Nearly five months have passed since the second inauguration of Donald Trump. In that time we have seen his administration work hard to confirm its status as the racist, reckless, vicious, corrupt, and anti-worker operation that his first day, and his first term, promised it would be. The various threads of assault on democratic rights, repression of workers, cruel cuts to vital services, and nationalism have been tangled together into a cohesive whole that we can see hurtling towards economic catastrophe, authoritarianism, and increased class conflict.
Trump’s Big Ugly Bill
The most recent major piece of the Trumpist agenda is the “big, beautiful” budget reconciliation bill that recently passed the House of Representatives. It begins by extending the tax cuts, primarily benefiting the rich, from Trump’s first term and raising the debt ceiling by $4 trillion to avoid a default on US debt. From this basic function it goes on to attack workers and the poor and transfer wealth to the capitalist class in nearly every conceivable way. Many of the parts of the bill have an anti-immigrant aspect to them, as does nearly everything the Trump administration puts forward.
The bill slashes Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, adding work requirements and other restrictions to both. It includes at least $600 billion in cuts to Medicaid and allows subsidies for the Affordable Care Act to expire, making coverage more expensive. These portions of the bill will cause many millions to lose access to health care and proper nutrition, including an estimated 13.7 million who would be forced off of their insurance plans.
It throws another $70 billion into anti-immigrant programs such as the border wall, more immigration jails, and more Customs and Border Patrol agents. It also allows for the indefinite detention of children and creates high fees charged at several points in the immigration and asylum process.
$150 billion dollars are allocated for weapons of war, mostly new drones. This windfall to high tech defense contractors is separate from the trillion dollar pentagon budget Trump has proposed, and the absurd “Golden Dome” plan, which may run into the trillions of dollars if it is ever completed.
Student loans, including Pell Grants, are also targeted, making it harder for students to get government loans to afford skyrocketing tuition and costs of living and will end up forcing more people to give up on going to college. At the same time, Trump has directed the Department of Education to resume involuntary collections of defaulted student loans, in a return to the predatory practices of the pre-pandemic era. The Big Beautiful Bill now extends repayment plans from 10-25 years to 30 years, meaning more working people will be trapped in debt for longer.
The portions of the bill relating to taxation mostly represent a transfer of wealth from workers to the rich. True, there are a few provisions that would benefit workers, such as an exemption for overtime pay and tips and a rise of the Child Tax Credit, but these are set to only last a few years, expiring when Trump leaves office. They are also more than offset for many workers by the cuts to SNAP, Medicaid, and student loans in other sections of the bill. The bottom 20% of households (those making under $14,000/year) would see an estimated decrease in income by $800 in 2027, while the top 1% would see an increase of $63,000 in 2027.
These are only the major parts of the wide-ranging bill. Other sections prohibit states from regulating AI companies, prevent any funds from being used to carry out court orders holding executive branch officials in contempt, and remove taxes on gun silencers, for example.
The bill is estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to add $3.8 trillion to the national debt. At a time when bond markets are already dangerously fluctuating, this will likely provoke further loss of confidence in the safety of investing in US debt, exacerbating the capitalist crisis.
While the Trump Administration stepped back from the brink of collapse by reversing many of its tariffs, the effective tariff rate remains higher than before he took office this year. Moody’s, the third of three credit rating agencies, recently joined S&P and Fitch Ratings in downgrading US debt from AAA status. The IMF also spoke up to warn that the US must “address its debt burden”. The only way the capitalists can think to make this happen is with further cuts to services for working people, not taxing the rich or ending corporate welfare.
Repression
As many of the sections of the budget bill have an anti-immigrant component, so too does Trump use the rhetoric and infrastructure of anti-immigration to repress the democratic rights of citizens and non-citizens alike, particularly in relation to the movement against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians.
While some support for Trump came from those who wanted an end to US wars fomented and supported by neoconservative Republicans and Democrats alike, he has so far ended up in a very similar position regarding Israel and Ukraine as his predecessor, i.e., total material and moral support for Israel and a never ending supply of weapons to keep the war in Ukraine going as long as possible.
To demonstrate his support for Israel he has cracked down on pro-Palestinian demonstrators, using ICE agents to abduct and imprison students like Rumeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Mahmoud Khalil, and many others. He has also attacked immigrant labor organizers such as Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez and the Lynn-Ette & Sons workers snatched from a bus in Western New York.
