Donald Trump has been elected again, this time as the candidate with the most votes. Millions of people in the US and worldwide are looking on in trepidation as he announces a series of ultra-right wing, ultra-loyal appointees to key government positions.
Before he was elected, Trump ‘joked’ about being “a dictator for one day”, and many fear that his Presidency will be extremely authoritarian and repressive.
And not without reason. Trump’s reactionary, authoritarian intentions are clear. And with his increased dominance of the Republican Party, plus control of the Senate and the House of Representatives, and a Supreme Court that he shifted in his direction under his last Presidency, he has fewer official constraints than he faced when he was first elected in 2016.
The need for mass opposition to his programme – including against his threats to carry out mass deportations of migrants – is clear. However, it would be a serious mistake to conclude that Trump will be able to fully implement his programme.
On the contrary, his Presidency will be beset by crises domestically and internationally. Initial protests around the time of his inauguration are not certain to be on the same scale as in 2016. But the opposition he will face in office will prove far greater. Above all, he is going to face huge opposition from the US working class, including not a few workers who voted for him in this election.
Numerous commentators in the liberal capitalist press have been expressing despair that Trump’s victory means he will now prove all-powerful. Yet look at Javier Milei, the ultra-right wing Argentinian President elected a year ago. Known as ‘el loco’ – the madman – his government has faced general strikes and constant mass opposition. Events on this scale are ahead for Trump too.
Here in Britain, we have some experience of a ‘gobshite’ right-populist leader, prepared to undermine capitalist institutions, who won an election, was hailed as all-powerful, but then crashed and burned.
Back in 2019, Tory leader Boris Johnson won a landslide general election victory, with the highest share of the vote for any party since 1979. He delivered an 80-seat majority for the Tory party. But we all know how that story ended.
Johnson’s promise to ‘get Brexit done’ was able to convince a layer of workers in Britain to lend the Tories their vote in 2019. But very few of them voted Tory in this year’s general election, when the party plunged to its worst result in two centuries. That reflected hatred of the Tories, rather than the slightest enthusiasm for Keir Starmer’s Labour. In fact, in 2019, with Jeremy Corbyn as leader, more people voted Labour than they did in this year’s general election.
Kicking the incumbents
Britain and the US are both parts of a global trend. In economically developed countries that have had general elections in 2024, the incumbents have held on in only one in seven of the contests.
Capitalism is an increasingly ailing system, and capitalist governments have overseen falling living standards, for which they are punished at the ballot box. This was the most important factor in this election. The vote count is not yet complete but, at the time of writing, the Democrat’s vote has fallen by around 7.2 million from 2020, whereas Trump’s vote has increased by only around 2.4 million.
It was the most expensive election in history, with Trump and Democrat candidate Kamala Harris spending over $14 billion between them. But most working-class Americans felt deeply alienated from both of these candidates of Wall Street. The Election Lab at the University of Florida has calculated that turnout was down from 2020, with only 58% of voting-age adults participating.
Nonetheless, there were many voters who – frightened by the prospect of further attacks on reproductive rights and by Trump’s racist anti-migrant propaganda – held their noses and voted for Harris to stop Trump.
On the other side, Trump further whipped up reactionary ideas in his election campaign, as he will continue to do in office. His victory does not, however, indicate that his right-wing divisive rhetoric has support among the majority. On the contrary, on the same day as the Presidential election, in eight states – five of them Republican – a majority voted to enshrine abortion rights in state law.
The primary motivation for most voters in this election was the economy. Right now, the US stock markets are booming, but real hourly pay has fallen for 25 consecutive months.
While some undoubtedly refused to vote for Harris in protest at the slaughter in Gaza, for most it was their fall in living standards that drove them to punish the Democrats by staying at home or in some cases even voting for Trump. Had there been a ‘third candidate’ standing on a genuinely pro-working-class programme, it would have transformed the situation.
To give one example, in New York District 14, Trump’s vote increased from 22% in 2020 to 33% now. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), the congresswoman for the district who was re-elected on 5 November, and a member of ‘the squad’ on the left of the Democrats, asked those voters who had backed her and Trump why they had done so. Typical answers included: “It’s really simple… Trump and you care for the working class”, and “Voted Trump, but I like you and Bernie [Sanders]. I don’t trust either party establishment politicians”.
