Stop the Billionaires’ Blitzkrieg: Build a Real Opposition  

By Jeff Booth AFSCME Local 3650 (personal capacity)
Boston, MA

Written for Issue 24 of “Socialism Today”, which went to print August 26th. Subscribe to get a copy directly to your mailbox!

Seven months in and the Billionaire-in-Chief still leads the corporate smash-and-grab of social benefits, civil liberties, and living standards of the working class. Trump, the Republicans, and the right accelerate previous Republican and Democratic policies for an economic and social race to the bottom. A race the corporate owners and their two political parties have forced us into for 50 years. 

At this moment, there’s no effective opposition to the government’s assault on working people. The Democratic Party has too much corporate skin in the capitalist game, including their blood-soaked policies of austerity, mass incarceration, and genocide. They can’t be an opposition to Trump. 

In many other countries, the response to Trump and Co. would be general strikes, uprisings, and protest movements larger and more militant than those of the “No Kings,” 5051, and the other Democratic-Party-adjacent, non-profit brands. The only visible goals of the liberal protests are to demonize Trump, capture activists to be foot soldiers for Democratic Party candidates, and corral votes for the corporate Democratic Party in the 2026 mid-term elections. 

At the same time, there’s a growing weakness in the corporate duopoly over U.S. politics. The Democratic Party is polling at 33% approval in a July 26th poll, their lowest result in 30 years. Building an opposition to Trump and the right based on such an unpopular party is a losing strategy. Trump dropped to 40% approval in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll released in August. These low numbers show a strong majority rejecting both corporate parties. 43% of adults identified as independents in a 2024 Gallup poll while only 27% identified as Democrats, a record low.

The far-right CATO institute with YouGov revealed polling data in March showing what they call “a troubling picture”: “62 percent of Americans aged 18–29” say they hold a “favorable view of socialism, and 34 percent say the same of communism.” These are amazing numbers given the billions spent in propaganda and indoctrination against socialism and communism. 

Trump and the Republican Party feel untouchable. The Democratic Party liberals do nothing but file lawsuits while Trump serially ignores at least one in three judicial orders. Trump and Co. are confident of endless taxpayer funds for legal actions and the unelected, unaccountable Supreme Court backing their power grab.

A Multi-Front Assault on Working People and Youth

Both the Trump/Right and the liberal vote-blue-no-matter-who wings of the ruling class are underestimating the crises of their economic system, the pain they’re inflicting, and the anger seething in sections of the working class. 

Trump and the Republicans owe much of their narrow wins in the recent elections to a surge of inflation when the Democratic Party controlled the Presidency and Congress in 2021 and 2022. For most working people, the high prices from that time never receded. Costs for food, heating/air conditioning, housing, healthcare, buying cars, and higher education remain seriously inflated and difficult to afford. 

The latest stats show another possible inflation surge. The Producer Price Index showed wholesale prices in July up 3.3% over the previous year and the “Core” inflation rate increased 3.7%, its highest in two years. Wholesale prices for fresh vegetables increased 39% in July. Wholesale milk prices rose by 9.1%. These numbers are starting to reflect Trump administration tariffs (taxes). As of August 14th, U.S. tariffs were at their highest amount in almost 100 years.

The harm of inflation on working people is shown in the fact that after adjusting for inflation, the average hourly wage now has about the same purchasing power as it did in 1978. Real wages, accounting for inflation, were at their highest 45 years ago when $4.03 an hour in January 1973 bought you what $23.68 an hour can buy now. 

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) points out that “The federal minimum wage of $7.25 hasn’t been raised in over 15 years, and the subminimum wage for tipped employees… remains just $2.13 per hour at the federal level, an amount set in 1993.” 

In addition to higher prices, unemployment is increasing. Corporations are more aggressive in pressuring and intensifying exploitation because they feel emboldened by Trump regime policies. Overall unemployment statistics are lagging behind the reality of mass layoffs of federal workers, well-publicized cuts in high-tech jobs, and the cancelling of government funds for many infrastructure projects. The unemployment rate for Black workers was 7.2% in July. For high-tech workers, especially those at entry-level, the impact of AI is a factor. According to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, college graduates from 22 to 27 years old who majored in computer science now have a 6.1% unemployment rate and computer engineering majors have a 7.5% unemployment rate. 

