In many ways, the Trump regime is now at its weakest point yet. In January, Trump faced a showdown with the working class of Minnesota. The resulting general strike in Minneapolis forced him to pull most ICE agents out of the state, fire his head of Homeland Security, and reduce the profile of his war on immigrants. In late March, Trump’s approval ratings dropped to the lowest point in his second term as discontent mounts over his connections to Jeffrey Epstein, his increasingly unpopular war in Iran, and the resulting 30% surge in gas prices.
Trump campaigned on ending “forever wars.” Instead, he’s launched a war on Iran which has quickly become a quagmire, wreaking total havoc on the global economy. He’s thrown his disastrous handling of the economy back in our faces, declaring the affordability crisis “a hoax.” And while his administration has dramatically increased the cost of healthcare for millions, the Pentagon is asking Congress for another $200 billion—roughly equivalent to the discretionary budgets for the departments of education, health, and housing combined!
All of this spells a major crisis for the Trump administration, but it would be a mistake to think he still couldn’t find a way out of it. While there’s mass anger around Trump’s war on Iran, the cost of living, and the Epstein files, anger alone won’t stop Trump. That outrage needs to be channeled into exactly the sort of class struggle that just pushed Trump back in Minneapolis, hitting him where it counts: in the pockets of the billionaire class that he belongs to and represents. It’s crucial that we take advantage of this moment of weakness for Trump using the momentum of the class struggle flowing out of January’s general strike in the Twin Cities. There’s an urgent need to escalate with further strike action on a nationwide scale.
Lessons From Minneapolis
Workers run the economy. Our labor generates every last dollar of profit that big business CEOs depend on to grow their already enormous personal fortunes and keep their rigged capitalist system going. When we withhold our labor through coordinated workplace action, it has the power to grind the economy to a halt. That’s a huge problem for Trump or any other capitalist politician tasked with ensuring that profits keep flowing to the billionaires.
ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis earlier this year fueled a qualitative leap forward in the anti-Trump struggle, putting the most powerful tool back into the hands of the working class: the political general strike. Trump’s shock-and-awe deportation strategy, intended to tamp down working-class opposition to his authoritarian rule by normalizing ICE terror in the streets, decisively backfired.
The sheer brutality of ICE’s invasion, including the execution of two peaceful protesters, spurred on widespread grassroots organizing to resist ICE, culminating in the nation’s first general strike in decades, on January 23. In response to the strike, 60 CEOs signed a letter calling on Trump to pump the brakes. Though ICE has not completely left the state, Trump ordered a tactical retreat: he wrapped up “Operation Metro Surge,” sacked Greg Bovino and former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and has decreased the intensity and volume of ICE operations, for now.
The working class landed its first blow against Trump 2.0, concluding the Battle of Minneapolis with a victory. But it will take continued struggle and organizing on a much greater scale to end Trump’s war on working people, both at home and abroad.
Seize The Moment: Get Strike-Ready For May 1
A coalition of labor leaders and community organizations has called to repeat Minneapolis’s day of “No Work, No School, No Shopping” on a national scale on May 1, International Workers’ Day. This is exactly the sort of escalation that we need.
Key unions like the Association of Flight Attendants and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), along with smaller unions in cities across the country, have been building for actions on May Day. Largely, though, these organizing efforts have been taking place behind the scenes by union leaders and staffers without involving the broader membership. This is detrimental to the goal of building the largest and most effective day of action. There’s an urgent need to widely publicize the idea of strikes, walkouts, and sickouts on May 1, including dispelling myths and fears around “illegal” strikes. Even basic organizing methods need to be spread and repopularized—especially among the 90% of workers not in a union, but including in unionized workplaces—like how to talk to your coworkers about taking action and how to defend against retaliation. The behind-the-scenes strategy was a weakness of the January 23 strike in Minneapolis as well, which could have been even larger and more powerful if union leaders had publicly called for strike action boldly and consistently, and used union resources to train up a new, wide layer of organizers across the city.
CTU has been perhaps the most vocal in publicizing their efforts to build for May 1. The union is demanding that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson grant students an excused absence for a “civic event” on May 1, so that educators can participate in a day of “No Work, No School, No Shopping.” Johnson should absolutely enact it. After all, in October, he literally called for a general strike—though this was largely bluster, and a serious call to action will require serious pressure from below. There’s no shortcut to shutting down Chicago Public Schools or any other workplace—it will take hundreds of conversations and planning meetings in order to successfully shut down the over 600 Chicago public schools, whether or not Mayor Johnson grants absences. And it will take workers everywhere getting prepared now to build the biggest nationwide strike on May Day.
With a bolder lead by major national unions and a powerful approach to bottom-up organizing, the potential would exist for May 1 to be a national general strike, the first in the history of the US. But a handful of citywide strikes or even partial work stoppages alongside mass demonstrations across the country would still be a very important step forward for the anti-Trump struggle.
…And Beyond
Even a one-day all-out general strike on its own likely wouldn’t spell a total defeat for Trump. To drive Trump out of office, workers would need to be prepared to bring the economy to a standstill indefinitely, until our demands are won. Getting strike-ready for May 1 will be crucial preparation to mobilize even more decisive strike action for the bigger battles ahead.
As the midterm elections draw closer, Democrats’ refrain that voting is our most powerful tool to take down Trump is growing louder and ringing more and more hollow. The Democratic Party has been worse than ineffective at mounting any sort of opposition to Trump. Twice now, they’ve used federal workers as collateral in negotiations, forcing them to work without pay during government shutdowns so that Democratic politicians can make a big show of fighting for healthcare and against ICE, while in reality achieving nothing. Democratic politicians have focused on how Trump launched his wars on Venezuela and Iran—without “due process” and permission from Congress—rather than genuinely opposing his imperialist war aims.
While Democrats have tried to direct the anti-Trump struggle into the voting booth, Trump is attacking voting rights from every angle and frothing at the mouth to declare November’s midterms illegitimate. Any attempt by Trump to steal the election needs to be met with mass strike action. Such a decisive rebuke for Trump at the hands of working-class struggle could undermine the ruling class’s confidence in Trump to the point of ditching him. On the other hand, if Trump succeeded in stealing the election it could pose a very serious setback for the working class and cement Trump’s authoritarian power grab.
If there’s one lesson to draw from everything that’s happened so far under Trump’s second term, it’s this: the Democrats and the courts can’t and won’t defeat Trump. Class struggle, like we saw in Minneapolis, is the only way to stop an authoritarian.