Monday 20 January saw the inauguration of Donald Trump as US president. Millions of people around the world followed it live and it did not disappoint: the spectacle was nauseating. A ceremony in which this far-right reactionary surrounded himself with the most powerful plutocrats in the country, confirming that far from being a spokesman for the anti-establishment, he is the most genuine representative of aggressive imperialist capitalism, ready to implement an agenda of brutal attacks on the working class at home and abroad, and to roll back as many democratic rights as he can.
Trump began his speech surrounded by the three richest people in the world -Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk-, the country's biggest CEOs and the greatest representatives of the far right on an international scale, such as the Argentinian Milei and the president of Italy, Giorgia Meloni. No one was missing. Nor was there any applause from Democratic Party leaders such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris. From minute one, the New York tycoon decreed open war on workers and the poor, especially against the immigrant population, women and the LGTBI collective, wrapped himself in the flag of the most furious warmongering, and promised all the resources of the state for the big monopolies and for the billionaires to continue increasing their fortunes. All of this was accompanied by the most shocking scene of the night: Musk giving the Nazi salute on three occasions.
Trump had a desk set up on stage at the Capital One Arena to sign his first executive orders, in a bid to usher in a ‘golden age’ in the United States. He repealed Joe Biden's 78 executive orders, froze the issuance of regulations by federal agencies and hiring of civil servants, withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement, and proclaimed two new documents to supposedly restore free speech and end the persecution of political opponents.
What happened yesterday is no joke. Yes, Trump has a lunatic, narcissistic and sometimes delusional behaviour, something that was also characteristic of the bloodthirsty dictatorships of Hitler or Mussolini. But Trump is not a madman living his moment of glory, let alone an outsider with no supporters within the American ruling class. The fact that he got off scot-free on all charges for his involvement in the assault on the Capitol on 6 January 2021 proves his enormous links to the state apparatus and the circles of political power in the country.
Trump's agenda may horrify us, many even surprise us, but minimising what he represents or mocking his eccentric behaviour does not prepare the movement, the working class and the youth for the serious challenge we face. Understanding the historical moment we live in and the deep social causes that explain the phenomenon of Trumpism[1], is a must if we are to draw the right political lessons and take up the fight against a threat that is unprecedented in recent decades: a far-right, anti-communist, racist, imperialist government, allied with fascist forces on an international scale, will steer the course of the world's leading power for the next four years.
A ruthless imperialist masquerading as a peacemaker
The speech of the now 47th US president was punctuated by constant references to ‘America's golden age beginning right now’. Trump has promised his social base - those irritated middle classes increasingly fanatical about his nationalist and racist discourse, and large sections of an impoverished and demoralised working class that sees no future - that he will make America great again. Declarations that ‘our country will flourish’ and that ‘we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any more’, stand on the wounded pride of a declining power. Reclaiming America's imperial aura with the might of its military industry behind it is his goal.
There is an ongoing battle for world supremacy, and the United States has been displaced and overtaken in many areas by a power that has accumulated immense technological, industrial and commercial muscle: China. Although the intervention in Syria and the strengthening of Zionism in the Middle East after the savage genocide perpetrated in Gaza have dealt a severe blow to the Russian-Chinese bloc in the region, it is impossible to hide the fact that US imperialism has been suffering serious setbacks in recent years.
Its remarkable loss of influence on all continents and among historical allies, the defeats in Iraq, Afghanistan and now in Ukraine, have placed Washington in an existential dilemma. This is what moves and encourages the US ruling class to do battle with all the means at its disposal, even if it means spreading chaos and definitively ending any vestige of equilibrium for global capitalism.
Trump is a declared enemy of the peoples of the world, but if he can go this far it is because Joe Biden and the Democrats have unleashed an escalation of savage imperialist militarism, imposing war in Europe on the Ukrainian front, bringing Germany to its knees to disconnect it from Russia, launching a trade war against its adversaries, and backing with the most terrifying weapons the Palestinian holocaust in Gaza.
