Trump won. Now what?

By Vince Gaynor

The race was not so close after all. Trump won by a difference of 4.5 million votes, receiving just a few thousand more votes than the 74 million he got in 2020. But the Democrats lost over 10 million votes, from Biden’s 81 million in 2020 to the 70 million Harris received in this election. Voter turnout also fell by about 10 million, from 155.5 million in 2020 to 144.5 million this year. 35 percent of people of voting age did not vote. This means Trump returns to the White House with 33 percent of possible votes.

The Republicans won the Senate majority from the Democrats and will most likely also maintain their majority in the House of Representatives. Trump’s second administration will have the Supreme Court conservative majority that he managed to establish during his first term and the solid support of a radicalized Republican Party.

We must prepare to face a strong offensive against workers in general and against women, immigrants, LGBT+ and Black people in particular. In the rest of the world, various expressions of the far right will be emboldened, as the celebrations of Netanyahu, Orbán, Milei and others show.

However, we must also prepare for significant expressions of resistance that Trump’s offensive will provoke, like we saw during his first term and in most cases that the far right reaches governmental power. We will be on the front line of that resistance, while striving to build a political force on the left.

Who is to blame?

The central responsibility for Trump and a far right that do not represent a social majority returning to power lies with the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders, the day after the election, said: 

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” (1)

It is no coincidence that the key states that swung in favor of Trump in this election are the “rust belt” states that concentrate a significant part of the industrial working class. What Sanders does not say is that he and the DSA, instead of offering an independent alternative, supported the capitalist and imperialist Democratic Party.

Biden won the presidency in 2020 because of the expectation of millions that he would reverse the reactionary measures of the previous Trump administration. But he maintained Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and the rich, as well as his reactionary policing, environmental and immigration policies, even deporting more immigrants than Trump had.

Biden not offering an immigration policy in any way better than the previous administration allowed Trump to increase his votes in predominantly Latino communities by more than 13 percecnt. Biden’s promise of a $15 minimum wage was forgotten, he broke the 2022 railroad strike and intervened in the 2024 port strike to keep the ports running. His policies in relation to gender, education and healthcare also fell short of the expectations he had generated. The resulting disappointment led to the Democrats losing more than 10 million votes in comparison to 2020.

It’s the politics, stupid

In 1992, a Democratic strategist explained to the Republicans why Bill Clinton had beaten George H. Bush with the famous phrase: “It’s the economy, stupid.” This time, it could be reversed. Biden’s administration coincided with four years of relative economic recovery. Unemployment fell, some wages increased due to low labor supply and inflation fell considerably. 

But the Democrats have lost support among workers because, despite the advantageous economic moment, their policies continued to benefit the same multimillionaires as always and disappointed or directly attacked workers, immigrants, people of color, women and LGBT+ people.

The political crisis, with various expressions throughout the world, as one facet of the systemic capitalist crisis that began in 2008, has a common denominator. A significant part of humanity has lost confidence in the representatives of the current political order. Traditional parties are in decline, there are still strong social struggles, but at the political level, radicalized expressions are growing more towards the right.

In the US, the largest number of votes that were in dispute were not the undecided between Trump and Harris, but the millions whose decision was between voting and not voting. Trump managed to retain the radicalized sectors on the right who would probably not vote for a more moderate Republican. The Democrats, on the other hand, presented themselves as the defenders of the delegitimized established political order, as the “no change.”

In this, Sanders was also right:

“While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.” 

The tragic aspect of this is that Sanders played a regrettable role in recent years, helping create what he now criticizes. Having been himself as massive an expression of the break with the old political order as Trump later was, but on the left and speaking of socialism, he then went on to support Hillary Clinton in 2016, Biden in 2020 and now Harris.

With the eternal excuse of the “lesser evil”, Sanders helped the greater evil. Millions of Americans first sought change they wanted on the left. The frustration they found then led many to seek it on the right, and millions more to abstain from voting. Hence, Trump won last Tuesday with just about the same number of votes that he lost with four years ago. This is the fault of the Democrats, who disappointed millions of people.

The genocide in Palestine also played a role

A factor that helped sink the Democrats is the Palestinian genocide committed by the State of Israel with the full support of the US government. A significant segment of the population has now seen past the Zionist lies, discovering that Israel is the perpetrator that massacres thousands of defenseless Palestinians. Biden earned the “Genocide Joe” alias. This led to the radicalization of a sector of the youth, which organized the militant university encampments, and to the breaking off of a significant part of the Democratic base.

Possibly a few million people who have tended to vote Democrat, many of the Arab-American and Muslim communities, did not vote for the supporters of genocide this time, however much they may have not wanted Trump to win.

A time for resistance

Some on the left, especially those who campaigned for Harris, claim that fascism in taking over. While there is a risk of this developing, there are no elements in reality that support this being the case today. Consequently, it is a false and demobilizing thesis. For the time being, it is still convenient for the ruling bourgeoisie to govern through the institutions of capitalist “democracy” and they see no need to risk so much by imposing fascist dictatorships.

Fascism implies the physical defeat of all political, union or social resistance organizations. Since this is not the case, there will be struggles against the attacks to come. There is even potential for them to be stronger than those that faced Trump’s first administration. The labor movement has carried out major strikes in recent years, and the radicalization of a sector of the youth is profound. Thousands of activists continue to draw conclusions from these experiences, and Trump is a catalyst that will provoke social responses.

We must pay special attention to the most oppressed and vulnerable sectors, particularly immigrants and the LGBT+ community. Trump’s victory will strengthen extremist groups of the racist, sexist and homophobic right, including some fascist groups that have already demonstrated their willingness to attack with deadly violence. And the state, more than before, will look the other way. We must organize the solidarity and defense of the most oppressed and prepare to confront all attempts of fascist violence.

On the international level, it is possible that Trump will withdraw support for Ukraine, strengthening Putin’s current offensive. It is also possible that the new government will lift the “limit” Biden’s supposedly placed on Netanyahu to not bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, which would aggravate the war escalation in the Middle East. Moreover, if Trump goes ahead with the protectionist economic policy he has promised, tensions with China will increase and the crisis that is already being felt in Europe will deepen.

The alternative we need

The Democrats’ disappointments that (again) paved the way for Trump confirm more than ever that the logic of the supposed lesser evil is a trap for working people and the youth. It only leads to ever worsening evil. The alternatives presented by Jill Stein and Cornel West did not achieve significant votes and once again discontent was expressed through abstention this election.

But the discontent is deeper than ever and building a working class party, on the left and independent of the Democrats, remains the central task in the United States. The capitulation of Sanders and the DSA squandered a great opportunity. But it also showed that the political space exists.

There are no shortcuts. Revolutionaries have the challenge of the great struggles that are coming and of organizing the numerous radicalized activist vanguard to lay the foundations of the working class and socialist party that is needed. The comrades of the ISL in the United States, together with the OTI and other revolutionary organizations, are committed to this task.

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sanders wrote. “First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well.”

He chastised Democratic leadership for defending “the status quo” while Americans “are angry and want change.”

  1. Full quote: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right. Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not. In the coming weeks and months those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions.”