President Donald Trump’s imposition of 25% tariffs on goods imported from Canada and Mexico and 10% on Chinese goods is a declaration of economic war on the rest of the world. Trump has threatened even steeper tariffs on China and has made it clear that the EU is in his sights as well. US imperialism is facing many challenges: it continues to lose ground economically against its principal rival, China, and the dollar is under threat as more countries start to trade in different currencies and the US crisis deepens. The response is unbridled aggression, and the bulk of the US ruling class is falling in behind Trump, for however crude and racist his language, he has positioned himself clearly as the one politician who will defend their interests whatever the cost. REAGAN GRAY reports.
Trump reckons with US economic crisis
US capitalism is experiencing an ever-growing balance of payments deficit – overall nearly $900bn in 2024, with a $1.2 trillion deficit in goods offset by a $300bn surplus in services. In 2023, the goods deficit with Canada was $72bn, with Mexico, $161bn, with the EU, $210bn and with China, $279bn. These figures reveal the relative decline of manufacturing in the US, and it has now ceded first position to China. The US national debt is also an indication of the country’s faltering economic state. The debt has doubled in ten years to $36 trillion and rising interest rates mean that interest payments on the debt have nearly doubled in two years from $476bn in 2022 to $882bn last year. Trump’s attempts to curtail increasing debt and reverse the relative decline of the US economy through tariffs will undoubtedly lead to retaliation by targeted countries. With the flurry of tariffs and sweeping cuts to government spending, the working class in the US will suffer the consequences of inevitably rising prices and the subsequent disintegration of any federal social support. Trump’s nationalist rhetoric will hardly compensate for their impoverishment.
Pre-inauguration, Trump threatened to take back control of the Panama Canal as well as acquire Greenland from Denmark. His aim is to restore the US to its global superpower status in the face of sharpening competition from EU imperialism and the BRICS alliance which includes China and Russia – an economic alliance of 10 countries with a stated aim to represent the interests of the ‘Global South’.
Trump’s executive orders
In the White House inaugural statement, Trump prefaced a flurry of executive orders by placing the onus of the country’s crisis onto ‘radical’ diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) measures, ‘climate extremism’, overzealous business regulation, and an abandonment of ‘common sense’ values.
His 51 executive orders are a clear assertion of strengthened imperialist aggression and attacks on the most vulnerable working-class populations under the guise of a return to ‘American values’. Executive orders are directives issued by the President which set the direction for national policy and law enforcement. These orders require federal judicial approval, but even without it, they set the tone and trajectory of an administration. In his usual fashion, Trump’s orders were largely theatrical but given that the legislative and judicial branches of the US government are stacked with a Republican/conservative majority, his directives will face little official opposition.
Unbridled imperialism
On his first day in office, Trump ordered a 90-day freeze of all US foreign aid. Secretary of State Marco Rubio subsequently issued a notice to all foreign embassies that funding would be halted immediately, apart from that which provides immediate lifesaving humanitarian aid. This unprecedented move will have immediate consequences, especially for over-exploited countries who have been ravaged and destabilised by the very imperialist powers whose monetary support they now rely on. The only governments exempt from this directive were Israel and Egypt, which will surely see a continuation of their annual monetary infusions of $3.3bn and $1.7bn respectively.
Further heeding the call from his loyal Zionist backers, Trump removed Biden’s sanctions on certain extremist Israeli settlers. This came just days before the Zionist invasion of the West Bank, killing at least 13 Palestinians in a targeted assault on Jenin as the ceasefire agreement took effect in Gaza. Trump has also added Ansar Allah, the Yemeni resistance group, to the list of organisations designated as terrorists by the US and has encouraged Jordan and Egypt to help ‘clear out Gaza’, signalling his intention to continue the work of his Democratic predecessors in ethnically cleansing Palestine.
Trump’s reinstatement of Cuba on the US’s list of state sponsors of terrorism rescinded an executive order made by Biden just days before the end of his term in a feeble attempt to bolster his tarnished reputation. This is part of Trump and Rubio’s rabid attack on any country that challenges US hegemony, for which Cuba has been punished for over six decades.
Attacks on migrants
Trump signed nine executive actions relating to immigration in a brazen attack on the country’s 11 million undocumented migrants and their families. Declaring a state of emergency at the US-Mexico border, Trump has already increased the militarisation of border enforcement, deploying 1,500 more troops to the southern border on top of the 2,500 troops and 18,000 border patrol officers that the Democrats had already stationed. He has also honoured his campaign promise of expediting deportations, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents initiating racist raids and checkpoints across the country, detaining anyone suspected to be undocumented. Since Trump’s inauguration, ICE has already made nearly 3,000 arrests, a deportation flight carrying 200 people has touched down in Colombia, and Trump has further declared that 30,000 migrants are to be detained in Guantanamo Bay, the prison located in the US occupied region of Cuba.
