Trump’s Second Presidency Begins: Interview with a US socialist

Donald Trump. Photo: Gage Skidmore/CC

Interview with Clare Bayler, from Independent Socialist Group.

Donald Trump is being inaugurated on 20 January. Lots of people in Britain are repulsed by his reactionary rhetoric and find it hard to understand what led to him being re-elected. How did he win?

Donald Trump won the 2024 US presidential election with a narrow majority of the popular vote. Working-class people are rightly concerned about the brutal attacks that will come from a second Trump Presidency. Ultimately Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party were unable to defeat Trump because they represent and defend the same capitalist system as the Republican Party.

Workers have experienced plummeting living conditions in the last few years. In pre-election polls, 81% of voters said the economy was their number one issue in the elections. Inflation has increased 21% since 2020, the federal minimum wage has remained at $7.25 an hour since 2009, and housing costs are at a record high.

Yet at the same time as Trump was re-elected, ballot questions (direct voting on policies) passed in states – including traditionally ‘Republican’ and swing states – to protect abortion rights, expand union rights, and raise minimum wages.

70% of Americans supported abortion ‘in all or most cases’ in a poll from June 2024. In November, in ten states where abortion was on the ballot, votes in eight showed a clear majority in support of the right to choose. Far from a massive rightward shift, these results show that reproductive rights remain popular with a large majority of Americans.

Voters approved ballot measures making it easier for workers in Oregon and Massachusetts to unionise. Arkansas and Missouri passed measures to increase those states’ minimum wage to $15 an hour. These two states, along with Nebraska, also passed paid sick leave requirements. Maine won a limited reform restricting the size of donations to ‘Political Action Committees’, reflecting a desire to get money out of politics.

What choice?

There are certainly hardcore Trump supporters who thoroughly embrace right-wing ideas. But there are many more “soft” Trump voters who, for a variety of reasons, could not bring themselves to tick the box for the Democrats, and saw only one other choice. These voters are likely to vote for more progressive candidates down-ballot, particularly independents, and to support pro-worker ballot questions.

Trump does not have a mandate of support from the majority in US society. Of the whole population of voting age adults, only about 52% saw any utility in voting at all (some of the remaining 48% do not have the right to vote). Only 27% were convinced to vote for Trump, and of those who voted for Trump, only a smaller – though admittedly difficult to quantify – section are actual ‘hard’ supporters.

What best accounts for Trump getting elected twice is a growing dissatisfaction with the status quo. The first Trump term was a reaction to the failures of the Obama administration to raise living standards, end the war in Iraq (and elsewhere), pass universal healthcare, and more. Many working-class people’s lives were devastated by the 2007-09 Great Recession, during which Obama bailed out banks and large corporations, while allowing mass home foreclosures and the removal of pensions.

Trump’s claims to be a political outsider spoke to people’s real need for change. When Trump in turn failed to improve the lives of the majority of Americans, his popularity fell such that he was unable to secure a second term. Joe Biden was elected as the ‘anyone-but-Trump’ candidate, and vowed that he would champion the status quo that voters rejected just four years before.

Biden’s legacy

The Biden administration laid the grounds for Trump to make a comeback by refusing to entertain the idea of universal healthcare during the pandemic, bailing out big business (again) during the Covid recession, taking no measures to stop historic ‘greedflation’, allowing the overturn of abortion rights, and backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Harris, running in Biden’s place, defended and campaigned on the same unpopular policies.

A serious strategy to defeat Trump would have been to offer real improvements. Left-wing demands like universal healthcare, raising the federal minimum wage, taxing the rich, and many others are overwhelmingly supported by voters. The Democratic Party has repeatedly refused to move in this direction, dangling reproductive rights, student loan cancellations, and closing the ICE detention camps in front of workers’ faces during campaigns and then abandoning these demands once in office – including periods when Democratic administrations controlled both houses of Congress. The Democrats are also adept at derailing and co-opting mass protest movements which can challenge the right in the streets – the Anti-Trump marches, Black Lives Matter, and abortion rights protests most recently.

By posing as the representatives of the left, while in reality working to prevent independent working-class political representation, the Democratic Party has created an enormous vacuum for real left-wing, class-based politics. Some turn to Trumpism in vain hope, but there’s also a tremendous opportunity for a new political party to emerge that is in reality of, by, and for the working class.

What faces Trump during his first year in office?

As the Trump administration takes office, it will be unable or unwilling to do anything but sharpen the many crises in which capitalism finds itself. Tariffs and other protectionist measures, tax cuts for the rich, and cuts to social programmes will not shore up the foundations of US capitalism or meet the aspirations of workers hoping for the return of good jobs.

Attempts to reposition US imperialism to better confront the rise of China will be hamstrung by the shaky economy. While Trump, and others inspired by him, attempt to pose as ‘pro-labor’, they are likely to run up against a labor movement which has record support from the public, especially if sections of the capitalist class push Trump to play hardball with attacks on workers’ rights and wages to prop up their profits.

While there is a lot of anxiety around Trump’s administration, he doesn’t rule with impunity. Sections of the capitalist class and political establishment are anxious that his actions could provoke mass movements in opposition. They will exert pressure behind closed doors, or even use legal challenges to try to keep the Trump administration within the limits of acceptable ‘presidential behaviour’ to accomplish their goals. Any number of crises, whether economic, political, or geopolitical, could come to a head under Trump’s administration and result in him losing the support of the sections of the capitalist class that back him.

