Part Two: Resisting authoritarian populism

See part 1 of this article here.

The illusion that the Democratic Party could be transformed into a workers party has kept the Left, social movements, and unions trapped as at best its loyal opposition and blocked us from forming a party of our own. As a result, we were bound to a party that failed yet again to stop the far right.

Now we face a clear and present danger. In January, Trump and his party will complete a hostile takeover of all branches of government, from the White House to Congress and the Supreme Court. They will act quickly to implement Trump’s authoritarian populist project of turning the United States into a managed democracy like that of Viktor Orban in Hungary.

Trump has nominated a team of lackeys that, however ideologically diverse and internally divided, are loyal not to the U.S. state and its constitution but their leader. These include more mainstream Republicans who are recent converts to the MAGA faith such as “Little Marco” Rubio and hedge fund manager Scott Bessent to militarists like Mike Waltz, Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, crackpots such as anti-vaxxer and renegade from his liberal dynastic family Bobby Kennedy, former executive of a professional wrestling empire Linda McMahon, conspiracy theorist and Vladimir Putin sympathizer Tulsi Gabbard, and Zionist attack dogs Elise Stefanik and Mike Huckabee. QAnon apologist, and nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel promises vengeance on the “deep state”.  While Fox News host, and accused sexual assaulter and white supremacist, Pete Hegseth, rounds out the team as Trump’s nominee as Defense Secretary.

Flabbergasted by this cast of characters, the commentariat has sought a term to describe it, finally settling on “kakistocracy,” a government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. Precisely.

Trump will either ram through these nominees through a willing Senate or install them through recess appointments. Regardless, he will launch his domestic program starting January 20, when he promised to be a dictator, but just on “day one.”

Padding the pockets of the rich and scapegoating the oppressed

The Trump administration’s top domestic priority will be to implement a toxic combination of America First protectionism and neoliberalism. Trump has pledged to extend and expand tax cuts for the rich, strip regulations on corporations, undue as many advances on climate change as possible including repealing Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, and impose an unprecedented increase in protectionist tariffs.

He will also follow through on his promised assault on key oppressed groups. He has threatened to deport all 12 million undocumented migrants, but will probably start with targeting those convicted of crimes and rescinding Temporary Protected Status for approximately one million people from countries like Haiti and Venezuela.

Trump has gone so far as to threaten to use not only Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, but also the U.S. military, as well as state and local police, to arrest people in their communities and at work. Already private prison corporations Core Civic and the Geo Group are preparing to incarcerate people in their jails before deportation, and their stocks are soaring as investors gush over potential profits from mass internment and expulsion of human beings from the United States.

Trump’s other main target will be trans people. Already he is threatening to curtail their rights, starting with barring their participation in sports for women and girls, and restrict or ban gender-affirming care. No doubt his attack will expand to the rest of the LGBTQ community. These threats are sending calls to crisis hotlines skyrocketing as people fear imminent assault on their very existence.

Activists also fear that Trump will not uphold his pledge to not ban abortion nationally. Anti-choice fanatics are already lobbying for him to invoke the Comstock Act to ban the shipment of medication abortion across state lines. Since that is the most common form of abortion, it would in effect ban it nationally, robbing people of control over their bodies.

Transforming and weaponizing the state

While he carries out this vicious scapegoating, Trump has assigned his fellow far-right billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, named after Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency) to carry out their long-planned war on what they call the “deep state.” They want to gut the administrative bureaucracy typical of the modern capitalist state, slashing and even abolishing whole departments, firing workers, and nixing any regulations that interfere with capitalist profiteering.

In an ominous op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, they promise to “hire a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America. This team will work in the new administration closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings.”

While they may trim some wasteful spending in the Pentagon, they will not cut its budget but will take aim at what remains of the welfare state, with Vought, the new nominee for the Office of Management and Budget, singling out Medicaid, Medicare, Health and Human Services, Education, and even Social Security for austerity, onerous new requirements to receive benefits, privatization, and delegation to the states. Musk intends to cut an astonishing $2 trillion out of the annual $7 trillion budget through laying off government workers, replacing them with technology, and slashing programs.

