Which way forward for the resistance?
Now is the time for independent politics and solidarity without exception

Five months into his misrule, President Trump is swinging a wrecking ball through the domestic and international order. Faced with obstacles to his program, splits within his coalition, and popular opposition, he has only escalated his attacks with raids against migrant workers and a war on Iran.
His unrelenting offensive has inflamed ever greater popular resistance. In Los Angeles, the multiracial, multinational working class, including key unions, built mass demonstrations and staged direct actions against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the police, and National Guard troops deployed by Trump.
More than 5 million people poured into the streets at No Kings rallies against Trump’s narcissistic and shambolic military parade on his birthday. And, while he consolidated his base behind his war on Iran, half the population opposed it. But Trump will not back down. Instead, he is intensifying his class war at home and unilateral imperialism abroad.
Despite the emergence of mass popular resistance to Trump, the Democratic Party establishment persists in following James Carville’s possum strategy; they are determined to play dead in the hope that his regime will implode on its own. It won’t.
We must face reality: no one is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves. To do that, a resistance, based on our own independent and democratic organizations, needs to be built; a resistance that opposes all of Trump’s attacks on the exploited and oppressed, and that organizes mass and increasingly disruptive protests and strikes to stop his regime in its tracks and defend our democratic rights.
Understanding our enemy
To defeat our enemy, we have first to understand it.
Trump is carrying out an authoritarian nationalist transformation of the U.S. state. He is doing this through unconstitutional and barely constitutional executive orders, eroding what passes for democracy, in favor of what political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism.”
Domestically, Trump has launched a neoliberal war on the working class, firing federal workers, gutting social programs, shredding any regulation of corporations, and slashing taxes for the billionaires. He is using our rulers’ oldest strategy of divide and conquer to get away with it.
Trump has whipped up bigotry and hate to attack migrants, Black and brown people, trans people, women, the disabled, the poor, and almost everyone else. His aim is pit sections of the working class against each other to prevent any united fightback.
Internationally, he is implementing a unilateral imperialist strategy to assert U.S. dominance over both friends and foes. He has imposed tariffs on nearly every country; threatened to annex Panama, Greenland, and even Canada; appealed to Russia to end its imperialist war in Ukraine and join Washington in the partition of the country; attempted to end Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza by greenlighting the ethnic cleansing and bombing Iran into submission; forced allies to increase their military budgets to five percent of their GDP; and planned to free up U.S. forces to confront China in a battle for supremacy over global capitalism.
These domestic and international agendas are fused in Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” now being rammed through Congress. It slashes taxes on the rich; guts Medicaid for workers, the poor, and disabled; plows $185 billion into immigration enforcement; and boosts the war budget to a record $1 trillion.
None of this has the support of the working-class majority. Trump barely won the popular vote, never had a mandate, and his poll numbers have plummeted. On top of that, his policy agenda faces enormous obstacles and the economy is tanking.
Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” still faces opposition from GOP senators worried about Medicaid cuts. Courts have curtailed the worst of his attacks on migrants and freed political prisoners Mohsen Mahdawi, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Mahmoud Khalil. And people have risen up in Los Angeles and across the country against his ICE raids.
Trump has already been forced to back off many of his reciprocal tariffs, earning the moniker “TACO Don” (“Trump Always Chickens Out”). Russia has escalated its war in Ukraine. Trump’s bombing of Iran has dug the United States deeper into war and genocide in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Trump has failed to pivot to Asia.
Trump has even screwed up on his signature issue, the economy. His tariffs will increase prices and cut into profits, which dropped this quarter by 3.3 percent in the biggest drop since the pandemic. His ICE raids will lead to labor shortages, drive up the cost of wages, and further slow the economy, ushering in a new epoch of stagnation and inflation.
At the same time, Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will cut tax revenue while it raises spending, increasing the government’s deficit, debt, interest rates, and interest payments, risking a fiscal crisis for the state. As a result, Moody’s has downgraded Washington’s credit rating.
These failures have led to a growing list of splits within the administration and between it and capital. Trump and Elon Musk had an apocalyptic breakup of their bromance over the financial profligacy of the Big Beautiful Bill, Trump broke with MAGA isolationists over Iran, and the majority of capitalists oppose his tariffs.
