Why Trump is No Friend of Working People (and How We Can Fight Back)

January 10, 2025 by Margot Stewart

The clear victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election represents a deep anger at the status quo which has most recently been presided over by the Democratic Party of Biden and Harris. For all of Harris’s pretense about being a change candidate, it was inescapable that she is the sitting Vice President. A sitting Vice President presiding over collapsing living standards for working people and a genocide in the Middle East. More than anything else, Trump’s victory represents a broad rejection of the Democratic Party and the critical absence of a serious mass working class party as an alternative.

While Biden and then Harris tacked to the right and abandoned support for wildly popular policies like Medicare for All and a $15 minimum wage, Trump made overtures to working people through promises to end taxes on tips and overtime pay. He promised to avert World War Three by ratcheting down support for the war in Ukraine, and he put forward slogans aimed at the Muslim and Arab American community like “Vote Trump, Vote Peace”, creating the illusion of a more humane policy towards the ongoing genocide carried out by the Israeli state.

Trump has a hardened, far-right base, but there are also many working people who held their noses to cast a ballot for him as the “lesser evil” against Kamala Harris, including among the Muslim and Arab community. However, we must be fully clear that Trump is no alternative for workers and oppressed people. He is not antiwar, and he is not pro-worker. His second term will represent an emboldened offensive against working people, organized labor, and oppressed groups. He will continue US imperialism’s all-in backing of the Israeli state’s genocide, in keeping with his promise to “finish the job” in Gaza.

It was not at all automatic that Trumpism would continue to gain ground. Across gender, age, and race, working people are furious at repeated sellouts and broken promises. Trump’s victory was a direct result of the viciously pro-war and anti-worker Biden-Harris administration, exemplified most directly by the genocide and the breaking of the railroad strike. It also reflected the failures and betrayals of left and labor leaders who have tied themselves at the hip to the Democratic Party.

Economy

The main driver of Trump’s victory was an angry working-class rejection of the status quo and deep cost-of-living crisis proudly presided over by the Democrats. In exit polling, 44% of new Trump voters indicated that one of their primary reasons for voting for him was that he ”will fix our economy and get things back to the way they were when he was president last time.”

Working people are right to be angry at the Democrats. While we face absurd costs of living and inflation, corporate profits are up from pre-COVID levels of 13% to 19.5% now, which is just 1.6% below their highest point during the pandemic. In 2024, the world’s 10 richest billionaires increased their wealth by 85%. Meanwhile, Democrat-controlled cities are slashing social spending and waging attacks on working people. Doing the bidding of big business, Seattle Democrats’ recently tried to attack the $15 inflation-adjusted minimum wage, which was originally won by workers and socialists with a key leading role played by Kshama Sawant’s socialist city council office.

With attacks like these, the disaster that has been Bidenomics, the end of crucial COVID-era measures under Biden like the Child Tax Credit, as well as the sellouts of figures like Bernie and the Squad who pledged and then utterly failed to fight for things like a $15 federal minimum wage and Medicare for All, it’s no surprise that many are looking for an alternative. But as we in Revolutionary Workers and Workers Strike Back have made clear, Trump is in no way that alternative. He is a steadfast representative of the billionaire class.

To see this you need look no further than his cabinet picks, which include a number of billionaires and CEOs. Foremost among them is Elon Musk, currently the richest man in the world and recipient of billions of dollars in government contracts to his businesses, including $3.8 billion to SpaceX in the 2024 fiscal year alone. Musk, alongside former presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, is set to lead the newly coined Department of Government Efficiency (painfully nicknamed “DOGE” after the decade-old internet meme) aimed at carrying out brutal austerity and attacking working people, including a target of laying off 75% of the federal government workforce, or 1.5 million workers.

While governments under capitalism are broadly run in the interests of the ruling class, and contain both bureaucracy and bloat, there can be no doubt that what is really on the chopping block are the social services that working people rely on. Corporate handouts and military funding are notably NOT being targeted. Trump has already expressed his intent to dismantle the Department of Education, an escalation in the decades long march towards privatization and vicious school funding cuts that both parties have carried out. This will in no way improve educational opportunities for working people, and will instead make quality education even less available for most people, while the rich send their kids to well-funded private schools. 

