From the moment Donald Trump announced he was running for president in 2016, the Democrats and their liberal allies in the media and the middle-class left have targeted him. More importantly, they’ve targeted the millions of workers Hillary Clinton famously referred to as “deplorables.”
The rulers “fear us because they recognize that more and more working people are beginning to see that the bosses and their political parties have no ‘solutions’ that don’t further load the costs — monetary and human — of the crisis of their system on us,” Steve Clark wrote in his October 2016 introduction to The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record: Why Washington Fears Working People.
Hillary Clinton’s election committee paid a former British spy to manufacture a dossier smearing Trump as a Russian agent. Democrats got courts to imprison eight of his political associates and smeared others. They mounted two failed impeachment trials against Trump. More recently, they tasked the Justice Department and some prosecutors with bringing frame-up charges against him to try and destroy him and his threat to retake office in 2024.
But Trump’s reelection Nov. 5 confirmed that most working people were sick of the Democratic administration over the scourge of high prices and other effects of today’s capitalist crisis, as well as its attacks on constitutional rights. Workers were looking for an alternative to the Biden administration, hoping to get some relief.
Still, the Democrats and the left are determined to find new ways to fight the “fascist menace” they believe workers put in the White House. They’re making some tactical retreats from earlier forays while opening new assaults.
Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith filed a motion Nov. 25 to dismiss his case against Trump for challenging the outcome of the 2020 election. This case was a flagrant attack on free speech, as Smith sought to criminalize Trump for things he said, not anything he did.
Within hours of Smith’s filing, Judge Tanya Chutkan granted his motion. But she said she was doing so “without prejudice,” and that prosecutors could reintroduce the same case once Trump leaves the presidency in 2029.
Efforts to preserve frame-up cases
Smith also filed Nov. 25 to remove Trump’s name from the case charging him and two co-defendants with hanging on to allegedly classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Previously, Judge Aileen Cannon threw out the case, but Smith is appealing that ruling. He wants to keep going after the co-defendants.
Trump was indicted after Smith organized an armed FBI raid at the estate, a politically motivated assault that made a mockery of the constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Trump was charged under the notorious Espionage Act, used in the past to target and to try to silence opponents of Washington’s wars and the Socialist Workers Party.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is trying to keep his case against Trump hanging over the president-elect. In May a Manhattan jury convicted Trump of charges concocted by Bragg for making hush money payments after an alleged sexual encounter 18 years ago with a porn star. From the beginning, the case was a brazen abuse of the right to a fair trial.
Bragg manufactured a charge that the payments violated federal campaign finance law, after federal prosecutors had already investigated the allegation and found it improper. Judge Juan Merchan, whose daughter worked for an anti-Trump outfit, ruled the case could proceed.
Merchan has now indefinitely postponed the sentencing of Trump. But the president-elect cannot appeal the frame-up unless Merchan sentences him.
Bragg — who ran for office on a promise to get Trump at all costs — proposes the case be put on hold for the entire four years of Trump’s second term in order to be resurrected in 2029.
The eight-year-long witch hunt against Trump has now switched to new terrain. Part of this is a shrill propaganda campaign to smear him as a fascist, a misuse of the term that would be farcical if it wasn’t so dangerous. Hitler smashed the unions in Germany in the 1930s, carried out the slaughter of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, established a bloody dictatorship and sought to expand German capital’s reach in the second imperialist world war.
Using the term “fascist” to describe Trump will weaken workers’ ability to recognize and fight the real thing when it arises as the class struggle in the U.S. deepens.
New attacks launched
The second part of liberals’ new effort to go after Trump is to use a phalanx of lawyers and propagandists to target his cabinet nominees and efforts to implement his program once he’s in office.
One target is Peter Hegseth, a former GI who fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan, who Trump nominated for secretary of defense. On Nov. 19, the city attorney’s office in Monterey, California, released to the press a confidential police report on a seven-year-old incident involving Hegseth. After reviewing the report at the time, prosecutors decided there wasn’t enough evidence of a sexual assault to justify filing charges against Hegseth. But liberal prosecutors decided to hand the report to the press anyway.
The public release of this cop file sets a dangerous precedent. Its sole aim is to smear a political opponent, by insinuating he might have carried out a sexual assault when no charges were brought. Millions of workers have been written up after run-ins with cops where charges were never filed. Such reports shouldn’t be held on standby for use as weapons against strikers or other future targets of government snoops.
Trump’s nomination of Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer for labor secretary is another step in his efforts to portray the Republicans as a pro-worker party. Her father was a Teamster and her nomination came after a recommendation from Teamsters union President Sean O’Brien.
The nomination is “hard to believe,” complain the editors of the Wall Street Journal. They are unabashed in painting the Republicans as a bosses’ party.
As Trump seeks to build a different image, the Democrats have increasingly ditched the appearance they presented for decades as “friends of labor.” Today they’re dominated by upper-middle-class meritocratic layers represented by former President Barack Obama.
Neither the Democrats nor Republicans, including a Donald Trump administration, speak for the interests of working people. They all look after the interests of the capitalist ruling families at a time of deepening economic and social crisis. Workers are increasingly turning to unions to fight boss attacks on jobs, wages and working conditions. More of us will come to see that these battles are also political battles, and that our class needs our own party, a party of labor.
In this struggle, we have a big stake in defending constitutional freedoms from government assault, regardless of who the target of its attacks may be.