President Donald Trump is campaigning hard for reelection, saying his administration has created more jobs and higher wages and that his trade policy and moves to grow the military — and his willingness to use it — mean U.S. workers have “peace and prosperity.”
Speaking at the Davos conference in Switzerland Jan. 21 — the same day the Democrats’ drive to oust him from office went on trial in the Senate — Trump claimed the U.S. is in an unprecedented “blue collar boom” that has especially benefited workers who are African American, Hispanic, women, veterans and youth.
The Democrats have spent over three years — since the day Trump was elected — trying to remove him from office. Today, increasingly lacking confidence they can field a candidate who can defeat him, they are stepping up efforts to find another way to bring his administration down before November.
Neither side provides a road forward for working people. There is a working-class alternative — the 2020 campaign of the Socialist Workers Party.
The liberals insist the real problem is the working class. Charles Blow argues in the New York Times Jan. 15 that Trump’s presidency rests on “white nationalists in the Rust Belt.” He describes what he calls the “white working class,” saying they lack “integrity and honor” for still supporting the president despite all the accusations liberals have heaped on him.
In a similar vein, MSNBC’s Noah Berlatsky says that the workers who elected and back Trump clearly engaged in “racist voting,” which he insists is barred by the U.S. Constitution. The question, he says, is “can they be stopped?” He argues what’s needed is to “dismantle some of the features of the electoral system,” including proposals to establish special Senate electoral districts that he hopes would dilute workers’ exercise of the franchise and boost meritocratic-minded liberals in the Senate. Others promote different schemes, like eliminating the Electoral College to weaken the influence of working-class votes in more rural states.
Defeat looms for impeachment
While the Democrats are frantic to find a way to take down the president and hogtie his working-class “base,” they admit they don’t have much chance with impeachment. They don’t have the votes.
So they’re demanding the Senate “trial” throw open the door to calling new witnesses and demand thousands of pages of administration documents in hopes of finding more dirt to throw. But when they decided to go for impeachment last fall and engineered a 100% partisan set of hearings in the House, they concluded by claiming they had amassed way more than enough “evidence” to have Trump removed from office. They say they may open new hearings and look for new propaganda grist and new charges.
This has been the game plan since Trump won the election, mounting “investigations” against him by ex-FBI bosses James Comey and Robert Mueller into alleged collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Moscow. When this all came up a cropper, they searched for something new and came up with claims Trump committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” by pressing for investigations into corruption in Ukraine.
Regardless of what they think of Trump’s personality or policies, millions of working people know the Democrats’ witch hunt is an attempt to overturn the 2016 election.
The methods used in going after Trump — who after all is just a politician like all the others seeking to shore up capitalist rule — are dangerous for the working class. They strengthen the capitalist rulers’ political police and criminal “justice” system’s use of frame-up charges; grand jury fishing expeditions; denial of the presumption of innocence and other constitutional protections against government intrusion; and to unleash their FBI on working-class fighters as they have in the past. For decades the FBI spied and carried out disruption operations against the Socialist Workers Party and others fighting for Black rights, the labor movement and against imperialist wars.
Desperately looking to find a way to prevent Trump from winning a second term, the editors of the New York Times have endorsed not one but two Democrats for president, Amy Klobuchar, and if she can’t win the party’s nomination, then fall back on Elizabeth Warren.
The Times editors claim Klobuchar, the most conservative of the Democrats’ candidates, might have a chance to chase down the president. If not, voting for Warren would at least be a “progressive” statement.
They throw Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden and all the others under the bus as certain losers.
Socialist Workers Party alternative
There is an alternative to both the Trump administration and the Democrats of every stripe who each in their own way fights to preserve the dog-eat-dog capitalist system.
The Socialist Workers Party national campaign presents the one optimistic road for working people, a road of uncompromising class struggle that leads towards ending the exploitation we face at the hands of the bosses and the government that serves them.
The SWP puts forward a fighting platform that advances the unity and self-confidence workers need to be effective defending our interests amid the crisis conditions most of us face today. And they point to workers’ need to prepare for bigger struggles to come, when the working class will have the opportunity to lead all those battered by capitalist exploitation and oppression to take political power out of the rulers’ hands and establish our own government.