Many working people recognize this, and voters in Colorado, Nebraska, and Kentucky just rejected ballot measures looking to shift money away from public schools through private school choice vouchers. In two of these states, Nebraska and Kentucky, Trump won handily.

These ballot measure results are just one example of many in which working people who supported Trump as a vote against the Democrats still broadly favor pro-worker, progressive policies like school funding, minimum wage increases, paid sick leave, curbing union-busting, and abortion access. Trump and his big business allies will not be advocates for things that workers need, but will instead further line the pockets of the billionaires. Even the COVID stimulus checks his last administration released, which contrast favorably in the memory of many to how the Biden administration has left working people out to dry in the face of skyrocketing costs of living, were not carried out under any genuine interest to help working people, but instead out of fear of economic crisis and social outrage over widespread unemployment. This was the same outrage which then found expression in the streets through the George Floyd rebellion.

In his 2024 campaign Trump promised sweeping tariffs of 25% on goods from Canada and Mexico and 60% on goods from China, composing the US’s top three trading partners. These tariffs are sold under Trump’s signature nationalist-protectionist bravado, but what they will ultimately achieve is increasing costs of essential everyday goods for working people and driving up already high inflation. Meanwhile, he has said one of his first moves in office will be to renew his previous administration’s $4 trillion tax cuts on the super rich, and he will no doubt go further in aiding big business through tax cuts, subsidies, and deregulation.

We can’t have faith in the representatives of either corporate party to improve the economic situation of working people or deliver measures we urgently need, like a $25 minimum wage and quality affordable housing and Medicare for all. They will do everything they can to make us pay for the crises of their system and oppose any efforts to tax the rich or otherwise make them pay. Victories for working people can only be won through militant workers and social movements that break from the Democrats and the Republicans and fight to organize the unorganized, and through a new party which is genuinely accountable to us.

Trump has made some overtures to the union movement, including flirting at an alliance with Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, who appeared at the Republican National Convention and then declined to endorse Harris as most other union leaders had done. Trump has also nominated PRO-act supporter Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer as his Labor Secretary. But he also has a long anti-union track record, including support for right-to-work in the Janus Supreme Court decision. The incoming administration will be thoroughly anti-worker and anti-union despite Trump’s overtures toward labor, and the Republican Party itself is a party of the bosses and dead end for the labor movement just like the Democratic Party.

Genocide

The other main driver of anger toward Harris and the Democrats this election cycle was the genocidal war on Gaza by the Israeli state, which took place fully under the Biden/Harris administration’s purview with billions upon billions of dollars of US funding. Even many longtime Democratic voters rightfully saw genocide as a red line and abandoned the Democrats, and some of them turned to Trump, either with illusions that he would bring peace, or to ensure that Harris was defeated.

Trump’s campaign sought to seize on this by posing as the candidate of “peace through strength.” Trump has long been an opponent of US support for the war in Ukraine, repeatedly touting that he could end the war in one day if he took office again, and saying that he would avert WWIII in doing so. In the final months of the election, in cities with high Muslim and Arab populations such as Dearborn and Hamtramck, MI, Trump yard signs read, “Vote Trump, Vote Peace,” with an image of a dove. The Muslim Mayor of Hamtramck prominently endorsed Trump, Muslim and Arab leaders joined him on stage at a Michigan rally, and he made visits to Dearborn.

It’s understandable, then, that even as the architect of the Muslim Ban, many Muslim and Arab American voters voted for Trump in order to defeat Harris for her support of the genocide. A CAIR poll saw the percentage of Muslims voting Democrat drop from 93% in 2020 to 20% this year, and the percentage voting Republican rise from 7% to 21%. But Trump does not represent any substantial policy changes towards Israel, or the broader conflict between the US and China-led blocs on a global scale. He is just as much a warmonger as any other representative of US imperialism.