But a cornered beast is actually more dangerous, as his raids on migrants and war on Iran prove. Trump will continue to escalate his assaults if he is not challenged by a far more militant resistance, one which has a meaningful and organized base within working class communities.
The Democrats: spineless, reactionary, and irredeemable
The Democrats are responsible for enabling Trump’s return to power, will not resist him, and do not offer an alternative to his reactionary misrule. Joe Biden’s administration directly paved the way for Trump.
Contrary to Bernie Sanders’ claim, Biden’s was not the most progressive administration since that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At home, Biden failed to redress social inequality, oversaw inflation that exacerbated it, increased spending on cops, and carried out mass deportation of migrants.
Abroad, the Biden administration intensified imperialist conflict. It maintained Trump’s original tariffs, escalated his chip war with China, increased military spending, banded NATO allies together for great power confrontation with Beijing and Moscow, and jointly carried out genocide in Palestine. All this led to disappointment, demoralization, and a drop in turnout for Harris in the election, opening the door for Trump and his band of gangsters to take the White House back.
Now out of power, the Democrats have balked at organizing any opposition to Trump. The House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, essentially ran up the white flag, whining, “What leverage do we have? They control the House, the Senate, and the presidency; it’s their government.”
Unlike the Republicans, who play hard ball when in the opposition, the Democrats are so committed to business as usual that, even in an emergency like we face today, they aid Trump’s rule. For example, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer defied calls to shut down the government and voted for the GOP’s funding bill.
By proving their commitment to capitalist stability and state solvency, they hope to peel away sections of Trump’s coalition. Thus, Ro Khanna, the darling of the liberal wing of the party, appealed to Nazi-saluting Musk after his breakup with Trump to support the Democrats in 2026.
He declared,
Having Elon speak out against the irrational tariff policy, against the deficit exploding Trump bill, and the anti-science and anti-immigrant agenda can help check Trump’s unconstitutional administration. I look forward to Elon turning his fire against MAGA Republicans instead of Democrats in 2026.
With the exception of a handful of politicians, the Democrats have capitulated on the two key issues that Trump is using to galvanize his base: immigration and war. Faced with Trump’s deployment of ICE, the National Guard, and Marines in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom did nothing to stop the raids. Instead, they imposed a curfew and deployed the Los Angeles Police Department to repress protests.
In the words of a top Democratic Party pollster, Molly Murphy, “Democrats should be careful not to become the party of the protesters in this moment. We can stand for calm and order, pointing the finger at Trump for the one stoking it, threatening it and inflaming the tensions.”
Similarly, the Democrats did nothing to stop Trump’s war on Iran. At best they voiced procedural opposition, saying it was unconstitutional. At worst, they gave it critical support.
Antony Blinken, Biden’s Secretary of State, wrote, “Now that the military die has been cast, I can only hope that we inflicted maximum damage—damage that gives the president the leverage he needs to finally deliver the deal he has so far failed to achieve.”
Jeffries led the majority of Democrats in the House to join the Republicans to block one of their own member’s resolutions calling for the impeachment of Trump for violating the War Powers Act. That is not the behavior of an opposition party.
As Hillary Clinton’s former campaign organizer, Patty Solis Doyle, admitted, “We’re leaderless, we’re messageless, we’re agendaless, we don’t have any alternative ideas to the president and the Republicans right now.” As a result, the Democrats are now more unpopular than Trump.
The only thing that unites the party’s capitalist establishment is its opposition to socialists in its ranks. When Zohran Mamdani rode the rising tide of resistance against Trump, anger over class inequality, and protests against the bipartisan genocide in Gaza to upset sexual harasser and corporate stooge Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s mayoral primary, the party leadership attacked their own nominee with Senator Kristen Gillibrand unleashing an Islamophobic tirade against him.
The emerging resistance
With the Democrats capitulating, various organizations, NGOs, and unions have been compelled to build a heterogeneous resistance. Some sections of the ruling class and its institutions have stood up to Trump’s attacks, the most significant being Harvard University, but they have done so on the most reactionary basis.
