’s boosted profits will trickle down and improve the lot for small business owners and workers. He paired all this with a reactionary social program to restore the social order of oppressive hierarchies of nation, race, and gender.
As part of that project, he threatened mass deportation of migrants, a war on “woke” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and imposition of so-called traditional family values against the “threat” of feminists and trans activists. And, of course, he vowed to launch a witch hunt against the Left, especially Palestine solidarity activists.
To “Make America Great Again, Again,” Trump promised to bolster U.S. power by extricating it from endless wars, scrapping traditional alliances, replacing them with transactional relations with all states, both allies and designated enemies, and boosting military spending to prepare the United States for great power confrontation, including war with China.
A master at hucksterism, Trump sold this authoritarian populist program, whose main beneficiaries would be the rich, as a defense of “the little guy” against the Washington elite.
His rallies galvanized his base, especially in the wake of the assassination attempt that left him with a bloodied ear, leading his devotees in chants of “fight, fight, fight” and claiming divine salvation to complete his right-wing transformation of the U.S. state and society. And his ad campaign combined appeals to economic grievances and promises to end foreign wars with the worst bigotry imaginable.
This toxic mixture of resentment was best symbolized in one ad that proclaimed, “Harris is for they/them; Trump is for you.” That transphobic ad, which was one of many that Trump’s campaign ran at the cost of $37 million, nearly 20 percent of its overall budget, spoke to popular grievances of small business owners, contractors, and sections of the working class against the establishment and fused it with scapegoating of an oppressed group.
But Trump also showed signs of his age and mental incapacity, especially in the debate, which made him the object of public ridicule for his racist, grotesque, and absurd lies that Haitian migrants were eating their neighbor’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. Moreover, his endless, meandering speeches at rallies exhausted even his most loyal followers, many of whom left venues, including at the Republican National Convention, before he finished.
Trump’s appearances reached their bizarre apotheosis at a town hall meeting when he forced his audience to listen to his favorite playlist while he swayed and smiled. However weird Trump appeared, he expanded his base, as his Madison Square Garden rally demonstrated. While it was a carnival of reaction replete with racism and sexism, it also drew a layer of people of color, lured by Trump’s attacks on the Democrats for their warmongering and failure to deliver improved economic conditions.
The missing Left
The Left failed to put forward an alternative to Harris and Trump that could have expressed the deep opposition to them both. We did not succeed in building either independent social and class organization or a new party out of the vast wave of struggle from Occupy through the Red State Teachers Revolt, the Women’s March, and Black Lives Matter.
Instead, the Left adopted Bernie Sanders’ electoral strategy inside the Democratic Party. Variously, people argued socialists could influence its policies, transform it into a worker’s party, or build a surrogate party inside it to eventually stage a dirty break and form a new party.
All that ended in disaster. Sanders and the Squad, with the important exception of Rashida Tlaib, were incorporated as at best the loyal opposition to the Democratic Party. The worst example of this degeneration was AOC, who morphed from a purported socialist firebrand protesting with Sunrise against Nancy Pelosi to becoming her supporter, referring to her as “Mama Bear,” supporting Harris, and claiming without a shred of evidence that Harris was working “ tirelessly” for a ceasefire in Israel’s genocidal war.
The toll of this strategy on class and social movements has been extreme. Most movements collapsed into electoral campaigns for the Democratic Party, failing to get their demands adopted and meanwhile demobilizing their struggles.
The exception was the ripple of union strikes and the Palestine solidarity movement. The Biden administration co-opted the first and repressed the second. It claimed to be pro-worker but lobbied behind the scenes to pressure officials for settlements, most recently at Boeing, and broke the railway workers’ strike.
The Democrats did not even try to co-opt the Palestine solidarity movement. Biden, Democratic Party mayors, and liberal university bosses tried to crush the movement with gag orders, bans on the right to assembly, and police repression.
Despite this fact, the Left, along with NGOs and most of the trade union bureaucracy, pulled out all the stops to campaign for Harris. While some tried to argue she was a progressive (a claim only tenable by denying her complicity with genocide), most recycled the same old lesser evil argument that she was the last backstop against fascism.
The Left, the NGO bureaucracy, and the union officialdom spent most of their time, money, and energy over the last year backing the Democrats in a vain attempt to defeat Trump, not on building our struggle for our demands. Unions alone spent an estimated $43 million just on the Harris campaign — and that does not even count all the paid organizers and volunteer workers making phone calls, knocking on doors, and organizing events to make the case for people to vote Democrat.
Of course, various third party candidates did get on the ballot in states across the country, but none of them has roots in real social forces and their campaigns failed to galvanize the Left and popular struggles. The only partial exception was in the case of the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in Michigan.
The funhouse mirror
As a result, this election was a funhouse mirror of popular consciousness, forcing people to choose between Harris on the center right and Trump on the far right. There was no credible Left alternative on the ballot that combined progressive positions on social and economic issues.