Biden has been nothing more than a made-up Trumpist governing for the same plutocracy of which the New York tycoon is a part. But we must underline that Biden failed in many of his international and domestic objectives. He has failed to prevent China's advance, he has crashed in Ukraine and strengthened Putin's regime, and the trail of misery and impoverishment he has left behind in these four years is appalling. This is a good reminder that the obstacles Trump will face are not a detail.
During his election campaign, and yesterday he repeated it, Trump vowed that his priority was to reach an agreement with Russia to end almost three years of war in Ukraine, and now he presents himself as the architect of the ceasefire in Gaza. But all this is pure fanfare, propaganda, to generate a state of opinion that thanks him for playing peacemaker. It is the world upside down. This reactionary is the ultimate expression of the most violent warmongering and will do whatever it takes to try to restore the power of a declining power.
Although he was sworn into office yesterday, Trump's second term has been off to a noisy start for weeks with an incendiary foreign policy agitation. He has proposed that Canada be annexed as a state of the Union, for Mexico he intends to intervene in its territory under the pretext of the fight against drugs and ‘the emergency of the migratory crisis’, he wants to recover the Panama Canal and even buy Greenland, and thus control key commercial and geostrategic areas for US capital.
Bragging? It is still too early to say. The history of the inter-imperialist struggle is full of dramatic events, wars and conflicts that at first seemed impossible, but which end up happening, driven by the devilish logic of contradictions that cannot be resolved through negotiation and agreement. The Trump administration is willing to go as far as it can to return the United States to world primacy. The problem is that it is not that easy.
More trade war, economic nationalism and profiteering
It is clear that the Trump administration represents a remarkable departure from the usual ways in which the bourgeoisie exercises its rule. In capitalist democracies, fiction and appearances play an important role. Parliament sets itself up as the repository of ‘popular sovereignty’. The judicial bodies are ‘independent’ of the executive and the legislature. The executive, composed of responsible professional politicians, seeks to govern on behalf of the people guided by the ‘common good’. With Trump all this theatre has been swept away.
We have a government made up directly of millionaires, prominent members of the ruling class and far-right opinion leaders. No longer do they hand the job over to a group of bureaucrats who they manage behind the scenes as was traditionally the case. It is now the direct domain of plutocrats who have set themselves the goal of making the state a servant for their private accumulation. A very relevant fact and one that also shows the senile degeneration of American capitalism. Without this layer of professional politicians educated in parliamentary farce, Trump is becoming more and more naked every day as the far-right agitator that he is. And that, obviously, will have serious implications for the consciousness of millions of oppressed people around the world and within US borders.
Trump uses a lot of demagogy and diversionary manoeuvring to try to obscure what is one of his main goals in this presidency: crushing the enemy within, extracting the greatest percentage of workers' surplus value by harshly attacking labour and wage conditions, further brutally diverting social spending to enrich the capitalists through more privatisation and subsidies, implementing vicious anti-union legislation, removing any environmental restrictions that stand in the way of the profit motive of the oil, mining and agri-food companies and, of course, putting a gun to the temple of millions of immigrants to accept slave-like conditions. And all this with very calculated plans to give more power and more impunity to the police machine, while their fascist squadron organisations grow stronger.
And the outward continuation of this domestic agenda is to prepare the US for a protracted economic war against China and its allies. Obviously, as proven by his first term in office and the policies of the Democratic administration that have followed suit, the chances of success of this strategy are highly questionable.
The struggle between US imperialism and the Asian giant for control of markets, strategic raw materials, global production and supply chains has taken a momentous leap forward. But Washington has come off badly for the moment. There is ample evidence that Beijing is gaining decisive positions. The New York Times has to admit: ‘China is using its roughly $18 trillion economy as a weapon. [...] China has become the world leader in telecommunications equipment, effectively destroying the North American industry. It has done the same in solar panels and commercial drones, and is close to catching up in high-speed trains and batteries. [In ten advanced industries (including semiconductors, robotics, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, space and chemicals), China is moving to the global forefront of innovation. [...] And in some industries, such as electric vehicles and commercial nuclear power, Chinese companies are now leading the way[2].
