The Election of Trump: Causes and Consequences
The response to the election of Trump must be the fight to go deeper into the working class, to develop within the working class a political and socialist leadership.
This post is the second in a short series from the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Website explaining the causes and consequences of the Trump victory and elaborating a political strategy for the working class to fight back against the incoming administration. Each post has been transcribed from a recent online meeting organized by the SEP and aims to provide a critical analysis of the election’s outcome and to outline a socialist strategy to mobilize workers in the immense struggles that lie ahead.
Joseph Kishore, national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party and SEP 2024 presidential candidate:
As indicated, I will try to give a summary of the political issues following on that introduction and introducing the three very important reports which will be given today. Now, the re-election of Trump is a political shock to millions of people in the United States and throughout the world. Less than four years ago, Trump attempted to violently overthrow the 2020 elections, and now this fascist demagogue has decisively won the 2024 election with both the electoral college and the popular vote majority. This meeting will be an initial review of the causes of Trump’s victory and its implications. The reports will present in detail the vote last week and what it shows, as well as the plans of an incoming Trump Administration. I just want to stress a few points. First, the coming to power of a second Trump Administration cannot be understood in relationship to merely the personal attributes of Trump and the Republican Party. It has to be related to the structure of American society and the escalating crisis of American and global capitalism. In its initial statement on the election of Donald Trump, the World Socialist Website wrote, ‘However it was achieved—and this is not to minimize the political complicity of the Democratic Party—the coming to power of a second Trump Administration represents the violent realignment of the American political superstructure to correspond with the real social relations that exist in the United States. American capitalism is dominated by an oligarchy which controls the entire political system. 800 billionaires have a combined wealth of more than 6.2 trillion dollars. There are now more than twelve billionaires with a wealth of more than 100 billion dollars each. This includes Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and top Trump supporter, whose wealth has soared to over 300 billion dollars—it has increased by 50 billion dollars since the election last week—Jeff Bezos of Amazon, 224 billion dollars, Larry Ellison of Oracle, 230 billion dollars, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, 203 billion dollars, and Warren Buffet, 145 billion dollars. There are some slides here which show the extreme growth of social inequality over the past two decades, twenty-five years.
This is a graph showing the labor share of national income from 2000 to 2024, which has shown a precipitous decline, including particularly under the Democratic Party administrations, but this has been a bi-partisan policy. It is a real collapse of the national income going to labor, going to the working class.
This is a graph showing the rise of income inequality, one of the basic measures of income inequality, the Gini Coefficient, which, again, shows the continuous growth of social inequality over decades. This graph shows that growth from 1970 through the present, the extreme growth of social inequality which is of course reflected in the immense concentration of wealth in the hands of the capitalist oligarchy. Now, to the next graph.
This just shows the rise in the wealth of the oligarchy, primarily in the United States, which increased 62 percent under the Biden Administration from 2021 through 2024. The individual billionaires are listed. Most of them are in the United States, showing a staggering growth in the wealth of this tiny layer of the population. The blue is the net worth in January of 2021, and the corresponding net worth as of November of 2024. And that actually does not include the growth in wealth since the election. As I mentioned already, the growth of Elon Musk’s wealth personally has grown now to over 300 billion dollars. Now, Trump, in this context, is not merely an individual with authoritarian inclinations. He is the political representative of an entrenched capitalist oligarchy. This oligarchy is breaking with democratic forms of rule. The administration, as will be detailed by Tom, is prepared to use every mechanism of the state to deport millions of immigrants, suppress dissent, and attack what Trump has repeatedly referred to as ‘the enemy within.’ At the forefront of Trump and the Republican Party’s social policies is a brutal assault on the living standards of the working class. Musk, whose wealth has skyrocketed, has stated that the policies of the incoming administration will produce hardship, which means a massive attack on essential programs and an increase in exploitation. He has called for a cut in government spending by 2 trillion dollars, which can only be taken out of Social Security, Medicare, and other basic social programs. It is worth stressing that while Harris had the backing of many billionaires, in advance of the election, several of the wealthiest oligarchs made clear that they were either openly backing a Trump victory, or else were orienting themselves to such an outcome. Perhaps most significant is the response of Bezos, the world’s second wealthiest individual, who instructed the Washington Post not to endorse a candidate, and, in the aftermath of Trump’s victory, congratulated him for his ‘extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory’ and wished him every success. In terms of the objective conditions underlying the turn of the ruling class to dictatorship, one should also stress the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has ravaged and continues to ravage American society, with nearly 1.5 million lives lost to date and countless more millions impacted by long COVID. The impact of the pandemic has been colossal in the United States and all over the world and continues. The excess death estimates conducted by The Economist were stopped earlier this year, but they show an ongoing catastrophe of mass death and long COVID, which has debilitated millions upon millions of people and goes completely unmentioned in the political establishment. The World Socialist Website and the Socialist Equality Party have referred to the normalization of mass death and debilitation. We should recall that four years ago, Trump’s coup was driven centrally by demands to remove all restraints on the spread of the coronavirus, regardless of the human cost. And that is a policy that the Biden Administration has, in fact, implemented. The Trump victory must also be seen against the backdrop of the escalating war. Just as the pandemic has normalized mass death, the past year has seen the normalization of genocide and the massacre of Palestinians by Israel backed by the United States and both of its parties. In Ukraine, NATO’s proxy war against Russia has normalized nuclear war. This conflict, along with the war in Gaza, the genocide, is backed by imperialist alliances with openly fascist elements in both Israel and Ukraine. And the ruling class is preparing for the big one, that is the coming conflict with China. In several of the meetings prior to the election, we referred to the recent article in Foreign Affairs, The Return of ‘Total War,’ by Mara Karlin, which makes the following assessment of the state of de-escalating global war. She writes: ‘In both Ukraine and the Middle East, what has become clear is that the relatively narrow scope that defined war during the post 9/11 era has dramatically widened. An era of limited war has ended; an age of comprehensive conflict has begun. Indeed, what the world is witnessing today is akin to what theorists in the past have called ‘total war,’ in which combatants draw on vast resources, mobilize their societies, prioritize warfare over all other state activities, attack a broad variety of targets, and reshape their economies and those of other countries.’ What does it mean to mobilize all of society for war, to prioritize war over all other state activities? It means that everything must be subordinated to war. Social spending must be slashed to pay for war. The working class must be disciplined behind war. The class struggle must be suppressed in the interest of war. Opposition to war must be crushed and criminalized. The domestic corollary to total war is political dictatorship. Second, and in this context, the election and its aftermath have revealed not only the political bankruptcy but the complicity of the Democratic Party in the turn of the ruling class to dictatorship and fascism. Eric London will review the figures in greater detail. But the election has clearly demonstrated that Trump was able to capitalize on broad-based social anger because there is not genuine articulation of the interests of the working class, the vast majority of the population, within the political establishment. Indeed, Harris underperformed significantly compared to Biden in 2020, with support for the Democratic Party collapsing across nearly every demographic, aside from the affluent middle class and the rich. There are not, as David stressed, tens of millions of people who want a dictatorship, and, indeed the actual program of the incoming Trump Administration is deeply unpopular. But Trump was able to posture as the candidate of opposition to the social catastrophe that has developed under the Democrats and Biden. The Democrats are not the party of social anger but of complacency, and, as adopted by the Harris campaign in her slogan, of ‘joy.’ And the Democrats are a party of war and genocide. The central focus of the Biden Administration over the past four years has been the escalation of war, the ongoing US-NATO war against Russia and the ongoing genocide in Gaza in particular, which are two component parts of an expanding global war. Indeed, the Democrats’ focus on war created the conditions in which Trump could absurdly present himself as an anti-war candidate. Even in the aftermath of the election, the Biden Administration is escalating the war against Russia, which has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Last week, the Pentagon announced that US Military contractors would now be deployed directly in Ukraine. The genocide in Gaza is a defining political experience for an entire generation. With military, political, and ideological support from the Biden Administration and the entire political establishment, Israel has waged a year-long campaign of mass extermination and annihilation. The official death toll is over 43,600, while we know that the real death toll is far higher, 200,000 or more.