Trump did not win a landslide, as the media initially reported. He didn’t even win 50 percent of the popular vote. Instead, he scored a very narrow victory over Harris in the popular vote and electoral college, while the GOP similarly eked out slim majorities in the Senate and House.
That alone shows that the United States is not a right-wing country. As does the fact that voters approved abortion rights referendums in seven out of ten states and passed many other progressive measures across the country.
But without a Left representing such positions, the electorate was forced to choose between two bad options, a lesser evil and a greater one. That “choice” was so unappealing that, despite a record $18 billion spent on an election that both parties claimed was the most important in history, 36 percent of eligible voters did not vote. Most of those were workers, the poor, and disproportionately people of color.
The two candidates split the 64 percent that did vote down the middle. At best, then, Trump has the support of a little more than 33 percent of the electorate, and many of those who voted for him did not support his policies but voted for him because he was the sole opponent of the Democrats who oversaw their misery.
The key to the result was not a massive increase in Trump’s haul of votes, but a big drop in Harris’ compared to Biden’s in 2020. She got 7 million fewer votes and tallied a lower total than Biden had in at least 36 states. Whole swathes of the Democrat’s traditional base stayed home, while some voted Trump. Harris garnered fewer votes from workers, women, Black people, Latinos, and young people than did Biden in 2020 and Clinton in 2016.
Trump did increase his total from 2020 by some 3 million votes, for the most part turning out a bigger portion of his base among unlikely voters. And, contrary to claims that his voters were unreconstructed sexists and racists, Trump lost support among white men and white women compared to 2016 and 2020.
By contrast, he expanded his vote mainly among Latinos, Black men, and the 42 percent of young people that voted. He swept the mostly Latino districts along the US/Mexico border in Texas.
The key issue that tipped the election for Trump was the economy. “On Election Day,” The Washington Post reported, “ 68 percent of voters said the economy was either ‘not so good’ or ‘poor,’ according to exit polls…. 75 percent said inflation had caused a moderate or severe hardship on them or their families.”
In exit polls, 32 percent of voters ranked the economy as the most important issue, and Trump took 80 percent of those. He won a slim majority of voters from families with incomes below $100,000 a year, a plurality of the voters, while Harris won the majority of those with incomes above $100,000.
Harris did rake in 80 percent of votes from the 34 percent who identified democracy as their main issue. On the two most decisive other issues in the election, Trump won 90 percent of the 11 percent of voters who identified immigration as their top concern, while Harris frankly underperformed on the 11 percent who said abortion, raking in only 74 percent of their votes.
That explains why Harris lost in states like Arizona and Nevada that passed abortion referendums. Clearly, people split their ballot, casting votes in support of abortion rights but also for Trump. In part, this is the result of his decision to downplay the issue and promise to oppose any national ban, but is also an indication that large numbers of people voted for reproductive rights while rejecting Harris.
Thus, Trump won a very narrow election on his signal issues of the economy and immigration. While he expanded his base, he did so only narrowly, but he certainly did not forge some new multiracial working-class coalition.
Denial, wishful thinking, and blame and shame
Trump’s defeat of Harris has sent liberals and the Left in search of answers. Some should be dismissed out of hand as clueless denial, like claims that Harris’s losing campaign was “ flawlessly run.”
The various “coulda, woulda, shoulda” arguments are just as unconvincing. Assertions that a primary could have produced a better candidate are simply not credible. Remember, Clinton and Biden were the victors in the last two primaries, and they were pathetic to say the least, the first losing to Trump in 2016 and the second winning but only to oversee austerity and carry out a genocide.
Furthermore, arguments that the Democrats should have run Sanders or someone like him, and if they did, they would have won, are also implausible. In reality, the Democratic Party establishment and its capitalist donors would not have allowed such a candidate to lead the ticket.
They united to block Sanders in 2016 and trounced him in 2020. There is no guarantee that he would have done better than Harris. She actually tallied a higher vote total than Sanders in his home state of Vermont this year.
The truth is the Democrats fared badly for obvious reasons. They were the incumbent party that oversaw a wretched economy at home and splurged on war abroad. That unappealing record explains the shift across the country toward Trump and the GOP.
We also must refute the various liberal commentators that concluded from Trump’s victory that the country is irredeemably right-wing. Such dismissals of half of the electorate as unreconstructed reactionaries echo Hillary Clinton’s castigation of Trump voters as “a basket of deplorables” and Biden calling them “garbage.”
The worst example of this argument was penned by Elie Mystal in The Nation. Leading the blame and shame chorus, he sadistically argued that people that voted for Trump “deserve” the attacks that Trump has planned.
