Trump’s Win and the Crisis of Capitalism

Since almost the turn of the millennium, we always point to the same factors when we analyse the fascist escalations in various countries and the elections in which fascist forces gained positions. As the main factor, it is necessary to count the objective ground formed by the multi-dimensional historical system crisis into which capitalism has tumbled and the hegemony war fuelled by it. It should seperately be underscored that, this is accompanied by several political/subjective factors which are also determined this background: the shift of the centre of gravity of bourgeois politics to the right, the unresolvable crisis of social-democracy, tending of the masses towards the extremes by the motive of escaping from the bad conditions they have fallen in, where capitalism is unable to promise a good future to them. Socialist circles, on the other hand, cannot be the principal address of these searches because of their weakness, the ideological confusion they have been dragged into, and their detachment from the class. Under these conditions, fascist movements, thanks to the support they receive from the bourgeoisie and the depths of the state, manage to divert the reaction of the masses into their own channels through all kinds of demagoguery, lies and distortions. No matter which advanced capitalist countries we consider, the picture, the underlying causes and the political factors in the elections are the same. The latest example was the American elections, once again!

The presidential and congressional elections in the US are over, and Trump won the right to be president for a second term. Although the final results have not yet been announced, the Republicans won the elections in all areas, with a clear superiority in the number of electoral delegates,  a majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives, and a vote margin of 3 million. According to the data released so far, while the voter turnout rate has dropped significantly, Trump seems to have received around 76 million votes (50%), while his rival Harris stayed at 73 million (48%). In other words, the situation in the previous election has reversed.[1]

Compared to the previous election, there has been a small increase of about 2 million votes for Trump, while the Democratic candidate's votes have decreased by 8 million. The meaning of this is clear: Trump did not increase his vote share or his political support in any significant way, but the Democrats, who have been in power for four years, have disappointed the electorate, for this reason, one out of every ten people who supported the Democrats in the previous election did not go to the ballots this time. In addition to the reaction to economic problems, such as falling real wages and skyrocketing inflation, we have to underline the reaction among Muslim Americans, among the leftist and democratic youth, and among minorities against the lack of a fight against racism and full support for the genocide committed by Israel. Moreover, it is well known that a significant portion of the workers who went and voted for the Democrats were primarily motivated by preventing Trump from winning.

Trump is elected, but this is not due to his success, his breakthrough, etc. Therefore, this result should essentially be interpreted as Trump did not win, but the Democratic Party lost. Under the current conditions, the Democratic Party government, which failed to meet the expectations of the masses and disappointed them with its policies has the political responsibility for Trump's re-election despite his actions in his first presidential term.

The masses did not experience a major shift to the right, Trump retained the votes he received in the previous election, whereas the Democrats suffered a catastrophic loss. It not possible to say that those who voted for the Democrats last time but did not go to the polls this time have withdrawn out of cynicism and disappointment. We can predict that the eight million people who reacted and did not go to the ballots, together with the combative elements who went and voted for the Democratic candidate against all odds, will not easily succumb to Trump. The dynamism of these groups is sufficiently evident in the anti-war demonstrations and strikes of recent months. Moreover, the opinion that those sections of the working class who voted for Trump are a “lost cause” is absolutely wrong.

A President convicted of petty crimes!

When Trump lost the election in 2020, and his coup attempt failed, many commentators said that he was politically finished. We disagreed and emphasised that even if Trump's political career was over, Trumpism was not! The picture we see today shows that both Trump and Trumpism are not over, and even more so if we consider that he has the full support of the Republicans. This is a striking indication of the depth and extent of the historical system crisis of capitalism and the decay it has created.

Trump was found guilty by a court of law this year for the petty crimes he had committed, becoming the first "former" president to be convicted in US history. Now will be entitled as the first convicted president to hold the highest political office in the country, the presidency. In January, a convict will take the helm of the country, and this person is not even convicted of political crimes! Trump, who was convicted of 34 offences ranging from financial crimes to falsifying documents to cover up the fact that he gave “hush Money” to porn stars after having sexual encounters with them, was not only a free man but also a candidate for the presidency again. The judge hearing the case postponed the announcement of the sentence until after the election. His crimes included calling on the military and then his supporters to stage a coup d'état after he lost the election and encouraging crowds to storm the Congress building. However, he was cleared of the investigation in this content, having been able to run for re-election by the court decision, and he won!

