How to fight Trump 2.0

Three months before the presidential election, many ordinary people feel a sense of relief. They do not have to watch a confrontation between two old men, one with the deaths of over 40,000 Palestinians on his record, the other a billionaire landowner and now a felon who is ready to launch a complete reactionary program.

After his defeat in 2020, Trump has come back more dangerous than ever, and the basis for the popularity of his reactionary ideas will not simply disappear if he loses this year. We have seen how the last four years of the Biden-Harris administration have given them a perfect opportunity to fester. So the question we must ask is: Do Harris and the Democrats have what it takes to put up a real fight against the rise of Trumpism and the far right?

Project 2025 and Agenda 47

The two main points of Trump's “Agenda 47” come as no surprise after years of campaigning around “building the wall”: seal the border, stop the “migrant invasion,” and carry out the largest deportation operation in American history. While imperialist wars, inflation, and climate crises uproot the most oppressed layers of society around the world, the right in the advanced capitalist countries to which migrants are fleeing is making anti-immigrant policies central to their campaign promises. This, of course, is in addition to a host of anti-worker, anti-women, and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric from the Trump campaign that serves to incite the far right and further divide and oppress workers.

Trump 2.0 could go much further than he did in 2016. He can now count on the support of experienced reactionaries who are ready to fill his cabinet and the state apparatus. These reactionaries include the 100 conservative groups behind the Heritage Foundation's “Project 2025,” a 900-page strategy book that envisions a right-wing restructuring of the federal government.

Plans include dismantling the U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Homeland Security, cutting Medicaid and Social Security, cutting funding for renewable energy, and further restricting access to abortion. Anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ policies are couched in language that calls for “restoring the family as the center of American life.” While Trump has recently tried to distance himself from Project 2025 in order to save face, a look behind the scenes shows that several of the authors already served in the previous Trump administration. Trump's running mate JD Vance uses similar arguments to what is in Project 2025.

The same old strategy

The threat of Trump and Project 2025 is generating real fear among ordinary people, especially queer youth and immigrants. For Democrats, this is the perfect fear-mongering bargaining chip. Combined with empty cries of “saving democracy,” it's a recipe for covering up their failures of the last four years. Democrats rely on this fear-mongering every election cycle, but fail when it comes to aggressively fighting for what working people really need.

Not only has the Biden administration failed to deliver on its campaign promises, such as eliminating student debt, raising the minimum wage, fighting for climate action, and reforming health care—it has done the opposite. The Biden administration has continued many Trump-era immigration policies, expanded drilling projects, failed to address the cost of living crisis, and led the charge in providing weapons, training, and strategy for the Gaza massacre.

A third option?

The “undecided” movement during the Democratic primaries, led primarily by Muslim Americans who refused to vote for Biden and his genocidal policies, expressed a real frustration with the pro-imperialist Democratic Party. Nearly three-quarters of a million voters marked “undecided” or sent a blank ballot by mail. But polls show Republicans are gaining momentum in majority-Muslim counties in Michigan as well.

The “undecided” movement must not only continue to withhold votes from Democrats, but also show a path forward, including by taking a clear stand for the genuinely anti-war Green Party candidate, Jill Stein. Even if Stein does not win, every vote against Harris and Trump is a vote for something new that concretizes the mood to break with the status quo. The result of the perpetual cycle of voting for the lesser of two evils pulls Democrats to the right and encourages the growth of the far right.

Defeating Trump vs. Defeating Trumpism

While a clear vote against Democrats and Republicans in November may signal a break with the two corporate parties, politics does not begin and end at the ballot box. Even if Trump loses the presidential election, it will take far more than the Democrats on the defensive to defeat the far right and the global rise of Trumpism.

Only a coordinated mass movement of workers and young people around a common pro-worker political program can fight and defeat the far right. This is far from utopian – after Trump's election in 2016, it was the masses who took to the streets and initiated the resistance, while the Democratic Party's initial response was to congratulate Trump on his victory.

It was the drivers of minivans and protesters at airports who forced the reversal of Trump's Islamophobic “Muslim ban.” It was the air traffic controllers who staged a “sick-out” and the threat of a strike by the flight attendants union that forced Trump to end the longest government shutdown in history. And it was a rally of 40,000 workers and youth in Boston that ended a far-right march after a white supremacist killed a protester in Charlottesville a week earlier.

These confrontations with the right are not unique to the US. This month, tens of thousands of protesters gathered in England and Northern Ireland to oppose the far right's violent, racist attacks on local Muslim communities. Socialist Alternative's sister organisation in the UK has been vigorously building this movement. The election of five independent candidates to Parliament shows the possibility of forming an independent coalition. These victories include Jeremy Corbyn, who was previously suspended from the Labour Party for his left-wing ideas, and others. All of these campaigns were organised around a pro-Palestinian programme – this could generate the enthusiasm for a new party needed to take the movement forward here.

New party, new system

In the 2010s, Bernie Sanders' call for a political revolution against the billionaire class mobilized millions of people behind him, creating a tremendous opportunity for a new independent workers' party outside the Democratic establishment. Today, the emergence of left-wing union leaders and union reform groups that label the bosses as enemies express that potential. The major unions that supported the ceasefire resolutions should break with the Democrats and start organizing to stop Trump's reactionary agenda. Linking labor struggles with social and antiwar struggles will be critical to paving the way for the emergence of a new party that can fight on the side of workers.

Ultimately, building militant unions and organizing a new party are just the first steps to getting what workers need. War, poverty, climate catastrophe, and oppression are deeply rooted in the system of capitalism itself, and the CEOs of major corporations are the real puppet masters of every election cycle. Working people not only deserve a new system based on need, not profit, but desperately need it. A socialist future is possible, but only if we start building the kind of left alternative we need now and organize on a large scale.