Such snobbery and sadism from liberal elites betrays their insulation from the wretched conditions working-class people endure in our society. They cannot explain why 36 percent of mostly working-class people and disproportionately people of color did not vote, why people earning under $100,000 tilted toward Trump, and most importantly why Harris’ support from oppressed groups actually declined.
There is no doubt that Trump’s bigotry appealed to a bloc of his voters, but, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor definitively explains, the main reason why his votes went up and Harris’ down was the Biden administration’s failure to improve people’s economic lot and Trump’s claim that he could. Capitalism’s crises and the Democrat’s inability to address them, not the electorate, are to blame for Trump’s victory.
The Democratic Party’s right makes an even more pernicious version of this argument, denouncing Harris for running what it calls a “woke campaign” that supposedly alienated bigoted voters. In reality, she ran an anti-woke campaign that studiously avoided opposing Trump’s bigotry, especially toward trans people, pandered to the right and so-called “moderates,” and trumpeted anti-migrant legislation, law and order policing, and militarism.
In doing so, she blurred the contrast between her positions and Trump’s instead of differentiating them. If the Democrats move further in that direction, as some party leaders are urging, then they will further entrench Trump’s bigotry, not challenge it.
Dear Democratic National Committee, please….
Also reeling from the election, the reformist Left has written what are in essence desperate advice columns to the Democrats in the hopes that they will adopt their council.
They rightly criticize Harris for abandoning her so-called base and pandering to the Right to attract moderate votes in the suburbs. Bernie Sanders offered the sharpest criticism, denouncing Harris for offering nothing to the working class and arguing that the Democrats should not be surprised that the white working class abandoned them for Trump in the past and that many Black and Latino workers have done the same in 2024.
Such a bitter judgement, however, is odd coming from Sanders, who said Biden could become “the most progressive president since FDR,” trumpeted his administration during the election for delivering huge reforms for the working class, and aggressively campaigned for Kamala Harris, calling her a “progressive.” Regardless, Sanders’ diagnosis of the election is inaccurate, his characterization of the Democratic Party’s past is untenable, and his expectation that its donors and party bureaucracy would adopt his strategy is unrealistic.
Remember, Trump barely won a majority of voters earning under $100,000 and 36 percent of people, mostly the working class, did not vote. He, at best, only won a significant minority of the working-class vote. Moreover, Harris won 54 percent of the union vote, slightly more than Biden did in 2020. So, it is wrong to say the multiracial working class went over to Trump.
The claim that the Democrats “abandoned” the working class is also untrue. As a capitalist party, it never represented workers, but only appealed to us for votes. It only ever implemented reforms that benefited workers and the oppressed when confronted with mass uprisings from below in the 1930s and 1960s, and only did so to co-opt such resistance and preserve the existing capitalist order.
Finally, it is naïve at best to expect the Democratic Party to adopt Sanders’ advice and offer radical reforms in the interests of the working class without mass opposition from below. As Senator Chris Murphy tweeted, “when progressives like Bernie Sanders aggressively go after the elites that hold people down, they are shunned as dangerous populists. Why? Maybe because true economic populism is bad for our high-income base.”
Left reformists, including Sanders, have also joined the liberal establishment in counterposing identity politics to class politics. Sanders warned that Democrats can’t “hang their hats on identity politics” and Dustin Guastella has repeatedly argued that Democrats and the Left more broadly must focus on class issues and downplay questions of oppression.
This is a disastrous response to the threat posed by Trump. He aims to divide and conquer the working class, precisely by targeting oppressed groups in our class. So, it is a mistake to deprioritize resistance to oppression. It must be fought precisely to unite workers against our common enemy.
Moreover, it is wrong to counterpose economic demands and demands about oppression. Abortions cost money. Gender-affirming care costs money. Sexism in the workplace lowers women’s wages. Racism does the same to people of color.
And most obviously the criminalization of migrant labor subjects such workers to second class non-citizenship, but also low wages, no benefits, and no legal recourse in civil or labor law. And that low wage floor is used to drive down all workers’ wages. The old labor slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all” recognized the interpenetration of exploitation and oppression, and it should be the Left’s north star now more than ever before.
Finally, the Democrats did not hang their hat on identity politics in anything but symbolism. In reality, because of their capitalist nature, they cannot genuinely fight either social oppression or class exploitation. In fact, they are agents of maintaining the system that relies on both, as their record of border repression and mass deportation of migrants for decades proves.
Pleas to the Democrats to adopt and advance a class program are wishful thinking that sows the illusion that the Democratic Party can and should be the vehicle for the Left to advance its demands. It is not and will never be.
The illusion that the Democratic Party could be transformed into a workers party has kept the Left, social movements, and unions trapped as at best its loyal opposition and blocked us from forming a party of our own. As a result, we were bound to a party that failed yet again to stop the far right.