This is a graph showing the verified fatalities in Gaza since October 7, 2023, the beginning of the genocide, by age group, which shows, in fact, the majority of those killed in this onslaught are among the youngest. 0 to 4 years old is at the bottom. It shows victims, male on the left and female on the right, about half and half, and by age, 0 to 4 at the bottom. The largest cohort of those killed in the genocide is ages 5 to 9: an absolute slaughter which is ongoing. The Democratic Party was and remains committed to a massive escalation of the war. During her campaign, Harris repeated pledged to ensure that the US Military is the, as she put it, ‘strongest and most lethal in the world.’ In the final weeks before the election, she campaigned with arch-warmonger Liz Cheney, touting the support for the Democratic Party from leading Republicans associated with the war against Iraq and the institution of torture as state policy.
This was combined with the relentless promotion of racial and identity politics. The Democrats could not and were opposed to making any appeal based on the interests of the working class. Instead, haranguing voters for not turning out for Harris, allegedly due to racism and hatred of women. Now, the lesser of two evils argument was and is bankrupt in two respects. First, the Democrats themselves are responsible for genociding Gaza and the expansion of war, as well as culpability in the attack on democratic rights, including the arrests and suppression of protests against the genocide on campuses throughout the country. And second, it is impossible to oppose Trump and Republicans through support of the Democratic Party. Indeed, the response of the Democrats to the election marks the continuation of their response to the coup four years ago. Then, amidst the ongoing coup, Biden went on national television to appeal to Trump to call it off while the Democrats did nothing to stop it themselves. This was followed, David referenced, by the call for a strong Republican Party, raised by Biden, Pelosi, and other Democrats. Now, in response to Trump’s victory, the Democrats are not seeking to alert the population of what is to come, let alone mobilize opposition to take measures to block Trump’s plans. Instead, the Democrats are treating the election as if it was just another normal process of the transfer of power. As David mentioned, gone are the Democrats’ occasional references to Trump as a fascist. Harris, who only recently warned that Trump represented a grave threat to democratic rights, warmly congratulated him on his victory. Biden went on national television to declare that he would ‘direct [his] entire administration to work with [Trump’s] team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition.’ And then there is the interview which appeared in The New York Times this morning with Nancy Pelosi, in which she declares that the Democratic Party is, in fact, still the party of the working class, an absurd declaration. But this is what she says about the incoming Trump Administration and the question, ‘Are you going to try to work with the Republicans?’ She replies, ‘It’s not a question of that. We always try to work with Republicans. That’s a responsibility that we have. It used to be that way until recent times. We always tried to find our common ground.’ And then in relationship to Trump, she said, ‘He’s the president. We all want the president to succeed. We wanted him to succeed in 2016 until they went down a path that we had to disagree with.’ By the way, the path which they disagreed with was the question of the escalation of the war against Russia. That was the main foundation of their conflict with Trump. She continued, ‘But again, let’s give this a chance and see where we can find our common ground.’ That is the response of the Democratic Party to the elections. And, of course, this is in line with the class character of the Democrats, a party of Wall Street, the military intelligence agencies, and privileged sections of the upper middle class. Its main enemy is not on the right but on the left. The fourth point I want to stress is in relationship to the broader social ideological issues. In advance of the elections, the World Socialist Website published a very important reply from David North to a letter from historians backing Harris. The letter completely covered up the actual policies of the Biden-Harris Administration, including not even referencing the genocide in Gaza, while absurdly asserting that Harris had dedicated her life to affirming the rule of law and democracy. Moreover, the academics completely ignored the underlying factors necessary for any serious explanation of the rise of Trump. As David noted in reply, without an analysis of the causes of the emergence of a significant fascist threat in the United States, there can be no serious and successful struggle against it. In a subsequent letter following up on the reply to the historians, we pointed to the theoretical framework of Democratic Party politics over an extended period of time, based on the elevation of race and gender as the central political categories, and the rejection of any appeal to the working class. The Democrats’ debacle exposes the reactionary character of what David referred to in that letter as the ‘flim-flam of identity politics.’ He wrote: ‘In the United States, the new anti-Marxism blended with the longstanding tradition of anti-communism. Leftwing politics, of the sort connected to working class militancy, disappeared. The grievances related to identity displaced any serious concern with the massive concentration of wealth in a small segment of society at the expense of the working class. The pseudo-left replaced calls for equality with demands for equity. This was closely connected to the relentless harping on racial and ethnic differences, and, with it, a contempt for the genuinely democratic traditions of the United States. This found noxious expression in the 1619 Project. All this has been accompanied by a general cultural degradation, the promotion of every form of backwardness.’ It is worth pointing to the response of Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead architect of the 1619 Project, to the election, which is, of course, to blame racism and hatred of women. She writes, ‘Anti-blackness continues to be a powerful force in this country.’ She added, ‘We are already seeing the rationalizing of how we got here and the blaming of the political party—that is the Democratic party—that, though flawed, actually reflects multi-racial democracy. We must resist this. Voters knew exactly who Trump was and chose him anyway.’ That is, it’s not the Democratic Party that is responsible, but anti-black racism. In fact, the pseudo-left’s obsession with identity has created fertile ground for the rise of Trump and the effort to build up a genuine fascist movement, including through the promotion of the most vile forms of racism. By dividing the working class along racial lines, the Democratic Party played a critical role in facilitating the rise of the far-right. Fifth and finally, the coming to power of a second Trump Administration will intensify the social and political crises of the American ruling class. The prevailing sentiment in the American working class is not one of demoralization and defeat, but rather of profound social anger. This anger, however, lacks a clear political direction. And the confusion generated by years of reactionary Democratic Party politics has allowed Trump to exploit these frustrations. But there are clear signs of a developing rebellion, which Jerry will review in more detail. Over the past year, the anger of workers and youth has expressed itself in the protests of millions all over the world against the genocide in Gaza. And we have seen a series of strikes in the United States in critical industries, including among autoworkers, aerospace workers, dock workers, and other critical sections of the working class, with workers striving to break free from the control of corporatist trade union apparatus. In our own campaign, the Socialist Equality Party advanced a real program upon which the working class could fight. In announcing the campaign in February, we explained that its purpose ‘is to raise the political consciousness of the working class, to develop its understanding that no solution can be found to any of the problems confronting working people except through the ending of the capitalist system and its replacement with socialism, and that this great historical task can only be achieved by adopting a global strategy aimed at the mobilization of power of the American and international working class in a unified struggle against the capitalist system.’ Under conditions of a universal media blackout of the SEP campaign and the massive and undemocratic restrictions on all independent and third party candidates, our campaign won a significant vote where we were on the ballot. But we stressed throughout the campaign that it was about far more than an attempt to win votes. It was an effort, and is an effort, to lay the foundations for a socialist movement among workers and youth, based on a clear understanding of the political tasks ahead. And this is now the central issue. The response to the election of Trump must be the fight to go deeper into the working class, to develop within the working class a political and socialist leadership. We recognize the dangers posed by a new Trump Administration. But as David stressed, now is not the time for panic. It is the time to organize, strategize, and the basis of this organizing and strategizing must be the fight for genuine socialism, for the building of a socialist leadership in the working class in the US and internationally. Finally, I urge all of you watching this meeting today, as you are listening to the very important reports that are being delivered, to draw the necessary conclusion, to fill out the form to join the Socialist Equality Party, to get involved in this fight. This is the most fundamental and necessary response to the reelection of Donald Trump.