Socialist Alternative

Part Two: Characterizing Trump 2.0

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With the inauguration of Trump as US president for the second time, we are publishing a three-part perspectives document from Socialist Alternative that is currently being discussed throughout our national organization.

Part one is an analysis of the election result, how we got here, and the developments taking place in consciousness. Part two provides a characterization for the likely trajectory of Trump 2.0 and what we can expect for various aspects of his rule, both domestically and in the escalating inter-imperialist bloc conflict. Part three covers the possibilities for struggle, the state of the left, and the strategy and program of Marxists under the coming, and highly dangerous, regime of Trump 2.0.

61. Already in the weeks since Trump’s election there have been many noteworthy developments and chilling prospects that begin to paint a picture of what we might see during Trump’s second term, though of course time will fill in the details. What we can say with certainty is that if Trump’s first term could be described as a billionaire bigot administration, his second term will be even more so.

62. The question is not whether struggle against Trump 2.0 will develop, it is only a matter of when, around which issues first, of what scale and character, and whether it will succeed in blocking Trump’s agenda and decisively pushing back the far right. As always, socialists will have an important role to play, and these questions, connected to the specific attacks we may see from Trump 2.0, will be discussed in part three of this document.

Cabinet Picks Indicate What’s Coming

63. Trump’s breakneck cabinet appointments starting only a week after election night, far faster than in 2016 and more quickly than most if not any president in recent history, indicated the increased experience and assuredness with which he and his team are approaching round two. Also different from eight years ago is that the process of Trumpification within the Republican Party is now essentially complete. This means the voice of “moderation” coming from the neoliberal era Republican establishment is nowhere to be found within Trump’s inner circle, versus eight years ago when more mainstream Republicans had his ear, especially at the beginning. It is clear that this time around, a full oath of loyalty is a necessary ticket for entry. Like last time, Trump will not be afraid to fire cabinet members who show unwillingness to carry out his agenda, which can lead to a certain revolving door effect, though maybe less than his first term given the starting point of requiring a higher degree of loyalty to the Trump agenda.

64. Including Trump himself, his proposed administration currently holds thirteen billionaires, just under 2% of all billionaires in the US, the most billionaire-dense country in the world. As of December 10, the total net worth of the administration is $382.2 billion, equivalent to the GDP of 172 countries combined, a fitting metaphor for US imperialism. Trump 2.0 will not just be a bourgeois-friendly administration, he is literally incorporating a wing of the bourgeoisie into his cabinet, clearly demonstrating which class’ interests his regime is setting out to serve. 

65. The mid-November New York Times headline, “Trump Defies #MeToo With Cabinet Picks Facing Accusations,” said much in few words. The uproar in the media over the five nominees accused of sexual assault, especially Matt Gaetz, shows that the #MeToo “mood” is far from completely dead. But the appointments themselves, and the fact that several of them will likely be confirmed by the Senate, without a single significant protest no less, does show just how far the women’s and #MeToo movement has been thrown back in recent years since it exploded onto the scene under Trump’s first term. Though Gaetz withdrawing his name for Attorney General was indeed a small victory, it did not come as the result of an active movement. We should be loud and clear that it’s going to take a lot more than widespread media reporting to stop the actual attacks Trump’s cabinet is going to inflict on women, trans people, immigrants, workers, and beyond – no matter which individual right-wing partisans fill the cabinet.

66. Tom Homan, who Trump has nominated to be his “border czar,” overseeing border policy without needing Senate confirmation like other cabinet appointees, served as director of ICE during the first year and a half of Trump’s first term and was a key architect of family separation as a deterrent for illegal immigration. Homan, who is known for egregiously racist comments about immigrants, was actually a top ICE leader in the Obama administration. In fact Obama awarded Homan the Presidential Rank Award in 2015 for his “extraordinary results” as director of the Enforcement and Removal Operations department of ICE, where he oversaw a $3 billion budget and 8,000 ICE agents who played a key role in Obama’s record-setting deportation machine. Trump and Homan have repeatedly talked about deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants, including using the military to do so.

67. Trump’s unwillingness so far to move on from Pete Hegseth as his choice to lead the Department of Defense despite high-profile credible sexual assault accusations and other controversies is not primarily because he is so attached to him and thinks that nobody else can do the job. Rather, after the scandal around Gaetz and his withdrawal, and then the quieter but still significant withdrawal of his pick to lead the DEA, a third withdrawal would risk making the incoming administration look weak and disorganized at a time when they need to be presenting as the opposite.

