Cracks in the Trump regime: How to defeat the right-wing, anti-worker offensive
August 14, 2025 by Justin Bare
In the beginning of his second administration, Trump's "flood the zone" strategy induced a state of shock-and-awe across the world due to the speed and scale of his attacks on working people. But now, things are looking precarious for Trump, as he faces obstacles and erupting divisions among his base of supporters. In some ways the Democratic Party is in even more dire straits, facing dismal approval ratings despite being out of power. Working people urgently need to fight back against both parties, and there are real openings for us to make gains, if we can understand the processes at play and what it will take to wage the most successful battles against the billionaires and their political servants.
Flood the zone
From day one of his second administration, Trump has carried out a brutal deportation policy, including sending immigrants residing legally in the U.S. to a prison for terrorists in El Salvador, with the most well known case being union worker Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a member of Sheet Metal Air Rail and Transportation (SMART) Workers Local 100. In addition, Trump has doubled down on support for the genocide in Gaza, and is using ICE detentions and deportations as a political weapon to attack people who have protested against U.S. support for the genocide, like Mahmoud Khalil.
Using DOGE, initially with the assistance of billionaire Elon Musk, Trump has carried out mass firings of tens of thousands of government workers. Trump has stripped labor protections from over 400,000 workers in the Department of Veteran Affairs, and over 12,000 in the Environmental Protection Agency. Among the unions drastically affected are the National Nurses Union and the American Federation of Government Employees. These workers stand to lose their legal rights to organize and fight for better wages, benefits, and working conditions if Trump's executive order stands up in the courts.
Trump has done considerable damage in just six months’ time, including raising the already-high cost of living for working people. Trump was initially forced to walk back significant parts of his so-called "Liberation Day" tariffs, after a stock market crash and a crisis in the U.S. Treasury market that reflected the panic and backlash of the corporate elite. This was combined with low public approval ratings, with polls indicating large majorities of American working people opposed to his tariff regime. Trump has since then followed through on the rest of his tariff program. Most imports into the United States will now face at least a 10 percent import duty, with the overall average effective tariff rate estimated at over 17 percent, the highest rate since 1935, during the Great Depression. As widely predicted, prices of many imported goods started rising in April, and are expected to grow further, with companies passing the brunt of the tariffs onto struggling working-class consumers. Some companies in other countries hit by the tariffs have already laid off workers.
Among the most sweeping assaults on working people by Trump and the Republicans was their trillion-dollar cut to Medicaid, Medicare, and food assistance, which will adversely affect tens of millions of the poor and working-class Americans across the country.
Trump has doubled down on the divide-and-conquer strategy that is used by capitalist bosses and their political servants by scapegoating immigrants, LGBTQ+ people and other oppressed groups. His attacks are used to redirect the anger of working people away from the billionaires. Some of his despicable efforts against transgender people include actions to cut funding for institutions that support trans athletes, to shut down services providing gender-affirming care, and to eliminate LGBTQ+ resources from government websites.
Most of these brutal policies are set to continue as long as Trump faces no credible threat to his power.
The Democratic Party has completely failed to fight Trump's attacks. And in reality, they paved the way for many of them. Biden carried out over four million deportations, more than Trump did during his first term, and Trump has a long way to go to catch up with “deporter in chief” Barack Obama. Fundamentally, it was anger of working people at Democratic Party politicians over their betrayals, outright attacks, and their support for the genocide in Gaza that returned Trump to the White House. Defeating Trump and the rise of right-wing populism requires also defeating the Democratic Party. Both parties represent the interests of the warmongering billionaires. Working people need a party of our own. Most immediately, we need the anti-genocide and workers’ movement to build independently of progressive Democrats, and we need independent candidates like Kshama Sawant.
Right-Wing Overreach
It is clear that Trump has massively overreached with his agenda so far. Many people voted for Trump out of disgust at the Biden administration and the fact that Harris represented a clear continuation of those policies. There was massive anger at the high prices for basic necessities, unaffordable housing, and U.S. support for the genocide in Gaza. But all of those problems are getting worse due to Trump's policies. The tariffs will have companies looking to raise their prices as much as possible to maintain profit levels. And Trump has sent more weapons to Israel as the Netanyahu regime takes the genocide to new heights of barbarity, now with a campaign of mass starvation.
Even among Trump's MAGA base, there are big cracks emerging. A huge majority of Americans were opposed to the prospect of a war on Iran, including much of Trump's base who see disastrous and costly foreign wars as fundamentally opposed to the entire purpose of "America First." His base is also opposed to Trump resuming the delivery of weapons to Ukraine to continue the bloody inter-imperialist proxy war. Trump's refusal to release the full Epstein files threw the MAGA world into chaos, as this was a primary focus of many of Trump's most ardent supporters during his election campaign.
Trump’s approval ratings were the worst of any president in modern history at the 100-day mark, and remain low across the board. His disapproval rating recently hit a record high for his second term. On many of his policies, Trump is massively unpopular. Asked whether the president should be able to deport legal immigrants who have protested Israel, 63% said he shouldn't while only 17% said he should. On whether the president should be able to send U.S. citizens to prison in El Salvador, 73% said he shouldn't and 10% said he should. Trump’s vicious cuts to Medicaid are wildly unpopular.
