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Since his return to the White House seven weeks ago, Donald Trump and his administration of billionaires have been working non-stop to eradicate democratic rights and transform the United States into a police state.
The open repudiation of rights guaranteed under the Constitution—including freedom of speech, protection against illegal searches and seizures, the inviolability of birthright citizenship, and even the right to habeas corpus (that is, security against arbitrary and illegal detention by the state)—is not only threatened. It is actually taking place.
Trump is carrying out his pledge to rule as a “dictator on day one.” All existing constitutional safeguards against dictatorship are being ignored. Under the cover of illegal executive orders, Trump is ruling by decree. On his orders, Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil—who holds a green card—has been seized and disappeared because he publicly engaged in a legal protest against the Gaza genocide.
Following the arrest, Trump boasted that Khalil is only the “first of many” victims. No one is safe.
The violation of democratic rights is part of a broader assault on the jobs, living standards and social rights of the working class. Trump and Musk are firing hundreds of thousands of federal workers and systematically dismantling the social programs of the Great Society and New Deal. They are targeting essential social programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and are moving to obliterate public education.
The third component of Trump’s dictatorship—inseparably linked to the repudiation of the Constitution and the impoverishment of the working class—is the preparations for war. Trump makes no secret of his ruthless imperialist agenda. He has proclaimed his intention to grab the Panama Canal and seize Greenland. Trump’s plans to annex Canada are modeled on Hitler’s 1938 incorporation of Austria and Czechoslovakia into Germany.
Moreover, Trump’s imposition of massive tariffs against multiple countries is a form of economic warfare that will escalate inevitably into military conflict.
The policies of Trump are not a short-term aberration, which will be followed by a return to normality. In fact, fascism is emerging as the new normal, growing like a malignant and metastasizing tumor out of the crisis of American and world capitalism.
The turn to fascism—dictatorship in its most brutal form—is the inevitable political outcome of the concentration of staggering levels of wealth in an oligarchy that consists of a few hundred mega-millionaires and billionaires. Trump and Musk are themselves grotesque personifications of the ruling oligarchy.
Though most developed in the United States, the breakdown of democracy beneath the weight of oligarchic rule that enforces massive social inequality is a universal tendency of global capitalism.
It is necessary to dispense with illusions and confront reality. It is necessary to recognize certain basic truths about the present political situation.
First, fascism is not merely a threat. The creation of a fascist dictatorship is the present-day working agenda of the Trump administration.
Second, it is futile and self-deluding to expect the organization of opposition from the Democratic Party. Far from opposing Trump, it is collaborating with him. Whatever its verbal declarations of opposition, the Democratic Party, which is funded by and subservient to the same oligarchs and devoted to the defense of capitalism, shares large portions of Trump’s agenda.
Third, the real and powerful resistance to Trump will come from the working class. The hundreds of millions of working people will not quietly and passively submit to Trump’s imposition of a police state. The great democratic traditions embedded in the history of the United States still live in the consciousness of the working class. Jefferson’s defense of the right to revolt against oppression and Lincoln’s affirmation of government of, for and by the people have not been forgotten. These democratic principles must be revived and brought up to date with a socialist perspective. The fight against Trump and the capitalist oligarchy can only be waged successfully as a fight for socialism. Moreover, this fight must be waged consciously as an international struggle, uniting the working class on a global scale.
In this struggle, the World Socialist Web Site—the voice of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States and the International Committee of the Fourth International—is an essential weapon. It is the political spearhead of the emerging mass movement of the working class, youth and all those who are committed to the uncompromising defense of democratic rights.
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