There can be only one explanation for all this “strangeness”: the American Establishment is in need of a fascist leader like Trump! Many people who have been his advisor during his first presidential term and worked in the White House say he is a “liar”, a “fascist” and “unfit for Office”. But can’t they find a candidate with a clean record who seems much more “fit” to be president? Let's try to answer this question by looking not only at Trump, but also at the situation of Biden, the first candidate against him. For months, they insisted that there was no more suitable candidate than this old man who was clearly losing his mental and physical faculties. The question we asked above about whether they cannot find a more “fitting” and clean candidate should actually be answered as follows: What they need is not a “fitting” person who stands out with traditional, polite, politically gentle, well-mannered, highly educated, statesmanlike, and so forth characteristics. They need a suitable manifestation of capitalist rottenness, a reflection of the period, someone who can get into dirty business without hesitation. They need someone who can make himself look very different from what he is, who can appear to be one of the people with his rudeness, who can be marketed as honest with his bluntness, whose criminality can be presented as proof that he is not an elite, and who, with all these characteristics, the people can see as one of their own. Moreover, someone who, as an upstart dollar billionaire, is certain not to cause a road accident for the continuity of the order! Never in any historical period has the rottenness of politics been so strikingly exposed. Likewise, each of the ministers Trump has chosen for his cabinet recapitulates this rottenness.

Background: historical system crisis

Now, just as they did when Trump first came to power, the liberal democrats have begun to write about how everything will get worse both in the USA and in the world. It is certainly true that everything will get worse if Trump is allowed to rule, but isn’t it a distortion of reality when this is said alongside ignoring what has happened so far? The world was far from being a bed of roses during the Biden-Harris era, and it is an absolute lie that things would have gotten better if they had won! If you listen to them, you would think that there has not been a US-sponsored genocide in Palestine for more than a year, that the war in Ukraine was not being dragged into a deadlock and being tried to spread, that they were not looking for a suitable moment and opportunity to draw China into the war! You would think that the winds of democracy were blowing in Europe, that fascists could not raise their heads and were crushed on sight. And again, you would have thought that the capitalist economy was running smoothly, new growth records were being broken, unemployment was zero, real wages were increasing everywhere, and poverty and misery were being eradicated. Now that Trump has come to power, everything will be much worse! No, this logic confuses the cause with the effect. Everything is already getting much worse, and traditional bourgeois governments are nowhere able to find a meaningful and lasting solution to this trend, which is why the path is smoothed for fascists like Trump. Since capitalism has been in a historical system crisis for a quarter century, everything is getting worse every day. The dynamics that bring Trumps, Putins and all other fascist mindsets to power draw strength from this ground.

Moreover, just before this system crisis emerged, the US monopolies had already begun to increase their profits enormously, while the American industrial proletariat, like most other workers in the world, had already begun to experience serious destruction. The lifestyle and living standards that had become widespread in the two decades following the Second World War began to disappear rapidly in the 90s. There were major changes in the economy and in the composition of the working class. Many branches of the manufacturing industry were shifted to countries where labour was cheaper and millions were bound to unemployment. Workers were told that this was the “inevitable result” of free trade and globalisation. No steps were taken in favour of the labourers who were adversely affected by this process, and the existing social services and benefits were rapidly liquidated, as well. Workers driven into unemployment and poverty were told that they lacked sufficient education and training for the “jobs of the future” and that they should blame themselves for their plight. Finance and consultancy companies, which produce no new value, have mushroomed everywhere, rising to the sky with plazas. Those who remained unemployed or did not have the opportunity for higher education, if they were lucky, had to settle for jobs in giant supermarket chains where they would be heavily exploited. And the rest were left to their fate in the slums of the once-industrial metropolises that had become ghost towns. Meanwhile, the most unskilled workers and the unemployed were put into brutal competition with migrant workers brought in from all over the world to do the worst or lowest paid jobs. Capitalism, which has stagnated since the turn of the millennium and has drifted into a historical system crisis, has put the entire burden on the backs of the labourers, further increasing the destruction. In total, poverty and unemployment have reached great heights, while the living standards of labourers have fallen and working conditions have worsened.

When explaining the picture we face today, it is essential to emphasise this objective background. But the issue is not just this objectivity. Although it is undoubtedly determined by this objectivity in the final analysis, subjective factors, the state and attitudes of political subjects also have a great share in the emergence of this result.

