It was clear very soon after Election Day on 3 November that the Democrats, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, had won enough delegates to the peculiar US institution of an Electoral College required to be elected as President and Vice-President. After holding out for three weeks, defiantly tweeting ‘I WON THE ELECTION!’, and flatly refusing to accept that he had lost, Trump finally approved the start of the transition process, conceding in deed – though not in word – that he’d been fired. He continued to insist that ‘Our case STRONGLY continues, we will keep up the good fight, and I believe we will prevail!’ The Biden-Harris ticket received over 80 million votes, compared to Trump’s nearly 74 million, giving them 306 Electoral College votes, against 232 for Trump. A large section of the ruling class exhaled a sigh of relief that, at last, ‘the adults are back in charge’ and US imperialism could resume ‘business as usual’.
Trump only supported taking the steps for transition after leading capitalists told him to stop fooling around. Mary Berra, chief executive of General Motors, announced that the company would join BMW, Volkswagen, Ford and Honda in rejecting the Trump administration’s attempts to loosen restrictions on exhaust emissions. The US Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, and the heads of Dow Chemical, Trane Technologies and other companies all pressed Trump to start the transition process. Another 164 CEOs from leading investment banks and major New York-based conglomerates signed a letter demanding the same for ‘the recovery and healing of our nation’. When Trump approved the start of the transition process on 23 November, stock market indices shot up to record levels.
By mid-October, Biden and the Democrats had raised five times as much from S&P 500 big company chief executives as Trump had. According to The Nation magazine, US corporate weapons manufacturers gave Biden $2.4m compared to $1.6m for Trump. Biden’s top donors included major shareowners in Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, US arms companies. Biden is repaying his ruling class backers. He appointed Janet Yellen to become the Treasury Secretary; she was Chair of the Federal Reserve Board (head of the central bank) when it transferred tens of billions of dollars to the banks during the Bush and Obama administrations in the midst of the 2008-09 financial crisis, providing nothing to millions of people made unemployed. Anthony Blinken is the proposed new Secretary of State. Blinken was Deputy Secretary of State under Obama and advocated bombing Libya and Syria. As an assistant to Senator Biden, Blinken wanted Iraq partitioned along sectarian lines. President Obama’s former Secretary of State John Kerry is to be the US’s first ever climate envoy; Kerry also backed US intervention in Syria and supported the 2013 coup in Egypt that brought to power the murderous General Sisi. Cuban-American Alejandro Mayorkas is set to become head of the Department of Homeland Security. Serving in Obama’s immigration team, Mayorkas helped deport a record three million people.
During the elec-tion cam-paign, Biden him-self stressed that he was among the first statespeople to re-cog-nise Juan Guaido as the legitimate leader of Venezuela and he called for the removal of the ‘tyrant’ Maduro from Venezuela’s presidency. Biden promoted his role in the Alliance for Prosperity in Central America. This was a programme of selling off national resources to mainly US corporations. The Alliance’s showpiece was the 2009 coup in Honduras, fuelling more desperate attempted migration to the US. In 1999, Biden played a key role in lobbying the US Senate to back Plan Colombia; a $1.3bn programme to fight FARC, who were branded ‘narco-guerrillas’. Biden supported the war on Libya, the US intervention in Syria, Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen and indefinite detention without trial at Guantanamo. He may say he supports a two-state solution for Palestine, but Biden will not halt the $3bn a year US aid that supports Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and imprisonment of Gaza.
Breaking with Trump’s ‘America First’ policy, Biden declared ‘America is back, ready to confront our adversaries, not reject our allies… ready to lead the world, not retreat from it. Once again, sit at the head of the table.’ Biden’s corporate backers hope he can reverse the relative decline of US imperialism, but acceptance of US hegemony will not be restored.
Record turnout
A 66.5% turnout of voters made it the highest total turnout since 1900, before women had the vote. Usually, turnout ranges around 55-60%. Biden got 51.1% of the vote and Trump 47.2%, a sufficient margin of victory to undermine Trump’s attempt to contest the outcome. The sheer incompetency of the Trump administration in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic affected the voting. The US has 4.25% of the world’s population but 21% of Covid-19 cases and 18% of deaths (over 271,000 as we go to press). There was a slight decline in white male support for Trump in 2020 compared to 2016, but he still won a majority from this demographic. However, Biden increased the Democrats’ share of white male votes by about 5.4 million compared to Hillary Clinton. This will have been significant in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Trump increased his share of the vote among people with family incomes over $100,000 a year, but this section of the electorate has shrunk from 34% in 2016 to 28%, some three million voters, as the middle class is attacked. It is estimated that Biden won about 90% of the Black vote. Trump increased his share of the Hispanic vote from 28% in 2016 to 32%, but in Arizona younger Hispanic voters successfully backed Biden against Trump.
