While Trump makes friends of enemies and vice versa internationally, at the heart of his pro-billionaire strategy is the demoralization of U.S. workers, including immigrants. He seeks to make the working class powerless to resist his onslaught on behalf of the top 1%.
By Andrea Bauer, April 2025
https://socialism.com/fs-article/trumps-cruel-rampage-why/
It’s perfectly understandable that people in the U.S. are tuning out the news these days. Chaotic mass firings, survival programs like Social Security and Medicaid in jeopardy, the Constitution being shredded: who wants to watch a real-life horror show?
What people do not get from the mainstream media purveyors of doom is a real explanation of why this is happening. Is there a motive to the madness?
The point is fear
Thousands of government employees have already lost their jobs and tens of thousands are living in the shadow of the ax. (See “Attacks on federal workers are an injury to all.”)
Sudden unemployment and the financial hardship that comes with it is devastating. Also hurtful is the cavalier and humiliating way the layoffs are being imposed. Donald Trump and his hatchet man Elon Musk are treating productive, longtime public staffers as just so much trash.
What is the purpose of such cruelty?
Uruguayan author and social justice champion Eduardo Galeano has said about torture, “The purpose is not getting information. It’s spreading fear.” The same is true about Trump’s firing of huge swaths of the workforce. It’s not about efficiency. It’s about spreading terror.
Trump’s goal is to get workers used to the arbitrary and inhumane exercise of power. To strip away any expectation that government exists to help them. And to soften them up for an even more extreme form of social control if the ruling class comes to believe this is necessary.
The U.S. is not yet under fascist rule. But Trump is encouraging the advance of fascist groups, and he and outfits like the Proud Boys are “standing by.”
Hand in hand with Trump’s campaign against ordinary workers is his purge of top leaders in the FBI, CIA, and military. Trump wants the whole government subservient to him to carry out his mission — protecting and enlarging the profits of billionaires — without impediment.
A fatally troubled economy
Consumer confidence and spending in the U.S. are falling, prices are still rising, unemployment is ticking upward, and the stock market is vacillating wildly, with huge drops based on Trump’s tariff chaos. Talking heads are beginning to raise the specter of recession.
In many other countries the situation is worse. Growth is stagnant in Europe; Germany, the region’s biggest economy, is especially struggling. (See “German far right surges with anti-migrant racism.”) Growth is slowing even in China.
Capitalism’s problems are not transitory, but built in. The profit system relies above all on the ability to expand. But today it is coming up against the barriers of finite resources and finite markets.
Decades of neoliberalism — “free” trade, deregulation, privatization, a race to the bottom in the areas of wages and labor and environmental protections — haven’t solved the problem. This failure means stepped-up international competition, from trade wars to hot wars.
Because of his extremism and his evil-clown persona, Trump can seem like a political outlier. His goal, however, is the same as every other president since the U.S. rose to global dominance: vie to keep the country on top. This explains his aggressively “America First” international policies, even though they will provoke still more economic problems. Whatever one might say about Trump’s intelligence, he understands that capitalism is a game of winners and losers.
Moreover, the ruling class is facing political challenges as well as economic ones. Class conflict has been rising since the militant, women-led, successful teacher strikes in Southern “red states” in 2018. So has popular discontent, exemplified by the massive Black Lives Matter protests against police violence after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Strikes and labor organizing have increased dramatically over the past five years.
Trump’s illegal and undemocratic attacks aim to pulverize opposition from any quarter, from labor or feminist or LGBTQ+ activists to defenders of Palestine or voting, civil, and immigrant rights. But history shows that repression generates resistance. Trump is playing a dangerous game.
How did we get here?
First, let’s note that capitalist democracy is not “democracy” — at least not in the abstract or idealized way it’s presented to us. It’s democracy within the framework of class rule — meaning that ordinary people have only those rights that won’t upset the status quo.
On top of that, in a decades-long trend, the executive branch has been amassing greater power at the expense of the other branches of government. Handwringing over the “imperial presidency” is, unfortunately, nothing new — although Trump is pushing the limits beyond anything seen before.
Also leading to this crisis point is the lack of an independent political voice for working people. Life without a labor party means that voters’ only choices are Democrats or Republicans. Thus “lesser evil” politics prevail time and again while workers’ conditions worsen — until an angry and disenchanted portion of the electorate is ready to accept the promises of a strongman to come to their rescue.
There is no reason to despair. Workers and oppressed people have incredible untapped power. Alongside the multitude of legal challenges to Trump’s outrages — from his vicious deportations to his sellout of Ukraine — are the rumblings of a grassroots resistance. This is where the fight will be won, with the aid of democratic united fronts that bring together people of different political persuasions in the pursuit of a common working-class goal: dump Trump and stop fascism.
Finally, one more takeaway from this debacle: reforms are fragile. If we the majority want a good life on a planet that can sustain us, revolutionary change is the only answer.