Now we face a clear and present danger. In January, Trump and his party will complete a hostile takeover of all branches of government, from the White House to Congress and the Supreme Court. They will act quickly to implement Trump’s authoritarian populist project of turning the United States into a managed democracy like that of Viktor Orban in Hungary.
Trump has nominated a team of lackeys that, however ideologically diverse and internally divided, are loyal not to the U.S. state and its constitution but their leader. These include more mainstream Republicans who are recent converts to the MAGA faith such as “Little Marco” Rubio and hedge fund manager Scott Bessent to militarists like Mike Waltz, Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, crackpots such as anti-vaxxer and renegade from his liberal dynastic family Bobby Kennedy, former executive of a professional wrestling empire Linda McMahon, conspiracy theorist and Vladimir Putin sympathizer Tulsi Gabbard, and Zionist attack dogs Elise Stefanik and Mike Huckabee. QAnon apologist, and nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel promises vengeance on the “deep state”. While Fox News host, and accused sexual assaulter and white supremacist, Pete Hegseth, rounds out the team as Trump’s nominee as Defense Secretary.
Flabbergasted by this cast of characters, the commentariat has sought a term to describe it, finally settling on “kakistocracy,” a government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. Precisely.
Trump will either ram through these nominees through a willing Senate or install them through recess appointments. Regardless, he will launch his domestic program starting January 20, when he promised to be a dictator, but just on “day one.”
Padding the pockets of the rich and scapegoating the oppressed
The Trump administration’s top domestic priority will be to implement a toxic combination of America First protectionism and neoliberalism. Trump has pledged to extend and expand tax cuts for the rich, strip regulations on corporations, undue as many advances on climate change as possible including repealing Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, and impose an unprecedented increase in protectionist tariffs.
He will also follow through on his promised assault on key oppressed groups. He has threatened to deport all 12 million undocumented migrants, but will probably start with targeting those convicted of crimes and rescinding Temporary Protected Status for approximately one million people from countries like Haiti and Venezuela.
Trump has gone so far as to threaten to use not only Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, but also the U.S. military, as well as state and local police, to arrest people in their communities and at work. Already private prison corporations Core Civic and the Geo Group are preparing to incarcerate people in their jails before deportation, and their stocks are soaring as investors gush over potential profits from mass internment and expulsion of human beings from the United States.
Trump’s other main target will be trans people. Already he is threatening to curtail their rights, starting with barring their participation in sports for women and girls, and restrict or ban gender-affirming care. No doubt his attack will expand to the rest of the LGBTQ community. These threats are sending calls to crisis hotlines skyrocketing as people fear imminent assault on their very existence.
Activists also fear that Trump will not uphold his pledge to not ban abortion nationally. Anti-choice fanatics are already lobbying for him to invoke the Comstock Act to ban the shipment of medication abortion across state lines. Since that is the most common form of abortion, it would in effect ban it nationally, robbing people of control over their bodies.
Transforming and weaponizing the state
While he carries out this vicious scapegoating, Trump has assigned his fellow far-right billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, named after Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency) to carry out their long-planned war on what they call the “deep state.” They want to gut the administrative bureaucracy typical of the modern capitalist state, slashing and even abolishing whole departments, firing workers, and nixing any regulations that interfere with capitalist profiteering.
In an ominous op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, they promise to “hire a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America. This team will work in the new administration closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings.”
While they may trim some wasteful spending in the Pentagon, they will not cut its budget but will take aim at what remains of the welfare state, with Vought, the new nominee for the Office of Management and Budget, singling out Medicaid, Medicare, Health and Human Services, Education, and even Social Security for austerity, onerous new requirements to receive benefits, privatization, and delegation to the states. Musk intends to cut an astonishing $2 trillion out of the annual $7 trillion budget through laying off government workers, replacing them with technology, and slashing programs.
Finally, Trump plans to weaponize the U.S. state’s repressive apparatus — its military, cops, and courts — against his identified “enemies within.” To carry this out, he first wants to purge the leadership of this apparatus of those who previously bucked his dictates and replace them with loyalists.
With such lackeys in place, Trump plans to bring the full weight of the state against his political opponents and the broad progressive movement, especially Palestine solidarity activists and the Left, but also against liberals in higher education, departments they control, courses they teach, and programs in “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” they oversee.
He will intensify the bipartisan New McCarthyism pioneered against the movement in solidarity with Palestine. Already, the House voted to pass H.R. 6408 to give the Treasury Department to strip NGOs designated as supporting terrorism of tax-free status. A conservative group has published a target list that includes a broad range of Left organizations from Jewish Voice for Peace to Tempest. While this particular bill may flounder in the Senate, there is no doubt that the incoming Republican Congress will pass it and others to enable Trump to carry out their planned war on domestic resistance.
