Trump’s 2.0 – A titanic conflict between the classes impends

Marxist Workers Party 4 May 2025

May Day was born out of the militant struggles of the US working class for an 8-hour day. It was adopted by the working class internationally. This year’s May Day coincided with the 50th anniversary of the victory of the Vietnamese masses over the US. The interview outlined that this year’s May Day coincided with the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Vietnam. As the CWI’s recently deceased Peter Taaffe pointed out in his book “Empire Defeated: Vietnam – the lessons for today”: after 30 years – the longest conflict of the 20th century, the world’s strongest superpower was defeated for the first time.”

Supplement to MWP May Day Power FM Interview
Trump’s second coming marks an historical turning point in the post- World War economic order. Reverberations have already begun across the world, economically, ideologically and politically. Trump 2.0’s threats to “repossess” ’the Panama Canal, conquer Greenland and annex Cananda as its 51st state, hark back to the naked, unbridled imperialist bloodletting after Word War 2. Millions were slaughtered in genocidal wars through assassinations, coups and the installation of military dictatorships as their puppet regimes, in Africa, Asia and South America.

In its ascendancy to an imperialist hegemon before that, it had elbowed aside rival imperialist powers, France, Spain, Germany and the UK. It famously laid claim to the Western Hemisphere as its sphere of influence through the 1823 Monroe Doctrine warning European nations, that the US was not open to the colonisation of its backyard by them. Roosevelt supplemented the doctrine with a 1905 corollary warning to its rivals.

Trump’s persona is repugnant. There is a ceaseless outpouring of vulgarities, abhorrent racist and xenophobic remarks from his speeches and “Truth Social”- his X account. He heaps unrestrained insults on other nations including former allies. Haitians in the US eat cats and dogs. Immigrants are criminals, rapists and released from mental institutions.

Trump, however, is no alien from outer space. However outsize his persona in US politics and the Republican Party, he is a representative of US imperialism. His programme draws on the legacy of imperialist plunder, rape pillage, plunder and genocide, lining the US’s path to its ascendancy as the most powerful economic and military hegemon in history.

He has portrayed the US, astonishingly, as a victim of nations feeding on it like parasites, raping and pillaging it through their trade surpluses with it. The tariffs imposed on friend and foe alike will put all this to an end, he rages. His portrayal of Gaza, in a video that went rival, as a piece of ethnically cleansed real estate is the most outrageous exhibition of coldblooded inhumanity. It is to be turned into a Riviera on the bones and graves of tens of thousands of Palestinians whose genocidal slaughter by the US supported far right Israeli regime.

The Trump regime is in essence a continuation of all previous ones in domestic and foreign policy. It is as blood thirsty and rapacious in its imperialist ambitions as all its predecessors. It differs from them, however, in the more brazenness of its methods and policies. The US’s economic decline relative to China especially, that is the driving force behind its programme.

To reclaim its hegemony, Trump has come to power armed with economic as well as a political and ideological war chest to repurpose US democracy and to upend the entire world economic and political governance. The virulent “America First” right wing political populism is the basis for its savage overseas aid cuts of World Health Organisation, United Nations World Refugee Agency, the World Food Programme and US Aid budgets.

Domestic impact
Within the US, the full impact of his economic policies is still to be felt. However, the 0.3% first quarter gross domestic product (GDP) decline reinforce predictions of a recession. There are fears of increased inflation and empty shelves in the summer from the fall in Chinese imports.

The US working class is already feeling the impact of Trump’s tariffs whose rationale is also reducing the world’s biggest debtor nation’s $36tr national debt. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has slashed over 260 000 jobs, the majority fired (75 000 through retrenchment packages). Even before Trump took office private sector layoffs and discharges totalled 3.5 million from January to February 2025, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics.

At 4.7% US unemployment figures are relatively low. But they conceal the decline of US working class living standards over decades since neo-liberalism began in the early 70s ending the illusion of the American Dream. Wages have not increased in real terms since 1971:

  • . 60% live from pay cheque to pay cheque.
  • . 8.9m (5.5%) now work multiple jobs – the highest ever recorded exceeding the spike in 2009 at end of the Great Recession.
  • . 5m work part time jobs – the 3rd highest figure on record.
  • . 10m are homeless.
  • . 85m are either medically under-insured or not all.
  • . Student debt is $1.6tr.


