What will Trump 2.0 mean for workers and the world?
Matt Dobson
The days and weeks leading up to Donald Trump’s inauguration saw wildfires wreak havoc in California. This followed the devastation of the Hurricane Helene’s damage in North Carolina and the South East. The US Guardian compared the storm’s wreckage, which have torn down both the richest and poorest dwellings, to the landscape of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road.
Millions of working and middle-class Americans look on in despair and rage that a continent-sized state machine, where trillionaires dominate the media and the two main parties, cannot provide the infrastructure and resources, to provide basic protection for their homes and livelihoods.
Trump’s opponents in the US ruling class look with trepidation at the many storms to come from his presidency. This maverick, if his rhetoric meets reality, will upset the “international order” of geopolitics. What effect will his aggressive tariff protectionist policies have on the economy?
His right populist views on immigration, health, abortion, the federal budget and the debt ceiling can inflame centrifugal tensions, including conflicts between individual states and institutions in an ever more polarised society.
Many workers were appalled and looked on in horror and bewilderment as Trump won the November 2024 presidential election by 2.5 million votes as the Republicans gained control of the three branches of government.
howl of protest
Trumpism 2.0 is a result of a howl of legitimate protest by sections of the US working and middle class who have suffered economically for the past five decades. 80% of voters saw the economy as the key issue. Seven out of ten workers have seen their wages flatline since the 1970s.
If economic trends present in 1970s America had continued, including, critically, the power and influence of labor unions, $50 trillion more dollars would be in the pockets of 90% of the population.
Instead neoliberalism, a war on organised labor by Democrats and Republican administrations and economic crisis have shattered any illusions in the American Dream – that each generation would be more prosperous than the last.
In reality the corporate Democrats, with their failure to deal with rampant profiteering during an inflation crisis post-pandemic fronted up by Biden and then Harris and backed by 82 billionaires lost the election.
They polled four million fewer votes than when Trump was voted out in 2020. Is it any wonder that young people, women, African Americans and Latino’s struggled to “feel the joy” of the Harris campaign, with blood on its hands over Gaza and Biden’s higher deportation rate than Trump.
Why would many workers, despite many Labor leaders backing Harris’ and Biden’s attempts to pose as a pro union President, back the record of an administration who banned a national railroad strike?
It is not the case that that the vote for Trump represents total support for his bigoted rhetoric. Take the issue of abortion. The state ballots to enshrine abortion rights that polled at the same time as the Presidential vote showed the majority of Americans, including in five states where the majority supported Trump, support legalised abortion.
The Trump campaigns populist promises of higher wages, protection of industrial jobs, action on affordable healthcare against big pharma and an end to support for foreign wars, are likely to come back to haunt him when his administration fails to deliver.
Today’s downtrodden worker voting Trump can quickly become tomorrow’s class fighter. Sections of the ruling elite are terrified that the chaos of Trumpism will provoke mass movements and struggle that undermine their rule.
Currently the boiling rage in US society often gets expressed by the ready means available. The context is the lack of a mass political voice that unifies, organises and expresses the interests of the majority.
This can have extreme results. Witness the public reaction, even understandable sympathy, for Luigi Mangione, the suspected assassin of the United Healthcare CEO. This response was rooted in the catastrophic lack of affordable healthcare and ruthlessness of the private vultures who profit from the industry.
A Trump administration may struggle to deal with the political impact of the trial. This harks back to the early history of the workers’ movement in the US, where Anarchist assassinations of bosses and bombings were a feature, a reaction to the brutality of US capitalism.
Once again socialists and labor activists must skilfully explain that individual terrorism is counterproductive. Individual CEOs can be replaced and such actions can strengthen attacks on the working class by the US state machine and security services under a Trump administration.
mass action
The most effective alternative that can bring down the system of of the billionaires is mass collective industrial and political action by workers.
There is ready audience for these arguments among the 70% of the US public, including 40% of Republicans, who view Labor unions positively. The majority of US capitalists and their allies internationally opposition to Trump also partly reflected their concern at the potential results of his aggressive protectionist and unorthodox foreign policy pronouncements, including that he will quickly bring the Russia – Ukraine and Gaza conflicts to an end.