The uncontrolled demolition of the post–Cold War order
Trump’s regime will be just as disruptive in the international state system. If Biden’s muscular multilateralism carried out the “controlled demolition of the post-cold war order,” Trump’s transactional nationalism will be the “uncontrolled demolition of it,” fundamentally upending the trade structures of global capitalism, degrading if not ditching alliances, and escalating great power rivalry, especially with China.
That strategy will fail to restore US imperial dominance, but, just as it did in his first term, accelerate its relative decline. Amidst that growing vacuum, other imperial powers as well as regional ones will become more assertive, intensifying conflict between states over a failing capitalist system.
Contrary to some characterizations, Trump is not an isolationist but an economic nationalist out to make deals with both friends and foes to the advantage of the United States and its corporations. In pursuit of that, he will definitively put an end to the U.S. imperial strategy of superintending neoliberal globalization.
At the heart of Trump’s economic program is protectionism and tariffs. He plans to jack up tariffs on all imports by 20 percent, including from Washington’s geopolitical allies in Europe, and by 60 percent on those from China. Already he has threatened to impose 20 percent tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China for their supposed refusal to crackdown on migrants and fentanyl smuggling. Such protectionism against Washington’s three largest trade partners, as well many others, would alter globalization as we have known it.
Trump’s nationalism will lead him to downgrade participation in geopolitical alliances or extract the United States from them entirely. While he has flirted with exiting NATO, he will likely increase the bipartisan pressure on European states to foot their own defense bill.
In place of alliances and multilateral pacts, he will tend toward bilateral deals with U.S. allies. Like he did during his last term, he will withdraw the U.S. government from the Paris Climate Agreement and many other such agreements, which he sees as restricting Washington’s power and regulating capital’s profiteering.
No one should mistake this as opposition to U.S. imperialism. In fact, despite his bombastic claims on the campaign trail to be anti-war, he showed no compunction in using U.S. military power in his first term. As Michael Galant argues, Trump escalated “conflict in every theatre of war he inherited, repeatedly brought the country to the brink of new wars, and recklessly threw around U.S. power with no regard for the many lives it would cost.”
He expanded the Pentagon budget, escalated the war in Afghanistan, supported Saudi Arabia’s horrific war on Yemen, moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, brought the United States to the brink of war with Iran, abandoned the various treaties on nuclear weapons, and threatened to nuke North Korea. With the United States embroiled in more conflicts throughout the world, we should expect more brinkmanship and exercise of military power in his second term.
Trump’s main priority will be great power confrontation with China. While his last administration’s National Security Strategy identified Russia as a great power adversary, he was predisposed to cut deals with Russia for his own opaque reasons and also to split it away from Beijing.
That is likely to continue in his second administration. To confront China, which the GOP platform and Project 2025 identify as Washington’s key adversary, he will complement the new tariff regime with a build up of U.S. industrial capacity to manufacture the conventional, nuclear, and high-tech weaponry necessary for war with Beijing.
Escalating imperial conflict and war
Trump will confront three pivotal flashpoints of imperial conflict — Palestine in the Middle East, Ukraine in Europe, and Taiwan in Asia. While unpredictable, precisely because of his transactional strategy, which makes him prone to vacillate between bellicose bluster and cutting deals, he is likely to escalate all three conflicts.
These flashpoints involve both struggles for national self-determination by oppressed nations, as well as rivalries among regional and various imperialist powers. Thus, any escalation could morph into much broader geopolitical, economic, and military confrontations if not war.
In the Middle East, Trump shares with the exiting Biden administration Washington’s commitment to dominating the region, controlling its strategic energy reserves, and backing off regional and imperial rivals, especially China.
That said, Trump has sent contradictory signals on Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine. On the one hand, he has promised to reach a settlement to end it. On the other, he and his incoming ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, support Israel’s colonial expansion into the West Bank and Gaza, something that would dramatically escalate its war and inflame the Palestinian resistance.
Moreover, Trump shares Israel’s determination to wipe out Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity. In line with his previous policy of “maximum pressure,” he will back Israel in launching another round of military strikes on Iran, which would further destabilize the Middle East and potentially trigger a regional conflagration.
Similarly, Trump has also taken conflicting positions on Russia’s imperialist war on Ukraine. On the one hand, he has pledged to cut a deal between Volodymyr Zelensky and Putin and end the war. But, on the other, he allowed his GOP underlings to approve the latest arms shipment to Ukraine, sustaining its resistance to conquest.
Trump would like to make a deal, but it is altogether unclear that one is possible. Why would Putin agree to one, when he is slowly annexing more and more of Ukraine? Meanwhile, neither Zelensky nor the Ukrainian people are willing to give up parts of their country and its inhabitants to brutal Russian rule.
Therefore, Russia is likely to continue to prosecute the war, despite its huge economic and human cost, hoping for the United States and Europe to tire and abandon Ukraine. Such defiance could trigger the ever erratic and irascible Trump to lash out in anger, issuing threats that could escalate the conflict.