After the election Trump claimed, without any evidence, that millions of fake votes had been cast and counted to get Biden elected. In reality, the President was chosen not because of fake votes or voters’ enthusiasm for Biden, but because they were against Trump, including some loyal Republicans who had voted Republican in all other races. There was no swing to Democrats, rather a swing against Trump.
The US ruling class has been concerned at Trump’s antics because he elevates his personal interests over those of imperialism. By creating uncertainty and confusion about the validity of the election process, Trump undermines the legitimacy of US ‘democratic’ institutions, demonstrating just how brittle they are and eroding their credibility in the eyes of those who are supposed to be overawed by them. After all, if politicians can bend the rules or ignore law and precedent, what prevents the poor and oppressed from doing the same?
While Trump denounces the supposed ‘Deep State’ and retweets the most bizarre and reactionary conspiracy theories, he is silent about the real power behind the façade of the ballot box: money. The Democrats are equally silent on this. During this election, some $14bn – equivalent to the entire Jamaican national income – has been spent attempting to win various elections. That is almost $100 (about £70) for each voter who turned out.
Trump’s priority was first, last and always Trump. A slew of lawsuits await him: for fraudulent property valuations, for trying to gag a pornstar’s revelations about him, for defamation after he attempted to deny allegations of rape and sexual assault, for ensuring that visiting foreign officials and dignitaries were accommodated at taxpayer expense in his hotels. He is personally on the hook for over $400m of loans. So, he did all he could to stay in the White House.
Political arsonist
The ruling class expects that, with Trump’s departure, everything will ‘return to normal’. In one sense it will, because Biden and his team are solid mainstream agents of imperialism. But there is another deeper problem which will not be fixed by Trump’s departure. It is not a question of Trump alone, but also of the social forces that put him there and the symbiotic relationship he has with them. The ‘White ascendancy’ – a reactionary cross-class alliance drawn from white Americans, similar to the ‘Loyalist ascendancy’ in Ireland, or to the Afrikaners in South Africa – has been central to the ability of the US ruling class to retain power over the two and a half centuries since the republic was founded. This alliance brought important privileges to the white section of the working class – preferential employment, higher income, better housing and education, along with the certain and reassuring knowledge that however poor you might be, at least you weren’t Black.
All the Civil Rights and affirmative action gains by the Black community in the past 60 years have not removed the underlying problem of racism. Black people in the US are over twice as likely to die from the coronavirus pandemic as white people. The 2018 US census data shows that the income of the average Black family was 59% of that of the average white family. The net wealth of a typical Black family is about one tenth that of an average white family in the US. Black and Hispanic people account for three quarters of those imprisoned for drug offences in the US. One in three Black adult males now has some form of criminal record. The entire US economy is built on the dual oppression of Black and Hispanic people. This is what the Black Lives Matter protests confronted in the summer of 2020. Trump and his gang, rather than try and calm the situation down following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on 25 May, chose to inflame the people’s righteous anger and to encourage the racists. Trump has incited the white supremacists – armed militias and all. He has given them legitimacy.
Polls show that some 70% of Republicans believe that the election was stolen from Trump. Trump will no doubt attempt to capitalise on his followers’ adulation and his own ‘victimisation’. Very few Republicans have acknowledged the Biden victory, even since the transition process began. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, whose name is synonymous with legislative obstruction, has not even talked to Biden since the election. Republican Senators are determined to throw sand into the new executive’s gears, particularly by preventing Biden’s cabinet nominees from being approved, despite their impeccable track record as imperialist lackeys.
Under capitalism, racism and inequality will continue in the US. A new executive led by President Biden will not be so overtly coarse and provocative as that of Trump. It will incorporate a more diverse ethnic makeup, but they will all serve monopoly finance on Wall Street and the military-industrial complex. The reactionary forces that Trump’s presidency and campaign thrived on will continue to mobilise. Against them and against the entire racist edifice that is the US state, a movement of tens of millions of people must be mobilised, led by the most oppressed – the Black and Hispanic people. We have seen this coming into shape, and it will continue to form – the people have had enough – four centuries of subjugation must be ended.
Steve Parker, Trevor Rayne