This is what lies behind all the economic, protectionist and tariff measures proposed by Trump. But these recipes have already been tried and have not produced the expected result. It is naïve to think that tariffs of 60% against Chinese products, or against goods from other countries that trade with China, will succeed in slowing down Beijing's economic and productive development. On the contrary, as experience has shown, it can be a boomerang that will hit the US market and the US working class in the form of inflation. To defeat China, Trump would have to declare a trade war on more than half the world.
At the same time, the US economy seems far from being cured of the gangrene it is suffering from. Overnight, Trump has amassed a fortune on paper of some $8 billion with the launch of a memecoin: the $TRUMP. And this is precisely the great American hope: to further boost financial speculation through all kinds of products, be it bitcoin or the repurchase of share packages, outside the development of industrial production and productive forces. The stock market bubble is skyrocketing, and bitcoin not only costs more than $100,000, its market value has reached $2.15 trillion.[3] A virtual currency! If we add to all this a trade deficit that in the last year has grown by 12.8%, the global outlook for the Yankee empire is complicated.
Hence all of Trump's coups d'effect and his imperialist threats. Hence the close interconnection between economic and political phenomena. Hence “the attempts to save the economy by inoculating it with the virus extracted from the corpse of nationalism produce that bloody poison that goes by the name of fascism”[4].
National emergency on the border, climate denialism and machismo
“I will declare a national emergency on the southern border”. With these words began the announcement of the xenophobic and racist policies that the Trump Administration plans to implement to crush and persecute the migrant population over the next five years.
To seal the border, Trump intends to send in the military and the National Guard to “repel the disastrous invasion of our country” by “millions and millions of criminal aliens.”
At the same instant Trump was on stage, immigrants waiting at the eight border points were finding out that the CBP One app had been shut down by the government. All appointments have been canceled, the app warned them. This program was used to process the arrival of migrants and the processing of asylum applications. Now it no longer exists, and visas cannot be processed at the Mexican border either, leaving thousands of people in legal limbo.
To seal the border, Trump intends to send in the army and the National Guard to “repel the disastrous invasion of our country” by “millions and millions of criminal aliens”. This racist discourse, following the style of the Nazis when they criminalized the Jews, is a triumph of the most supremacist sector of the Make America Great Again movement that promotes the “great replacement” theory. Mass deportations, targeting more than 14 million people, are already a frightening reality. In just one week Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have carried out nearly 4,000 arrests and hundreds of removals from the country. Massive raids in the streets, workplaces, schools and even churches in cities like New York, Boston or Chicago have unleashed a real manhunt, marked by racial bias, which also encourages the violence of fascist and paramilitary Trumpist gangs to do whatever they want, in the purest Ku Kux Klan style.
Terror and anguish are now a fact of life for millions of undocumented migrants. But Trump, who has just announced that he will set up Guantanamo as a concentration camp for 30,000 immigrants, is moving forward in establishing a police state, in militarizing society, deepening authoritarian tendencies and, for the moment, testing his forces on the weakest link of the population. In addition, of course, to using racism to look for a scapegoat and divert attention from the responsibility of the capitalists in the social crisis hitting the country...,
In addition to deportations, another of the executive orders signed provides for the suspension of refugee resettlement and the death penalty for “illegal immigrants who maim and murder Americans.”
Talk of immigrants draining scarce resources or dissolving national identity is nothing new for Trump. But now there is an even greater interest in using racism to continue looking for a scapegoat and divert attention from the responsibility of capitalists and businessmen in the social crisis hitting the country.
In energy matters, the objective is also clear: “drill, drill and drill” giving free rein to the massive extraction of fossil fuels such as gas or oil. At a time when the climate crisis threatens the very survival of humidity and raging fires consume California, the new president and his trusted technofascists promise to repeal all “undue” regulations on energy production and use, eliminate emissions limits and relax pollution limits. Of course, bye bye to the Paris Agreement. While we know that this pact is a dead letter in the fight against environmental destruction, Trump's gesture will allow more multi-billion dollar investments by banks and multinationals in industries that pollute and destroy the environment.