68. While not formally a government agency yet, Trump’s promise to create a Department of Government Efficiency (facetiously acronymed DOGE) with billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy at its head is a clear indication of the coming administration’s increasingly outward embrace of some libertarian economic ideas, even if not a deep-seated ideological commitment. The first foreign leader who met with Trump after winning was Argentina president Javier Milei, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist.” Musk has promised to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, almost a third, and talked about fully eliminating 400 federal agencies. They will not likely accomplish even close to this given Washington bureaucracy and opposition even from Republicans who don’t want to upset their constituents, not to mention the potential for struggle in opposition. However, significant cuts can absolutely be made that will have devastating impacts on certain sections of workers and the oppressed, including cuts to vital services, public education, and mass or semi-mass layoffs of federal workers.

How the Ruling Class Sees Trump

69. A National Committee perspectives update in February 2017 noted that “As we explained earlier, the ruling class is severely divided, with some willing to work with Trump to advance their own sectoral interests, but significant sections lining up to oppose, from their own class standpoint. The state apparatus is also clearly split.” While these are certainly still aspects of the situation, they are significantly less so than eight years ago.

70. While it’s clear that, especially from the point of view of needing a steady hand to lead US imperialism into the next stage of the inter-imperialist bloc conflict, much of the ruling class would prefer somebody else, they see many positives in Trump that they can work with. There is also a certain resignation to the reality that right populism is an unavoidable, and even important and useful force in this period to keep the working class divided, subservient, and to maintain their class’ rule. Eight years ago Trump was a pesky figure the ruling class thought they could put back in the box, but with Trumpism clearly here to stay, they will find more ways to work with the administration.

71. The respectful tone of big business leaders is also a striking contrast to 2016, let alone four years ago in the wake of January 6th. Jeff Bezos, who eight years ago was one of the most high profile CEOs opposing Trump, publicly backing various lawsuits against him including over the Muslim Ban, is talking much differently now. At the New York Times DealBook summit in December, Bezos spoke about how much Trump “has grown in the last eight years,” saying “I’m very hopeful — he seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. And my point of view is, if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him, because we do have too much regulation in this country.” Beyond going after “entitlements” including Social Security and Medicare, this is what the ruling class is most excited about when they think about Trump 2.0: deregulation, tax cuts, and “government efficiency.” Amazon, Zuckerberg’s Meta, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman all made $1 million donations to Trump’s inauguration fund in December. Not even four years after banning Trump from Facebook (now Meta), Zuckerberg is now making a sharp anti-fact checking, anti-woke, anti-regulation turn and has just added major Trump ally and UFC CEO Dana White to Meta’s board.

72. Big business’ profit-hungry mouth watering was reflected right away in the “Trump bump” – November 6th becoming the fourth biggest single-day point gain in the Dow Jones’s history and the sixth for the S&P 500, which had its best day in just shy of two years. Stocks for two of the largest banks, Capital One and Discover, shot up 15% and 20% respectively on the hopes that Trump’s rollback of antitrust laws would allow the two banks’ pending merger, thus far deemed highly unlikely, to actually go through. The private prison industry is elated, hoping with good reason that Trump’s plans for mass deportations will require building scores of new detention centers, which they’ll get the contracts to build. Stock for GEO Group, the multinational corporation that runs ICE processing centers, surged 42% the day after the election. We should point these out in agitational material, speeches, and conversations at work and on tables to underscore just who will benefit from a Trump presidency: the big banks, fossil fuel corporations, Silicon Valley, private prisons, the weapons industry, and the billionaire class as a whole – not working people, no matter who they voted for.

73. All of this is not to say, however, that the ruling class is pleased with everything in Trump’s agenda, especially if he goes as far as he has threatened on things like tariffs and immigration. Trump’s threat of 60% tariffs on China, 25% on Mexico and Canada, and 10% on all other imports carries significant danger for the economy. In the most basic sense, the main danger is inflationary pressure caused by corporations passing on the increased prices of imported goods and raw materials onto consumers. And then there is the danger of retaliatory measures in response leading to a trade war that spirals out of control and brings about a much harder decoupling between the two major imperialist powers and their associated blocs than we have seen thus far.

74. Deutsche Bank’s chief economist Matthew Luzzetti estimates the proposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada alone would lead to 3% inflation in the US in 2025, with even bigger effects later on. The UK’s National Institute of Economic and Social Research has predicted that “Cumulatively, US real GDP could be up to 4 per cent lower than it would have been without the imposition of tariffs.” Martin Wolf, chief economic commentator of the Financial Times, considers this optimistic because of the knock-on retaliatory measures Trump’s tariffs would provoke. EU countries, which need all the trade assistance they can get right now, are very concerned.

