By Alejandro Bodart and Vince Gaynor

Since taking office for his second term on January 20, Trump has launched a reactionary, authoritarian and imperialist offensive. This time, he has the establishment’s support, with the Republican Party aligned behind him, the biggest capitalist magnates explicitly backing him, and the Democrats and union leaders in a permissive position.

The latter certainly contributed to the fact that the large opposition mobilizations that greeted him in 2016 have not emerged, but the growing social and political polarization also fuels the radicalization of many who are willing to fight to stop him, and his reactionary program will not go unchallenged.

Revolutionaries will have a fundamental role to play in the struggles that are coming and in organizing the activists who will lead them.

A global process

The rise of the far right is a worldwide phenomenon. Various expressions of this sector govern seven countries of the European Union (Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Czechia, Croatia, Slovakia and Finland), are close to forming a government in Austria and are on the rise in France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Some of its most extreme and extravagant expressions, such as Argentine president Javier Milei and Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, are promoted around the world as examples to follow. Bolsonarism remains as an influential force in Brazil despite having lost the government.

The fundamentalist Modi government in India and Putin’s authoritarian regime in Russia share central characteristics with the Western extreme right. Even beyond these political expressions, a general tendency towards more authoritarian and repressive regimes prevails in the world across the capitalist political spectrum.

The global extreme right is not homogeneous; there are more radical sectors and others closer to the traditional right, more nationalist and more neoliberal ones. But beyond the variety, they constitute the spearhead of a decided global turn to the right by the ruling class, which has strengthened a reactionary sector of society.

A product of the systemic crisis

The systemic crisis that capitalism has navigated since 2008 is only comparable to those that preceded last century’s world wars. The destruction and concentration of capital caused by those wars allowed the prevailing capitalists to recover sufficient profitability to overcome those crises. Not seeing themselves yet in a position to face a new world war, today they attempt to recover profitability by boosting exploitation.

Given the depth of the crisis, the destruction of the welfare state and most post-WWII gains, as well as neoliberal flexibilization have proven insufficient. They need to eliminate the most basic rights of the working masses, reduce us to working until our bodies collapse for the bare minimum necessary to survive and continue working. Fully aware that this harms the vast majority of people, generates opposition and provokes resistance, they also need to reduce democratic mechanisms to a minimum and bolster repressive devices to a maximum.

The fact that the far right most clearly expresses this common agenda of the imperialist bourgeoisie as a whole largely explains its rapid acceptance and assimilation by capitalist regimes and political parties and contributes significantly to its global rise.

At the same time, the phenomenon of the far right is part of a global process of polarization that also generates massive mobilizations, rebellions and revolutions, including significant strikes that have revived some of the most powerful sectors of the world’s working class. It is an uneven process, because, despite gigantic struggles and significant radicalization on the left, no political expression has emerged on this pole to match the far right on the other.

However, since they have not managed to crush the will to resist, what predominates is instability. And as long as the masses continue to fight, revolutionaries have the duty to push the struggles forward and the opportunity to organize the most determined activists, which makes building and strengthening revolutionary organizations possible.

2025 is not 2016

Trump’s victory is part of the global phenomenon of the rise of the far right, it feeds off of it and, in turn, strengthens all its expressions. This feedback explains, to a large extent, the confidence with which Trump and his associates took office and launched such a broad and ambitious offensive.

Trump was one of the first expressions of the far right when he began his first term in 2016. At that time, he was not the capitalists’ first choice, they saw more risks than opportunities in his Administration. He faced large mobilizations and the opposition or lack of collaboration of a large part of the establishment. He failed to implement many of his initiatives and lost reelection in 2020. He was even tried and convicted of several crimes. But he did consolidate a radicalized social base, which represents a minority but a significant one, while traditional political continued to disintegrate.

The Democratic Biden Administration that succeeded Trump maintained some of his key policies – immigration, tax cuts for corporations and the rich – broke strikes, viciously supported the Zionist genocide in Gaza and repressed students who showed solidarity with Palestine. The resulting disappointment was supplemented by the capitulation of Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America, who had raised expectations in previous years and went on to support the reelection of “Genocide” Joe and then Harris without hesitation. As a result, the Democrats lost some 6 million votes.

Meanwhile, Trump grew stronger within the Republican ranks as the most consistent opposition leader, as a radical figure persecuted by the establishment and, fundamentally, as an expression of the extreme right that advanced internationally during those four years.