Finally, Trump plans to weaponize the U.S. state’s repressive apparatus—its military, cops, and courts—against his identified “enemies within.” To carry this out, he first wants to purge the leadership of this apparatus of those who previously bucked his dictates and replace them with loyalists.

With such lackeys in place, Trump plans to bring the full weight of the state against his political opponents and the broad progressive movement, especially Palestine solidarity activists and the Left, but also against liberals in higher education, departments they control, courses they teach, and programs in “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” they oversee.

He will intensify the bipartisan New McCarthyism pioneered against the movement in solidarity with Palestine. Already, the House voted to pass H.R. 6408 to give the Treasury Department to strip NGOs designated as supporting terrorism of tax-free status.  A conservative group has published a target list that includes a broad range of Left organizations from Jewish Voice for Peace to Tempest. While this particular bill may flounder in the Senate, there is no doubt that the incoming Republican Congress will pass it and others to enable Trump to carry out their planned war on domestic resistance.

The uncontrolled demolition of the post–Cold War order

Trump’s regime will be just as disruptive in the international state system. If Biden’s muscular multilateralism carried out the “controlled demolition of the post-cold war order,” Trump’s transactional nationalism will be the “uncontrolled demolition of it,” fundamentally upending the trade structures of global capitalism, degrading if not ditching alliances, and escalating great power rivalry, especially with China.

That strategy will fail to restore US imperial dominance, but, just as it did in his first term, accelerate its relative decline. Amidst that growing vacuum, other imperial powers as well as regional ones will become more assertive, intensifying conflict between states over a failing capitalist system.

Contrary to some characterizations, Trump is not an isolationist but an economic nationalist out to make deals with both friends and foes to the advantage of the United States and its corporations. In pursuit of that, he will definitively put an end to the U.S. imperial strategy of superintending neoliberal globalization.

At the heart of Trump’s economic program is protectionism and tariffs. He plans to jack up tariffs on all imports by 20 percent, including from Washington’s geopolitical allies in Europe, and by 60 percent on those from China. Already he has threatened to impose 20 percent tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China for their supposed refusal to crackdown on migrants and fentanyl smuggling. Such protectionism against Washington’s three largest trade partners, as well many others, would alter globalization as we have known it.

Trump’s nationalism will lead him to downgrade participation in geopolitical alliances or extract the United States from them entirely. While he has flirted with exiting NATO, he will likely increase the bipartisan pressure on European states to foot their own defense bill.

In place of alliances and multilateral pacts, he will tend toward bilateral deals with U.S. allies. Like he did during his last term, he will withdraw the U.S. government from the Paris Climate Agreement and many other such agreements, which he sees as restricting Washington’s power and regulating capital’s profiteering.

No one should mistake this as opposition to U.S. imperialism. In fact, despite his bombastic claims on the campaign trail to be anti-war, he showed no compunction in using U.S. military power in his first term. As Michael Galant argues, Trump escalated “conflict in every theatre of war he inherited, repeatedly brought the country to the brink of new wars, and recklessly threw around U.S. power with no regard for the many lives it would cost.”

He expanded the Pentagon budget, escalated the war in Afghanistan, supported Saudi Arabia’s horrific war on Yemen, moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, brought the United States to the brink of war with Iran, abandoned the various treaties on nuclear weapons, and threatened to nuke North Korea. With the United States embroiled in more conflicts throughout the world, we should expect more brinkmanship and exercise of military power in his second term.

Trump’s main priority will be great power confrontation with China. While his last administration’s National Security Strategy identified Russia as a great power adversary, he was predisposed to cut deals with Russia for his own opaque reasons and also to split it away from Beijing.

That is likely to continue in his second administration. To confront China, which the GOP platform and Project 2025 identify as Washington’s key adversary, he will complement the new tariff regime with a buildup of U.S. industrial capacity to manufacture the conventional, nuclear, and high-tech weaponry necessary for war with Beijing.