75. It is unclear to what degree Trump’s tariff proposals are genuinely intended to be implemented on day one versus acting as a negotiating tactic with other governments, which we’ll discuss more later. However, many businesses aren’t waiting around to find out. Companies from retail to home furniture to steel and more are rushing to stockpile as much as they can before inauguration day, as well as accelerating plans to move their factories out of China. The president of one big retail trade conglomerate told the New York Times he is concerned about a “Whack-a-Mole trade policy” where after a company moves production out of China into another low-cost country, that country is then hit with tariffs. It is this sort of unpredictability and rashness which much of the ruling class would far prefer to do without.

76. On immigration, the ruling class obviously has no problem with deportations. In reality, the overall picture over the last few years is of a level of immigration possibly unseen since the late 19th century. This historic change to the country’s demographic composition is not really reversible and the bourgeois have generally benefited from increased immigration, but they won’t see a temporary slowdown as a major problem. They surely support keeping immigrants scared and subservient, and even if it means losing a certain amount of more hyper-exploitable workers, the benefit at this time of a scapegoat on which to blame crime and other social problems to help keep the working class divided outweighs the cost.

77. However, at a certain point, especially for some industries like service, agriculture, hospitality, construction, and tech, it can go too far. The debate that opened up in late December over H-1B visas for skilled workers in specialty occupations between Musk and other pro-Trump tech moguls on one side, and other close advisors like Stephen Bannon and the more hardcore section of the base which has been whipped up to oppose all immigration on the other, foreshadows the tensions that could deepen. While he will be forced to manage the expectations of the harder right section of his inner circle and base, and will undoubtedly make concessions to them in order to hold together his coalition, Trump’s prompt statement in support of H-1B visas definitely indicates where his true loyalties lie: corporate interests. It also sheds light on his approach of distinguishing between highly skilled immigrants, who generally also have more money, and the most vulnerable and demonized wider immigrant and migrant masses.

78. Deporting all 11 million undocumented immigrants will simply not be feasible (Obama’s record-setting number was approximately 3 million over 8 years). However, even a quarter of that in the span of four years could pose real problems for thousands upon thousands of restaurants and construction crews who rely on cheap undocumented labor. There is also talk in the bourgeois media of the role of immigration in “reducing wage inflation,” economist jargon for immigration keeping wages down for native-born workers. Deportations on the scale Trump is actually talking about would be opposed by a big section of the ruling class, not for any moral reason, but purely from their class standpoint for the reasons just outlined, as well as the potential for explosive struggle, which will be discussed more below.

79. The whole ruling class agrees on the need for a general turn to the right – toward heightened nationalism, militarism, state repression, and divide-and-conquer tactics of oppression and discrimination – by their political representatives. While many within the ruling class still don’t like how unpredictable Trump is, and his lack of respect for classical bourgeois political norms, they are far more prepared to work with him than they were eight years ago. In addition to what he can do for their profits, part of their reasoning is also to not risk encouraging the sort of mass movements that took place during Trump’s first term.

80. While Trump is obviously fully loyal to the rule of capital and the world domination of US imperialism, his allegiance above all is to himself. This guarantees he will make decisions which are at times out of sync with the immediate interests of the wider US and Western ruling class. How much open opposition he receives from the ruling class will depend just how far he tries to go at certain moments, the wider context at the time, and the level of struggle and from which layers in society.

The Potential for Cracks in the Trump Coalition

81. Recent events, from the debate over H-1B visas to the vote for Speaker of the House where Trump only barely got the Freedom Caucus holdouts in line to elect Mike Johnson, have shined a light on the pre-existing divisions that exist in the Trump coalition. The coalition contains deeply contradictory elements and differences can turn into deeper cracks at some stage. While the overall alliance between a section of the billionaire class and the MAGA right is unlikely to decisively break in the near term, this general dividing line in the Trump coalition will crop up again and again around various issues.

82. Fundamentally and in the long term, Trump will come down on the side of the billionaires, where his true allegiance lies, but this won’t always be how things appear on the surface. For instance, influential figures in the MAGA hard-right like Laura Loomer and Charlie Kirk, have recently become publicly critical of Musk, wary of his sway over Trump, including his massive financial contributions, and invoking Musk’s ties to China through Tesla production. At some point — and this moment could indeed come sooner rather than later — Trump may throw Musk under the bus in a high-profile break up as part of a concession to the MAGA base, or make other such concessions to the hard right of the coalition, in order to keep them happy.

83. At moments when the cracks become more prevalent and Trump does side more decisively  with the billionaire wing, it could anger a section of his base, including for semi-healthy reasons like frustration at the influence of billionaires over a politician they had perceived as being “for the people,” but of course also for reactionary reasons like if Trump doesn’t go, according to them, far enough in attacking immigrant rights or the “woke agenda.” While in the more extreme scenario this could lead to part of the base breaking from Trump, without a real left that can offer an alternative path, this layer can move even further to the right. At the same time, any weakening of the Trump coalition would objectively weaken the administration and can provide openings for struggle and the left.