Or he could throw in the towel, rewarding Russia’s aggression and thereby greenlighting Putin’s project of rebuilding of the Russian empire by imposing its will and even seizing other countries in its former colonial sphere of influence. Either way, the war is likely to continue and potentially escalate.
Taiwan is perhaps the most important of all of these flashpoints. China sees Taiwan as a renegade province it wants to seize, while the United States has traditionally used it as a pretext to justify military deployment to contain and deter China’s rise as a regional power. Both do not care about Taiwan’s right to self-determination.
As with the other flashpoints, Trump and his advisors have made contradictory statements. Trump has implied that he is unwilling to defend Taiwan against Chinese aggression, but he increased arms sales to Taiwan in his previous term as part of his administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy.
Given Trump’s escalation of great power confrontation with Beijing, this contradiction will be resolved in one direction or the other. Certainly Project 2025 signals that the United States must defend Taiwan as part of a strategy to contain China. It declares, “The most severe immediate threat that Beijing’s military poses, however, is to Taiwan and other U.S. allies along the first island chain in the Western Pacific. If China could subordinate Taiwan or allies like the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan, it could break apart any balancing coalition that is designed to prevent Beijing’s hegemony over Asia. Accordingly, the United States must ensure that China does not succeed.”
The stakes of this conflict are not just geopolitical, but also economic, since Taiwan produces 90 percent of the world’s most advanced microchips, which are central high-tech commercial production and the most advanced weapons systems, from fighter jets to AI cyberwarfare. Given his determination to contain China’s challenge to the United States, and China’s determination to annex Taiwan, Trump, despite his ambivalence, will likely bend to his more sophisticated advisers and make the defense of Taiwan a priority, intensifying their rivalry over the island and its people.
Provoking crisis and chaos
Trump will attempt to impose his authoritarian populist program at home and abroad, exacerbating global capitalism’s multiple crises. Such conditions will provoke opposition from above by elements of the capitalist establishment and from below by workers and the oppressed.
Trump will brook no opposition to his project, provoking a constitutional crisis in the state. He will override not only norms but also laws he considers unfavorable to carry out his campaign of revenge against political opponents, gutting of entire departments, and weaponization of the state to repress domestic dissent.
Already, he delayed signing traditional transparency agreements as part of the transition process and has yet to sign one allowing FBI background checks of his cabinet. Moreover, he has pressured GOP Senate Majority Leader John Thune to allow recess appointments of his most extreme appointees in clear violation of the Constitution.
This is just a taste of things to come. Trump wants to use his right-wing Supreme Court’s rulings to justify use of presidential authority unprecedented in recent history to bypass Congress and enact policy through executive orders.
To empower DOGE, he wants to revive impoundment, a power that allowed presidents to override the distribution of funds approved by Congress, until it was banned under Richard Nixon. He wants to resurrect Schedule F, which he attempted to use in his first term, to fire federal bureaucrats and whole layers of federal workers, especially in departments that refuse to obey his orders and replace them with obedient lackeys.
If Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy carry out their most extreme threats, including abolishing whole departments, they will not only undermine constitutional norms, but also important functions of the state like that of the Department of Education in reproducing U.S. capitalism and others such as the State Department in enforcing its imperialist hegemony. They seem willing to risk such disruption to Orbanize the United States.
As part of that project, Trump has promised to curtail the power of Democratic Party governors and mayors who vow non-cooperation with his assertion of executive authority, especially on his key initiative of mass deportation. He wants to rip up state and city laws that bar cooperation between ICE and the police to arrest, detain, and deport migrants. If elected leaders resist, as some of them have pledged to do, Trump has threatened to withhold essential federal funds that will undermine the functioning of their states and cities.
In perhaps his biggest threat to Constitutional restrictions on presidential power, he wants to weaponize the repressive apparatus, from the Justice Department to the FBI, against his political enemies. As he unsuccessfully tried to do in his first term, he has threatened to deploy the military against protests against his orders.
To intimidate generals who might put the Constitution before obedience to the president, Trump has flirted with recalling retired military leaders so that he can court martial them for refusing to obey his orders to repress protests in his first term. It remains to be seen if the Pentagon brass will resist or buckle to his dictates.
If Trump implements his economic program, it will provoke an economic and budgetary crisis and exacerbate class and social inequality. His massive tariffs would drive up the prices of consumer goods, triggering another bout of inflation and hammering workers’ standards of living.
His plans for mass deportation will not only violate human rights on an unprecedented scale, but they will also create a severe labor shortage in agribusiness, meatpacking, food processing, and construction, driving up the cost of groceries, rent, and homes. On top of that, his planned tax cuts will drive up the government’s deficit and debt, precipitating a fiscal crisis that can only be resolved by massive austerity measures, especially if Musk and Ramaswamy get their way in gutting critical benefits for workers.