A regular visitor at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote to Trump to congratulate him on his election, which he described as “history’s greatest comeback,” saying, “Your historic return to the White House offers a new beginning for America and a powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America.” He has previously called Trump “the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House,” while Trump in a recent phone call offered Netanyahu support to “do what you have to do” with respect to the war on Gaza. The two have publicly butted heads before, but just as the Biden administration continued to provide consistent backing to Israel’s genocide amidst numerous corporate media headlines detailing Biden’s “frustration” with Netanyahu, so too will Trump be a steadfast backer of Israel as he defends US imperialist interests in the Middle East.

The only way we can bring an end to the horrors being visited upon the Palestinian people is by building the antiwar movement, which currently is not nearly strong enough to end the war. What’s required is to build a much more powerful movement that breaks completely with both the Democrats and the Republicans, which the leadership of groups like Uncommitted and Jewish Voice for Peace have been unwilling to do. The movement needs to be built alongside a militant rank-and-file movement in the unions to push for coordinated strikes and civil disobedience nationwide. A key starting point will be building off of the momentum of the over 780,000 votes that were cast for Jill Stein against both candidates of genocide, which Workers Strike Back will be doing at our organizing conference in February to discuss next steps.

Immigration

A cornerstone of Trump’s campaign was his rhetoric around immigration, with his “border czar” Tom Homan now promising “shock and awe” in carrying out “the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen,” a campaign which Trump has promised has “no price tag.” Trump has especially vilified immigrants from Latin America, whose economies have been savaged by bipartisan U.S. foreign policy, including corrupt trade deals, un-repayable loans, and the brutal sanctions that are creating near-famine conditions for the workers and poor of Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. In almost every case, the crises and instability that force immigration are caused by the exploitation of labor and the environment by the capitalist class, and by the displacement from imperialist wars like those being funded right now by the US.

But the reality is that the vilification of immigrants has been a wholly bipartisan project. Not only have the Democrats offered basically no pushback to Trump’s anti-immigrant attacks, but to this day former President Barack Obama still holds the record for overseeing more deportations than any other president in history, and President Joe Biden enacted some of the most draconian policy of any President against immigrants appealing for asylum. Kamala Harris attempted to race Trump to the right on immigration policy and present a similarly “tough on the border” image. These years of attacks on immigrants and working people by Democratic administrations are what have paved the way for Trump’s promised onslaught.

In reality, what is being called a “migrant crisis” by both parties is really a crisis of affordable housing and healthcare, living-wage jobs, and funding for public education, infrastructure, and social services. The majority of workers in the U.S. face this crisis, while the billionaires get ever richer and blame working-class and poor immigrants as part of their perennial strategy to sow divisions among working people. There is also a crisis of war, economic destruction, and environmental catastrophe that is forcing millions out of their homes around the world.

It’s urgent that working people in the US adopt the principle of the labor movement that “an injury to one is an injury to all.” The attacks by both Trump and the Democrats on immigrants actually undermine the wages and conditions of native-born workers also.  By placing migrant and especially undocumented workers into an increasingly precarious situation, it allows the bosses to lower wages and worsen conditions overall in a given industry.  It’s a divide-and-conquer strategy which is used to pit worker against worker, redirecting anger away from the bosses. This whole process is used cynically by the bosses to maximize profits at our expense. It is urgent that both immigrant and native-born workers stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the fight for a better standard of living, which is absolutely possible through taxing the absurd wealth of the richest corporations like Amazon and by fighting to take the big corporations into democratic public ownership. It is also urgent that we build international solidarity against war and the role of US imperialism in undermining economic conditions for workers everywhere, which is the primary driver for mass migration.

Queer rights

Another divide-and-conquer strategy used by the ruling class, and Republicans especially, to redirect anger away from the bosses is to attack oppressed groups like LGBTQ people. Republicans have ramped up their attacks on queer and particularly trans people in recent years, with 669 anti-trans bills having been considered in 2024 and 84 still under consideration at the federal level. Trump and VP JD Vance ramped up their rhetoric against trans people in the leadup to election day, pouring tens of millions into targeted campaign ads with slogans like “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” They have pledged to enact legislation at the federal level recognizing only two genders that are determined at birth; blocking hospitals that provide gender-affirming hormonal and surgical care from receiving federal funding, including Medicaid and Medicare; and barring minors from accessing life-saving gender affirming care in all 50 states.

