
The election of Donald Trump, a right-wing populist with strong ties to the far-right, has prompted fear of what his agenda could have in store for the working class. Trump ran on an anti-immigrant platform and has announced plans to deport all immigrants who are in the country illegally, as well as ending “birthright” citizenship when he enters office. While Trump has stated that he will not sign a national abortion ban, his vice president J.D. Vance has endorsed such a measure, and restrictions such as limiting access to abortion pills are expected to be implemented. Trump has promised to repeal measures limiting the use of force by police and supported attacks on protestors and the left during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protest wave. Trump has a track record of anti-worker, anti-union decisions. Trump is also expected to roll back protections for transgender people and has promised to “pass a bill that says the only genders acknowledged by the US government are male and female.”
Trump’s plan to cut the corporate tax rate from 21% to 15% – after already cutting the tax rate in 2017 from 35% to 21% – will mean decreased funding for social programs that workers rely on, and austerity measures are sure to come. Trump’s pick for education secretary, Linda McMahon, has promised to bring “choice and competition” to education through support for charter schools – a for-profit, privatized, anti-union “alternative” to public schooling. Billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been picked to lead the “Department of Government Efficiency,” promising to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget – though this “department” will only have an advisory role and won’t be able to make cuts itself. No doubt Trump’s administration will largely leave untouched the military’s $895 billion budget, which has grown by 16.7% since Biden entered office in 2021.
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 keep the Trump administration within the limits of acceptable “presidential” behavior 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.
Trump’s First Inauguration Met with Months of Protests
Corporate politicians and media have promoted the idea that elections are the only say working people are allowed to have in the political process. But Trump’s first administration supplies plenty of examples otherwise. The Muslim travel ban Trump attempted to pass by executive order during his first month in office in 2017 was resisted by protests at dozens of airports, including over two thousand protestors at JFK in New York City. The pressure from these protests pushed courts across the country to rule against portions of the executive order, eventually leading to its replacement a month and a half later with a more limited executive order. Protests in 2018 following Trump’s May 2018 announcement of a “zero tolerance” immigration policy that would separate children from their families saw the “zero tolerance” policy overturned and an executive order passed halting separations.
Unions have also played a role in opposing Trump. The 2018 budget debate led to the longest government shutdown in history as a result of Trump’s demand for border wall funding, promising to veto any bill that didn’t fund the entire wall. On January 20th, 2019, Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), called for a general strike to end the shutdown. The following Friday, air traffic controllers led a sickout that caused widespread delays to flights across the East Coast. Nelson announced that the AFA was “mobilizing immediately” for a strike. Within hours, Trump agreed to a deal to end the government shutdown.
Isolated victories like these will not be enough to defeat Trump. But they show that the working class isn’t powerless against a Trump presidency. Capitalists need a stable, orderly operation of the economy to maintain their massive profits. Because of this, they fear workers’ power above all else. Capitalists bend to pressure from mass protests, strikes, and independent political action of working people voting and organizing outside the two-party political duopoly. Capitalists and their politicians will give concessions or reverse course if enough disruption happens to their profiteering. Pressure from an organized, coordinated, and united mass working-class movement against Trump would drain Trump’s political support and leave him unable to push his anti-worker agenda through.
Recent events give a perfect illustration of how mass protests can check the power of a right-wing president. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in early December on a flimsy justification of protecting against threats from North Korea. In reality, this measure was targeted at opposition parties within the country that he accused of “an anti-state act of conspiring to incite rebellion.” However, his attempt to seize power was foiled by protestors who gathered around the South Korean Parliament building and prevented the military from disrupting Parliament’s vote to end martial law. The decision of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions to call an indefinite general strike until Yoon was removed from power provided the final nail in the coffin to force Yoon to end martial law. Though his decision to end martial law cut across the trade unions’ call for a general strike, their role in bringing it to an end showed the power workers wield to fight for their demands.
How Can We Organize?
Unfortunately, the needed organization and coordination to effectively oppose Trump is sorely lacking right now. In contrast to the demonstration of power in South Korea, some unions in the U.S. are moving towards accommodating or even collaborating with Trump. Recent protest movements in the U.S. like Black Lives Matter have been dominated by ideas of “decentralization” and “horizontalism” that defeat attempts to create broader organizational structures. Promoted as a more “democratic” method of organization, these ideas instead create informal leadership structures unaccountable to the broader movement.