Despite all of this bad news for Trump, the Democrats are also wildly unpopular, and Congressional Democrats have even lower approval ratings than Trump. According to a July poll, the Democratic Party’s approval rating has cratered to its lowest point in 35 years. Millions are still angry about the disastrous outcomes of Biden's administration for working people globally, and now there is the additional fact that the Democrats have completely failed to fight against Trump's attacks on working people.
Administration in crisis
Trump came in on favorable terrain, with the anger at the Democrats so high that people expressed wanting to go back to the economy of Trump's first administration. Additionally, there were illusions that Trump would be able to end the genocide in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, after making proclamations about getting this done "on day one." And yet, Trump has completely squandered this honeymoon period with his actions, and his popularity rapidly diminished. The Trump administration is now in crisis.
The economic situation was already tenuous, with the unwinding of the pandemic boom. Just a few years ago, there was a labor shortage in which workers could switch jobs relatively easily to get higher pay and better benefits. Now the labor market is freezing up in many sectors of the economy, with low numbers of job postings and workers hunkering down in their current jobs.
In the midst of this precarious situation, Trump has come in like a wrecking ball with massive tariffs, layoffs of government workers, and spending cuts to vital research programs. These are drastic and reckless changes for an economy that has appeared to be on the brink of recession for many months, and in fact these actions have significantly increased the likelihood of higher inflation and recession. The combination of these two things is often called stagflation, one of the most dangerous economic scenarios for working people where costs go up while workers are laid off due to economic decline.
We could also see new crises coming out of escalated international tensions, climate-related natural disasters like the Texas floods that were made more deadly due to cuts to weather and disaster agencies, or many other dangerous situations that have become even more volatile due to Trump's rampaging approach to removing obstacles in the way of the rich getting richer. The capitalist class supports much of what Trump has done, but even they don’t support some of his more extreme and chaotic policies or his unpredictable style, which is why he wasn’t their preferred candidate in last year’s election. With Trump’s damaging overreach and collapse in popular support, he will have limited room to handle the next big crisis, and he will be seen by many as a cause of the problem and an obstacle to solving it.
Trump is susceptible to pressure
Contrary to Trump's preferred image of himself as an all-powerful executive, we have seen that Trump is quite susceptible to pressure. On certain issues, the capitalist class has been able to make Trump walk back large portions of his policies, most notably on tariffs. The courts have blocked a number of executive orders, and they may yet deal a fatal blow to many of Trump's tariffs.
So while Trump has been willing to go further in breaking the political establishment norms to get his way, it is already clear that there are major limits to this. The main problem is that much of the resistance and pressure he has received is from the capitalists and courts, but we need working class resistance, mass movements, and strike action in order to stop the attacks on working people and bring down Trump altogether.
The initial protests of this year show the potential to build this, and that working people are looking for a way to fight back. The No Kings protests mobilized over 5 million people by some estimates, potentially the largest single day of political protest in U.S. history. This shows that working people will not sit idly by while Trump attacks our democratic rights, and as socialists we have always supported, and have in fact been the strongest fighters for, democratic rights. But these movements will not succeed unless they break from the Democratic Party that is leading them into dead ends — as always, the Democratic politicians refuse to fight for workers. In fact many of the people at the No Kings protests were angry at the genocide in Gaza, which is supported by Trump and both the Republican and Democratic parties. Yet the Democratic Party leaders of the No Kings protests refused to talk about that issue, and instead focused on encouraging people to essentially "vote blue no matter who."
The vast majority of the union leadership has also utterly failed to fight Trump. Instead, many such as UAW president Shawn Fain, have tried to make peace with Trump since his election, after shamefully backing pro-genocide, anti-worker Democratic candidates Harris and Biden. A notable minority like Teamster President Sean O’Brien went even farther, cheerleading Trump during the election. We need a rank-and-file rebellion in the labor movement against its rotten links to both these parties of the bosses, and for the creation of a new working-class party. Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn have shown this is possible with their launch of a new party in the UK.
What does Trump represent?
To build a powerful and organized working class movement against the attacks of Trump, the Republicans, and the Democrats, one thing that is vital to understand is the character of the Trump administration. There is much confusion about this, because many people are shocked by Trump and his attacks. Many political forces characterize the Trump regime as autocratic or even fascist. Trump’s attacks certainly are shocking, but we need to analyze them correctly to understand the historical processes that led to them and where they are headed.
Trump is dangerous and does represent a significant expansion of executive power. This is not unique however, and does not come out of nowhere. Trump is both continuing and escalating the longer term expansion of executive power by US presidents. It is a response fundamentally to the stagnation of capitalism over decades, the rise of China, and the end of unilateral US dominance of the world. The long-term decline of profitability has given the capitalists less room to maneuver and a less stable society overall, and they must rely more on repressive measures. This is true not only in the U.S. but globally, and it underlies the global rise of right-wing populist parties, which are tapping into anger at the status quo in the absence of any real left alternatives.