Trump is a distorted result of the masses’ desire for change

It is a well-known reality that if the communists do not have sufficient strength and organisation within the working class, great economic devastation and loss of hope from the parties of the order make the masses open to fascist demagoguery, Trump is a concrete example of this reality. The votes for Trump are the reaction of the workers most affected by the devastation to this shock. Like so, unlike his rivals, Trump garners votes by talking right about these problems and appears to offer solutions. Those who do not state this reality on the support Trump gets but instead accentuate the low level of education, the strength of religious beliefs, cultural underdevelopment, racism, misogyny, anti-immigrant sentiments, etc., are absolutely wrong. Since American society did not go back fifty years culturally as a result of a catastrophe, those who hold this view must explain why these cultural factors have become so strong and decisive today and not yesterday. Democrat ideologues refrain from giving such an explanation because they themselves are among the creators of this picture.

Neo-liberal ideologues label the highlighting of the problems of the working people as populism or left populism. For them, there is no alternative to the capitalist attack programmes codified as neoliberalism. They call this TINA (“There Is No Alternative”). The leftists of the Establishment have surrendered to this paradigm in all countries. According to this paradigm, all political parties must remain within this framework. Therefore, the issues that politicians should give prominence to are how to increase productivity (i.e. exploitation), to what extent and how to protect the environment (i.e. how to continue plundering it without destroying it completely), how to continue globalisation even more strongly, etc. For years, they made this line dominant in all countries and all bourgeois parties, left and right, have come to almost the same line. This is the reason why in all countries the labouring masses who see this line as inside the established order, are shifting to parties that position themselves or pretend to position themselves outside of it. Particularly in the USA, the elite image of the Democratic candidates and the globalist ideology they advocate raise a deep reaction among the working masses. The decades-long policy of the trade unions to support Democrat candidates seems to have come to an end. Candidates like Trump, who present themselves as outside and against this elite world, and who pretend to be so, also manage to turn the face of unions (such as the Teamsters) towards them.

The bourgeois ideologues had declared that “the working class is dead”, that “the class struggle is over”, with the bluster of the “post-industrial economic age”, the “information age” and so on. Even under a false flag and a false leadership, those who were declared dead say that “we are here”. As David Brooks, a well-known writer in the US, put it as part of a self-critique, “As the left veered toward identitarian performance art, Donald Trump jumped into the class war with both feet.”[2] Indeed, with the usual fascist demagoguery, Trump has won the election by diverting and exploiting the class anger felt by workers all over the country.

Responsibility of Democratic Party

Behind the fact that workers’ reactions and anger fuel fascists like Trump, in a way, lies the policies of bourgeois politicians who absolutely do not care about the interests of the working class and who cannot (and in fact, will not be able to) propose a fundamental change.

Commentators who watched the Democrats' election campaign, the line they followed, what they did and what they did not do, point to countless mistakes. The details are not our concern, but if we take into account the correct criticisms, we see that the Democrats virtually did everything they could to ensure Trump's victory.

The Democratic Party is marketed as the representative of the lower and middle classes and minority groups. The explicit or covert support of most trade unions following the Second World War further reinforces this perception. However, the Democrats, as much as the Republicans, are in fact the representatives of finance-capital. We have talked a lot about the accelerated evolution of left-wing parties in the advanced capitalist countries towards the centre since the 80s and especially since the collapse of the USSR. These years were also a period in which groups and individuals within the Democratic Party who deserved the title of bourgeois left were further suppressed and high obstacles were put in their way. The culmination of this attitude was the anti-democratic manoeuvres that blocked Sanders in the race for the nomination in the run-up to the 2016 election. This conduct against Sanders, who was supported by the rising leftist and socialist tendencies within the youth, actually paved the way for Trump's first presidency. Because the issue was not only whether Sanders should be the candidate or not, but also the decisive rejection of a campaign that put the interests of working people at its centre, and the promotion of a globalist, neo-liberal, pro-Zionist, pro-Wall Street and militarist line. This position has been continuing ever since.

Just like in Turkey and Europe, the Democrats who lost the elections in the USA are looking for the blame not on themselves but on the “stupid people”. The senile Biden exposed what was in his brain during the campaign by calling Trump supporters “garbage”. Unlike Democratic candidates and Presidents who insult the uneducated sections of the working class as “deplorable”, Trump addresses them by saying “I understand you, I speak the same language as you, I can’t speak fancy, but I respect you”. He presents himself as someone who is outside of the Establishment, someone who has entered politics to drain the swamp in Washington and on Wall Street. It is a big lie, but it has been convincing for a significant part of the labourers. Because, like all civil fascist leaders in history, Trump has placed the economic problems of the labourers at the top of his demagogic propaganda, and he handled even the immigration problem, which is the second problem he most frequently mentioned, in connection with economic problems.