Acceleration of the Authoritarian Drift 

84. As the World Perspectives document stated, across the world, “There is now a general trend towards a stronger state and a creeping authoritarianism. This is not because of a particularly significant threat from the left (in most countries rather the opposite) but because it is seen as necessary to avoid “democratic” disruption of the agenda of the ruling class, discipline the population and prepare it for a harsher world of climate disaster, austerity and militarism.” This is true from Russia to Israel, Turkey, India, Hungary, South Korea (where recent overreach by the president led to his impeachment), Nigeria, and more. Trump 2.0 will certainly accelerate this trend to the US, though it’s been a feature on both the “left” and the right of the US political establishment in recent years. In many countries, authoritarian overreach has led to mass struggle, like Netanyahu’s attempted “judicial coup” in 2023 leading to a historic general strike, or the mass opposition to Yoon Suk Yeol’s recent declaration of martial law in South Korea.

85. By “authoritarian drift,” as we have characterized it recently, we don’t necessarily mean full-on dictatorships in every case. Rather what we have seen, and what will likely take place in the coming years in the US without mass struggle to cut across it, is an increasingly repressive form of bourgeois rule that concentrates more and more political power in the hands of the executive branch, while chipping away at previously existing “checks and balances.” The recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, which calls for an “energetic executive” and formally places the president above the law, is an example of this process in motion. If Trump invokes the Insurrection Act to activate the military on US soil, as he has repeatedly signaled he is willing to do, it would be another step in this direction. After months of disavowing Project 2025, Trump now says it has many “very good” parts and has appointed several authors of the far-right authoritarian manifesto to prominent positions in his administration. 

86. Trump’s encouragement of favoritism and loyalty are also part of his authoritarian agenda. In the business world, he will again use tariffs to foster a new type of capitalist competition: who can suck up to the president more to win the biggest exemptions. From July 2018 (three months after Trump’s first big round of tariffs were announced) until the end of 2020, the Commerce Department received nearly 500,000 exclusion requests for the tariffs on steel and aluminum, a process which Trump set up. The separate agency which handled exemption requests for China tariffs alone received more than 50,000. Companies were even allowed to submit objections to their competitors’ requests. One recent study shows that companies that made recent donations to Republican candidates were more likely to be awarded exemptions, while those who gave to Democrats were less likely. All of this will be even more prevalent and pronounced in Trump’s second term.

87. Trump’s cabinet picks are clearly designed to surround himself with loyalists who will carry out his orders, but in the process he’s also testing the waters for how far the rest of the ruling class and political establishment will let him go. Gaetz’s withdrawal, but also the hesitation around Hegseth, RFK Jr. and others, as well as the Senate majority leadership contest show that while on a very long leash, Trump doesn’t have complete free reign.

88. The fact that Rick Scott got only 13 votes for Senate majority leader and was eliminated in the first round, despite being endorsed by Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, and Vivek Ramaswamy, shows the hesitations of many of the most powerful Republican electeds. Also, especially in the Senate, the composition balance of the Republican caucus remains different to that of the party’s hardcore MAGA base (this is also true of the House, but less so). Though not endorsed by Trump himself, Scott was the clear favorite of the hard-right wing of Trump’s base, pledging in no uncertain terms to recess the Senate in order to bypass the Senate confirmation process of Trump’s appointees. Meanwhile, winner John Thune was for years the Republican whip under Mitch McConnell, who frequently clashed with Trump and tried to rein him in. While Thune – who Trump called for a primary challenge against in 2022 but to no avail – has said he is open to recess appointments, he is clearly less enthusiastic about going down that path. It’s clear that if the Senate leadership election was not a secret ballot but a public vote (which nomination votes will be), the result may very well have been different. 

89. A key part of Trump’s strategy to concentrate more power in his hands is to bring these types of matters more out into the open, and then to turn the MAGA base on any Republican who doesn’t wholeheartedly support his every move. Beyond just their own selfish career concerns, a serious problem facing Trump-skeptical Republicans is that whenever Trump is opposed from within the party, it only further proves the Trumpists’ point that they are under attack from the establishment and need to continue “draining the swamp.”

90. This of course is a key difference between the way Bernie and Trump built (and in Bernie’s case betrayed) their movements. When Bernie was faced with opposition and sabotage from the Democratic establishment, he “respected their right” to do so and acquiesced time and again. When anti-Trump Republicans go after Trump, he is unrelenting in exposing them and encourages his base to furiously take them down. Neither the Democrats nor anti-Trump Republicans will succeed in peeling Trump’s base away from him – everything they do accomplishes the opposite – which is precisely why we call for mass struggle with a working-class program that offers an alternative to Trump and all pro-capitalist politicians.

