Trump & Co., A War Presidency

Although U.S. finance capital didn’t back Donald Trump’s surprising path to the presidency, he will nonetheless represent the interests of the finance capitalist section of the ruling class. “Fascism represents the policy of large-scale capital, and not the revolt of petty bourgeois policies against large-scale capital,” says R. Palme Dutt, the early 20th-century British communist leader and author of Fascism and Social Revolution. Based on the people he’s appointed to cabinet-level positions and others under consideration, Trump could represent an opportunity to unify the rulers’ dominant section with the wing represented by more domestically oriented capitalists, like Charles and David Koch.
While still on top of the dunghill of global capitalism, the U.S. is in significant decline. It faces intensifying competition from two rising capitalist powers, China and Russia. The U.S. bosses’ only chance to stave off their rivals—at least for a while longer—is to impose fascism at home. They need to intimidate, divide, and nationalize the working class to fight in the next broad global conflict. From this point forward, every U.S. president will play his or her part in building a mass fascist movement. Progressive Labor Party cannot stop this trend; it is ingrained in the contradictions of the profit system. But communists have a vital role to play in this volatile period. Our job is to organize the international working class to defend itself and fight back. Our historical task is to turn the guns around and transform imperialist war into a mass revolutionary war for a communist future.
The Next War President
The U.S. military is essential to U.S. capitalist dominance around the world. While Trump may have made isolationist-sounding campaign promises to cancel trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or to step back from NATO and give Russia freer rein in Eastern Europe, make no mistake. Trump will be a war president. There is consensus within the ruling class that Russia and China must be militarily confronted, and sooner than later.
The president-elect’s campaign rhetoric aside, his first cabinet appointments appear to be in lockstep with the finance capitalists’ agenda for imperialist war. Trump’s new national security adviser, Michael Flynn, is a retired U.S. Army general who has pushed for more aggressive intervention in the proxy war in Syria. He also co-authored a book titled, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies. A well-vetted servant of U.S. imperialism and a former senior military intelligence officer, Flynn took part in the invasions of Grenada (1983) and Haiti (1994). More recently, he helped engineer the slaughters of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan to defend main-wing oil interests in the Middle East.
While Trump is as ruthless a capitalist as they come, he has a lot to learn about handling state power on behalf of the arch-imperialists. To that end, he wasted no time in getting briefed on international affairs by arch-imperialist and genocide architect Henry Kissinger. After the meeting, Kissinger told CNN:
On should not insist on nailing [Trump] into positions that he had taken in the campaign. “The art now would be to develop a strategy…that can be linked to some of the main themes of American foreign policy.
In other words: No Trump policies are solidified, and the main wing can align Trump to their imperialist needs.
White Supremacy in the White House
Racism is the backbone of capitalism. Trump’s appointment of alt-right (media baron Stephen Bannon as chief White House strategist and senior counselor, along with his nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions as attorney general, reflects an unambiguous commitment to racist terror. We can expect Trump to build on the legacy of State-Terrorists-in-Chief Barack Obama (who deported a record 2.5 million immigrants) and George W. Bush before him.
 “Over the last 16 years, the federal government has used local police and jails as a key tool to orchestrate mass deportations – and that’s precisely what Trump plans to do on a more frightening scale than ever” (the Guardijjjan.com, 11/21).
Sessions is an open racist. In 1986, he was denied a federal judgeship after a Senate committee learned that he’d called the NAACP “un-American” and “communist-inspired” and “had accused a white attorney who supported voting rights of being a race traitor” (New York Times, 11/21). As Alabama’s attorney general in the 1990s, Sessions blocked reforms to provide basic services to underfunded, segregated public schools (NYT, 11/21).
Under Obama, liberal attorney generals Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch have done nothing to stem the rising tide of racist police murders across the country. In Chicago, the U.S. Department of Justice acknowledged that “...police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color” (Washington Post, 4/16). The DOJ then proceeded to give the Chicago Police Department $2 million for “overtime and upgraded equipment” (ABC 7, 9/9). We can expect more of the same from Sessions.
Bannon is an ex-Goldman Sachs banker and, until recently, the executive chairman of the white supremacist website Breitbart News. As Mother Jones (8/22) observed, he is most ominous when it comes to anti-Muslim racism:
He describes Islam as “a political ideology” and Sharia law as “like Nazism, fascism, and communism.” On his Sirius XM radio show, he heaped praise on Pamela Geller, whose American Freedom Defense Initiative has been labeled an anti-Muslim hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Bannon called her “one of the leading experts in the country, if not the world,” on Islam. And he basically endorsed House Speaker Paul Ryan’s primary challenger, businessman Paul Nehlen, who floated the idea of deporting all Muslims from the United States.
Bosses Cracking Down on Bosses
Despite their internal divisions, the ruling class and their politician servants are aligning to shore up their decadent system. One hallmark of rising fascism is stricter discipline within the ruling class, which must sacrifice some short-term profits to finance an imperialist military and critical domestic infrastructure. “Trump wants an active-duty Army with another 60,000 soldiers in the ranks, an unspecified number of additional sailors to man the 78 ships and submarines he intends to see built in coming years. He wants up to 12,000 more Marines to serve in infantry and tank battalions, and at least another 100 combat aircraft for the Air Force” (Military Times, 11/20).
Liberals like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, longtime champions of higher corporate taxes, have already expressed their willingness to cooperate with Trump in this effort.  Politicians may be Democrats or Republicans, “progressives” or conservatives; they may have tactical or even strategic disagreements. But they are all enemies of the working class. As the U.S. moves closer to full-blown fascism, they will fall in line to support the profit system’s long-term needs. If ruling-class history is any guide (see: German in the 1930s), any holdouts will be eliminated.
It’s too early to assess Trump’s impact on the splits that plague the unstable U.S. ruling class. But it should be noted that he has nominated Kansas Congressman Mike Pompeo as the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Since the days of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the U.S. rulers have entrusted this job to reliable main-wing insiders, from Allen Dulles to George H.W. Bush to David Petraeus. As The Nation (11/18) noted, Pompeo marks a clear departure from tradition:
Pompeo came out of the same Wichita, Kansas, business community where the Koch family’s oil-and-gas conglomerate is headquartered. Indeed, Pompeo built his own company with seed money from Koch Venture Capital. More important, from a political standpoint, is the fact that Pompeo made the leap from business to government with a big boost from the Koch brothers and their employees. “I’m sure he would vigorously dispute this, but it’s hard not to characterize him as the congressman from Koch,” says University of Kansas political science professor Burdett Loomis.
Workers Fight Back!
Workers are not taking the rulers’ attacks lying down. Since Trump’s election, hundreds of marches and demonstrations have erupted all over the country. Black workers are mobilizing against police terror in dozens of cities. Movements like Black Lives Matter, #NoDAPL, and Not My President are severely limited by their reformist nature, opportunistic leadership, and/or bankrupt identity politics. At the same time, they show that workers are ready to fight and resist the drive to fascism and imperialist war. Internationally, from Haiti to Pakistan, in countries where fascism is most advanced, workers are locked in open class struggle against the bosses.
These fightbacks are inspiring to the workers of the world. Ultimately, however, they will fall short without leadership from a serious, disciplined, mass communist organization. History has taught us that only communism can defeat fascism. The Soviet Army smashed the Nazis during World War II. The Chinese Communist Party led peasants, students, soldiers, and workers to victory over Japanese fascism, liberating the planet’s most populous country from the capitalist class. With the leadership of Progressive Labor Party, we can do it again! Join us!