Escalating imperial conflict and war

Trump will confront three pivotal flashpoints of imperial conflict—Palestine in the Middle East, Ukraine in Europe, and Taiwan in Asia. While unpredictable, precisely because of his transactional strategy, which makes him prone to vacillate between bellicose bluster and cutting deals, he is likely to escalate all three conflicts.

These flashpoints involve both struggles for national self-determination by oppressed nations, as well as rivalries among regional and various imperialist powers. Thus, any escalation could morph into much broader geopolitical, economic, and military confrontations if not war.

In the Middle East, Trump shares with the exiting Biden administration Washington’s commitment to dominating the region, controlling its strategic energy reserves, and backing off regional and imperial rivals, especially China.

That said, Trump has sent contradictory signals on Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine. On the one hand, he has promised to reach a settlement to end it. On the other, he and his incoming ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, support Israel’s colonial expansion into the West Bank and Gaza, something that would dramatically escalate its war and inflame the Palestinian resistance.

Moreover, Trump shares Israel’s determination to wipe out Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity. In line with his previous policy of “maximum pressure,” he will back Israel in launching another round of military strikes on Iran, which would further destabilize the Middle East and potentially trigger a regional conflagration.

Similarly, Trump has also taken conflicting positions on Russia’s imperialist war on Ukraine. On the one hand, he has pledged to cut a deal between Volodymyr Zelensky and Putin and end the war. But, on the other, he allowed his GOP underlings to approve the latest arms shipment to Ukraine, sustaining its resistance to conquest.

Trump would like to make a deal, but it is altogether unclear that one is possible. Why would Putin agree to one, when he is slowly annexing more and more of Ukraine? Meanwhile, neither Zelensky nor the Ukrainian people are willing to give up parts of their country and its inhabitants to brutal Russian rule.

Therefore, Russia is likely to continue to prosecute the war, despite its huge economic and human cost, hoping for the United States and Europe to tire and abandon Ukraine. Such defiance could trigger the ever erratic and irascible Trump to lash out in anger, issuing threats that could escalate the conflict.

Or he could throw in the towel, rewarding Russia’s aggression and thereby greenlighting Putin’s project of rebuilding of the Russian empire by imposing its will and even seizing other countries in its former colonial sphere of influence. Either way, the war is likely to continue and potentially escalate.

Taiwan is perhaps the most important of all of these flashpoints. China sees Taiwan as a renegade province it wants to seize, while the United States has traditionally used it as a pretext to justify military deployment to contain and deter China’s rise as a regional power. Both do not care about Taiwan’s right to self-determination.

As with the other flashpoints, Trump and his advisors have made contradictory statements. Trump has implied that he is unwilling to defend Taiwan against Chinese aggression, but he increased arms sales to Taiwan in his previous term as part of his administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy.

Given Trump’s escalation of great power confrontation with Beijing, this contradiction will be resolved in one direction or the other. Certainly Project 2025 signals that the United States must defend Taiwan as part of a strategy to contain China. It declares, “The most severe immediate threat that Beijing’s military poses, however, is to Taiwan and other U.S. allies along the first island chain in the Western Pacific. If China could subordinate Taiwan or allies like the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan, it could break apart any balancing coalition that is designed to prevent Beijing’s hegemony over Asia. Accordingly, the United States must ensure that China does not succeed.”

The stakes of this conflict are not just geopolitical, but also economic, since Taiwan produces 90 percent of the world’s most advanced microchips, which are central  high-tech commercial production and the most advanced weapons systems, from fighter jets to AI cyberwarfare. Given his determination to contain China’s challenge to the United States, and China’s determination to annex Taiwan, Trump, despite his ambivalence, will likely bend to his more sophisticated advisers and make the defense of Taiwan a priority, intensifying their rivalry over the island and its people.

Provoking crisis and chaos

Trump will attempt to impose his authoritarian populist program at home and abroad, exacerbating global capitalism’s multiple crises. Such conditions will provoke opposition from above by elements of the capitalist establishment and from below by workers and the oppressed.

