“Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore.” Donald Trump couldn’t have made clearer his intention to rule indefinitely if he should succeed in clawing his way back into power. He said it far more succinctly than in the 900 pages of Project 2025 (with more kept secret until January) or in his two-hour campaign rants.
Trump has twice been the loser in the popular vote: by three million in 2016 and seven million in 2020, and no doubt he will lose again with the voters. But Trump still hopes to be installed, just as he was in 2016, by the Electoral College—the anti-democratic compromise made with slaveholders ensconced in the U.S. Constitution. In the aftermath of the first Russian invasion of Ukraine and the seizure of Crimea in 2014, Russia used hacked voter data in online campaigns to depress votes for Hillary Clinton. That included pushing Jill Stein, another Vladimir Putin asset, among left-leaning voters or calling Trump the “lesser evil.” Trump himself publicly asked: “Russia, if you’re listening,” find Clinton’s missing emails.
UNENDING RESISTANCE TO TRUMPISM
Women’s March on Washington on Inauguration Day 2017. Photo: Victoria Pickering, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Resistance to Trump began from his first full day in office in 2017. The Women’s Marches in Washington, D.C., and across the country opened four years of freedom movements erasing his claims to national support. Strikes of teachers across West Virginia and in Chicago gained solidarity from fellow workers and parents; spontaneous demonstrations at airports to obstruct Trump’s Muslim ban, and Black Lives Matter demonstrations—especially after the police murder of George Floyd—all denied Trump any sense of being in control and disrupted his grander plans. Still, it was four years of horrible retrogression.
The failure of anti-Trump Americans to block Trump from the White House was compared in 2016 to German Socialists and Communists failing to stop Hitler in 1933. But now Trump has vowed permanent minority rule for MAGA, and hang any opposition.
Trump has far more tools than he had in 2016: Twitter, bought by Elon Musk with financing from two Russian oligarchs, is now an open sewer for amplifying Trump and his MAGA followers. Mainstream media have called out neither his confusion and rapid descent into dementia, nor his unhinged attacks on women, LGBTQ people, Blacks, Hispanics, Jews and Muslims. A whole International of authoritarian regimes, Putin’s Russia and Orban’s Hungary at the head, is backing Trump—who vowed to flee to Venezuela if he loses.
HANDPICKED SUPREME COURT DOES TRUMP’S BIDDING
Trump is now also protected by the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) he handpicked that gutted abortion rights in the Dobbs decision and gave corporations the upper hand to ride roughshod over regulators by overturning the Chevron doctrine. SCOTUS greenlighted the argument that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) cannot punish companies for firing workers trying to organize a union because the NLRB itself is unconstitutional.
SCOTUS has already given Trump total immunity in advance. Instead of the hastily assembled plans after the 2020 election to create fake electors and call out paramilitary mobs to disrupt Congress on Jan. 6, they have had nearly four years to plan for the upcoming election. In Michigan most of the Republican electors are ones under indictment for fraudulently claiming the same position in 2020. In Georgia, the State Election Board is in the process of legalizing every illegal trick from 2020.
Trump is desperate: if he fails, the rapist and convicted felon is possibly headed to jail for 34 convictions, plus instigating a coup and taking from the White House classified documents of great interest to Putin, Netanyahu and Mohammed bin Salman. Trump’s crimes have been compared to Eugene Debs running for President from federal prison in 1920. But the comparison is laughably cynical: Debs was a Socialist jailed for encouraging workers not to fight and kill other workers in World War I just as Rosa Luxemburg did in Germany.
TRUMPISM BACKS ANY AND ALL DICTATORS/MURDERERS
Crop art at the Minnesota State Fair 2024 depicting Trump and JD Vance. Photo: Lorie Shaull, CC BY 2.0
Putin is equally desperate, as Ukraine’s ongoing incursion into Kursk Oblast and wider targeting of military bases and oil depots have brought the war home to Russia. He desperately needs a friend in the White House who will halt support to Ukraine, instead of finally loosening the restraints on Ukraine’s ability to defend itself and strike Russia with U.S. weapons.
The new faces on Trump’s team are committed lackeys of dictators and enemies of Ukrainian resistance. J.D. Vance, Trump’s pick for Vice President, also spouts an even weirder form of misogyny, including contempt for women who haven’t given birth and arguing against women’s self-development, than Trump’s lifetime of assaults on women. RFK Jr. doubles down on the anti-vaxxer passion that MAGAts adopted when Trump botched the COVID-19 pandemic so badly that a million people died unnecessarily. And Tulsi Gabbard solidifies the campaign’s links to Bashar al-Assad, the butcher of Syria, to anti-Muslim fascist Narendra Modi of India and to Putin.
This threat must be blocked. Marxist-Humanists are not in support of either capitalist party, each of them bragging about the stock market, supportive of continuing to arm Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and dependent on the cash of millionaires. Since SCOTUS opened the floodgates to bribing politicians with Citizens United, it is now billionaires who expect—and pay—to be listened to and obeyed. In 1964, News & Letters projected that Blacks and workers would stop Goldwater, who was running against the Civil Rights Act and Medicare, and was backed by the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan. That was so, even though Lyndon B. Johnson’s “election would not basically change the objective situation of capitalism on the rampage.”
The Republicans’ plans to gut healthcare, housing and food aid would worsen living and working conditions for tens of millions. The new bureaucracy of MAGA loyalists would be used as a weapon against workers, immigrants, and all others who are not oligarchs. That together with emboldened police forces and the ideological onslaught would be used to crush resistance. The Supreme Court that Trump installed gives him immunity for “official acts.” If he had carried out a coup on Jan. 6 by ordering, as Commander-in-chief, the 82nd Airborne to charge the Capitol, instead of instigating an attack by his MAGA supporters, he’d have been in the clear—and he would expect to suppress any resistance from Inauguration Day on.
In 2024 the task is more than stopping the man who said he would “be a dictator on day one.” We need to begin the process of de-MAGAfication, like the de-Nazification after World War II. That would mean attacking all the racist, misogynist, anti-worker, fascist MAGA candidates on the ballot, including the “moderates” criticizing Trump before voting his way. Resorting to the electoral system is a necessary defense, but at the same time it cannot be separated from joining and building movements whose challenge to the system goes beyond electoral politics. If women, Blacks, workers and others successfully stop fascism in November, then there is a breathing space for the forces of revolution to oppose the dominance of capital that we face.
This comes at a fitting time. The presidential debate brought Trump down to size but diverted from the magnitude of the threat he represents, as if his campaign is the operation of one person rather than an expression of a faction of the ruling class determined to take over the state and destroy democracy in order to eliminate regulations, boost profits, and crush labor and social movements. At the same time, the competition between Trump and Harris over who is the best militarist, who would be the most effective imperialist and repressor of immigrants, who is more supportive of the fossil fuel industry and the state of Israel, gave fuel to people who maintain that the two parties are indistinguishable. We can’t support either capitalist party and yet at the same time must recognize the threat posed by that fascist faction of the ruling class. While we can’t ignore electoral politics, there is no solution there, including fantasies about third parties, the most “progressive” of which are apologizing for Putin as much as Trump does. We need to be building movements that go beyond electoral politics to challenge the whole system and prepare for spontaneous eruptions—the power of ideas is paramount in that kind of building and preparation. I agree with the editorial’s conclusion: “If women, Blacks, workers and others successfully stop fascism in November, then there is a breathing space for the forces of revolution to oppose the dominance of capital that we face.”