Unlike what happened in 2016, the Republican Party aligned behind his candidacy and built a coalition with more than 100 radical right-wing organizations and an ambitious reactionary program, detailed in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. The biggest capitalists, who were divided during his first term, are now clearly invested, as expressed by the public support of tech magnates and richest men in the world Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, who had projected a more progressive image until now.

The Trump Administration also has a conservative majority in the Supreme Court, a Trifecta – majorities in both houses of Congress – and a Democratic leadership positioned more as collaborator than opposition.

The sum of these elements show that the imperialist ruling class has a greater level of unity around the need to adopt a more reactionary orientation. Having concluded that Trump’s first term failed because he did not advance more decisively, they support the current plan to try to impose deeper changes faster. A similar dynamic has also led capitalists in other countries to shift their support to the far right, as we’ve seen, for example, in Argentina.

Consequently, Trump and his associates entered the White House overflowing with confidence. But his actual base of support is a minority in society as a whole. Trump won the election by a margin of only 1.5% and the abstention of a third of the electorate means that only one third of eligible voters chose him. We cannot lose sight of this structural weakness that lies behind the Administration’s apparently unlimited confidence.

The dimension of the offensive

Since taking office, Trump has launched a battery of attacks on all fronts, with measures against workers, the oppressed, democratic rights and environmental regulations, and declarations of imperialist aggression.

In one of his first measures, Trump pardoned the protesters convicted for the January 6 attack on Congress, several of them declared fascists. His cabinet constitutes the most oligarchic and reactionary Administration since the 19th century. The office with extraordinary powers over the Budget granted to billionaire magnate Elon Musk is particularly indicative of this.

Beyond how realistic Musk’s declared objective of cutting more than a quarter of the national Budget is, he has already fired tens of thousands of state workers and is pushing for the “voluntary” retirement of two million more. He changed the categorization of state workers to facilitate the dismissal of millions of workers in positions previously considered non-political. And he paused all national and international aid, causing a global crisis of access to HIV medications among other problems.

The Administration unleashed a massive ICE raid, arresting thousands of inmigrants, transferring dozens of them to the detention and torture camps of Guantanamo. Trump signed decrees that eliminate the rights of trans people, that criminalize Palestine solidarity activists and that eliminate programs against racial and gender discrimination.

He also rolled back the already insufficient environmental regulations that Biden had implemented, and withdrew the country from the Paris Accords and the World Health Organization.

Some of these measures have been challenged legally, but the chances of many of them being ratified rather than struck down by the courts are greater today given the current political environment and composition of the judiciary.

There are also many announcements of measures that are not very feasible, but that invigorate the Administration’s reactionary social base. In the same sense, Elon Musk’s Nazi salute, although he later denied what it was, is a powerful message to the radicalized right-wing sector of the population on which this government seeks to rely to confront the inevitable resistance that the implementation of its program will provoke.

This practice does seek to “flood the field” with so many outrageously reactionary but unfeasible attacks that it becomes impossible to respond to everything, making the measures that they do intend to implement appear less terrible or go unnoticed. But it is also part of a cultural battle for determining the established common sense. It seeks to radically expand the racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic and generally reactionary attitudes and actions that are considered acceptable, and what rights are considered privileges or even crimes.

This is not a minor battle, they seek to strengthen and motivate the action of the most extreme, violent and directly fascist sectors that constitute the hard core of the far right’s social base, and to weaken and demoralize workers and the oppressed in general and the activists willing to confront them in particular.

The Trump Doctrine

One of the central facets of the ongoing systemic crisis of capitalism is the crisis of imperialist hegemony. The United States, while still the leading global power, is in clear decline while regional powers are growing in strength and China emerges as a global competitor.

In 2016, much of the bourgeoisie opposed Trump’s protectionist and isolationist tendencies and Biden tried to recover the previous orientation. But now, the conclusion that the multilateral strategy with which US imperialism has dominated the world over long decades is no longer useful and a major change is needed to regain global power by force seems to prevail.

Therefore, the sharp turn that the new Administration is pushing towards commercial protectionism and a more aggressive expansionist nationalism has the support of the establishment.

Trump began by announcing new trade tariffs against Mexico, Canada and China and declaring his intention to regain control of the Panama Canal, annex Greenland and colonize Gaza. Although the latter are generally considered unfeasible and the tariffs on Canada and Mexico were later negotiated, the announcements served as a declaration of intent.

