Four months into the second Donald Trump presidency, larger protests against Trump’s attacks on immigrants, women, and the LGBTQ+ community are developing. Trump’s rapid-fire executive actions are meant to intimidate and spread fear. People across the US are angry, exhausted, overwhelmed, and struggling to keep up with the news cycle.
Still, resistance is stirring. Millions of people came out for the “Hands Off!” rallies that were organized in hundreds of cities nationwide on April 5th and April 19th. These protests were called in response to a myriad of issues, including Trump’s flagrantly racist ICE crackdowns on migrants and revocation of student visas, his destructive mass federal layoffs, his attacks on transgender rights, and his annihilation of healthcare accessibility and social services. The “Hands Off!” protests include many working people looking for an alternative to Trumpism. These protests are a positive development, but to successfully fight back against Trump’s attacks and the system he represents, these protests need to be the start of a new mass movement.
Trump’s Attacks
The attacks coming from the Trump White House and his clique of billionaire backers are the latest escalation of capitalism’s long-standing tactics to sow division among the working class. They aim to exclude trans people from public life while also making cuts to healthcare and medical research. The Trump administration is now defining one’s sex as “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female” and removing recognition of gender identity. The executive order is dubiously titled ‘Defending Women’.
Trump claims that “gender ideology” (or people who are trans) poses a threat to women, painting transgender women in particular as imposters and predators. Trump has described the “sinister threat of gender ideology” as “one of the most prevalent forms of child abuse facing our country.” He uses fear-mongering about transgender people to draw attention away from his cuts to social services and failure to address the cost of living crisis, pitting workers against each other to prevent united working-class organizing.
Trump does not care about protecting women. Among other misogynistic moves, Trump has committed to enforcing the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funds from being used for abortion. The Biden administration left this open for attack by refusing to codify abortion rights into federal law while the Democratic Party was in charge of both Congress and the White House.
To further stoke fear and sow division, the Trump administration has accelerated the repression of Palestinian rights activists, initiated by the Biden administration. US immigration authorities have cracked down on several international students who have taken part in anti-genocide protests or spoken out in defense of Palestinians in Gaza, including Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was whisked away by plainclothes ICE agents and brought to a detention center in Louisiana. This sets a dangerous precedent that the US can revoke legal immigration status for political activism.
Trump has issued an executive order to limit “wasteful” diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) activities in government and by government contractors and grant recipients. This will allegedly restore “merit-based opportunity,” the implication being that good, hard-working white men have lost opportunities to women, people of color, gay and trans people, and people with disabilities – people who did not “deserve” them. This is an attempt to stoke distrust and resentment among different sections of the working class. This attempt to divide working people on gender lines helps to facilitate Trump’s race to the bottom when it comes to funding for services and programs. It also undermines workers’ organizing across differences in race, gender, and immigration status to advocate for increased funding and resources. This works to prevent those sections from realizing their shared struggles and their source: oppression by the ruling class.
Different sections of the working class have more in common than many of us realize. We are all concerned with many of the same issues. The cost of living – housing, healthcare, debt, education – keeps rising as wages stagnate. Climate disasters continue to ravage communities around the world. Attacks on DEI and mass layoffs cause chaos in working people’s lives. While these issues predate Trump, he and the other capitalists he represents will continue to watch the world burn if they stand to make a profit. As such, fighting against Trump needs to be a step toward fighting against the capitalist system as a whole.
Democratic Party Complicity
In 2020, millions of Americans voted for the Democratic Party as a vote against Trumpism and the far right. But instead of following through on popular campaign promises to close border camps and end the funding of Trump’s border wall, implement the Equality Act to protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination, to cancel student debt, codify Roe, and implement a Green New Deal, the Democrats continued many of Trump’s policies. The Democratic Party urged a peaceful transfer of power and confined itself to performative “fights” against Trump in the courts, refusing to build mass protests in the streets. In 2021, the Democratic Mayor of DC told people not to counter-protest the January 6th Capitol riot. The capitalist class and their two corporate parties often don’t see the far right as a threat and have accommodated the new Trump regime.
If anything, the Democrats consistently seize opportunities to channel energy from social movements away from independent politics and toward voting blue. The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests over the death of George Floyd, which started taking on a more working-class character, were subsumed into the Biden campaign. Funding for police departments has only increased over the last five years.
