Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Five months into his misrule, President Trump is swinging a wrecking ball through the domestic and international order. Faced with obstacles to his program, splits within his coalition, and popular opposition, he has only escalated his attacks with raids against migrant workers and a war on Iran.

His unrelenting offensive has inflamed ever greater popular resistance. In Los Angeles, the multiracial, multinational working class, including key unions, built mass demonstrations and staged direct actions against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the police, and National Guard troops deployed by Trump.

More than 5 million people poured into the streets at No Kings rallies against Trump’s narcissistic and shambolic military parade on his birthday. And, while he consolidated his base behind his war on Iran, half the population opposed it. But Trump will not back down. Instead, he is intensifying his class war at home and unilateral imperialism abroad.

Despite the emergence of mass popular resistance to Trump, the Democratic Party establishment persists in following James Carville’s possum strategy; they are determined to play dead in the hope that his regime will implode on its own. It won’t.

We must face reality: no one is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves. To do that, a resistance, based on our own independent and democratic organizations, needs to be built; a resistance that opposes all of Trump’s attacks on the exploited and oppressed, and that organizes mass and increasingly disruptive protests and strikes to stop his regime in its tracks and defend our democratic rights.

Understanding Our Enemy

To defeat our enemy, we have first to understand it.

Trump is carrying out an authoritarian nationalist transformation of the U.S. state. He is doing this through unconstitutional and barely constitutional executive orders, eroding what passes for democracy, in favor of what political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism.”

Domestically, Trump has launched a neoliberal war on the working class, firing federal workers, gutting social programs, shredding any regulation of corporations, and slashing taxes for the billionaires. He is using our rulers’ oldest strategy of divide and conquer to get away with it.

Trump has whipped up bigotry and hate to attack migrants, Black and brown people, trans people, women, the disabled, the poor, and almost everyone else. His aim is pit sections of the working class against each other to prevent any united fightback.

Internationally, he is implementing a unilateral imperialist strategy to assert U.S. dominance over both friends and foes. He has imposed tariffs on nearly every country; threatened to annex Panama, Greenland, and even Canada; appealed to Russia to end its imperialist war in Ukraine and join Washington in the partition of the country; attempted to end Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza by greenlighting the ethnic cleansing and bombing Iran into submission; forced allies to increase their military budgets to five percent of their GDP; and planned to free up U.S. forces to confront China in a battle for supremacy over global capitalism.

These domestic and international agendas are fused in Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” now being rammed through Congress. It slashes taxes on the rich; guts Medicaid for workers, the poor, and disabled; plows $185 billion into immigration enforcement; and boosts the war budget to a record $1 trillion.

None of this has the support of the working-class majority. Trump barely won the popular vote, never had a mandate, and his poll numbers have plummeted. On top of that, his policy agenda faces enormous obstacles and the economy is tanking.

Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” still faces opposition from GOP senators worried about Medicaid cuts. Courts have curtailed the worst of his attacks on migrants and freed political prisoners Mohsen Mahdawi, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Mahmoud Khalil. And people have risen up in Los Angeles and across the country against his ICE raids.

Trump has already been forced to back off many of his reciprocal tariffs, earning the moniker “TACO Don” (“Trump Always Chickens Out”). Russia has escalated its war in Ukraine. Trump’s bombing of Iran has dug the United States deeper into war and genocide in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Trump has failed to pivot to Asia.

Trump has even screwed up on his signature issue, the economy. His tariffs will increase prices and cut into profits, which dropped this quarter by 3.3 percent in the biggest drop since the pandemic. His ICE raids will lead to labor shortages, drive up the cost of wages, and further slow the economy, ushering in a new epoch of stagnation and inflation.

At the same time, Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will cut tax revenue while it raises spending, increasing the government’s deficit, debt, interest rates, and interest payments, risking a fiscal crisis for the state. As a result, Moody’s has downgraded Washington’s credit rating.

These failures have led to a growing list of splits within the administration and between it and capital. Trump and Elon Musk had an apocalyptic breakup of their bromance over the financial profligacy of the Big Beautiful Bill, Trump broke with MAGA isolationists over Iran, and the majority of capitalists oppose his tariffs.

But a cornered beast is actually........

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