Biden’s crackdown on campus antiwar protesters last year was the worst since 1968, in an effort to block movements and defend U.S. imperialism’s horrific policies in the Middle East. Trump has escalated that, as a further expression of the same desperation by the U.S. ruling class.
However, Trump is not an autocrat or fascist, even though he would certainly like unchecked authority. There is simply not the basis for these types of regimes in the U.S. at present. Working people will not allow Trump to throw out democratic rights without a fight, and the capitalists themselves would act to prevent an all-out breakdown of their system. As Vladimir Lenin, one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution, explained: capitalist democracy, as limited as it is, is the best shell for the capitalists' interests. There are big risks to the capitalists themselves under fascism, so they only begin to consider going down that path when working class movements become powerful enough to present an existential threat to the system of capitalism, with the potential for socialist revolution on the table. Unfortunately, the working class today is still far too disorganized and lacks the kind of revolutionary leadership and organization necessary to accomplish a socialist revolution.
Some point to Trump's attacks on civil liberties, the abductions of immigrants and political activists in broad daylight, and the use of the military to repress the protests in Los Angeles as examples of a slide into an autocratic regime or fascism. These are dangerous attacks on working people and we must organize movements to fight against them, but these tactics are not new under "democratic" capitalism. Democratic Party President Woodrow Wilson sentenced socialist Eugene V. Debs to a decade in prison for opposing World War I and it was upheld by the Supreme Court. Democratic Party President Franklin D. Roosevelt, an idol of reformists like Bernie Sanders, sent over one hundred thousand Japanese Americans to concentration camps during World War II. These are horrendous crimes against working people, and yet no one would call these presidents fascists.
A genuinely autocratic regime would not have such difficulty with changing tariffs or interest rates, as Trump has. Mahmoud Khalil, the anti-genocide activist who was abducted and detained by ICE for three months, was recently released by a court order. The Trump administration is appealing the release rather than defying the courts by keeping him in detention anyway, which shows that Trump does not have the power alone to take these kinds of actions that we would expect from an autocrat. Trump has been blocked multiple times by the Supreme Court already, and even had to walk back various threats to fire Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell several times. Under autocracy, socialists and left activists would not even be able to organize openly. Instead of a collapse of socialist activity, we have actually seen a growth of membership in socialist organizations spurred by Trump's election and the attacks of his first months in power, and by the refusal of the Democrats to fight these attacks.
Defeating Trump & the Rise of Right-wing Populism Requires Defeating the Democratic Party Also
This is not just an academic point about how to characterize Trump. It would be a disaster for working class movements if we misunderstand the Trump regime and grossly exaggerate his power. It would lead to wrong conclusions in terms of how to fight Trump, and potentially even the idea that he can’t be stopped. We should consider — why was the Harris campaign and much of the Democratic Party so adamant about spreading the narrative that Trump is a fascist? It's because this plays directly into the idea that we need to support the Democrats no matter what, even if those Democrats are funding a genocide, in order to oppose Trumpian “fascism.” But in reality the Democratic Party has not just been a fundamental obstacle to every movement of the working class, including movements to stop Trump's attacks — they have also adopted much of Trump's approach on various issues, including cracking down on immigrants and undermining the rights of trans people.
Additionally, the misreading of Trump's shock-and-awe campaign points towards security culture and secretive organizing, rather than what's needed, which is openly building mass movements to fight against the rich for what working people need. Of course many immigrant workers in the U.S. will feel less confident to fight back at the moment due to the deportation policy. But we cannot change the brutal deportation policy without mass movements that truly threaten Trump's ability to rule. This cannot be accomplished with underground organizing.
Trump is a right-wing populist, who is pushing the envelope of presidential power to carry out his anti-worker repressive agenda, but he can be defeated by the working class. It’s crucial that we recognize what the Trump regime represents because we need to understand how to fight back. The way out is not to elect Democrats, who will continue most of Trump’s policies, as Biden previously did, because the billionaires who own both parties support them. That is a dead end. Instead we need to build independent movements and unions, a new party for working people, and we need to fight for an end to the bankrupt system of capitalism.
Earlier this year in Washington state, Democrats proposed enormous budget cuts that would hit state workers with a massive pay cut due to mandatory furlough days. Last year in Seattle, Democrats tried to undermine the $15 minimum wage victory that was won by working people with the lead of Kshama Sawant's socialist city council office in 2015. These same kinds of attacks are coming from Democrats in so-called "blue" cities and states across the country.
In Washington and Seattle, Workers Strike Back led movements that pushed back the attacks mentioned above, including defeating the attack on the minimum wage and the more recent attacks on ethics laws and renters rights. We did that by directly calling out the Democratic politicians and mobilizing working people into the fight. We need mass strike action and civil disobedience to stop all the attacks on working people, no matter who they are coming from. And we need to go beyond just defending against attacks, to take up offensive campaigns around bold demands that can inspire many more working people with a way forward, instead of just maintaining the status quo. Rank-and-file members of unions have a particularly critical role to play, to fight for an independent working class position of their unions, against the leadership siding with Democrats or Republicans. With these kinds of fighting strategies, we can fight and defeat the rich, including Trump.