By John Pickard
It is almost a foregone conclusion that the attempt to assassinate Donald Trump will have increased the likelihood that he will be elected US president in November this year. That fact alone is a vindication of the position, historically held by socialists, that acts of individual terror are always, by their very nature, counter-productive.
Donald Trump is a horrible political creature, an ignorant narcissist, a racist, a misogynist, and a habitual liar, a man whose entire life was gifted to him by inherited wealth. He is a person devoid of any talent beyond self-publicity. He is the perfect metaphor for modern capitalism, lacking any historical justification, without a coherent ethical or philosophical foundation, and bereft of any moral compass.
But the answer to Trump and politicians like him is not a sniper’s bullet; it is the organised strength of the labour movement, uniting all workers, black and white, men and women, young and old, in a fight for a better, a socialist society.
There is only one force that can bring about a positive change in our society – a society riven with unending crises and upheavals internationally – and that is the organised working class. All of those who seek, either alone or in small isolated groups, to substitute themselves for the real agent of change, the labour movement, will ultimately find their efforts futile and ineffective.
Having survived the sniper’s bullet, Trump is now happily selling T-shirts and election merchandise featuring a photograph of his bloodied face immediately afterwards. His campaign for election now has more momentum than ever, as Trump himself and his entourage call his survival an “act of God”. In reality, it is not so much the intervention of a deity, as it is a sign of the times. Political violence is the new ‘normal’ in US politics and the shooting in Pennsylvania is only the lastest example of it.
To this day, Trump calls the 2020 election ‘stolen’
The whole system of Trumpism and his Republican Party is shot through with the rhetoric and imagery of violence and intolerance. It is only three and a half years since supporters of Trump refused to accept the last presidential election result and tried to storm the Capitol Building in Washington, an action that resulted in several deaths. To this day, Trump descibes those who participated in the January 6 insurrectionary action as “patriots”. He has continued to peddle the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen”, and it is fervently believed by a third of registered Republicans.
According to a poll by Axios last October, nearly a quarter of all Americans thought that “patriot may have to resort to violence in order to save our country”. The report also found that there was one thing the vast majority of Americans agreed on — 75% in fact —which was that American democracy “is at risk in the 2024 presidential election”.
The threats of violence are coming overwhelmingly from the right of US politics. As the Axios graphic (below) shows, compared to registered Democrats, two and a half times more Republicans – a third of the total – believe that “patriots may have to resort to violence”. The Capitol Police in Washington, those who were the targets of the 2021 attack, have also reported a big increase in threats of physical violence against elected politicians. While they investigated 902 such threats in 2016, that figure jumped up to more than 9,600, or ten times more, by 2021. It is increasing exponentially as the USA – a country with many more guns than people – slides towards what some commentators have said, will be a new Civil War..
Speaking to NPR, National Public Radio, the head of PRRI said “We have been tracking an uptick in tolerance for political violence and an uptick in violent rhetoric in our national conversations over the last few years…Self-identified Republicans are three times more likely than Democrats to say they believe true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.”
Violence emanates from the right more than anywhere else
National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice, reported earlier this year that since 1990, “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives.”
In the context of US politics today, as an article in New Republic put it, the attempted assassination of Trump “was not an abnormal incident. It’s a sign of the times”.
If violence or the threat of it is a constant in American political life, it is an indication of the deep and enduring malaise of US capitalism. Poll after poll shows a profound pessimism among all demographic groups about the future. There is a generalised and vague feeling that, for whatever reason, things were ‘better’ in the past and that too many decisions are taking place over their heads and without their consent.
For millions of workers, the ‘American Dream’ has become a nightmare, with living standards for most stagnant – at best – and many working households unable to keep up the payment of bills. The national infrastructure of roads, railways, water and energy is delapidated and falling apart. There is little faith in mainstream politicians to solve anything – as most of them are bought and in the pockets of the thousands of corporate lobbyists that infest Washington and every state and major city legislature.
Trumpism represents an appeal to those, mostly unorganised workers, who are looking for something outside mainstream politicsl. Trump – in words – offers radical solutions like tax cuts and saving ‘American jobs’ but he is the puppet of the rich and super-rich and will do nothing to alleviate the problems of workers. Worse, he will try to hamstring the labour movement and prevent a fight back against the erosion of wages, conditions and democratic rights.
Organised labour has huge potential power, industrially and politically
As he has shown, and as Republicans in the Supreme Court and at state level have shown, Trumpism is a threat to all the established rights of women and racial and religious minorities. Trump back in the White House would be a huge setback for American workers.
A new President Trump will challenge all of the established rights of workers, including union rights. It is clear from the tendency in US politics today that he will use all the federal, state and judicial powers at his disposal to hamstring workers’ rights. It is not ruled out that political violence from the right could begin to be directed at workers trade unions, certainly at protest movements that attempt to rally or demonstrate their point of view.
Yet the organised labour movement is potentially a powerful social force, both industrially – with fourteen million in trade unions – and politically. The trade union movement is going through an upsurge at the moment. The US legal system has to sanction ballots in workplaces where unions are seeking recognition and there has been a upswing of ‘filings’ for such ballots in the recent period, to its highest level since 2015.
Some big, high-profile ballots have been lost – like at the Mercedes-Benz car plant in Alabama – but others have been won, like at Volkswagon in Tennessee. But more importantly, in thousands of smaller and medium-sized companies, workers are attempting to get organised. The government’s National Labor Relations Board received more than 2,600 election petitions just since October, a 32 per cent increase from last year and more than were processed in the whole of the previous fiscal year.
The US working class is beginning to move and with its enormous potential, it is ultimately the only force that can stop the politics of Trump. But as much as the US unions are making headway in the industrial plane, they will need at some point to move onto the political plane with their own party of labour.
Feature photograph from Wikimedia Commons, here.