Trump will brook no opposition to his project, provoking a constitutional crisis in the state. He will override not only norms but also laws he considers unfavorable to carry out his campaign of revenge against political opponents, gutting of entire departments, and weaponization of the state to repress domestic dissent.

Already, he delayed signing traditional transparency agreements as part of the transition process and has yet to sign one allowing FBI background checks of his cabinet. Moreover, he has pressured GOP Senate Majority Leader John Thune to allow recess appointments of his most extreme appointees in clear violation of the Constitution.

This is just a taste of things to come. Trump wants to use his right-wing Supreme Court’s rulings to justify use of presidential authority unprecedented in recent history to bypass Congress and enact policy through executive orders.

To empower DOGE, he wants to revive impoundment, a power that allowed presidents to override the distribution of funds approved by Congress, until it was banned under Richard Nixon. He wants to resurrect Schedule F, which he attempted to use in his first term, to fire federal bureaucrats and whole layers of federal workers, especially in departments that refuse to obey his orders and replace them with obedient lackeys.

If Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy carry out their most extreme threats, including abolishing whole departments, they will not only undermine constitutional norms, but also important functions of the state like that of the Department of Education in reproducing U.S. capitalism and others such as the State Department in enforcing its imperialist hegemony. They seem willing to risk such disruption to Orbanize the United States.

As part of that project, Trump has promised to curtail the power of Democratic Party governors and mayors who vow noncooperation with his assertion of executive authority, especially on his key initiative of mass deportation. He wants to rip up state and city laws that bar cooperation between ICE and the police to arrest, detain, and deport migrants. If elected leaders resist, as some of them have pledged to do, Trump has threatened to withhold essential federal funds that will undermine the functioning of their states and cities.

In perhaps his biggest threat to Constitutional restrictions on presidential power, he wants to weaponize the repressive apparatus, from the Justice Department to the FBI, against his political enemies. As he unsuccessfully tried to do in his first term, he has threatened to deploy the military against protests against his orders.

To intimidate generals who might put the Constitution before obedience to the president, Trump has flirted with recalling retired military leaders so that he can court martial them for refusing to obey his orders to repress protests in his first term. It remains to be seen if the Pentagon brass will resist or buckle to his dictates.

If Trump implements his economic program, it will provoke an economic and budgetary crisis and exacerbate class and social inequality. His massive tariffs would drive up the prices of consumer goods, triggering another bout of inflation and hammering workers’ standards of living.

His plans for mass deportation will not only violate human rights on an unprecedented scale, but they will also create a severe labor shortage in agribusiness, meatpacking, food processing, and construction, driving up the cost of groceries, rent, and homes. On top of that, his planned tax cuts will drive up the government’s deficit and debt, precipitating a fiscal crisis that can only be resolved by massive austerity measures, especially if Musk and Ramaswamy get their way in gutting critical benefits for workers.

His imperial strategy of transactional nationalism and especially his greenlighting of Israel’s expanding aggression will not only destabilize the world, maiming and killing ever higher numbers abroad, but also exacerbate conditions for the majority here at home. More war in the Middle East could spike the cost of oil globally, intensifying inflation in the United States and globally.

Conflict in the palace and with its subjects

Such policies will tend to break up Trump’s so-called electoral coalition, which is really just an unstable amalgam of classes with contradictory interests—rogue billionaires, petty bourgeois reactionaries, and desperate workers from various racial groups.

The trouble could start in the palace itself. While far more coherent and united, Trump’s regime remains internally divided between industrial protectionists, Wall St. neoliberals, libertarian opponents of the deep state. These factions differ on essential questions like tariffs.

Musk, for example, does not support the level protectionism Trump has proposed because of Tesla’s huge investments in China. How long will those two billionaires’ bromance last if Trump cuts into Musk’s profits by starting a trade war with China?

Trump’s inflationary policies could also drive a wedge between him and most corporations. While capitalists are overjoyed at the prospect of tax cuts and deregulation, whole sections of them are threatened by the rest of his program. As examples, agribusiness opposes mass deportation because it needs criminalized workers and multinationals oppose protectionism because they need unfettered free trade. Already a host of companies are voicing their displeasure.