The core of his argument was the need to increase tariffs to restrict imports and promote domestic manufacturing, and to implement policies to repatriate production facilities that have been offshored. Thus, the promise he articulated as enterprises that had closed down or offshored would come back and industrial workers would go back to work received great support. This is one of the promises that traditional industrial workers attach the most importance to. And as a matter of fact, there were some developments in this direction during the first Trump period, and Trump was able to keep these “achievements” on the agenda continuously until the pandemic came and slapped him hard.

It doesn’t matter that Trump is doing all this with gigantic lies and distortions, because the Democrats are as big liars as he is. One commentator, referring to Trump’s being in tune with the working people and the way he presents himself as a human being, as a person, said: “Even when Trump lies, he does so as a human being. The Democrats, on the other hand, even when they tell the truth, they look like a faceless apparatus” Trump’s lies are persuasive to labourers because of the sense of confidence he created. Exit polls on election day, too, show this: Among Harris supporters, democracy (58%) and abortion rights (22%) are seen as the country’s biggest problems, while among Trump supporters the economy (49%) and immigration (21%) stand out.

These statistics not only explain the defeat of the Democrats, but are also directly relevant to the socialist movement. These statistics strikingly reveal where to focus in order to become an effective force in the eyes of the masses. The majority of the socialist movement in advanced capitalist countries has abandoned the line of class struggle and is mired in identity politics and environmental sensitivity. This objective situation is not only limited to being detached from the class. The lack of interest in the class, in its life and struggle, has also become quite dramatic. This is what needs to be broken first and foremost.

The isolationist and pacifist Trump?

Finally, let us conclude by summarising our views on two of the most talked-about aspects of the new era.

Based on some of Trump’s rhetoric, not an insignificant number of commentators have argued that he will pursue an isolationist policy, that “like every average American, he sees the world only in America”, and that he will have little interest in the world. There is a crisis of a historical magnitude and a war for global hegemony accompanying it, and this war has long since turned into a world war concentrated in certain regions. And will the US turn inward under these conditions!! To draw the conclusion that the US will turn inward, one must take every word of bourgeois politicians as truth and not understand the basic characteristics of the period we are passing through. Trump can neither bring about the end of globalisation, as he demagogically claims, nor can he pursue an isolationist line. The US economy cannot be cut off from the world market by a bourgeois government. His concern is to preserve the hegemonic position of the USA in this market.

In his first presidential term, Trump talked about withdrawing from Afghanistan and the Middle East in order to appease the reactions of the people of America and of the world against the rising war, and to realise some tactical differences he had in mind; but then these words were nullified by the American Establishment. For all his talk, he neither left NATO nor withdrew US forces from their bases in Europe. On the contrary, he was the first US President to supply Ukraine with heavy and powerful weapons. Therefore, Trump’s claim that he aims to “keep the US out of conflicts” has no validity.

The meaning of Trump’s rhetoric during the election campaign to end wars was clear from the very beginning: to reach a compromise with Russia on Ukraine, to give Israel his full support and enable it to end its war with a “decisive victory”!

J.D. Vance, who will be Trump's vice president, wants to “cut off hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine and start negotiations with Russia”. He argues that the preservation of Ukraine's former borders is “unrealistic” and that “Ukraine should be a neutral country and territorial disputes should be frozen”. In other words, Russia will not interfere in Ukraine's “international choices” in exchange for recognition of its annexation of the Ukrainian territories it occupies. As for the Israeli war, the aim is not an immediate cessation, but a decisive victory for Israel with a quick act. The statement made by Trump's spokesperson after he won the elections demonstrates this clearly enough. Arguing that the Biden administration did not give Israel enough support, the spokesperson explained that Trump wants “wars to end as soon as possible, but with a decisive victory for Israel”.

The world war initiated by American imperialism continues, and there should be no doubt that it will intensify and spread under the Trump administration. This is not a question of who sits in the presidential chair. Especially in our times, even if voter preferences affect the results of the elections, they do not create a fundamental change in the main policies pursued by the governments. This reality is most true for the United States. In this context, the statement of the Russian Foreign Ministry on the US election results underlines a valid point: “The US ruling political elite, regardless of party affiliation, adopts an anti-Russian approach and adheres to the line of blocking Moscow. This line is not affected by internal political fluctuations in the US.” The same is undoubtedly true for the US policy towards China. Those who claim that there will be categorical differences in the foreign policy of US imperialism with the transfer of power from one party to another should take this observation into account.