The Women’s March in Washington, DC, was one of the largest single-day protests in US history, with over 470,000 people in attendance – yet nothing really changed. When they left the march, protestors had no program to follow but to fall in line with the Democrats. ”Progressive” Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have tried to capture the anger against Trump to funnel people back into the Democratic Party through their 2025 Fighting Oligarchy Tour instead of using this energy to build a political organization by and for working people. The “Squad,” while posing as being for the working class, is anything but. Both Sanders and AOC voted to approve Marco Rubio for Secretary of State and approved massive funding for Israel’s genocide. The Democratic Party led brutal crackdowns on Gaza protests last spring. It offers no way forward for the working class.
Real Resistance
Compare the Democratic Party’s “resistance” to Trump to those involved in the Stonewall Riots, who were able to make much greater gains for working LGBTQ+ people. The riots began when the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in New York City, was raided by police on the evening of June 28th, 1969. Police raids on gay bars were common then, but that night, patrons fought back. The crowd outside the bar continued to grow, attracting sympathetic working people from all over the city. Gay and trans activists took advantage of the moment to spread information and build the community that would fuel the growth of the gay rights movement. These activists would go on to connect with the Black Panthers, socialists, and other groups who were fighting against police brutality in the context of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. They went on to win the removal of bans against LGBTQ+ rights and gay marriage, along with anti-discrimination laws. Unions also took up LGBTQ+ rights, such as in the 1977 strike of 1,500 Teamsters against Coors Brewing Company over its anti-gay hiring practices. The boycott lasted until the mid-1980s.
Working-class mass movements of the past have made significant gains, and those tactics and strategies need to be taken up once again if workers want material solutions to the attacks on LGBTQ and women’s rights. The key is to use mass demonstrations and strikes in a sustained, coordinated mass movement that’s tied to an independent working-class political party.
The United Auto Workers, whose members have been some of those on the frontlines of the pro-Palestine protests, could be mobilizing its members – not only those on college campuses but in other workplaces as well – in defense against ICE raids, harassment by management, discrimination, restrictions on abortion and reproductive rights, and the gutting of many federal programs and services which LGBTQ+, women, and immigrants especially benefit from. At Columbia University and the University of California system, unions have coordinated rallies and even strikes in defense of pro-Palestinian protestors. It’ll take not just one or a few unions but the larger labor movement and wider working class to beat back Trump’s policies. A workers’ party is a key piece to solving the puzzle of how to unite us as working people across social movements and the labor movement.
Why We Need Socialism
Capitalism stokes the “us versus them” sentiment that is weaponized against our most vulnerable groups while Trump and his gang of billionaires profit. Our struggles as workers – gay and trans workers, racialized workers, immigrant workers, disabled workers – are linked by the economic structure of capitalism. Laws against job discrimination mean nothing when the standard is “at-will” hiring and firing. Women and the LGBTQ+ community see lower wages than their straight, cis-gendered male counterparts. 40% are employed in the lowest-paying sectors, such as hospitality, education, and retail – jobs that often don’t receive medical benefits or paid leave. Trans women, in particular, make $0.60 for every $1.00 that the average worker in the US makes. Medical discrimination runs rampant in our for-profit healthcare system, in which insurance is tied to employment, and out-of-pocket costs further hinder access to care, whether one is insured or not.
This oppression is built into the capitalist system: discrepancies in wages and benefits are explicitly used to create a race to the bottom. Capitalism spins the lie that good jobs are finite resources that workers must compete to earn. The right aims to divide and conquer the working class by picking off vulnerable sections, turning others against them with hateful rhetoric, and blaming these sections for the suffering of others. We must remember that they will come for all workers after they come for the trans, immigrant, or anti-war workers.
The United States lacks an independent workers’ party. This strengthens the far-right, who face no real opposition from either Republicans or Democrats. We must connect our struggles and unite against the ruling class. As socialists, we believe that a better world is possible through socialist revolution. We need a socialist program to end the oppression of LGBTQ+ people, people of color, and women. We need a workers’ party to take housing, energy, healthcare, and transportation under democratic public ownership, and ensure that all people have what they need, regardless of employment status or identity group. A workers’ party would ensure that its leaders were accountable to its membership. When enough workers choose independent, left working-class politics over the corporate duopoly, Trump and the far-right won’t stand a chance.