What will Trump as the president mean for working people in the US?

By Terry Evans
January 20, 2025

As Joseph Biden prepares to turn the presidency over to Donald Trump, his Democratic Party administration leaves working people facing crisis conditions — from sky-high prices for basic necessities to the growing threat of new imperialist wars.

Millions of workers have hopes that the Trump presidency will offer some change in their fortunes. But capitalist rule requires that the government, first and foremost, defends the profits and prerogatives of the exploiting class. Workers will continue to face attacks on wages, schedules, health care and job conditions, and bear the brunt of a social and moral crisis that has meant tens of millions struggle to raise a family.

Neither of the bosses’ parties — Democrats or Republicans, Trump or Biden — will take steps to alleviate the pressures capitalism loads on the backs of working people.

The rising number of strikes in recent years shows it’s possible to stand up to the bosses’ assaults. These battles have shone a spotlight on the key place of working-class solidarity in bringing greater union strength to bear. Workers’ class consciousness and confidence in our own capacities have grown. All workers’ struggles are also political battles, and the problems working people face won’t fundamentally change until we organize independently from the bosses’ Democratic and Republican parties and set out to build our own party, a party of labor.

On his way out of office, Biden has unilaterally proclaimed a series of presidential orders to impose part of his “woke” program while bypassing Congress. These diktats are aimed at putting more and more obstacles in front of the incoming Trump administration. Biden used a 1953 statute to ban drilling for sorely needed oil and gas in large parts of the Atlantic and Pacific off U.S. shores Jan. 6.

As part of cementing his “legacy,” Biden bestowed presidential medals on Hillary Clinton, infamous for calling workers who back Trump “deplorables”; woke billionaire George Soros; and former Republican Elizabeth Cheney, who joined the Democrat-led House committee’s Jan. 6 “investigation.” It was actually a show trial, a failed attempt to prevent Trump from getting elected.

Biden also rammed through the appointment of 235 hand-picked judges at a ceremony Jan. 2, hoping to tilt the courts to Democrats’ partisan liking. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer told the gathering that the new judges “will be a barrier against attacks on our democratic institutions.” The “attacks” are a code words for Trump and the workers who elected him.

Most of the Democrats’ attempts to use the capitalist “justice” system to cripple Trump and his 2024 campaign are now coming apart. But New York City Judge Juan Merchan set Jan. 10 — 10 days before the inauguration — for a hearing to pass sentence on the incoming president. Merchan presided over the biased prosecution of Trump on charges he recorded a hush money payment to a porn star as a legal cost.

While Merchan admits it would be wrong to imprison or even put Trump on probation, he says passing sentence will brand Trump as a felon.

Partisan commentators in the liberal media delight in the fact Trump will be the only president to ever take office as a “convicted felon.”

But even this isn’t enough for Washington Post commentator Jennifer Rubin. She says Trump should be thrown in jail. The fact this isn’t going to happen, she says, “is largely the fault of voters. They knew he was a felon. They still voted him into office,” she wrote Jan. 6. Rubin echoes the visceral contempt that the upper-middle-class meritocrats who lead the Democratic Party have toward working people.

Democrats outcry over an ‘insurrection’

With only two weeks left in office, Biden’s Justice Department announced plans to prosecute 200 more people for their involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, melee at the Capitol, despite Trump’s pledge to pardon many of them.

Nearly 1,100 people have been sentenced so far, but only 170 of those cases actually went to trial. Prosecutors threatened felony charges with long sentences, forcing hundreds to agree to a plea bargain.

For four years Democrats have raised a furor over what they call an “insurrection,” which shows they have no idea what an actual insurrection looks like.

The Justice Department has insisted they had not one single FBI agent at the break-in at the Capitol Jan. 6, or at the rally on the Ellipse before it. But last month federal officials admitted they had at least 26 FBI informants in Washington, D.C., that day. They say 23 of them went “on their own,” but three were tasked with spying on “potential domestic terrorism subjects.”

In reporting this, the Washington Post’s only complaint was that “the FBI should have done more.”

The rulers have turned to their political police, the FBI, as a central weapon in their attacks on constitutional protections.

Free speech and assembly, the right to bear arms, to worship freely, and other basic rights won in blood by working people will be crucial in coming battles by the labor movement and all those oppressed by capital.

In the next few weeks the Socialist Workers Party will be announcing a slate of candidates across the country in 2025. These campaigns will give voice and champion workers’ struggles worldwide. Backing these campaigns is the best way working people can show support for  organizing independently of the bosses’ parties, a necessary step in fighting to establish a government of our own.