In a multipolar world where a declining US is threatened by China, it is an open question as to how far his rhetoric will become reality.
Even a Harris administration would have had to retain trade and tariff barriers (as Biden did) to undermine China. But Trump’s aggression, even before his inauguration, demanding Greenland from Denmark and raising the prospect of tariff conflicts with Canada and Mexico, threatens to shred up what remains of post-World War two international relations.
Despite promising isolationism, Trump will be buffeted by increasing world conflicts and disorder. The US can no longer act as the world’s policeman and banker, as it did from the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Protectionism can even bring new financial crisis and meltdowns in the world economy. Britain and Scotland will not be unaffected. As a minor power caught between the EU and the US as trading partners, the appointment of Mandelson as Starmer’s toady US ambassador in the vain hope of manoeuvring a favourable position with Trump will not save declining capitalism here.
Even before entering the White House, Trumps administration, itself a coterie of mavericks and personal friends from Tesla social media tycoon Elon Musk, to Hillbilly champion JD Vance and ex leading Democrat Tulsi Gabbard has erupted in divisions.
Over immigration, Musk’s opposition to attacks on Tech workers will be echoed by sections of the capitalist class in border states. In care, hospitality and construction sectors the bosses will oppose a blunt policy of raids, deportations and detention of migrant workers.
Trump may try and marry tax breaks he promises for the wealthy with continued investment in manufacturing in states who voted for him to protect jobs. While his victory will give confidence to the far right thugs and vigilantes, there will be limits to his reaction and it is not correct to term his administration as fascist.
Fascism historically mobilised the middle class and downtrodden layers to smash the organisations of the working class. Today the labor unions and workers’ struggle are in a stage now of real recovery.
2024 saw massive strikes of UAW autoworkers, Boeing machinists and dockers that made real gains for workers. Amazon Teamsters, from coast to coast, and even ski resort workers are on the picket lines recently.
Trump, under pressure, even courted the Teamster leadership. Trump’s administration may well concentrate power in his hands and step up state repression. A warning was seen in the 2021 Capitol Insurrection and “March on Washington” when supporters of Trumpism, some armed, attempted to overturn the election result.
The workers’ movement cannot afford to be complacent. When Trump raised in 2019 about refusing to leave office sections of the unions were correct to discuss the idea of a general strike.
Of course, the” March on Washington” was dwarfed by the numbers involved in labor strikes since 2020. Also, by the numbers in the women’s marches and Black Lives Matter.
During the early stages of BLM, 40% of Republican voters supported the protests. Protests against Trump, unlike in 2016, have so far been muted. The labor unions must use their organising capacity and unifying authority to lead a fightback on wages, housing, healthcare, women’s and migrant rights, alongside a mass recruitment drive into their ranks and an offensive struggle on the right to organise and strike.
Where needed, they can organise defence against attacks by the state and vigilantes on demonstrations and pickets. It must never be forgotten that every major gain for American workers, whatever their background, historically came when the union’s were on the offensive, including in the 1930s New Deal period.
No trust can be placed in the corporate Democrats. The appeals by Bernie Sanders, and Oscario Cortez, with diminishing authority, on the Democrats to “move back to the working class” will fall on deaf ears.
Our sister organisation, the Independent Socialist Group, is pioneering the fight to transform the leaderships of the unions to fight and also raising the need for a new mass workers’ party, based on labor, capable of drawing in all those who want to fight the dictatorship of the corporations.
A step towards this means running socialist and pro-worker candidates. The potential for this was seen in the campaign of union worker Dan Osborn in Nebraska who won 46% of the vote. The class struggles in the US that are coming will be on a even higher level than the 1930s and 1960s.
The anxiety of the ruling elite intellectually has been witnessed with the proliferation of books and essays on the decline of US society and the American dream. US society can only move forward and the lives of those ordinary workers can only be transformed through socialist change.
That means the working class taking over and democratically running the world’s largest, richest economy, from the banks to the insurance companies, tech servers, factories, refineries and warehouses, as part of the struggle for a socialist world.