Since then, the United States has raised trade tariffs with virtually everyone, which offloads part of the crisis onto the rest of the world, fortifying the profits of American companies at the expense of others. This aggravates the economic crisis of all of the United States’ trading partners, including historic allies such as Europe and Taiwan, and countries governed by other far-right leaders like Argentina. Therefore, it will generate greater diplomatic and political friction between them, and will sharpen the inter-imperialist conflict with China and Russia.

Trump is also intensifying a more aggressive and unilateral international political intervention. He played a central and visible role in imposing a ceasefire in Gaza, and then proposing the most expeditious expulsion of the entire Palestinian population. Now he has opened negotiations with Putin to negotiate the surrender of Ukrainian territory to Russia behind the backs of the Ukrainian people.

The attempt to strengthen US imperialism by force, however, also has an element of desperation, and carries a not insignificant risk. Strengthening itself economically and geopolitically at the expense of everyone else, including its historic allies, deepens the economic and political crisis and instability throughout the world. This disorder and the conflicts, wars, rebellions and revolutions it breeds are, in turn, the greatest danger to imperialism’s plans.

How to fight them

The new Trump Administration’s offensive opens a new political situation, marked by a qualitatively superior reactionary capitalist attack that will change the dynamics of the class struggle significantly.

Although they do not yet intend to break the general margins of bourgeois-democratic institutions and completely eliminate non-bourgeois political and labor organizations, the authoritarian and repressive leap they seek to impose is profound. It implies drastic cuts in democratic rights, and a deepening of state persecution and para-state violence against the oppressed and labor and left-wing activists.

The Democrats who, during the election, threatened that a Trump win would bring fascism, now minimize the risks that they until recently exaggerated. When the next elections approach, they will remember how dangerous Trump is in order to present themselves as the only alternative. But the need to confront Trump and fight to stop his plans is immediate.

Far from this, the Democrats made an effort to guarantee a smooth transition and now they are looking for ways to collaborate with the new Administration. They want to avoid the emergence of mobilization movements that later require their time and resources to demobilize and channel into lobbying and elections.

Revolutionaries have to move in the diametrically opposite direction. We cannot minimize the danger that the new Administration’s attacks represent, nor should we overestimate it. Beyond the characterizations, we must be on the front line of confronting the government’s measures, transmitting the urgency of organizing to fight them and calling for the broadest unity to provide the struggle with the greatest possible force.

At the same time, we need to expose the Democrats who talk about the danger of Trump to solicit votes but not to confront him when it matters the most. We should explain the responsibility they have in opening the door for Trump, in disarming the movements that could fight him with greater strength and the need to build a political alternative independent of the capitalists and their interests.

We must continue the economic and social struggles that we have been waging for workers’ wages and the right to organize; against institutional racism and police violence; in defense of immigrants, the right to decide, identity and all gender rights, among many others. These struggles will intensify. Just as we had to fight to establish that Black lives matter, we will have to fight to defend the lives of trans people, migrants and women.

But democratic struggles in particular will take on a new significance. We must take on the tasks of organizing self-defense against the fascists that will act with greater confidence, of facing persecution and repression, of politically and physically defending the right to protest and all democratic rights in ways that have not been on the agenda for a long time.

The will to fight

The demoralization accumulated during Biden’s term, the Democrats’ deactivation of the recent years’ movements and their decision not to organize national protests for Trump’s inauguration largely explain why this time there were no mass demonstrations as in 2016.

However, there is a layer of radicalized activists that sees the need and urgency to organize resistance. There are thousands of young people that were radicalized by the Palestine solidarity movement, workers that became politically active through the Amazon or UAW strikes, women, LGBT+, immigrant, and Black activists who have seen their movements deactivated by the Democrats and see an immediate necessity to organize a serious fight against very real dangers.

Trump’s offensive will inevitably provoke resistance in the country and around the world. The strength and possibilities it will have depend largely on the level of organization and the political orientation of this radicalized vanguard. This poses a task for revolutionaries today, a challenge in which what we do or not do, what we achieve or don’t, matters.

Today it is possible and necessary to organize thousands of politically radicalized activists and workers willing to fight in a revolutionary project to influence the course of the struggles to come, and to lay the foundations for a revolutionary party that represents the working class and fights for socialism in the United States and the world. We believe this can only be achieved by regrouping revolutionaries in the country and internationally, a perspective that the International Socialist League strongly advocates.