His imperial strategy of transactional nationalism and especially his greenlighting of Israel’s expanding aggression will not only destabilize the world, maiming and killing ever higher numbers abroad, but also exacerbate conditions for the majority here at home. More war in the Middle East could spike the cost of oil globally, intensifying inflation in the United States and globally.
Conflict in the palace and with its subjects
Such policies will tend to break up Trump’s so-called electoral coalition, which is really just an unstable amalgam of classes with contradictory interests — rogue billionaires, petty bourgeois reactionaries, and desperate workers from various racial groups.
The trouble could start in the palace itself. While far more coherent and united, Trump’s regime remains internally divided between industrial protectionists, Wall St. neoliberals, libertarian opponents of the deep state. These factions differ on essential questions like tariffs.
Musk, for example, does not support the level protectionism Trump has proposed because of Tesla’s huge investments in China. How long will those two billionaires’ bromance last if Trump cuts into Musk’s profits by starting a trade war with China?
Trump’s inflationary policies could also drive a wedge between him and most corporations. While capitalists are overjoyed at the prospect of tax cuts and deregulation, whole sections of them are threatened by the rest of his program. As examples, agribusiness opposes mass deportation because it needs criminalized workers and multinationals oppose protectionism because they need unfettered free trade. Already a host of companies are voicing their displeasure.
They are also unhappy with Trump’s threat to fire Chair of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell. He is using that threat, which he is unlikely to carry out, to pressure Powell into lowering interest rates to spur growth. That not only will undermine the independence of the Fed, a problem for capital, but could also compound inflation, creating more problems for small businesses and eating into workers’ standards of living.
In the end, Trump will fail to overcome any of capitalism’s systemic crises, and instead exacerbate them, creating conditions that will spark resistance from workers and oppressed groups against his rule. Just as he did in his first term, Trump will respond to such dissent and opposition with ever more scapegoating and repression.
That in turn will spur his far-right and fascist allies to function as proxies against any and all progressive resistance. Already white supremacists have sent text messages to Black people across the country with instructions to report to the nearest plantation to pick cotton. Nazis have also begun to march in cities across the country. These forces mobilized in defense of Trump last time and will do so again this time—and they have grown in number and are now far better organized and sophisticated.
The Democrats’ fake resistance
The Left, social movements, and unions must build a new resistance against a second and far more dangerous Trump regime. That resistance must be independent and not look to the Democrats to either lead the struggle or offer any kind of genuine alternative in upcoming elections.
Already, Biden and Harris are promising Trump, who they called a “fascist,” a smooth transition back into power. If they were serious about that charge, they would be doing everything in their power to block his presidency, proving that their rhetoric was just electioneering to terrify us into voting for them.
Even their campaign workers are shocked by their bosses’ decision to aid and abet Trump’s assumption of power. “It was detached from the reality of what happened,” said one staffer. “We are told the fate of democracy is at stake, and then the message was, ‘We’ll get them next time.’”
On top of that, the Democrats have told their followers that they will not support a protest strategy against Trump. As the New York Times reported, “the party’s early preparations to oppose the next Trump administration are heavily focused on legal fights and consolidating state power, rather than marching in the streets.”
What resistance the Democrats will offer will be ineffective. So far, they are threatening lawsuits to obstruct Trump’s most extreme attacks on laws, regulations, and government departments. But, with the courts stacked with Republican appointees all the way to the Supreme Court, their legal cases will yield few results.
Already, in a preemptive capitulation to the constitutional norms that Trump disregards, prosecutors have suspended his sentencing for convictions as well as planned court cases against him. They have deferred to the Supreme Court’s upholding of nearly unlimited presidential immunity, which essentially guarantees Trump rule with impunity.
The only other major initiative is from governors trying to insulate their states from Trump’s assertion of power. California Governor Gavin Newsom has taken action to protect his state’s various programs and regulations from Trump’s attacks. Billionaire Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker and Colorado’s Jared Polis have launched Governors Safeguarding Democracy to coordinate such efforts.
They promise to protect state courts, laws, and elections from the Trump administration. But, in a sign of their spinelessness and predisposition to manage rather than resist Trump, several governors that initially were listed as signatories to the group withdrew their names.
The group’s legal strategy faces courts that are rigged against them, and, given their respect for constitutional order, they are unlikely to defy court rulings to resist Trump. If they do, it will provoke a deeper constitutional crisis between the federal government and their states.
They will avoid this at all costs. So, their efforts will more likely devolve into a platform for these politicians’ aspiration for leadership in the Democratic Party for the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election.
In those contests, which seem in the distant future for those facing immediate attacks, the Democratic Party will at best offer an anemic liberalism to shore up the wretched existing order, delivering none of the fundamental reforms required to address the needs of the vast majority. Their disappointment will open the door for Trump’s successors to return to power with an even more draconian, far-right program.