The lack of organizational structures leaves our movements vulnerable to pressure from corporate politicians hoping to bend them to their own interests. The Biden campaign used this to effectively reroute the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests into support for the Democratic Party. In addition, as right-wing forces in support of Trump gather steam, we can expect to see this lack of structure exploited to disarm protest movements or pull them to the right.
We cannot expect the other corporate party to help in the fight against Trump. Democrats quickly accommodated to Trump. Biden called on workers to “bring down the temperature” and accept a Trump administration. Where Democrats orient to any movement that develops against Trump, it will be with the purpose of pushing these movements off of the street and into the Democratic Party. And as the last four years under Biden have proven, the Democratic Party only puts a different face on attacks on working people.
Tactics to Fight State Repression
Some groups organizing anti-Trump protests and other actions are moving towards more underground methods of organizing, promoting a “security culture” of using anonymity and encryption to hide their operations. These underground methods have been used with success in the past, such as by left-wing groups organizing under Nazi rule in the 1930s. But they are only one tactic and one that needs to be evaluated with respect to the situation we are organizing under.
Democrats and Republicans violently cracked down on Gaza protests and encampments last year. Further repression under the Trump administration is to be expected, and it’s understandable for groups opposing Trump to fear this repression. Yet opposing Trump means creating a movement of working people able to draw in significant layers of the working class. The repression is intended to create a chilling effect, pressuring organizers to be less visible and limiting the ability for protest movements to develop. Small underground groups can’t substitute themselves for the power that the working class wields when organized openly on a mass scale. Premature use of these underground tactics of organizing leaves the working class as a whole in the dark and stands in the way of the formation of such a mass movement.
We need to use the most effective tactics available to be able to fight the Trump regime. Right now, this means a mass protest movement against Trump and his right-wing agenda. This kind of mass protest movement must be structured democratically at all levels, organized across cities, states, and the entire country. This movement needs to use every tool in its toolbox to reach out and involve as many workers as possible. With democratic accountability to the rank-and-file for its leaders, such a movement can protect itself against right-wing infiltration, sabotage, and pressure from capitalist forces hoping to restrict it.
This movement can resist Trump using the tactics that have been proven to work: mass protests and counter-protests, rallies, marches, public meetings, occupations, and strikes, as well as starting to build independent political action, not part of either corporate party, by running independent progressive and left candidates and using electoral politics as another platform for organizing real opposition to Trump and the far right. The involvement of organized labor in this movement is key to its success. Unions bring to the table not only the power for labor action, but also their money, active members, and organizing staff.
One major goal of a mass protest movement against Trump and the right needs to be the establishment of a workers’ party. Faced every election with a choice between one terrible corporate candidate or another terrible corporate candidate, support for Trump and other future right-wing populists able to effectively wield this dissatisfaction in service of their own campaigns will continue. A strong independent party armed with the power of a mass movement of working-class people, unions, and a socialist program of demands and strategies to fight would be able to seriously weaken the support the pro-capitalist populists rely on and finally offer a candidate workers want to vote for, not just vote against.
Despite Trump, Demands Can Be Won
A movement to stop Trump’s policies and the far-right can’t just be a defensive one. If we only focus our efforts on preventing the worst Trump puts forward, we will still find ourselves in the current anti-worker status quo that got us here in the first place. A movement against Trump needs to also fight for demands that will benefit the working class. This should include the demands of social movements that have fought against Trump: enshrining abortion protections into law, protecting immigrants, convicting killer cops, demilitarizing the police, and more. But they must also be tied with economic demands: public housing, universal healthcare, a $30/hr minimum wage, better working conditions, funding and improving public transit and education, and other demands aimed at alleviating the pressure and suffering that’s been forced on working-class people by the capitalists and their two political parties. Fighting for these demands will in turn help attract more workers to the movement.
These reforms can be funded by doing what neither corporate party is willing to do: taking the profits of the capitalist class, which have soared during the last few years as conditions for workers have gotten worse. Reforms can be won, even under Trump! Winning reforms doesn’t depend on the good graces of the person in power, but on the pressure workers are able to place on the capitalist class. A mass movement against Trump can prevent the worst of his program from being put into place, and it can also win vital demands workers need and build a socialist fightback that can become part of a movement to end capitalist control over our politics, our conditions, and our lives.