Trump also signed an order to end birthright citizenship in attempts to legalise deportation of children born within the US to undocumented parents, who are US citizens under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. This order, however, was swiftly struck down by the federal courts, citing its unconstitutional framework. Though unsuccessful, this order is still indicative of the lengths that Trump will go to in order to criminalise migrants and their families over the next four years.
Ideological war
Many of Trump’s executive orders were couched in restoring the mythical ‘meritocracy’ and ‘protecting women and children from harmful gender ideology’, a thinly veiled attack on the most vulnerable and oppressed populations such as women, black and brown people, and the LGBTQ+ community. These attacks are not only used by the ruling class to justify the slashing of government spending that would provide access to gender affirming care and reproductive autonomy, but also to displace blame for the disintegration of society from the ruling class onto the most vulnerable groups. Trump’s unfiltered bigotry and contempt for these sections of the working class will have dire implications in a country already rife with racial and gender-based violence.
Deregulation and cuts
Trump officially moved to create the Department of Government Efficiency, headed by his accomplice and wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, aiming to make $2 trillion worth of government departmental cuts. Trump imposed a complete freeze of federal loans and grants until the administration can conduct an ‘across-the-board ideological review’ of spending. Whilst this order has been temporarily halted by the federal courts, the implications for the working class will be dire, and fear looms among the millions of people who rely on already meagre federal programmes to make ends meet.
Trump has ordered the withdrawal of the United States from both the World Health Organisation and the Paris Climate Agreement, and alluded to dissolving the Federal Emergency Management Agency during his inaugural tour of the US. As fires rage uncontrolled in Los Angeles and impending climate disaster looms, Trump and his fossil fuel magnate backers are promising to ‘drill, baby, drill!’ With his sights set on fuelling capitalist production and securing the profitability of US industry, the price will be environmental disaster and entirely preventable loss of life.
Trump’s tech team
Whilst Trump throws the working class to the wolves, he is prioritising the promotion of US technology, artificial intelligence, and cryptocurrency. China is barrelling ahead of the US in the advancement of AI, electric vehicles, micro-chips, and information technology. The January launch of DeepSeek, a Chinese-made open-source AI platform, highlighted China’s superior capacity for innovation in a direct threat to US industry.
Trump’s inauguration day guest lineup featured Mark Zuckerburg, CEO of Meta (net worth $223.6 bn); Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon ($247.6bn), Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google ($1.3bn), and of course Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX ($422.7bn). This quartet of tech billionaires holds more wealth than half the US population. This display of oligarchy, along with Elon Musk’s outright expression of support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and his public Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration, indicate the deeply reactionary, autocratic trajectory of the US as the country slips further into decay.
Part and parcel of capitalism in decay
Biden’s final presidential address on inauguration day was dripping in hypocrisy and false pretence as he warned of the dangers of the incoming oligarchy and erosion of the democratic principles of the country. Despite the bourgeois media rhetoric, the realities of a second Trump presidency are not unique, nor are they uncharacteristic of capitalism. Trump’s plans represent US imperialism in its essence: consolidation of industry, the formal merging of monopoly capital with the state, and global aggression as the ruling class vies for control over resources and labour. This is inevitably expressed in the form of national chauvinism, state racism, and an ideological war against the left and anyone else who challenges the exploitation of workers. Donald Trump happens to be the man chosen by an increasingly desperate and determined ruling class to spearhead the project of wringing out profits from the masses whilst spoon feeding them enough bourgeois propaganda to coax them into submission.
The fightback
As soon as Trump returned to office, liberals and opportunists seemingly woke up from their four-year slumber. The Democrats served as a sedative for those who are well-off enough to distance themselves from the struggle of the most vulnerable of the working class, so long as the government carries out its imperialist violence within a veneer of acceptable rhetoric. Those that are being hit the hardest are demonstrating what is necessary to fight back. Within the US, communities are coming together to defend migrants from ICE and are organising to distribute aid and support amid fires raging in Los Angeles. Abroad, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are returning to the north of Gaza despite the Israeli state and the US’s efforts to expel them completely. The battle is not just against Donald Trump and the far-right; the fightback must be against imperialism and the ruling class in its entirety. The choice has always been clear: socialism or barbarism.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 304 February /March 2025