Harvard promised to crack down on Palestine solidarity protestors, reform their curriculum, and get rid of various professors and programs. Trump deemed these concessions insufficient and promptly cut off government funding. But rather than truly fight, Harvard is in fact offering further capitulation.
The ruling class, its Democratic Party, and its institutions like Harvard will never lead a resistance in the interests of the working class and oppressed. That has been built by other forces.
These include NGO adjuncts of the Democratic Party like Indivisible, whose explicit strategy is to mobilize opposition and then channel it back into electoral campaigns for the Democrats, as well as others like 50501, whose political strategy is not yet set in stone. Whatever their limitations, these groups called mass protests on April 5 and then again on June 14 that turned out millions of people across the country.
The organized working class has likewise entered the fray. Left-leaning unions and union formations, including the Federal Unionists Network, staged protests against the assault on public sector workers by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Other public sector unions, such as the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, have also been forced out of their decades of inactivity. The Service Employees International Union also staged protests in opposition to the arrest of one of its leaders, David Huerta, during an ICE raid in California.
The trade union Left led by the Chicago Teachers Union pulled the best of these forces together in the May Day Strong coalition. It includes mainly public sector unions, mostly in education, as well as the United Auto Workers, Indivisible, 50501, and other activist NGOs, especially in the immigrant rights movement. This formation led the charge for mass, union demonstrations on May Day.
Other social movement formations have risen to the occasion. Immigrant rights organizations such as Arise Chicago and Vermont’s Migrant Justice prepared for Trump’s war on immigrants by organizing emergency response networks, which have led effective protests against deportations and, in the case of Los Angeles, mass confrontations with ICE agents.
Finally, in the face of bipartisan McCarthyism, the Palestine solidarity movement— including various groups from the Palestinian Youth Movement to local coalitions and Jewish Voice for Peace—has stood up to Trump’s witch hunt and continued mobilizing against Israeli apartheid and genocide. Its agitation has won the freedom for the movement’s political prisoners jailed by Trump and has galvanized growing support for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel.
Solidarity: The only way to win
The Left must intervene in this heterogeneous movement. Now is not the time to stand on the sidelines and chide the current resistance for not being perfect, with the ideal politics, strategy, and tactics. It is the time for us to throw ourselves into struggle and argue for the politics of solidarity necessary to oppose Trump’s divide and rule strategy.
It is time to bring back the old labor slogan “An injury to one is an injury to all.” To succeed, the resistance must be symmetrical to its enemy in the White House. That means opposing all of Trump’s attacks. He will exploit any chink in our armor to split us and make us fight each other.
To avoid that trap, the Left needs to challenge liberals aligned with the Democratic Party who argue for the exclusion of “controversial” issues. They do so not because the issues are unpopular, but because the Democrats view them as a liability in their electoral strategy of shifting to the right to appeal to middle-class suburban voters at the expense of working-class and oppressed people.
Governor Newsom is doing that today by selling out trans athletes and supporting gender apartheid in sports and, like other Democratic Party governors, cutting social services and health care for immigrants. This liberal strategy is catastrophic for the resistance; it plays directly into the hands of Trump’s efforts to divide and conquer us.
It is essential for the resistance to build solidarity with all under attack—from trans people to Palestine solidarity activists and migrants facing deportation. That is the only way to build the fighting unity necessary to confront and stop Trump. Now is the time for the politics of solidarity without exception.
Against subordination to the Democratic Party
The Left must offer an alternative to the prevailing strategy in the resistance—forging a popular front with the so-called progressive capitalist party, the Democrats, to elect them and stop Trump’s Republican Party.
The latest incarnation of this argument is the “block and build” strategy. In reality, the popular front has always failed to block the right, to build class and social struggle, and it has permanently deferred efforts to establish a party for workers and the oppressed.
Trump’s reelection is a case in point. The Left’s subordination to Biden enabled Trump to pose as the only opposition, exploit disappointment with the Democrats in power, and return to the presidency with more votes from the multiracial working class.
The same pattern has played out globally and for obvious reasons. In country after country, the capitalist establishment has, because it has no solution to their system’s multiple crises, opened the door to the far right who, in power, have only deepened the social and political crises and further eroded our already decrepit democracies.
