Minutes after he was inaugurated, flanked by the world’s richest billionaire men, Trump signed dozens of Executive Orders that aimed to undo decades of reforms won by mass movements.
Ten years after the birth of Black Lives Matter, one of Trump’s orders celebrated the death penalty. Eight years after the oil pipeline occupation at Standing Rock, another order calls for doubling down on fossil fuel extraction. Trump signed another order that the US government does not recognize the existence of trans people.
Now Trump is following through by halting funding to anything his administration views as supporting “the use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.”
Along with carrying out high profile deportations and threatening thousands of public sector jobs, Trump’s sudden funding freeze sets the stage for massive cuts to programs that benefit the working class. Cuts to food stamps, healthcare, student grants, and after-school programs are brutal attacks on working-class people—especially at a time when the price of eggs is skyrocketing and Trump’s tariffs will raise inflation to enrich US corporations and billionaires.
These attacks are designed to keep working-class people divided while the billionaires get rich. During Trump’s first administration, the richest 200 people got a trillion dollars richer, enough to have sent out a second round of stimulus checks on their own. The only way forward for working-class people is to unite against all forms of divide-and-rule tactics, and fight for things that actually make our lives better.
Under both corporate parties, the capitalist US government never supported working-class demands to begin with—it only ever conceded under the pressure of mass movements. After pretending to care about issues like racism and sexism in order to undermine and co-opt the Black Lives Matter movement, the Democrats have now taken a hard turn to the right. They’ll always say whatever they think will get them elected so they can keep protecting the profits of the billionaires, just like Trump.
The Democrats refuse to oppose Trump’s central message, which is that socialists, trans people, and things like green energy programs are making life worse for ordinary people. In response to Trump’s funding cuts, Democratic Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar tweeted about cancer research. Senator Patty Murray of Washington and Representative Rose DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrats on the Senate and House Appropriations Committee, wrote a letter (gasp!) to the White House expressing concern about how this might disrupt their legislative priorities. An unsurprising demonstration of their complete uselessness to the working class.
This is why Socialist Alternative fights to build a new party that actually fights for working-class people. A real working-class party would run candidates accountable to working people—candidates who take the average wage of those they represent. This party would also be a vehicle to organize movements in our workplaces, schools and communities to win things that actually improve the lives of working-class people. It would be a place to discuss, debate, and democratically decide on the way forward for our movements.
We disagree with Bernie Sanders and former leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America that we should follow the example of politicians like Dan Osborn in Nebraska, who ran for the US Senate last year by combining economic demands like raising the minimum wage with pandering to anti-immigrant, anti-trans, and nationalist ideas.
The party we need should oppose all the divide-and-rule tactics that endanger the lives of marginalized people and ultimately only benefit the billionaires. A new party would be a huge step forward in the fight for working-class people in the US toward building a socialist society based on the needs of people and the planet.