By Dave Stockton
Donald Trump’s election has caused dismay, not only at home but among the liberal and social democratic governments, parties and their media worldwide.
How, they ask, could a ‘potty mouthed’ ignoramus, who encouraged fascist mobs to run amok on Capitol Hill after the 2020 election, be about to assume the presidency? Surely American democracy itself must be tottering.
At home the number one victims on Trump’s list are the 11.7 million ‘illegal’ immigrants. He has promised to carry out ‘the largest domestic deportation operation in American History.’ He will order the military to start with one million deportations on ‘day one’, with special detention camps built to hold them till they can be sent back to their countries of origin.
Legal migrants are to be targeted too. He promises to ‘ramp up ideological screening for people legally applying to come into the country’. He threatens to expand his first term ‘Muslim ban’ to ‘block more people from certain countries from entering the US’.
Even if there is much bluff and bluster in this, it will require a powerful united front of resistance, in which all communities—and the trade unions—defend all those targeted in this vile racist plan.
But if liberals worldwide are dismayed, hard right populist leaders are delighted. The chorus stretches from Hungary’s ‘illiberal democrat’ Viktor Orban to Argentina’s ‘anarcho-capitalist’ Javier Milei, with Narendra Modi, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Benjamin Netanyahu in between. All see Trump as one of them.
Vladimir Putin, the great disrupter of America’s purported ‘rules based order’, also recognises a kindred spirit in Trump. The president-elect has several times praised the murderous Putin as a ‘strong leader’ and claimed he could end the war in Ukraine ‘within 24 hours’.
Putin hopes that Trump will let him keep the one-fifth of the country he now occupies. He knows Trump is no enthusiast for Nato or the USA’s European allies, who he repeatedly accuses as freeloaders.
China presents a knottier problem for Trump. During his first term Trump imposed import tariffs of 25% against the world’s second-largest economy; in his 2024 campaign Trump suggested they could be raised to 60% or even higher. He also promised to block advanced technology exports from the US or Europe, to obstruct China’s target of being the global AI leader by 2030.
China is already experiencing an economic downturn, with falling property prices, soaring local government debt and rising unemployment among young people. Severe restrictions on China’s exports could lead to serious social unrest.
All this could strengthen Trump’s hand in wringing a deal out of Xi. What is sure is that such a trade war will not benefit those US workers who voted for him, fondly imagining it would bring manufacturing jobs. In fact it will just increase the price of imports. Trump’s ‘first buddy’ Elon Musk may have another problem, since Tesla, produced in a giant factory in Shanghai, has just exported its millionth electric car.
On 20 January Trump will erupt into a world where centrist governments have been toppling to rightwingers. In France and Germany, Macron and Scholz cannot get their budgets passed, while Britain’s capitalist class have turned on Rachel Reeves and Kier Starmer over tax rises. Far right parties look set to gain.
Rivalry leads to war
The background to all this is the deepening inter-imperialist rivalry between the US, Russia, China and the fractious EU. America First means aggressively using its still enormous economic and military power to put both rivals like China and allies like Europe on rations.
With the Great Climate Change Denier in the White House we will see the break-up of the feeble attempts to pay compensation to countries devastated by the emissions of the developed world. This was already visible at COP29. The appointment of anti-vaxxers and covid deniers to the Federal Health authorities will also spell disaster in any future pandemics.
The break-up of multilateralism for unilateralism is already encouraging regional powers like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan to attempt to do the same to one another. The result will be growing economic disruption and wars, which will eventually blow back on the US.
Passivity in the face of this will encourage destruction on an even bigger scale. Instead we need class consciousness, independence from all wings of the ruling class and intransigent opposition to all the emerging imperialist camps. This means revolutionary workers’ parties, linked together in a new, Fifth International.
