The Trump administration has continued its slew of executive orders and coordinated attacks on various sections of the population. This is a strategy of shock and awe, designed to overwhelm and disorient people, and to go after the most marginalized in order to shift attention and blame for society’s problems away from the wealthy. And while they are doing this, they want to massively cut funding for programs that help poor and working people, cut taxes for the wealthy, increase the power and control of the presidency, and continue the U.S.’s imperial domination of the globe.
Much of this is not very new. Both Democrats and Republicans always govern in the interests of the wealthy at our expense, even though they try to pretend otherwise. But with Trump, the usual pretense is gone, the sheer scope of these blatant attacks are ripping the mask off their entire system of exploitation and brutality.
We see this with Trump’s attacks on immigrants. The demonization and exploitation of immigrants are a normal feature of the capitalist system, regardless of who’s in power. The Biden administration deported more immigrants than in Trump’s first term. But under Trump, the vile hatred of immigrants that is part of this system is brought to the surface through racist rhetoric, highly publicized deportations, and the overt militarization of the border. All of this is meant to create fear and attempt to sow further divisions in the population.
Cutting social programs to pay for handouts to the wealthy has been part of the playbook of Democratic and Republican administrations. But in unleashing Elon Musk’s DOGE team to cut whatever programs they want and fire government employees with minimal oversight, Trump is using the power of the presidency to wage an unprecedented attack, designed to gut programs that provide humanitarian aid and disaster relief, regulate corporations, and provide minimal support for education, health care and more. This strategy of cutting funding across the board will be used to lay the basis for Trump’s massive tax cuts for the wealthiest in our society, and aims to weaken government entities that could stand in the way of unrestricted corporate profits and power.
Trump brought as his first foreign visitor to the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the convicted war criminal who has overseen the genocidal attack on the Palestinians. At the press conference, Trump said that the U.S. would take over Gaza and own it, removing all Palestinians, and then be in charge of developing it like the French Riviera.
Trump can get away with saying this only because Biden supported Israel’s total destruction of Gaza in the first place. Biden supplied Israel with the weapons and support to carry out this massive genocide and destruction, which has killed over 46,000 Palestinians and destroyed about 92% of the buildings in Gaza. Biden and Harris enabled this genocide to take place, while mouthing words of support for Palestinians. And Trump is now saying openly what Israel and the U.S. really think about Palestinians and Gaza. U.S. imperialism cares nothing about the genocide of the Palestinian people.
The Biden administration may have tried to present a more acceptable version of this system, to hide its blatant defense of the super-rich at the expense of the majority of the population of working people. Trump represents the same system, but with all of the pretense ripped away, with the racism, the sexism, the inequality, and the brutality ramped up and laid bare for all to see.
But without the mask, it will be more difficult to hide the true nature of their system. Trump’s policies will begin to overreach, and expose clearly who the system protects and who it harms, drawing a line in the sand, with Trump and the class of billionaires on one side, and the vast majority of working people on the other.
Behind the bluster, behind the pronouncements, Trump is a demonstration of the sheer brutality of this system, which only benefits the rich, and promises more attacks and misery for the working class in this country and around the world. But we must remember, that no matter what they announce, no matter how far they try to go with their attacks, their whole system cannot run without workers. Now is not the time to wait and see what happens. Now is the time to speak out, and stand up, and begin to build up our forces to resist Trump and the whole system he defends.
