Vol. 81/No. 27      July 24, 2017

 
(front page)

US rulers’ crisis continues with liberals’ drive to
oust Trump

 
Much of the liberal media, Democratic Party politicians, some anti-President Donald Trump Republicans and the middle-class left refuse to accept that he is president and hope their relentless assault against members of his administration and family will lead to indictments, get him impeached or worse.

These forces are determined to take what are political differences with President Trump and turn them into criminal matters. That is the meaning of their endless “investigations.” Over the last few days, their focus has become some emails and a meeting between Donald Trump Jr., and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. Jared Kushner, the president’s advisor and son-in-law, and then Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort also attended some of the meeting. Kushner reportedly left 10 minutes after it began.

This is “disturbingly close” to treason, New York Times columnist Charles Blow insisted July 13. He goes on to say Trump is “not only a disgrace but also an assault on the culture and the country.”

“Take comfort in this eternal truth,” Blow concludes, “for all things, there comes an end.”

The media, the late-night comedy shows and morning news sing the same shrill song. “Mainstream media are speaking almost in unison; they are out of control with a consistency that shows they have forgotten what control feels like,” David Bromwich writes in “The Age of Detesting Trump” in the July 13 London Review of Books.

Target is the working class
The hysterical anti-Trump witch hunt continues to grow. It shows an absolute determination to do whatever it takes to drive him out of office.

The real target is the working class the rulers see behind Trump’s election.

In a previous week’s column, Blow called Trump, “a madman” who “himself is the offense,” as is anyone who supports him.

The rulers fear the working class because they see the anger and wide-ranging discussion by working people on the bruising effects of today’s capitalist economic crisis, leading to the class struggle to come.

Trump’s election registered a deep political crisis in both the Democrats and Republicans.

The hysteria is amplified by petty-bourgeois leftists, who write off the majority of the working class and can “understand” the logic in efforts to assassinate Republican elected officials. By focusing their fire on President Trump, they give support to the Democratic Party, and to capitalism.

Workers World Party and its newspaper called the June 14 assassination attempt by Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson, who targeted Republican congressmen at a baseball practice, “an anomaly” — that is, a freak that runs contrary to what the paper alleges is the real threat today: racist, sexist and anti-gay attacks by the government, built on growing prejudice in the working class.

“The targets of the shooting were reactionary Republicans,” Workers World says. “The person carrying out the shooting felt threatened by the Republicans’ attacks on the poor.”

But it is the liberal, left hysteria against Trump that spawned Hodgkinson’s attempt to reduce the number of Republican representatives in Congress. And it’s responsible for the threats of more attacks from Mark Pritchard, who was arrested after he broke into the Arizona office of Republican Sen. Jeff Flake. “You know how liberals are going to solve the Republican problem?” Pritchard told Flake’s staff. “They are going to get better aim. That last guy tried, but he needed better aim.”

Flake was on the ball field when Hodgkinson opened fire.

Workers World says “revolutionaries need to get better organized, to get more militant, to find means of mass resistance and self-defense that will make it impossible for the ruling class to continue its deadly assault on the masses.”

But backhanded support to the Democratic Party and rationalization of violence against alleged rightists only strengthen the hands of the ruling class. They provide a handle for government attacks on workers’ political rights.

They are deadly obstacles to workers being able to discuss and debate the road forward in the face of today’s capitalist economic crisis. Working people need to take political power out of the hands of the capitalist class and its two crisis-ridden parties, the Democrats and Republicans.  
 
 
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