91. Even if certain nominees are not approved (Hegseth, Patel, etc.), while somewhat of a defeat for Trump in the short-term, in the long term it will actually strengthen his grip over both the party and the base. Finding somebody else to do a similar job won’t be hard, and the “moderate” Republicans are not likely to stand in the way of nominee after nominee. Their rejection of these early figures would be primarily to send a message to Trump that they’re not willing to go full bore for Trump’s authoritarian power grab. We, of course, have no illusion that replacing specific individuals in Trump’s cabinet will stop his reactionary program from being implemented. Only mass struggle can do that.

Fascism and Bonapartism

92. While not underestimating whatsoever the danger that Trump poses to the working class, poor, and oppressed in this country and around the world, we also defend a scientific analysis and characterization of the coming regime. This cannot be done merely by looking at Trump himself, but by also assessing the wider balance of class forces within US capitalism. While it is correct to describe Trump as moving in an authoritarian direction, we can also be more precise. In popular media over the last eight years Trump has often been called a fascist. Trump 2.0 will not bring fascism to the US, even if there are indeed some fascistic elements present in his approach. At this time, the most precise characterization for the likely trajectory of Trump 2.0 is a regime of parliamentary Bonapartism, with the necessary clarification that such characterizations always exist on a spectrum, and can transform and be transformed. We will explain what is meant by this below, but first it is necessary to explain why Trump 2.0 will not be fascist.

93. A Marxist definition of fascism differs from that which is often found in the media and popular consciousness. The latter often focuses on superficial character traits of leaders, and labels a wide array of right-wing figures as fascist. Often the term has been used extremely loosely, like the trend in the early 2000’s of many liberals calling George W. Bush a fascist, only to praise him ten years later when he didn’t endorse Trump. Loose accusations like these are often used to whip up lesser evilism, which is part of why a sober and scientific assessment is needed.

94. Fascism is a mass social movement, encouraged and utilized by the ruling class after failed attempts at, or to avert preemptively, revolution by the working class, whose goal is to completely smash the labor movement and workers’ organizations in order to ensure the survival of capitalism. Fascist regimes are universally led by hardline dictators and a strong state to the utmost degree. In 1932, in warning of the rising fascist threat in Germany and issuing a damning criticism of the Stalinists’ criminal ultra-left dismissal of those dangers, Trotsky explained:

Fascism is not merely a system of reprisals, of brutal force, and of police terror. Fascism is a particular governmental system based on the uprooting of all elements of proletarian democracy within bourgeois society. The task of fascism lies not only in destroying the Communist vanguard but in holding the entire class in a state of forced disunity. To this end the physical annihilation of the most revolutionary section of the workers does not suffice. It is also necessary to smash all independent and voluntary organisations, to demolish all the defensive bulwarks of the proletariat, and to uproot whatever has been achieved during three-quarters of a century by the Social Democracy and the trade unions…  Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat — all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.”

95. Fascism is not the preferred path of the ruling class, but rather a last resort to save their system. As Trotsky said, “The big bourgeoisie likes fascism as little as a man with aching molars likes to have his teeth pulled.” Later, in the same 1932 piece mentioned above, he explained the context in which the ruling class turns toward fascism: “At the moment that the ‘normal’ police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium — the turn of the fascist regime arrives.”

96. This is not the situation in the US today. From the point of view of the ruling class and maintaining their rule, the existing state apparatus undoubtedly needs strengthening. And while a section of the ruling class is indeed willing to abandon some long-held norms of American “democracy,” the underlying processes in the conflict between the classes are not as developed as Trotsky described above. Project 2025, for instance, is not a plan for building a mass fascist movement to temporarily supplement, or even suspend, many of the ordinary functions of the bourgeois state so as to later secure it more firmly and dictatorially under bourgeois rule. It calls for a strengthening of the repressive apparatuses of the state, a centralization of bourgeois rule in the hands of a strong elected executive, and both legislative and judicial attacks on unions and oppressed groups. This is certainly nothing to balk at, but it does not immediately threaten a fascist takeover. Trump and his ilk would certainly like to smash the unions more decisively, but they understand this is not actually necessary for capitalism’s survival at this juncture, nor would it be possible without provoking a truly massive social explosion.

97. To the extent that Trump and the big capitalists will attack the workers’ movement in the coming years, and they certainly will, this will be done overwhelmingly through legal means – horrible contracts, court rulings, expansion of anti-union laws like right to work, laws criminalizing the right to protest, harsher police and judicial repression of strikes – not the utilization on a mass scale of armed thugs who are independent of the state machinery. We are not seeing union meetings in which workers are expected to vote “no” on concessionary contracts being violently broken up by fascist gangs.