The cultural war that the new president is selling us is based on the most repugnant machismo and the attack on sexual diversity. He has already been very clear: there are only two genders, male and female, which augurs an open war against the Trans community, and women and children must be protected from the radical gender ideology. An agenda already implemented in many Republican states with the prohibition of abortion rights that is now advancing thanks to Sillicon Valley plutocrats like Zuckerberg, who has allowed to label gay or trans people as “mentally ill” on Instagram and Facebook.
Elon Musk, 21st century techno-fascism
Trump's arrival in the White House has sparked enthusiasm among Washington billionaires. More than 50 superrich offered their resources to Trump and his program, and the reception that Wall Street gave him leaves no room for doubt: the indexes soared to record highs and the dollar recorded its biggest rise since 2020.
One of them, and now his right-hand man, is Elon Musk. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is the best demonstration of the type of elements that are part of the dictatorship of financial capital that dominates the world. With a fortune of 421.2 billion dollars, Musk has no problem in showing himself as he is: a neo-fascist who makes the Roman salute in front of millions of spectators, who has arrived where he has arrived thanks to the most ruthless worker exploitation, and who raises his wealth thanks to speculative madness.
Just as Krupp, Thyssen or Bosch supported the Nazi party, today Elon Musk not only shares much of the reactionary Trumpist agenda, but is placed in a place of power within the new Administration.
The decrepitude of US imperialism is also reflected in its own leaders. It is not out of the question that Elon Musk will provoke contradictions within the Government, especially because of his opposition to tariffs on electric vehicles, but this ultra-right-winger is a great asset to push forward the ideological battle against anything that smells of the left and a neoliberal economic program to make the mega-rich even richer.
The class struggle in the U.S. enters a new phase
Trump's victory poses a great danger for the working class and youth, against migrants, the anti-fascist movement and in solidarity with Palestine, the militant feminist struggle. The class struggle enters fully into a much tougher stage, marked by the ultra-right agenda of the White House and the recrudescence of the authoritarian and Bonapartist tendencies of the state.
But the American working class has long experience. Trump's first term was marked by strong social mobilization, starting with the Women's March and culminating in the social uprising against racist police violence after the assassination of George Floyd.
The failure of all Joe Biden's promises and the savage capitalist policies he has imposed are the best demonstration of what works and what does not work in the fight against the extreme right. All the left that appealed to the capitalist state and bourgeois democracy has failed.
The lessons of these years have been many, and they have been very hard and useful. The radicalization and polarization towards the extreme right has been parallel to the growth of a polarization also towards the extreme left, the formation of new structures, organizations and movements born from below and which have acquired tremendous firepower. In the United States as well.
Under the slogan We Fight Back 2025, more than 700 protests, demonstrations and rallies brought together hundreds of thousands of people in major American cities to welcome Trump as he deserves. The will to fight is strong and has been demonstrated.
The return of Trump puts on the table the urgency of building a mass organization with a revolutionary program. A socialist alternative is what is needed so that the working class, numerically much more powerful than in the past, can deploy all its strength, place itself at the center of political action, become the focus of reference for all the sectors that are suffering the capitalist crisis, politically isolate and physically crush fascism. An organization of the workers and for the workers that in the face of racism and attacks on immigration raises unity and internationalism against our real enemies.
This is the task before the American working class and youth. There are only two roads: either the most ruthless reaction, or the struggle for socialist revolution to overthrow this rotten system that only offers us imperialist wars, extreme right and extreme misery.
Notes:
[1] Donald Trump vuelve a la Casa Blanca tras una victoria rotunda
[2] We Are in an Industrial War. China Is Starting to Win.
[3] El bitcoin hace historia: alcanza los 100.000 dólares y un valor de mercado de 2 billones