In carrying out policies in service to corporate interests, the Trump administration may end up in head-on confrontations with the labor movement, losing the support of his working-class voters. We are not powerless – mass movements and workers’ action can defeat Trump’s attacks.

The last time Trump was inaugurated there were Women’s Marches of millions across the US. There were protests in Britain too. Are there protests planned in the US this time?

The Independent Socialist Group is calling, helping organise, and participating in Inauguration Day protests where we have members. These protests need to be used as a launching point for a new, sustained, mass protest movement against the Trump administration, its corporate backers, and the far right.

Mass protests and strike mobilisations during the first Trump administration were able to halt or reverse the Muslim travel ban, repeal of the Affordable Care Act (limited healthcare reform), and the government shutdown resulting from Trump’s demand for border wall funding. Isolated victories like these will not be enough to defeat Trump. But they proved that the working class isn’t powerless against a Trump presidency and prevented or delayed him from pushing parts of his anti-worker agenda through.

Opposing Trump means creating a movement of working people able to draw in significant layers of the working class. Repression like the crackdowns on Gaza protests and encampments last year is intended to create a chilling effect, pressuring organisers to be less visible and limiting the ability for protest movements to develop. Understandably fearing further repression under the Trump administration, some groups organising anti-Trump actions are turning towards more underground methods of organising. But small underground groups can’t substitute themselves for the power that the working class wields when organised openly on a mass scale. Premature use of these underground tactics of organising leaves the working class as a whole in the dark and stands in the way of the formation of such a mass movement.

What are the tasks for socialists in the US with Trump in the White House?

We need to help build not just a defensive, but an offensive campaign to take on the conditions and the capitalist system that creates figures like Trump and the far right.

It’s crucial for the working class to build its own political party in order to break the stranglehold of the ruling corporate duopoly. A mass, left-wing workers’ party – made up of working-class people including socialists, progressives, and organised labor – backed and funded largely by unions, and firmly independent of the two existing capitalist parties, has the potential for massive popular support. But it will need significant finances and resources to get off the ground.

Unions can play a major role in this. For the eighth year in a row, support for unions exceeded 60% while support for the two corporate parties reached no more than 51%. Gallup polls have also shown around 60% of all Americans are in favour of a third major political party. If the 70% support for the labor movement in 2024 had translated into vote shares for a hypothetical candidate in the presidential election, it would have equalled 107 million votes, over 30 million more votes than either the Democrats or Republicans received.

A mass workers’ party could win

The viability of such a party was demonstrated by the Dan Osborn campaign for US Senate in Nebraska. Osborn, a former union strike leader, campaigned as a pro-working class, pro-union candidate, independent of both the Democrats and the Republicans. He called for increasing the minimum wage, adopting the pro-union PRO Act, and ending corporate money in elections. He secured the endorsement of many unions and raised nearly $8 million without accepting any corporate donations. While he narrowly lost (47.7%), he pulled even with the Republican incumbent in the polls towards the end of the campaign, before a big-money ad offensive against him.

Osborn outperformed every Democrat candidate for US Senate in Nebraska since 2006 and got a higher percentage of votes than Harris (47% to 39%). While there are valid criticisms of Osborn’s campaign, especially around his position on immigration, it demonstrated that working-class demands resonate even in states written off as ‘conservative’ by liberals. Osborn was a first-time candidate, campaigning without the benefit of any sort of party infrastructure, and also outperformed any other independent or third-party candidate anywhere in the 2024 elections.

Imagine if the political resources of the labor movement were put towards establishing a new working-class party. In 2020, unions spent $1.8 billion on the elections. Those resources mean that a new party backed by a major union would immediately be seen as a much more serious force than even long-established third parties.

Socialists need to be at the forefront of making the case for a workers’ party, including agitating inside the unions and campaigning for a new political strategy for the labor movement. However it will likely be necessary to lead by example, with socialist groups running independent candidates and pushing protest movements and other left and progressive groups to do the same. Between now and the 2026 and 2028 elections it will be key for socialists to initiate and fully participate in movements to defend those who will be targeted by the Trump administration, as well as campaigns to win concessions from the capitalist class. Socialists will need to be making the case for an independent, working-class political party as an indispensable tool in the fight for workers’ interests.

Even starting at the local or state level, individual candidates or small groups can make some major breakthroughs and help lead campaigns for higher wages, improved funding and staffing for public services, taxes on the rich and large corporations, and much more. With some momentum from victories and the outline of a party, major labor unions may be broken away from the Democratic Party.

A new party with a clear pro-worker platform could help build a workers’ movement around shared needs, class issues, and struggles. With socialists campaigning within such a party for it to take up socialist ideas, it could open the way for demands neither corporate party will touch, such as nationalising key sectors of the economy like heating, electricity, telecommunications, and healthcare, as well as point the path toward building a socialist alternative to capitalism globally.

Interview with The Socialist (weekly paper of the Socialist Party – CWI England & Wales) spoke to Clare Bayler, member of Independent Socialist Group – the Socialist Party’s co-thinkers in the United States.

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