They are also unhappy with Trump’s threat to fire Chair of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell. He is using that threat, which he is unlikely to carry out, to pressure Powell into lowering interest rates to spur growth. That not only will undermine the independence of the Fed, a problem for capital, but could also compound inflation, creating more problems for small businesses and eating into workers’ standards of living.

In the end, Trump will fail to overcome any of capitalism’s systemic crises, and instead exacerbate them, creating conditions that will spark resistance from workers and oppressed groups against his rule. Just as he did in his first term, Trump will respond to such dissent and opposition with ever more scapegoating and repression.

That in turn will spur his far-right and fascist allies to function as proxies against any and all progressive resistance. Already white supremacists have sent text messages to Black people across the country with instructions to report to the nearest plantation to pick cotton. Nazis have also begun to march in cities across the country. These forces mobilized in defense of Trump last time and will do so again this time—and they have grown in number and are now far better organized and sophisticated.

The Democrats’ fake resistance

The Left, social movements, and unions must build a new resistance against a second and far more dangerous Trump regime. That resistance must be independent and not look to the Democrats to either lead the struggle or offer any kind of genuine alternative in upcoming elections.

Already, Biden and Harris are promising Trump, who they called a “fascist,” a smooth transition back into power. If they were serious about that charge, they would be doing everything in their power to block his presidency, proving that their rhetoric was just electioneering to terrify us into voting for them.

Even their campaign workers are shocked by their bosses’ decision to aid and abet Trump’s assumption of power. “It was detached from the reality of what happened,” said one staffer. “We are told the fate of democracy is at stake, and then the message was, ‘We’ll get them next time.’”

On top of that, the Democrats have told their followers that they will not support a protest strategy against Trump. As the New York Times reported, “the party’s early preparations to oppose the next Trump administration are heavily focused on legal fights and consolidating state power, rather than marching in the streets.”

What resistance the Democrats will offer will be ineffective. So far, they are threatening lawsuits to obstruct Trump’s most extreme attacks on laws, regulations, and government departments. But, with the courts stacked with Republican appointees all the way to the Supreme Court, their legal cases will yield few results.

Already, in a preemptive capitulation to the constitutional norms that Trump disregards, prosecutors have suspended his sentencing for convictions as well as planned court cases against him. They have deferred to the Supreme Court’s upholding of nearly unlimited presidential immunity, which essentially guarantees Trump rule with impunity.

The only other major initiative is from governors trying to insulate their states from Trump’s assertion of power. California Governor Gavin Newsom has taken action to protect his state’s various programs and regulations from Trump’s attacks. Billionaire Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker and Colorado’s Jared Polis have launched Governors Safeguarding Democracy to coordinate such efforts.

They promise to protect state courts, laws, and elections from the Trump administration. But, in a sign of their spinelessness and predisposition to manage rather than resist Trump, several governors that initially were listed as signatories to the group withdrew their names.

The group’s legal strategy faces courts that are rigged against them, and, given their respect for constitutional order, they are unlikely to defy court rulings to resist Trump. If they do, it will provoke a deeper constitutional crisis between the federal government and their states.

They will avoid this at all costs. So, their efforts will more likely devolve into a platform for these politicians’ aspiration for leadership in the Democratic Party for the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election.

In those contests, which seem in the distant future for those facing immediate attacks,  the Democratic Party will at best offer an anemic liberalism to shore up the wretched existing order, delivering none of the fundamental reforms required to address the needs of the vast majority. Their disappointment will open the door for Trump’s successors to return to power with an even more draconian, far-right program.

For independence, struggle, and organization

It is high time to break free of the entrapment of the Left, social movements, trade unions, and our collective resistance in the Democratic Party. It is not a workers’ party but a capitalist one, and we cannot use it to advance our interests, let alone support it as a lesser evil to stop the greater evil on the right. It is to blame for Trump return to power.

In building a new resistance to Trump’s regime, we must learn from the two key failures of the last one. First, the mass uprisings, from the Climate March, to the Women’s March, the mobilization for migrants, and most importantly Black Lives Matter, did not build new permanent organization for long-term struggle for our demands.