All of this is in the context of wider ICE deportation sweeps that have seen thousands of immigrants, with or without documentation, rounded up and shipped off to the infamous CECOT Prison in El Salvador, and recently South Sudan, with little or no due process. Legal challenges to these sweeps on habeas corpus grounds have led the administration to put forward the possibility of suspending this basic democratic right.
In a piece of brazenly racist political theater, Trump welcomed a group of white South Africans into the US as refugees fleeing a nonexistent genocide, while supporting an actual genocide in Gaza and sending non-white asylum seekers back to the countries they fled, or to third countries where their lives would also be in danger.
While Trump’s agenda is centered on the abuse of immigrants, he is also attempting to smash unions wherever he sees an opportunity. By executive order he has ended collective bargaining for over a million federal employees–one out of every fifteen union workers in the US–at dozens of agencies, supposedly on grounds of national security, though most of the agencies have little or no relation to the military or intelligence. The order has been characterized as “by far the largest single action of union-busting in American history.”. With dues at these unions no longer being collected, and with the 130,000 layoffs and buyouts already forced through, the federal unions are in a downhill slide that will be difficult to recover from.
Many of the unions representing federal workers have filed a lawsuit to prevent the order from going into effect. The suit is in the courts at time of writing, but is far from assured of a decision in workers’ favor. The loss of dues will make it difficult to support the suit, as will the unions’ reluctance to fully mobilize their memberships.
There is also a bill introduced in Congress, H.R. 2550, which seeks to stop the order. This is also unlikely to work without vigorous public pressure and union solidarity action. Current union leadership’s reliance on the Democratic Party to oppose Trump is a doomed strategy.
Blue Resistance?
After months of the Democratic Party meekly acquiescing to all of Trump’s moves, voting to confirm his cabinet picks, and generally taking a submissive posture, on March 30th Corey Booker, the Democratic Senator from New Jersey, gave a 25- hour speech on the senate floor. It was compared in the press to the previous record for long speeches held by Strom Thurmond, who filibustered for 24- odd hours against the Civil Rights Act in 1957.
Many liberals were led to believe that this represented a resurgence of the “resistance” of the Democrats to the power of the Trump regime. The speech, however, was not a filibuster at all, but simply an empty act of political theater meant to better his position for a presidential run in 2028. There was no bill to run the clock out on.
This is what the Democratic Party “resistance” amounts to: empty opportunism and crass careerism. They are not in opposition to the Republicans so much as they are in competition. If the Trump agenda is to be fought it is clear that we cannot rely on the Democrats to do it.
Will the courts save us?
All of these attacks on democratic rights are of highly questionable legality, relying on supreme executive power granted by a fictional state of emergency. This has led some to speculate that the courts will prevent at least the worst excesses. So far there is some indication that they could do so. Öztürk, Mahdawi, and Khalil were all released from ICE detention after courts found, under pressure from mass protests, that there was no legal basis to hold them. Trump did attempt to stack the courts with his supporters during his last term, and was largely successful. His win rate in court cases, in both lower courts and the Supreme Court, however, remains low.
While he has experimented with ignoring court rulings, for example in the case of Kilmar Garcia, and indeed the current budget bill attempts to prevent courts from charging him with contempt of court, unless he is prepared to do away with courts altogether he will need them to rule effectively.
The “rule of law” in capitalist societies is always soft and susceptible to various kinds of pressure. The courts are set up to protect the ruling class and their property, not enforce an impartial interpretation of the law, and most of the time that is what they do under pressure from the capitalist class. But they can be forced to rule in favor of the working class if they feel that their position or the capitalist social order is threatened.
This is why workers cannot despair and wait around for the courts, or the Democrats, to save us. Working people need to form disciplined, structured mass movements in the streets that have the potential to shake the foundations of capitalist power. Unions can take up militant strategies and leave the sidelines, bringing the power of organized workers and mass action to bear in the broader political arena.
The power of the working class lies in solidarity, in mobilization, and in taking up socialist ideas and methods. Mass working class resistance can stop the right-wing agenda of the capitalists, and also be the basis for organizing a political party of our own. With a workers’ party, militant unions, and mass movements, we can break through the misery of the capitalist system and fight for a new kind of world–a socialist one.
Independent Socialist Group 