The frantic efforts of liberal Democrats, their backers in media like CNN and the New York Times, the Never Trump wing of the Republican Party, and the middle-class left to overturn the 2016 election and remove Donald Trump from the presidency are faltering. Many of their actions have the opposite reaction of what they hoped, bringing disgust from workers with their mud-slinging and without denting support for Trump.
Moves by the Democrats to disrupt the hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh weren’t popular. Neither was the so-called anonymous administration member whose missive was run in the Times, or the unsourced “tell all” book by Democratic pundit Bob Woodward. Their stories were denounced by Gens. John Kelly and James Mattis, as well as Vice President Mike Pence, all administration members long rumored by Democrats to be disgruntled disadmirers of Trump.
Ex-FBI boss Robert Mueller’s special counsel probe may be coercing plea-bargain deals and convictions of a few Trump associates, but it hasn’t produced any evidence of Trump “colluding” with Moscow. The liberals’ dream of impeachment is increasingly unlikely.
Workers who voted for President Trump, seeking to “drain the swamp” in Washington of bourgeois disdain for their problems, and many more who in disgust didn’t vote for either Trump or Hillary Clinton, see some developments that are good for working people. They see more jobs as the capitalist economy is in an upswing. They see moves toward tamping down the seemingly endless wars the capitalist rulers have started, from Korea to Afghanistan and elsewhere. So the feverish “resistance” of some middle-class layers doesn’t get much foothold among working people.
Trump rules for capitalist class
The capitalist rulers themselves see progress in these developments, for their own reasons. Trump rules for the capitalist class, of which he is a member.
The country’s ruling class sees openings to intensify their exploitation of working people and advance their conflicts with rival capitalist powers. Trump’s tax cuts have boosted the bosses’ profit-making ability during the current expansion of capitalist production.
These opportunities to expand their exploitation of working people has led the bosses to step up hiring. Unemployment rates, declining before his election, continue to drop. As it becomes easier for workers to get and to change jobs, confidence grows to resist the intensification of work, the assault on wages and to fight against the bosses’ efforts to offload the social and economic crisis of capitalism onto our shoulders.
As hiring has grown the bosses haven’t raised wages significantly, and they won’t, until a rise in working-class struggles forces them to do so. Workers need to organize and rebuild the labor movement, to unite working people to defend their common interests. Rising indebtedness, sharpening competition and mounting production costs have squeezed farm income to a 12-year low, with ruinous impact on working farmers.
The administration has made moves to negotiate an end to the war in Afghanistan, as it has simultaneously reinforced U.S. troop deployment, stepped-up airstrikes and pushed the Pakistani government to stop providing a refuge for Taliban fighters. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the appointment of a U.S. diplomat, Zalmay Khalilzad, to oversee talks the government is urging between the Taliban and Kabul.
The administration has conducted direct trade talks with rival governments, wielding the vast size of the U.S. economy and the threat of punitive tariffs to advance the U.S. rulers’ interests in competition with their rivals. After talks with the Mexican government to push through a deal that strengthens U.S. auto bosses against competitors, especially in Asia, Trump is seeking similar concessions from the Canadian rulers.
With these deals in place, as well as gains from a tentative pact with leaders of the European Union — a protectionist bloc of conflicting capitalist powers dominated by the German rulers — administration officials say Washington is better positioned to pursue its trade conflicts with its biggest competitor, Beijing.
The White House announced it has readied a third round of tariffs to impose on Chinese bosses. The president says that Washington’s trade offensive is bringing back “American jobs.”
“There is no such thing as an ‘American job.’ There are two Americas, one of the bosses and one of the working class. Our interests are antagonistic. They seek to exploit our labor, and to cow us with their cops, deportations, courts and prisons,” said Margaret Trowe, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senate from New York. “We are part of an international working class with common interests. Whether the U.S. bosses and their government push protection or free trade, we go to the wall either way. The way forward is the fight for class independence and a road to take political power into our own hands.”