American Protests: Against Trump or the Agenda Strikes Back?

Kuzma Medyak (Rabkor) 18 April 2025

On April 5, two days after Donald Trump declared a tariff war on China and much of the world and the subsequent collapse of the American stock market, nationwide protests against the current US president broke out, spreading across all 50 states and more than a thousand cities. The protests are widespread, with some 20,000 protesters taking to the streets in Washington alone.

The slogan for the protests is “hands off!” On their website of the same name (handsoff2025.com), the protesters express their grievances against the country’s ruling elite: “they hand out trillions to billionaires while forcing the rest of us to pay higher prices for food, rent, and health care,” “they are encroaching on our communities and our rights,” “they are undermining protections for working people.”[1]

It sounds very revolutionary, but don’t be fooled: the “hands off” movement has absorbed many different organizations that are not communist, but left-liberal in orientation: eco- and LGBT* activists, women’s rights groups, pacifists, the “Democratic Socialists of America,” a total of 198 organizations opposing Trump and his transformation of the country.[2]

The movement's official website notes that the protest is strictly peaceful and that protesters should not take any weapons with them, and any confrontations with dissenters should be resolved non-violently. [3]

The reasons for the protest are painfully simple: Trump, who came to power, defending the interests of big capital, began to pursue a policy of, as they say here, “optimization” - in March, 75 thousand government employees were fired,[4] and in the future, according to Robert Kennedy Jr., it is planned to reduce the staff of the Ministry of Health, throwing ten thousand employees out into the cold.[5] The imposition of tariffs on most of the world and the collapse of the stock market were the last straw for the American people and, realizing that if something is not done, then it will only get worse, and impoverishment will only accelerate, people began to go out en masse to protest against the rule of Donald Trump and Elon Musk - the two main government rich men, who are more active than previous presidents in squeezing the juices out of workers and cutting social security.

The protest is currently led by left-liberal forces that do not intend to fundamentally change the capitalist system that gave birth to Trump and Co., but, nevertheless, the protesters intend to defend the bourgeois-democratic rights of the people from encroachment by the current US establishment. To summarize, the following picture emerges: on the one hand, Trump, expressing the interests of big capital (Musk in the government is the most striking example of this) and gradually strengthening his control over society, and on the other hand, an indignant people led by followers of the SJW agenda in mass culture, those who are usually called "soy leftists" on the Internet, but who were not afraid to stand up for the defense of bourgeois-democratic freedoms.

So who should Marxists, particularly American ones, support? Let's start from the opposite: Trump is definitely not our candidate. A man of strong anti-communist views, a conservative and a reactionary - for Marxists, a figure that is unacceptable and even shameful to support. There is only one way out - to support popular uprisings against Trump. Think for yourself: under which regime is it easier to defend the rights of the working class and agitate for socialism: under the authoritarian nationalist regime of Trump, or under a bourgeois democracy without restrictions on freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and so on? But Marxists would not be Marxists if they thoughtlessly supported this movement, turning a blind eye to its shortcomings. American communists need to try to lead the protest, to show the masses that the problem is not just Trump and Musk, but capitalism itself, which gives rise to them; that you can cut off the shoots of the weeds as long as you like, but they will grow back again and again until we tear out the root itself.

How will it all end? The desired maximum is Trump's impeachment, which some hotheads in Parliament are already talking about[6], but such a scenario seems unlikely, since impeachment requires a vote of two-thirds of the Senate, which is now almost equally divided between Republicans and Democrats.[7] (53 Republicans versus 45 Democrats and 2 independent Democrats), so Trump is not in danger of leaving office anytime soon. The minimum result of the protest is a further decrease in the support for the current administration, which has already fallen to 43%. Probably, Trump, thanks to the "hands off!" protests, in order not to completely lose support among the people, will partially back down to the demands of the strikers. But, of course, not by much. History shows that when the ruling class sees a threat in a growing grassroots opposition movement, in order to weaken it, it throws a bone from the master's table to the people thirsty for improvements, thereby appeasing part of them. But does Trump see the protests as a threat to his rule? History, as usual, will show.
https://rabkor.ru/columns/debates/2025/04/17/american-protests-against-trump-or-the-agenda-strikes-back/

Back


Links Search