In reality, of course, only ‘establishment politicians’ were available in this election, and AOC and Sanders campaigned for Harris. Yet, while Harris lost the Presidential election, she actually won the ‘billionaires’ race’, with 83 backing her compared to a mere 52 for Trump. That reflects the divisions in the US capitalist class, with different sections – depending largely on their material interests – backing each candidate.
Nonetheless, most of the US ruling class wanted Harris to win, as the most reliable representative of their interests. They are alarmed by Trump’s reckless willingness to undermine the existing institutions of US capitalism – both domestically and globally. The endless succession of ‘establishment figures’ backing Harris was one factor which allowed Trump to pose, ludicrously, as a candidate who defends the ‘little people’ against the elites.
Yet when he was last in power, Trump cut taxes for the rich so drastically that the 400-richest families were paying less in tax than their servants! His intentions are no different this time. At the same time, far from improving the US economy, Trump’s policies are set to deepen the next US, and global, recession.
True, temporarily his election has sent the US tech companies’ shares soaring even higher, as the markets salivate at the prospect of even fatter profits as regulations are axed. But at a certain stage, the tech bubble on the US stock markets will burst. One of numerous possible triggers for the inevitable next recession.
Back in 2007-08, when the bursting of the US sub-prime mortgage bubble triggered the Great Recession and all its consequences, its severity was partly limited by the preparedness of US imperialism to act as the world’s banker, effectively underwriting China’s 2008 stimulus packages. In today’s multipolar world, with the US increasingly putting up barriers to try and block China’s further development, there was already no prospect of cooperation on that scale again.
With Trump in the White House that is doubly true. Joe Biden kept the tariffs against China that Trump introduced in his first term and added further state subsidies to US-based manufacturing. Trump will further ratchet up protectionism, attempting to defend the interests of US capitalism at the expense of the rest of the world.
This will solve none of the problems of US capitalism, with higher tariffs only increasing the costs of goods for American workers. Meanwhile, Britain, a declining power outside of the EU trading bloc, will be among hardest hit. Keir Starmer’s pro-capitalist Labour government will endeavour to make sure it is the working class, not the elites, who pay the price for that.
Even with now-impossible levels of global cooperation limiting the consequences, the Great Recession had devastating effects, from which capitalism has not recovered. In Britain, for example, in 2024, GDP economic output per head is 29% below where it would have been if pre-2007 trends had continued.
It also had huge political effects. It enormously undermined the parties of the capitalist establishment.
Trump’s dominance of the Republicans reflects that, as are similar right-populist and far-right phenomena globally. But it also led to a new generation to begin to look for a socialist alternative to capitalism. The support for Bernie Sanders in the US, and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, were both indications of that.
Crisis and struggle
Future crises will have further seismic effects on the consciousness and outlook of the working class in both the US and Britain. Already the working class has begun to re-enter the scene of history as an organised force.
Even in his first term, Trump had a whiff of the power of the working class, when, for example, in January 2019, Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, called for a general strike to end the federal government shutdown which was leaving around half a million federal workers unpaid.
This time, however, Trump has come to power in a period which has already seen – albeit from a low base – the largest number of strikes in the US since the 1980s. Trade unions are more popular than at any time in the last 60 years.
Faced with inevitable new attacks on wages, jobs, and living conditions under Trump, we will see a further development of strikes, alongside other battles against war, over the consequences of climate change, and in defence of migrant, women, and LGBTQ+ rights.
However, as in Britain, in the US there is a vital need for the working class to have its own party – able to link together the different struggles around a common programme for the ending of this rotten capitalist system, and the building of a democratic socialist society able to meet the needs of all.
Inevitably, in Britain and the US, there will be forces in the workers’ movement who continue to call for support for the supposed ‘lesser evil’ to block the likes of Trump. This year’s US Presidential election showed clearly that this approach does not work – only independent action by the working class offers a way forward.