Even if the strategy worked and elected Democrats back to power, it would not stop the further radicalization of the Trumpite right. Another regime of the capitalist, imperialist establishment would only prepare the ground for one of Trump’s even more reactionary successors like the execrable JD Vance to win in the next election cycle.
The subordination of the Left to the Democrats demobilizes class and social struggle during elections and under that party’s rule. Instead of building protests and strikes, the popular front strategy leads us to redirect our time, money, and energy into campaigning for a party that represents our class enemy.
As a result, class and social struggle is weakened. That is exactly what happened during the Biden administration, which saw the decomposition of movements from Black Lives Matter to climate justice.
The leadership of these movements traded in their marching boots and picket signs for a seat at the table of a party that happily coopted and betrayed them. Only the Palestine solidarity movement grew in this period, precisely because it was independent of the Democratic Party and protested it for carrying out the genocide in Gaza.
The necessary result of the Left’s subordination to the Democrats is the abandonment of building a socialist party of our own as an alternative to the two capitalist parties. That’s why 90 years after the Communist Party launched the popular front in the 1930s we still have no mass workers party of our own.
To escape this trap, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and Democratic Socialists of America advocate a strategy of taking over the Democratic Party. But the Democratic Party has proved itself impervious to such attempts.
Most of the time the party succeeds in blocking any challengers from winning office. But if candidates manage to pull a rabbit out of the hat and win, the party establishment and its capitalist funders isolate, neutralize, or coopt them.
AOC is a case in point. She has gone from an outsider and movement firebrand to someone who cozied up to Nancy Pelosi as the “mama bear” and defended Joe Biden as a progressive even as he was lead the genocide. AOC campaigned for Kamala Harris, lying at the Democratic National Convention, which barred Palestine solidarity activists, claiming that the presidential candidate was “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza.”
Those who do win executive office at a local level or nationally will inevitably face the unenviable predicament faced by all reformists—trapped managing the capitalist state or a section of it amid stagflation, fiscal crises, vicious opposition from the Democratic Party and Republican Party, and absolute hostility of the ruling class.
Without insurgent struggle led by unions and social movements to fend off the forces of reaction and hold elected officials accountable, electeds like Brandon Johnson in Chicago or, if he wins the mayoral general election in New York, Zohran Mamdani, will at best be compelled to disappoint their supporters’ expectations and at worst betray them.
For mass protests and strikes
In place of this tried and repeatedly failed popular front strategy, the Left should argue for a united front strategy to bring together a formation of the working class and oppressed independent of the capitalist class, parties, and institutions.
In place of entrusting our salvation to the Democratic Party, we have to build our collective class power to shut this country down with mass protests and strikes to actually block Trump from carrying out his attacks. And out of this mass action, we must strengthen and build our own organizations.
We should look to the model of our comrades in South Korea who, when threatened with a right-wing coup, staged mass strikes and protests that paralyzed the nation’s capital, drove the coup regime from power, and saved their democracy.
We have a long way to go. We do not have the organization and fighting unity among workers and the oppressed yet. But the United States is a cauldron today of anger against Donald Trump.
That unorganized mass opposition is both a sign of our current weakness and potential strength. We should argue inside all our unions, social movement organizations, and coalitions (like May Day Strong) to forge local and national united fronts.
We need to spend all our time, money, and energy on building mass democratic organization, making our unions strike ready, and staging increasingly disruptive protests and strikes against the Trump regime. To stop its relentless assaults, we have to make this country ungovernable. That is how South Korea won—and that is how we will win.
But we cannot just fight Trump on ideological and economic terrain. We must also fight him on the political terrain of electoral politics. Through our independent struggle we can lay the foundations of a new socialist party of our own that contests for elected office against the Republican right and the capitalist establishment Democrats.
Such campaigns should be on our own ballot line, with candidates accountable to our parties, unions, and movements and with the aim of building mass struggle from below. Socialists already elected in the Democratic Party should leave it and commit to building a party of our own.
Now more than ever this is the time for the Left to break with the Democrats, build independent protests and strikes to stop Trump, and forge a new party to fight for reforms on the road to revolution and the founding of a new socialist democracy.
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