The beginning of Trump’s second term in the White House has been marked by vicious attacks on immigrants, trans people, and the pro-Palestine movement. The second Trump administration is a combination of a plutocratic takeover embodied in Elon Musk and his DOGE team on the one hand, and a zealous, anti-rights plan directed largely at pleasing the MAGA base on the other. The shifting grounds in the political situation requires from the Left a careful analysis of the political situation and a reassessment of our own forces and political action.
As Left Voice we believe that the working class and oppressed and the entire Left need our own spaces to debate strategy and analysis openly. In that spirit we asked three leading left intellectuals and political activists in the United States the same question: What are the main challenges and opportunities for the Left under Trump’s second term? We asked them to limit their responses to 500 words. Here’s what they said.
Warren Montag
The reality facing the left today is sobering indeed. It amounts to nothing less than one of the most brazen and far-reaching attacks on every gain and concession won by the working class, people of color, women and the LGTBQ community over the last century. Further, a large sector of the ruling class has come to the conclusion that even the often merely formal democracy of the US electoral system constitutes an impediment to the achievement of what now appears possible: a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a perpetual, but as yet undeclared, state of exception in which Trump as Sovereign will allow neither law nor custom to constrain his actions. He has resurrected a dream that lay dormant for nearly a century: a capitalist world without regulation or meaningful taxation, a world of a nearly total privatization of public services. Trump has held out the prospect of unlimited profit, protected from the demands of the vast majority of the population by ending collective bargaining, a permanent campaign of deportation and of course violent repression by both state and non-state actors. He has found an effective way to divide the working class by adopting a white Christian nationalism focused on combatting “anti-white racism” expressed in DEI programs and supposedly anti-Christian “wokeism” more generally.
For its part, the Democratic Party, by adopting the Republican worldview on such fictions as the border “crisis,” the unprecedented crime-wave, and “wokeism” run amok, as well as on the very real question of Palestine, offered voters Trumpism with just the right pinch of guilt to render the dish palatable to its base. As was the case with the invasion of the Capital in 2021, Democrats have responded to Trump’s recent declaration, “he who saves his country does not violate any law,” with handwringing and talk of a constitutional crisis. All they have to counter Trump’s initiatives are vague threats of legal action, although the Democrats are well aware that the Supreme Court is packed with Trump supporters (a number of whom were confirmed with the help of Democrats). The real question for us at this point is how far the degeneration of the Democratic Party must go for the left to understand that it is incapable of responding to the threat that Trump poses, a threat that requires a response that cannot wait for 2028 or even 2026.
The left must study the strategy internal to what may look like a barrage of random attacks. Trump and his coterie have studied the defenses protecting their key targets, finding loopholes in the law or determining that the existing laws cannot easily be enforced. This does not mean, however, that the strategy as it is practiced is without its weak points. Of these, none offers a greater opportunity for both inflicting a defeat on the far right agenda and building a mass movement capable of shifting the balance of forces than the growing resistance to mass deportations. The fact that it has arisen from the self-organization of overwhelmingly proletarian immigrant communities in their struggle against racist repression means that the class unity that demands active and intransigent support for those under attack and that is the condition for defeating the ruling class offensive begins here.
Jodi Dean
Trump’s second term provides the Left with unique opportunities to name our enemies, recognize our friends, and forge a mass movement for socialism.
Trump’s inauguration staged for all to see that his would be a reign of billionaires for billionaires. Prominently seated were Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. Also present were the billionaires Miriam Adelson, Mukesh Ambani, Bernard Arnaut, and Sundar Pichai. Trump empowered Musk, the richest man on the planet, to chop down the US federal bureaucracy. Musk’s DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency, has fired thousands of federal workers in agencies that include the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. These agencies have material impact on the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of Americans.
The cuts are linked to Trump’s efforts to extend his tax cuts to corporations and the very rich. The blatant use of the federal government to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich is happening before our eyes. This presents the left with an enormous opportunity to hammer home the message: the billionaires are the enemy. They are robbing us. They are stealing from us. Their wealth comes from our work and the Trump administration’s willingness to dismantle necessary public programs so that the rich can get richer. The whole system is rigged so that they get more while the rest of us get less and less.
