What Donald Trump’s election means for the world

This article was requested and published in the Winter edition of Seara Nova, a print magazine of politics and culture of the Portuguese left. The print magazine has existed since 1921 and is sold in hundreds of kiosks throughout Portugal. The following is the original, which was written Nov. 25.

Donald Trump’s election win this Nov. 5 by a narrow margin over Democratic candidate Kamala Harris means that this racist, xenophobic, anti-worker and anti-woman billionaire will once again be the U.S. president. While no working-class organization considers a Trump victory good news, there was little real choice. Both the Republican and the Democratic Parties represent the interests of the capitalist ruling class. Both parties attempt to maintain U.S. hegemony worldwide, using military and economic warfare. 

Both parties have voted for tens of billions of dollars in Congress to fund a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza. Both have backed policies to wage economic war against socialist China and surround that country with a version of NATO in the Pacific. And the winner had to come from one of these two parties.

Despite these similarities, the two parties employ different tactics. The Trump forces present a different set of challenges to the working class, which comprises  nearly all of the U.S. population, made up of all nationalities and genders. 

This article will examine the foreign policy issues at stake with Trump in the White House. It will review the class character of these latest elections in the center of world imperialism, consider how a Trump election affects different sectors of the U.S. population and discuss the possibilities for mobilizing mass resistance.

Regarding the vote totals themselves, it appears that when all votes are counted, the popular vote will be about 77.5 million for Trump, more than 75 million for Harris and 3 million for assorted others. This means that while Trump won the Electoral College by 312-226, he had no landslide victory or “mandate,” getting less than 50% of the total votes. \(cookpolitical.com/vote-tracker/2024/electoral-college)

NATO, the European Union and war with Russia

The election outcome does nothing to change Washington’s ability to wield power internationally. Even combined with its imperialist allies in NATO and Japan, the U.S. no longer has the same dominant position it did in the 1990s. Since then, China’s economic role has grown enormously and it is playing a leading role in an economic coalition, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and other countries), that competes with the G7 countries, whose economic strength has declined, especially since the 2008-09 financial crisis.

Since 2001, to try to reverse or at least delay its loss of hegemony, Washington has launched direct military wars —  on Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya — and proxy wars — on Syria, Yemen, Ukraine. Whether led by Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump or Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the bombing and occupations brought enormous destruction and misery to the people. Sometimes they even destroyed the existing sovereign government. 

Despite the suffering and the trillions of dollars these wars cost, nowhere could Washington establish a stable client regime. One of the poorest countries in the world, Afghanistan, expelled the U.S. occupiers in 2021. Trump’s arrogant pose does nothing to change this balance of power. 

The one confrontation where Trump claims differences with the Democrats regards Ukraine. There the U.S. and NATO have intervened and provoked Russia since the early 2000s, backing the 2014 Maidan coup and then supporting Kiev’s war on the Donbass region. Ukraine is now on the edge of collapse. Trump claims the war would never have begun if he had been president, that he would have made a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin. If that’s really Trump’s goal, it’s to shift U.S. assets to confront China.

The U.S. establishment has already taken steps to prevent Trump’s deal. Biden authorized Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to fire Western-supplied long-range ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) missiles from Ukrainian territory into Russia. The Kiev regime immediately fired at Russia’s Bryansk region early Nov. 19, escalating the war.

Regarding Trump, the European NATO governments can expect higher costs and risks if the war continues. Most EU and British politicians have already joined the war against Russia. They aim to remain junior partners in the U.S.-led imperialist alliance. European workers and farmers will need to mobilize to avoid a war in which they have no interest.

Like the Democrats, Trump has promised support for Israel in West Asia and hostility toward Iran and the People’s Republic of China. Trump will use, even increase, sanctions to wage economic war against Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela and against any country the U.S. considers an opponent worldwide.

Capitalists impose election propaganda     

Both capitalist parties bombarded the population with reactionary ruling-class propaganda, consisting mainly of blatant lies, repeated endlessly. For their candidates in local and national elections this year, they spent $16 billion.