98. The same is true with regard to the coming crackdown on immigration. It’s been reported that several far right and fascist militias have contacted Trump’s transition team offering their assistance in patrolling the border and detaining immigrants, but Trump’s focus is instead clearly on beefing up the state: ICE, Homeland Security, and mobilizing the US military and local law enforcement. Nonetheless, far-right and outright fascist organizations, militias, and vigilantes are absolutely emboldened by Trump’s victory. In many instances, Trump and a section of the ruling class will turn a blind eye, if not openly encourage them, however this is different from full scale and ongoing, outright collaboration with these forces.

99. It is certainly not the case that the ruling class will never turn toward fascism in the US (they very much would if it was deemed necessary, and it would come about not by a “chipping away” of checks and balances but much swifter change) but merely that it is not posed right now. This is also not to say that there aren’t fascistic elements within Trump’s approach, and that those elements cannot be strengthened if the class struggle escalates in a major way. For instance, Trump’s role in January 6th represented an encouragement of genuinely fascist organizations and individuals to attempt to circumvent the state (though not everybody who participated in January 6th was a fascist). Not to mention the fact that his coming pardoning of the January 6th protesters amounts to releasing fascist leaders back into society as “heroes” to many, to build their organizations, which will definitely see further growth under Trump 2.0. Trump and those around him know these forces – still quite small historically speaking, for instance compared to the Nazis’ two million members in the early 1930s or the Ku Klux Klan’s three to six million members in the mid-1920s – can be useful or even critical at some stage. However, mobilizing them on a mass scale is not seen to be necessary at this time.

100. Historically Marxists have defined Bonapartism as dictatorial governments which arise above the classes, so to speak, and act as a temporary arbiter between the struggling camps, but always ultimately with the purpose of protecting the rule of one class or the other. There are many instances of bourgeois Bonapartist regimes since the original Bonaparte in Napoleon after the French Revolution, while Trotsky explained that Stalinism represented a proletarian Bonapartism. Compared to a democratic republic in “ordinary” times, Bonapartism relies more directly on a strong leader, the military, and the police – to the detriment of parliament – in order to maintain bourgeois rule and order. This is in distinction to fascism, which arises when the “‘normal’ police and military resources,” to re-quote Trotsky, are no longer reliable defenders of capitalism so a mass fascist movement must be mobilized.

101. There is no firm black and white dividing line between Bonapartism and fascism, but the differences are important. The former has often been used by the ruling class as “preventive Bonapartism” as Trotsky articulated, but it can also transform into fascism if the preventive measures don’t work. When characterizing bourgeois regimes we are, again from Trotsky, “dealing not with inflexible logical categories but with living social formations which represent extremely pronounced peculiarities in different countries and at different stages.”

102. With reference to France in the late 1920s, Trotsky explained that Bonapartism often “appears at first glance to govern with the assent of parliament. But it is a parliament which has abdicated, a parliament which knows that in case of resistance the government would dispense with it.” This is also not the situation in the US today, even if Trump at his most honest wishes it was. For instance, despite the threats, it is highly unlikely that Trump will actually pursue trying to imprison the members of the special Congressional committee that investigated his role in the January 6 attack. If he does, he would face enormous opposition from the ruling class and be extremely unlikely to succeed. While more tolerant and in some ways more welcoming of Trump than eight years ago, the ruling class is not at all prepared to go that far down the road with him at this time (though Biden reportedly considering preemptively pardoning the committee members does show the fear is real among an important section of the establishment). 

103. What we see with Trump then is more akin to what Trotsky and the CWI have referred to as parliamentary Bonapartism where parliament still functions, but its power is reduced and acts largely as a facade for the real, and increasing, power of the individual Bonaparte. In 1992, describing the capitalist regimes which followed the collapse of Stalinism in Russia and Eastern Europe as “semi-parliamentary bonapartist,” the CWI explained that “behind the trappings of parliamentary democracy, increasing power is concentrated in the hands of the ‘leader’, who balances between the contending class forces in society.” In 1984, the Militant argued that “Thatcher’s methods indicate a tendency towards parliamentary Bonapartism where behind the forms of parliamentary democracy the premier, using her control of the state apparatus, exercises increasingly autocratic control.” It is not the case that immediately on January 20, the US will be ruled by a fully formed Bonapartist regime, but one in which elements of Bonapartism coexist with parliamentary (a term which never fully applied to American “democracy” in the first place) democracy. 