The Trump administration is claiming they will have cut 300,000 government workers by the end of the year. Using layoffs, buyouts, and forcing people to quit, they aim to reduce the federal workforce by 12.5%. The Supreme Court backed the Trump regime on cutting the federal workforce while a Federal Appeals Court also gave Trump the power to “void” union contracts for unions representing hundreds of thousands of federal workers. It’s estimated that at least four-fifths of federal workers or 2.5% of all union workers in the U.S are now without union contracts.

What Trump Represents

The anti-worker, anti-union agenda of the Trump administration is more obvious as job cuts and union-busting directly impact workers. ICE raids, terrorizing and kidnapping immigrant workers, disrupting workplaces and neighborhoods, spreads chaos, fear, but also anger against Trump in many communities. Sending National Guard troops into LA and DC and threatening the same for Chicago and New York is taking the militarization of policing to a new level of aggression and repression. This attempt to spread fear and division among the working class is deliberate and meant to normalize violence against resistance to Trump’s regime as cuts in jobs, social programs, healthcare, and education spread through the working class.

The hyper-militarized police forces, including ICE, are built on decades of big money for cops at all levels of government, directed and funded by both corporate parties. Trump’s big bourgeois bill wastes around $170 billion for persecuting immigrant workers, for border buffering, and includes another $75 billion for ICE and that makes ICE the largest police force in the Federal Government.

Trump’s big ugly bill unleashed over 1 trillion dollars for the military. This is the same bill that cuts food assistance, Medicaid, and college Pell Grants for students from low-income families. It’s estimated the bill will cause as many as 17 million people to lose health insurance within 10 years. “At a time when 44% of Americans say they’re having serious trouble paying for health insurance… Health insurance premiums for some Americans could increase by a whopping 66 percent next year. Trump’s tax bill gave $1 trillion of tax cuts to the richest 1% of the country, but excluded a $335 billion extension of… subsidies for people to buy insurance on the Affordable Care Act exchanges… Those subsidies will expire at the end of 2025.”

The scope and in-your-face character of Trump’s big capitalist bill seems unprecedented, but its net effect is the familiar austerity for working people, but all the money in the world for corporate subsidies, state violence, and the military. Combined with trade wars, enabling genocide in Gaza, a blank check for arming Israel and Ukraine, threats against China, Venezuela, Mexico, etc., the Trump regime is gathering a combustible mix of increasing inequality, declining living standards, and crazed war-mongering. 

What is to Be Done?

The Democratic Party’s army of lawyers, lawsuits, a felony conviction, the Epstein scandal, the “No Kings Protests”… none of these have stopped Trump and the far right from gaining economic ground at our expense and trampling over union rights, civil liberties, the right of free speech for pro-Palestinian protestors, and shredding union contracts for federal workers (and still the mantra from the union leadership is “we can’t strike, it’s illegal”). They ignore the reality that legality means nothing to the Trump regime. Ro Khanna of the Democratic Party says Democrats must obey law and order no matter what Trump does. James Carville says the Democratic Party should just play dead. We have to ask Mr. Carville, how can we tell if your party is playing dead?

The liberal wing of the ruling capitalist class and their Democratic Party won’t save us. Much of the left in the U.S. supports progressive candidates in a pro-capitalist party that supports genocide.

We need a new approach. We need a united front of the anti-Trump protestors, the pro-Palestinian protest movement, and unions. We need clear demands around stopping Trump, stopping the genocide in Gaza, restoring union rights and contracts for federal workers, and economic demands that include a $30 an hour minimum wage, Medicare for all, and a federal jobs program for the mass building of public housing and publicly-owned green energy. We need the labor movement to seriously start organizing for a general strike against the Trump agenda for the above demands and others that would emerge from the movement.

We need union leaders, progressives, and the left to break with the corporate Democratic Party and unite to build a workers’ party, totally independent of the Democratic and Republican Parties, the corporations, and the billionaires. We need to organize for revolutionary socialism in the struggle against Trump and the capitalist class. Revolutionary socialism brings together the method of analysis (Marxism), tactics, program, and a working-class vision of an alternative to corporate politics, capitalism, and imperialism.