These are certainly ominous pledges–and the Democrats have done exceedingly little to defend queer people from them. For the past four years Biden has stood aside in the face of the slew of anti-LGBT bills in states around the country and waffled on the question of whether or not schools should be allowed to bar trans athletes from participation. While Trump attacked Harris for her support of transgender Americans, her platform did not specifically mention transgender people at all. And when asked in an interview shortly before the election if she believed trans Americans should have access to gender-affirming care, Harris replied “I think we should follow the law,” an answer so narrow that it goes no further than what the previous Trump administration did!

The Democrats have nothing to offer queer working people, just as they did nothing to oppose the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and refused to codify Roe v. Wade into law over decades despite their posturing as defenders of abortion rights. Similarly, we can expect little from them in defending against any future attacks on the right to gay marriage. But likewise, Trump’s scapegoating and fear-mongering against queer people have nothing to offer working people broadly. This is a classic divide and conquer strategy of the ruling class, on every level, with the goal of cutting across solidarity between working people and preventing a real struggle for the things that we all commonly need: Medicare for all, including gender-affirming care; a massive expansion of affording housing; a $25 minimum wage; and protections against discrimination and harassment in the workplace.

The only way to win these things is through working class solidarity across all lines: race, national origin, sexuality and gender, queer and otherwise, and through a united fight against all attacks on working people.

Working people need our own alternative

Added to all of this are possible corporate and Republican attacks on OSHA, the EPA, the Clean Water Act, the National Labor Relations Act, fair and prevailing wage laws and the agencies that are charged with enforcing all of the above. Trump has promised to ramp up oil drilling on public lands and offer tax breaks to oil, gas, and coal producers under the mantra “Drill, baby, drill,” further inflaming the already desperate climate crisis. He will go after workers rights to organize, quipping in a call with Elon Musk that the latter should fire striking workers. His program includes measures such as limiting voting to same-day voting and requiring proof of citizenship on the spot to vote, all measures that would disproportionately bar working class voters and especially working people of color.

Trump won this election because of the absolute disaster that was the Biden administration for working people: four years of betrayals and sellouts capped off by the fastest-developing genocide in human history. But Trump’s second term is shaping up to be just as disastrous, with no end in sight to the bloodshed in the Middle East and numerous attacks lined up against working and oppressed people. The US ruling class preferred Harris as a more predictable, reliable advocate for their interests than the famously mercurial Trump, but they are now lining up to join forces with Trump in their battle to offload the endless crises of their bankrupt system onto the working class.

The Democratic Party has been exposed to a section of working people as wholly opposed to our interests. This was shown by the historic break from the Democrats in this election, especially with the Muslim and Arab community, with the 780,000+ votes for independent antiwar candidate Jill Stein, and with the millions of former Democratic voters who sat out the election. But after denying the Kamala Harris the White House on the basis of her funding and arming genocide, the absolute worst defeat for the antiwar movement and working people broadly would be to go back into the Democratic party or succumb to illusions in Trump and the Republicans.

We urgently need a new party of, by, and for working people, one that is directly linked and accountable to our unions and movements on the ground, that democratically decides what candidates to run and on what platform, and which doesn’t take a cent of corporate money. Such a party won’t be built overnight, but we need to start to build an independent movement now in order to lay the groundwork and to arm the workers’ and antiwar movements with the militant strategy necessary to fight against future attacks.

Workers Strike Back is hosting an organizing conference in Seattle, Washington on February 22nd at 10AM, where we will be discussing next steps for the antiwar and workers’ movement, and the path towards a new party. We urge anyone who agrees with Workers Strike Back’s demands for an end to the genocide and all wars, a $25/hr minimum wage, affordable housing and Medicare for all, good union jobs for all, an end to all oppression, and a new party for working people, to join us there.