104. At the same time, it can’t be excluded that if Trump and those around him feel his agenda is being blocked or moving too slowly and a major showdown develops, that he will seek to rule by decree and move in a more clearly dictatorial direction. The Republicans’ slim majority in the House, the smallest in history, could definitely facilitate this sort of situation. Between parliamentary Bonapartism and fascism there are many variations of right-wing authoritarian rule which are not fascist but also more repressive than what we will see initially from Trump 2.0, as demonstrated across the world from Russia to Saudi Arabia or Brazil under Bolsonaro.

105. Of course Trump will also work hard to purge the state apparatus and insert his loyalists. At the end of Trump’s first term, he issued an executive order creating a new classification for federal workers, Schedule F, whereby those workers would be stripped of their job protections, allowing the president to fire Schedule F employees for any reason. The Office of Management and Budget, a particularly important agency for Trump’s agenda, reported that 68% of their employees would be eligible for Schedule F reclassification. Reinstituting Schedule F is at the core of Project 2025 and Trump’s plans for his second term. The president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal government workers union, estimates that Schedule F would apply to 500,000 federal employees. While a mass firing of half a million federal workers is not in the cards, a smaller but still extremely significant amount certainly could be, which would then provide Trump with the opportunity of appointing thousands of loyalist right-wing ideologues to genuinely important positions in the government bureaucracy. 

106. This is part of what differentiates Bonapartism from other forms of authoritarianism. Even if Harris had won, she too would have taken part in the global trend of a drift toward authoritarianism in order to, again as the World Perspectives document stated, “avoid ‘democratic’ disruption of the agenda of the ruling class, discipline the population and prepare it for a harsher world of climate disaster, austerity and militarism.” But Harris, while undoubtedly strengthening the power of the state apparatus, would not have attempted to elevate her administration above the rest of the state or promoted such individual loyalty and power in the way that Trump is clearly set on doing. The forces behind Trump are more open to cleaning house to expand their influence, and have no interest in compromising for the sake of maintaining the “sanctity” of “American democracy.”

107. To varying degrees depending on the specific context and form, Bonapartism represents elements of retreat by the ruling class from the bourgeois democratic-republic, which Lenin called “the best possible political shell for capitalism.” The shift today towards authoritarianism and Bonapartism by the ruling class in many countries indicates not the strength of the system, but its crisis-ridden weakness and decline.

Trump and the Inter-Imperialist Bloc Conflict

108. Behind Trump’s false posturing as anti-war and the accompanying media narrative, his real foreign policy is not “isolationist.” His recent comments about wanting to annex Greenland, retake control of the Panama Canal, and make Canada the 51st state show this quite clearly, though none are actually likely to come to fruition in the near term, or the latter in general. While we shouldn’t overstate the level of coherence in Trump’s approach to geopolitics, he will absolutely not change the overall direction of the inter-imperialist bloc conflict, and is essentially for a more aggressive projection of US imperialism’s power and hegemony, both within the Western bloc and against its enemies in the opposing bloc led by China. While the ruling class talks about “deterring war by projecting strength and ensuring economic and domestic resilience” (Commission on the National Defense Strategy Report), in the real world of the 2020s it is very easy for that to have the opposite effect.

109. We have talked about three main “theaters” of the inter-imperialist bloc conflict – Ukraine, the Middle East, and the Western Pacific – with the first two being hot and the last still largely cold. In the Middle East, Trump will not make a fundamental shift from the fully pro-Israel Biden administration, but he will be even more brazen. There will be no more crocodile tears for Gaza, less symbolic criticism of Netanyahu, and perhaps even increased US funding for the Israeli war machine. While Trump has said the US should not get involved in Syria and that it’s “not our fight,” at the same time, US imperialism smells blood in the water when it comes to Iran. Trump is notoriously hawkish on Iran and, after suffering serious political and military setbacks and defeats in virtually every arena (Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and even at home), he will undoubtedly work to assert the interests of US imperialism in the wider region.

110. Trump’s promise to end the war in Ukraine his first day in office was one of his most high profile on the campaign trail. Reality, however, is going to be much more complicated than Trump’s fake anti-war populist posturing. The Trump team is reportedly considering various “peace plan” proposals which were leaked to the press, all of which center around some sort of “land for peace” deal with Russia, and NATO membership for Ukraine in the short term being off the table. Zelensky has been pressing hard for immediate NATO membership as a condition for a ceasefire, but he has signaled he is prepared to accept a deal without it if there are other guarantees. For instance some of the proposals Trump’s team is discussing raises the idea of the US sending increased weapons shipments after the fighting stops as a security guarantee for the future. Trump’s willingness to negotiate a deal of this sort is less because he has such a unique view among Western leaders, but more about being on the cutting edge of the West’s acceptance that they are essentially losing this phase of the conflict and would benefit from a pause. Part of why Western media and governments have adopted such a goading tone in relation to Assad’s fall in Syria is to distract from the much shakier situation they’re presiding over in Ukraine.