Trump’s campaign directed the most vile, racist slanders at migrant workers. He blamed immigrants for every problem of capitalist society — crime, narcotics, low wages, everything. These insults are all lies, and they were the major issue in Trump’s election campaign. Trump even claimed during his debate with Harris that Haitian migrants were “eating pets.”   

Much as the center and center-left parties in Europe, the Democratic Party presented only a weak defense of migrants and claimed they would block migration. A similar pattern held for another issue the Trump campaign pushed — alleged Democratic Party support for trans people. Again, the Democrats and Harris tried to avoid this civil rights issue. In the election arena, there has been little opportunity for any left party to build solidarity among all sectors of the workers. The deluge of ruling class propaganda pushes ideology rightward.

People did push back some restrictions on reproductive rights. In June 2022, Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices eliminated the Constitutional protection for the right to abortion, which had existed since 1973. In 10 states, popular movements put the right to abortion on the ballot on Election Day and won in seven of them, with about 60% of people voting for the right to abortion.

Genocide Joe – and Harris?

The most politically conscious and active sectors of U.S. society — those demonstrating against U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal war in West Asia — would never support Kamala Harris if she identified with and argued for President Joe Biden’s full backing of Israel. They knew that Trump was vicious against Palestinians and praised [Israel’s Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime, but they had seen too much of “Genocide Joe” to back his vice president.

Harris was so intent on supporting the Zionist state that her campaign would not even allow any Palestinian — even loyal Democratic Party members — to address the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. This proved that U.S. support for Israel was not just the result of effective lobbying; it was due to the common interests of U.S. imperialism and the Israeli state. 

Harris avoided challenging this entwined U.S.-Israel relationship that is so poisonous to the world’s people and murderous to Palestinians. She did so even though her choice infuriated hundreds of thousands of activist youths who might otherwise have enthusiastically supported an African American woman running for president. Harris emphasized her commitment to aggressive U.S. militarism by displaying her support from former Vice President Dick Cheney, a war criminal regarding Iraq.

The cabinet from hell

Trump quickly nominated most of his cabinet and White House staff. Instead of technocrat managers to run the gigantic departments that make up the empire’s government and state bureaucracy, he has chosen an unsavory collection of inane monsters. They all bow down to Trump, most of the men have been accused of abuse of some sort, and they are devoted to reactionary, racist ideology. They are all enemies of the working class.

Together they bring so many contradictions to the new administration that late-night comedians joke about Trump firing them within six months. Matt Gaetz, the nominee for attorney general, had to quit in the first week. Pete Hegseth, named to head the Defense Department, is a former Army National Guard captain and host on the right-wing broadcast Fox News who defended U.S. soldiers convicted of war crimes in Iraq. Hegseth accused Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. of having gotten his job only because he is African American, an absurd insult. Will Hegseth last?

Trump has created positions in the newly established “Department of Government Efficiency” for Elon Musk, the richest person on earth, and pharmaceutical billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy. They will recommend cutting government programs they consider unnecessary — perhaps education, Social Security, Medicare and anything that regulates their businesses. Nearly all of the other nominees are beyond reactionary and bring their own contradictions. 

Trump’s appointee as “border czar,” Tom Homan, intends to expel some 13 million undocumented workers, rounding them up and putting them in camps. These migrants keep essential industries — construction, agriculture, hospitality, home care — running. It’s a plan to cause mass misery and disrupt society.

If this cabinet from hell self-destructs, good. But the people of the U.S. must be ready to mobilize to expose and counter Trump’s fascist-like policies. Those who have been demonstrating to stop the genocide in Gaza have stayed in the streets. There are already calls for demonstrations to protest Trump’s inauguration.

John Catalinotto has been an editor of the weekly newspaper Workers World (now an online daily at workers.org) since 1982. From 2004-08 he was a contributor in the USA to the Portuguese Communist Party weekly newspaper Avante, and he has been an occasional contributor to odiario.info and Seara Nova.