Second, the largely liberal leaders of the resistance funneled these movements into an electoral project in the Democratic Party, first in Sanders’ doomed primary campaign and then into Biden’s presidential run. In the process, they demobilized the struggle, moderated their demands to those acceptable to the Democrats, and became at best the loyal opposition within a party fundamentally opposed to them.

This time, our resistance must be independent, build organization and unions for the long haul, and remain focused on fighting for our own demands. In the first instance, the resistance must be in defense of those groups Trump has targeted for immediate repression—migrants, trans people, and Palestine solidarity activists.

Against the Democrats, who will not resist such scapegoating, we must rally to the defense of anyone attacked. Importantly, this resistance must not push Palestine to the side, but embrace the struggle for its freedom from Israeli colonialism as a key part of our struggle for collective liberation.

This is not a moral injunction. Given the strategic significance of Israel and hegemony over the Middle East to U.S. imperialism, solidarity with Palestine is in fact a strategic lynch pin to our struggle against the right, capitalism, and empire.

That must begin with principled defense of Palestine solidarity activists’ right to free speech, assembly, and organization. If they can deny these frontline fighters those rights, all of our rights will be in jeopardy.

One of our key defensive struggles will be mass action against the marches of the Right and fascist groups, which are already on the march. Our model should be Boston’s protest in 2017 that mobilized tens of thousands of people to chase fascists out of the city.

In all this organizing, we must agitate inside unions for them to play a central role in the new resistance and use their power to strike against Trump and the far right. Already unions are heeding the United Auto Workers” Sean Fain’s call to schedule their contract negotiations for 2028 so that workers can jointly shut down whole industries.

While that is a good effort and must be supported, it will be far too late to stop what Trump has planned against workers and the oppressed. So, rank-and-file militants must agitate for immediate responses, especially to austerity measures and job cuts to federal and state workers.

The Chicago Teachers Union is already combining their fight for a contract with opposition to Project 2025 and its planned demolition of public education. The Left in unions must argue for and organize job actions outside normal contract negotiations, especially in the public sector, which is literally on Trump’s chopping block.

Toward a new workers’ party

In this new resistance, the Left must help cohere a new militant minority of activists, build new mass organizations to sustain struggles, and pull together rank-and-file formations in unions. We also must argue that such struggles have to remain not only independent from the Democrats, but also set their sights on building a new workers’ party to challenge it and the far right.

Such a party will not be built by any existing group declaring itself a party. None has either the roots in the class nor the size and influence to make such declarations remotely credible. Nor can it be built by a regroupment of existing small socialist organizations.

Building a party cannot be done by proclamation, only through a process of struggle and political debate with real forces. Revolutionary socialists must argue for one from within the resistance and among the emerging militant minority.

That party’s main priority must be organizing class and social struggle, not electoral campaigns. Any candidates we do run must be on our own ballot lines, especially in the one-party districts across the country where the spoiler charge has no traction.

Those candidates must be accountable to our party, organizations, and unions. And their role if elected should be as tribunes of the resistance and its demands, using their  office to build movements with no illusions that victories can be won without mass disruptive protests and strikes.

The politics of any new workers party cannot be prescribed in advance, but forged through common organizing, discussion, and debate. But, given the intensifying conflicts between imperialist and regional powers often over oppressed nations and peoples, at the heart of its politics must be principles of anti-imperialism against the US as well as all other great powers and of solidarity with all struggles of the oppressed and exploited, without exception. Such internationalism is necessary to meet the challenges of our epoch.

We are entering into an unprecedented period of far-right rule in the United States. The whole existing Left, social movement organizations, and unions will be challenged to rally to our mutual defense and opposition to looming attacks on workers and the oppressed.

Out of this period of reaction and resistance, we must build stronger infrastructures of dissent, mass organizations for social struggle, rank-and-file groups in unions, and a new workers’ party. Faced with global capitalism’s multiple interacting crises, which seem increasingly apocalyptic, our choice, now more than ever, is socialism or barbarism.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”