Stop Trump’s fascist agenda

Mass struggle can defeat capitalist reaction

Millions of people are angry, depressed, and disgusted at Trump winning the capitalist election. Many are terrified.

They have a right to be. Trump says “no price tag” will stop him from deporting millions of immigrant workers in fascist roundups.

His campaign spent $215 million on TV ads attacking transgender people. Bigots are being encouraged to assault Transgender people, their families, and allies.

Text messages have been sent to Black people across the country, ordering them to report to plantations and pick cotton as enslaved people. 

Yet, for all of the bluster of Trump and Fox News, the convicted rapist is hardly getting any more votes than he got four years ago. It’s the Democratic vote that has fallen like a rock.

Wars and hunger don’t produce enthusiasm 

Trump was able to appeal to people sick of wars because Biden shipped at least $175 billion of weapons to Ukraine. Another $17.9 billion of bombs and shells were sent to Netanyahu’s apartheid regime that’s committing genocide in Gaza and Lebanon. 

Getting war criminal Dick Cheney to endorse Kamala Harris didn’t help either. For many in the Arab and Muslim communities, Trump couldn’t be worse than the genocide enablers Biden and Harris.

What has four years of Joe Biden as president done for the working class? Rents went through the roof, increasing by nearly 30% from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to January 2024. 

A record-high 653,104 people were counted as homeless in January 2023, with over 256,000 of them unsheltered in the winter. The $193 billion spent on the proxy war against Russia and Netanyahu’s genocide could have housed hundreds of thousands of people.

Food prices rose by 27% between January 2020 and September 2024. It was obvious that capitalist monopolies were responsible.

Even the White House admitted that “four large meat-packing companies control 85% of the beef market. In poultry, the top four processing firms control 54% of the market. And in pork, the top four processing firms control about 70% of the market.” 

Biden’s response was to let SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits — formerly known as food stamps — be cut by at least $95 per month on March 1, 2023. 

While the White House refused to sue monopolies, McDonald’s did. The exploiter of over two million low-wage workers and the largest purchaser of beef filed an antitrust suit against the four biggest meat packers on Oct. 4. 

How many of the 49 million people who had to use food banks in 2022 didn’t see any point to vote in 2024?

Capitalists claw back concessions

The 2020 elections were held after the Black Lives Matter movement had swept the United States. As many as 26 million people had taken to the streets.

It was because of these millions that Kamala Harris was made the Democratic candidate for vice president. If the 2020 election had been held months earlier, when the movement was at its height, Biden’s 7 million vote margin over Trump would have been greater. 

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck earlier that year, billionaires and banksters were frightened. Not so much for their own health, although thousands of them fled their Manhattan penthouses.

They were terrified of what tens of millions of workers suddenly thrown out of work would do. That’s the reason why their Congress approved “economic impact payments” that gave thousands of dollars to tens of millions of families.

For the first time in nearly 50 years of cutbacks and union-busting, many poor and working people felt they had gotten a little bit ahead. Rents were frozen while evictions and foreclosures largely stopped.

The number of people living under the absurdly low federal poverty level dropped by 14.5 million people. The number of Black and Latinx children living in absolute poverty dropped by 60%.

So it was all the more painful when Biden and the Democratic Party-controlled Congress let the American Rescue Plan’s anti-poverty measures expire in 2021.

The number of people living in absolute poverty rose by 14.5 million people, while the share of children living in poverty rose by seven percentage points. 

Meanwhile, rising prices — largely the result of monopolies grabbing as much profit as they could — canceled any wage gains made by the working class.

The capitalist class recoiled from the anti-poverty measures they felt compelled to carry out at the height of the pandemic. They even think it was these limited programs that fueled the Black Lives Matter movement instead of hundreds of years of oppression.

Fightback to survive

Their rebellion against those concessions makes the wealthy and powerful all the more vicious. Trump, Vance, and their string pullers like Elon Musk and Wall Street hedge fund operators plan to launch an offensive against the working class at home.

They want to axe every program won by the working class in the last 90 years, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Capitalists seek to jack up the retirement age to 70. 

Trump will use the U.S. government’s deficit created by the trillion-dollar Pentagon budget and $950 billion in tax-free interest payments as the excuse to do so.

At the same time, Trump & Co. is targeting the rest of the world, particularly the People’s Republic of China.

Trump’s scheme to bring industry back to the U.S. is fueled by the needs of the military-industrial complex. But his plan to super-size tariffs on imported goods may self-destruct.

While before World War II, the vast majority of manufactured items were produced in the United States and Western Europe, today they’re largely made in Asia, Brazil and Mexico.

Trump’s tariffs will be a wage cut for the entire working class. People will have to fight back.  

Next year will be the bicentennial of the first world capitalist crisis. Since 1825, recessions or depressions have occurred every 10 years or so.

While shutdowns during the pandemic may have delayed the next recession, it will break out sooner than later.

The Democratic Party will do nothing to protect us. Many of its big shots are calling to retreat from any opposition to bigotry.

We need to organize ourselves to stop Trump’s raids against immigrants. Union organizing drives are the best weapon against all the Elon Musks.

One of the first steps is to demonstrate against Trump’s “inhoguration” on Jan. 20, 2025. Mass struggle is our only way to survive.