For independence, struggle, and organization
It is high time to break free of the entrapment of the Left, social movements, trade unions, and our collective resistance in the Democratic Party. It is not a workers’ party but a capitalist one, and we cannot use it to advance our interests, let alone support it as a lesser evil to stop the greater evil on the right. It is to blame for Trump return to power.
In building a new resistance to Trump’s regime, we must learn from the two key failures of the last one. First, the mass uprisings, from the Climate March, to the Women’s March, the mobilization for migrants, and most importantly Black Lives Matter, did not build new permanent organization for long-term struggle for our demands.
Second, the largely liberal leaders of the resistance funneled these movements into an electoral project in the Democratic Party, first in Sanders’ doomed primary campaign and then into Biden’s presidential run. In the process, they demobilized the struggle, moderated their demands to those acceptable to the Democrats, and became at best the loyal opposition within a party fundamentally opposed to them.
This time, our resistance must be independent, build organization and unions for the long haul, and remain focused on fighting for our own demands. In the first instance, the resistance must be in defense of those groups Trump has targeted for immediate repression — migrants, trans people, and Palestine solidarity activists.
Against the Democrats, who will not resist such scapegoating, we must rally to the defense of anyone attacked. Importantly, this resistance must not push Palestine to the side, but embrace the struggle for its freedom from Israeli colonialism as a key part of our struggle for collective liberation.
This is not a moral injunction. Given the strategic significance of Israel and hegemony over the Middle East to U.S. imperialism, solidarity with Palestine is in fact a strategic lynch pin to our struggle against the right, capitalism, and empire.
That must begin with principled defense of Palestine solidarity activists’ right to free speech, assembly, and organization. If they can deny these frontline fighters those rights, all of our rights will be in jeopardy.
One of our key defensive struggles will be mass action against the marches of the Right and fascist groups, which are already on the march. Our model should be Boston’s protest in 2017 that mobilized tens of thousands of people to chase fascists out of the city.
In all this organizing, we must agitate inside unions for them to play a central role in the new resistance and use their power to strike against Trump and the far right. Already unions are heeding the United Auto Workers” Sean Fain’s call to schedule their contract negotiations for 2028 so that workers can jointly shut down whole industries.
While that is a good effort and must be supported, it will be far too late to stop what Trump has planned against workers and the oppressed. So, rank-and-file militants must agitate for immediate responses, especially to austerity measures and job cuts to federal and state workers.
The Chicago Teachers Union is already combining their fight for a contract with opposition to Project 2025 and its planned demolition of public education. The Left in unions must argue for and organize job actions outside normal contract negotiations, especially in the public sector, which is literally on Trump’s chopping block.
Toward a new workers’ party
In this new resistance, the Left must help cohere a new militant minority of activists, build new mass organizations to sustain struggles, and pull together rank-and-file formations in unions. We also must argue that such struggles have to remain not only independent from the Democrats, but also set their sights on building a new workers’ party to challenge it and the far right.
Such a party will not be built by any existing group declaring itself a party. None has either the roots in the class nor the size and influence to make such declarations remotely credible. Nor can it be built by a regroupment of existing small socialist organizations.
Building a party cannot be done by proclamation, only through a process of struggle and political debate with real forces. Revolutionary socialists must argue for one from within the resistance and among the emerging militant minority.
That party’s main priority must be organizing class and social struggle, not electoral campaigns. Any candidates we do run must be on our own ballot lines, especially in the one-party districts across the country where the spoiler charge has no traction.
Those candidates must be accountable to our party, organizations, and unions. And their role if elected should be as tribunes of the resistance and its demands, using their office to build movements with no illusions that victories can be won without mass disruptive protests and strikes.
The politics of any new workers party cannot be prescribed in advance, but forged through common organizing, discussion, and debate. But, given the intensifying conflicts between imperialist and regional powers often over oppressed nations and peoples, at the heart of its politics must be principles of anti-imperialism against the US as well as all other great powers and of solidarity with all struggles of the oppressed and exploited, without exception. Such internationalism is necessary to meet the challenges of our epoch.
We are entering into an unprecedented period of far-right rule in the United States. The whole existing Left, social movement organizations, and unions will be challenged to rally to our mutual defense and opposition to looming attacks on workers and the oppressed.
Out of this period of reaction and resistance, we must build stronger infrastructures of dissent, mass organizations for social struggle, rank-and-file groups in unions, and a new workers’ party. Faced with global capitalism’s multiple interacting crises, which seem increasingly apocalyptic, our choice, now more than ever, is socialism or barbarism.
Ashley Smith is a member of the Tempest Collective in Burlington, Vermont. He has written in numerous publications including Spectre, Truthout, Jacobin, New Politics, and many other online and print publications.
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