Vol. 81/No. 28 July 31, 2017
(front page)
Liberals furor against Trump reflects fear of
working class
The fact is both the Democratic and Republican parties are in crisis. The rulers increasingly fear the working class, which is battered by depression conditions and sees no wing of the capitalist political parties with answers and responds to Donald Trump’s call to “drain the swamp.” The bosses see working-class battles coming down the road.
The most significant phrase uttered by President Trump in his inaugural speech, economics columnist Martin Sandbu wrote in the July 18 Financial Times, was not “America First” but “American carnage.”
“What sort of country describes itself, in the words of its highest leader no less, in such terms?” Sandbu asked.
“American decline is not a figment of Mr. Trump’s imagination,” Sandbu said, describing the carnage facing working people in the U.S. “Centuries-old progress against mortality has gone in reverse” and working people “are dying from the afflictions of broken lives and broken communities: drug overdoses, liver disease and suicide.”
The rulers fear of the working class fuels the relentless drive of the liberal Democrats and media moguls, as well as the middle-class left and some anti-Trump Republicans, to press for indictments against his family members and to drive him from office. They are bound and determined to criminalize what are in fact political differences with President Trump.
Campaign against the working class
“Trump didn’t seize the presidency by deception,” wrote Colbert King in the Washington Post July 14. “Nearly 63 million Americans sent that burlesque comedy with headliner Donald Trump to Washington.” In other words, the problem isn’t Trump, but the workers who voted for him.
“The hosts of the late-night shows decided that they had carte blanche to insult not just the people within this administration, but also the ordinary citizens who support Trump,” Caitlin Flanagan wrote in the May issue of Atlantic, viewing them as the “minions pouring out of his [Trump’s] clown car.”
As a result, working people don’t believe much of what they see on the news, Flanagan says, because they see themselves falsely portrayed as “a bunch of trailer-park, Oxy-snorting half-wits” and KKK supporters.
This is why the workers who turned to Trump, many of whom had turned to Barack Obama four years earlier, don’t buy the liberal assault on the president. They agree that the capitalist media runs “fake news.”
Is Moscow the smoking gun?
After months of trying to find a crime they could pin on Trump and his administration, the New York Times and others leading the charge against the president thought they finally found the smoking gun — a June 9, 2016, meeting Donald Trump Jr. had with a Russian lawyer and an ex-spy lobbyist who they thought had dirt on Hillary Clinton. Trump Jr. says it turned out the duo didn’t have any information of use, and they listened instead to their calls for relaxing sanctions against Moscow.
But even after the release of Trump Jr.’s emails, and scores of op-eds in the Times and other papers crying bloody murder, no one can point to any “crime” that has been committed.
President Trump gets a hearing from many workers when he argues that Hillary Clinton violated the law with her handling of thousands of government emails, but was never prosecuted, while “my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News media.”
Charles Krauthammer, a conservative opponent of Trump, conceded in the Washington Post July 13 that Moscow is not the only world power that tries to intervene in the elections of other countries.
“You don’t have to go back to the ’40s and ’50s when the CIA intervened in France and Italy to keep the communists from coming to power,” he said. “What about the Obama administration’s blatant interference to try to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu in the latest Israeli election?”
The criminalization of political differences between different factions of the capitalist parties will continue.
Both parties are wracked by divisions and will never be the same. In addition to the ceaseless anti-President Trump chorus, the Republicans are divided by their own differences, incapable time and again of passing an alternative to Obamacare. And this despite the fact they have a majority in both houses of Congress.
Trump himself isn’t really a Republican. “President Trump has a funny way of talking about the Republicans as if he’s not one of them,” James Hohmann wrote in the Post July 19. “Maybe it’s because he was a registered Democrat until as recently as 2009.”
The Democrats are in no better shape. While they all are buoyed by the shrill campaign against Trump, they are bitterly divided on how to rebuild a party that can win elections and con working people. The Bernie Sanders “revolution” is working hard to gain position to take over the party, even if it means the Democrats continue to lose elections while they plod along.
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