111. There is a far bigger question mark, however, over whether Russia would accept such a deal. Putin likely feels, with some validity, that he is slowly winning the war, and that with the Ukrainian military struggling in terms of manpower, weapons, and morale, why pull back now. It would also be handing Trump, an imperialist rival despite previously friendly relations on the surface, a huge diplomatic victory early in his term. Additionally Putin has just suffered a colossal blow with the overthrow of Assad in Syria, which may make him want to “make up ground” in Ukraine. If Putin rejects whatever Trump and Zelensky are willing to offer, it is very possible that Trump will make a 180 degree turn and become even more hawkish with regard to US support and funding for Ukraine than the Biden administration.

112. This could bring about a complicated situation for Trump in Congress, where after years of opposing aid to Ukraine with Trump’s support, hard right congressional Republicans would now be asked to ramp it up. It would be a test for how much authority Trump has over this section of the party, and if the hard right will be willing to stick to their guns, even if it means opposing Trump. Trump making a hawkish turn on Ukraine would risk turning off a section of his base, but likely the more dominant effect would be to take an even bigger piece of the base who, up until now have had a healthy skepticism of US funding for Ukraine, and ratchet up their pro-war attitude. Those who would be disillusioned with a hawkish turn by Trump could potentially be won to the left, but without a strong anti-war left alternative to the equally hawkish Democrats, including the former progressive wing, many could be pushed toward even farther right ideas.

113. It is highly unlikely that Trump actually leads the US out of NATO, despite his threats over recent years in that direction. Marine Le Pen and the National Rally in France have dropped that call, and Georgia Meloni in Italy did the same after taking power. In fact, far from weakening NATO, his harsh criticism and threats toward other member states is actually designed to strengthen the imperialist alliance. Trump’s threat to withdraw US security guarantees to NATO members who aren’t “carrying their weight” can have its desired effect, as seen in the recent discussion among several EU countries about launching a $500 billion joint fund for common defense projects and weapons procurement across Europe. Again, behind the smoke, Trump does not represent a retreat from the US’s role at the center of the inter-imperialist bloc conflict, but the opposite, just with a more aggressive and less “conventional” strategy.

114. Of course in the backdrop of the above is the primary rivalry in the global imperialist power struggle, that between US and Chinese imperialism. Part of Trump’s desire to end the war in Ukraine is to turn the US’s focus to China, Taiwan, and the Western Pacific, a “theater” which is not yet hot but which both powers are preparing for the possibility of. Trump’s call for 60% tariffs on China is intended to show Xi Jinping just how serious he is. If Trump actually follows through on implementing tariffs as high as this on day one, he would face serious blowback from the vast majority of capitalists. While it’s possible he does this – which would be a remarkable escalation – more likely it is a threat he will use in negotiations with Xi Jinping, and will end up increasing the tariffs on Chinese imports from the existing 20% but less than previously promised. Even this though would likely spur retaliatory tariffs and it is not hard to see how the trade war could easily get out of hand which would have serious economic consequences. Either way, Trump’s message to US corporations out of the gate is clear: take your business out of China. The process of decoupling will continue to accelerate.

115. Alongside all of this it will be necessary for Trump to wage a concerted effort to ramp up American nationalism and patriotism. A recent report from the bipartisan Commission on the National Defense Strategy calls for a “renewed sense of engagement and patriotism among the American people” and references a poll showing that 38% of Americans today feel that patriotism is very important to them, down from 70% in 1998. A Wall Street Journal op-ed about the report lamented, “Not since the 1930s have Americans been this profoundly indifferent as a great war assembles in the world outside, and not since Paul Revere traversed the dark country lanes of Massachusetts have Americans more urgently needed to rouse themselves from sleep.” While nauseously dramatic and propagandistically framed, in essence this is genuinely how a section of the ruling class feels.

116. Trump will take every opportunity to whip up nationalist sentiment within the working class through his populist rhetoric and cynical talk about a return to “the good old days.” For example, his promise to organize the “most spectacular birthday party” for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is guaranteed to be a sickening display of nationalism, if the “entire year of festivities” comes to fruition. His call for a free, publicly-funded national online college funded by taxes on the elite private universities to stop higher education from “turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions” is part of this same push. Although we certainly don’t disagree with taxing the elite private universities or a publicly-funded national college, we are completely opposed to the right-wing school Trump is attempting to set up. While these plans may or may not come together, we should not underestimate the toxic, far-right, nationalist offensive the Trump regime will push as part of preparing for the coming period of more imperialist war.

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