We also have an opportunity to get clarity on who our friends are – not the Democrats. The Democrats are worse than useless. They are complicit. Raising the alarm and leading the charge against the billionaire class is not hard. But the Democrats have failed to present any significant opposition. They, too, see billionaires as key constituents or at least as too powerful to risk alienating. So leaders like Hakim Jeffries muddle about saying that there is nothing they can do and that they are willing to work with Republicans. Top strategists like James Carville advise the Democrats to roll over and play dead. The absence of an opposition party is not a crisis. We already know that the Democratic party is where movements go to die. This time we can energize the resistance ourselves, through our unions and grassroots organizations. The Democrats aren’t for us, and we don’t need them.
We now have a real opportunity to forge a mass movement for socialism. The breath of Trump’s attacks is already inciting opposition across a broad spectrum of the working class, from laid-off federal workers, to trans people and their families, to veterans, to immigrants, and more. If a problem on the left has been our fragmentation, the very fact that Trump is attacking everything everywhere all at once is a benefit. We can see that we are fighting many fronts of the same struggle against the billionaire class.
That we have a tremendous opportunity to name the enemy, recognize that the Democrats are not our friends, and unite our struggles doesn’t mean that the next few years will be easy. But the relationships and experiences built through pandemic mutual aid efforts, the George Floyd protests, the Palestine solidarity movement, resurgent labor unionism, and immigrant rights networks, give us a fighting chance.
Promise Li
Trump’s second term has thrust working-class communities at home and abroad into a new era of peril. He has stoked geopolitical conflict by unleashing trade wars on multiple fronts, especially heightening the inter-imperialist rivalry with China. Trump has deepened the imperialist exploitation of Palestine and Ukraine as they resist Israel and Russia’s colonial occupations. There is little developmental strategy accompanying this aggressive nationalism. Instead, his administration is dismantling the welfare state’s remnants, gutting federal support for education and environmental protections. Most Democratic Party politicians have put up little fight. Some are enacting the far-right’s policies, like mass deportations. Others even boast they could execute them more efficiently.
Thus, we are in a period of defensive struggles against the far-right. Trump’s regime does not yet represent full-throttled fascism, but is laying its foundation. His second term has opened with the rapid expansion of authoritarianism, though his administration lacks a strong mandate. Militant far-right forces in Trump’s first term, like the Proud Boys, remain disorganized. But far-right movements are mobilizing in new ways. They are becoming more multiracial, particularly among petit-bourgeois immigrants. Zionists have combined mob attacks with an increasingly advanced doxxing infrastructure against pro-Palestine protestors. We must attune to how far-right movements are evolving to dismember working-class self-organization, and push state repression toward fascist terror.
Recent struggles, from solidarity with Palestine to labor upsurges, are significant milestones in the left’s rebuilding after decades of defeat. But such efforts are uneven and tenuous, especially as the far-right counterattacks. Nonetheless, the left has an opportunity, as ordinary Americans experience a historic crisis of faith in the Democratic Party. Socialists must vie for political leadership in the opposition against the far-right. We must broadly gather working-class forces and allies around independent political demands to break from the Democratic establishment’s consensus. For instance, we should organize around the state disappearance of Mahmoud Khalil as an extension of the US’s warmongering policy, which our political system cannot help but perpetuate. We must reject attempts to reduce Khalil’s kidnapping to merely a matter of civil liberties.
Indeed, Americans are rediscovering how to resist through mass mobilization beyond Democratic leadership. Los Angeles witnessed this in February. Immigrant high schoolers organized a week of mass walkouts against deportations across the county. Socialists and unions successfully organized protests to reverse the Children’s Hospital’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth. However, these movements will not sustain themselves spontaneously. Socialists from different traditions must unify with militant workers and marginalized groups to develop a political strategy. We must rebuild infrastructures of resistance to consolidate and defend our ranks. Only then can mass-based revolutionary parties emerge to contest the two-party system.
Having political recommendations is not enough: socialists must confirm them in practice to win over working people. We must be the most dedicated and energetic organizers in combating oppression across battlefronts, from uplifting disability justice to strengthening tenant unions. The main challenge is doing this spadework not simply for the sake of organizing, but to organize our communities toward class politics.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the positions held by Left Voice.