    • The top 3 billionaires own as much wealth as the bottom 170m.
    Tump has portrayed himself as a champion of the working class, a self-made billionaire determined, as an outsider, to use his presidency to “drain the swamp” of the rich in Washington. Yet his billions in campaign funding confirmed him emphatically as a beneficiary of “the best democracy money can buy” – the title of investigative journalist Greg Palast’s book. In an even more pronounced and unapologetic manner Trump’s regime bears the features of an oligarchy. In a break with tradition, inauguration seats were reserved for CEOs, led by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, from the “Magnificent 7.” These tech companies dominate US stock markets. They have a combined market capitalization larger than the stock markets of the UK, Canada, and Japan combined. This is a government of the rich by the rich and for the rich.

    Trump’s tariffs war and the overseas aids cuts, driven by the US’s life-long imperialism predatory self-interest, necessitates a war on the working class in the US and internationally. The ideological and political weaponry in its arsenal is aimed at dividing the working class on the basis of race, gender and nationality, at home and abroad, within and between countries.

    It has buttressed these with attacks on democracy itself. Viewing these as obstructions to the implementation of its “Make America Great Again (MAGA) programme. Trump’s regime has attacked the right to protest, intimidated the judiciary and defied court orders and arrested a judge. He has blackmailed educational institutions on what they may or may not teach and threatened the media in an attempt to silence it. Masked plain clothed Immigration Enforcement Officers have kidnapped, jailed and held people without trial.

    Trump 2.0’s tariff policies, global aid cuts and ideological offensive will have a devastating effect worldwide economically and politically.

    International Impact
    Trump’s trade war is an escalation of a war raged against the neo-colonial world especially through the post-war economic and political order it was the architect of since WW2. With its hegemony in decline, it regards that same order as unfit for purpose. In attempting to upend it, it has turned against its own European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies, cutting them adrift in the naked pursuit of its own interests shown so graphically over Ukraine.

    It continues to strangle Iran with sanctions and refuse to rule out bombing it. It has turned El Salvador into a penal colony for the incarceration of illegally deported immigrants. The scenes of prisoners bent over with hoods on their heads and chains around their ankles are reminiscent of military dictatorship and gulags. Insolently, Trump suggested to Bukele at the White House that the self-styled “world’s coolest dictator” that he build 5 more of these maximum security dungeons for US citizens to be included in mass deportations.

    The International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (WB) of which the US is the largest shareholder, and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) now crippled by the US’s refusal to fill vacancies for its Appeal Body. These institutions have all contributed to the massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich countries plunging them into unsustainable debt, underdevelopment, super-exploitation, mass starvation and endless wars.

    As a share of the global gross domestic product, debt has risen to 336% for all countries worldwide. To meet debt payments, it is estimated that around 100 countries will have to cut spending on critical social infrastructure including health, education and social protection. Africa

    In 1960 GDP per person in Africa, adjusted for purchasing-power parity, was about half of the average in the rest of the world. Today it is about a quarter. Plotted on a graph the steadily growing gap looks “like the jaws of a yawning crocodile”, says Jakkie Cilliers of the Institute for Security Studies, a South African think-tank. On current trends Africans will make up over 80% of the world’s poor by 2030, up from 14% in 1990.

    The case of Lesotho underlines the absurdity of Trump’s accusations that trade surpluses prove the US is “exploited, raped and pillaged.” To the insult that he has never heard of Lesotho Trump has added the injury of a 50% tariff – the highest of any African country. Lesotho’s annual GDP (population 2.3m) is $2.1billion. The US (population 347,275,807) GDP is $23.5 trillion.

    One investor, on one day, makes more money on the stock market than the entire country of Lesotho in a year. Lesotho’s trade surplus with the US is largely driven by diamond and textile exports, including US company Levi jeans. In 2024, its exports to the US totalled $237m, accounting for more than 10 percent of its GDP, according to Oxford Economics.

    In the colonial world the trade surpluses reflect dependency resulting from unequal term of trade. Foreign exchange earnings, (in US $ that dominates the world financial system) from raw material and agricultural exports cannot cover the cost of the plant, equipment and technology imports. The debt from IMF and WB loans creates dependency and a debt trap.

    Developing countries are sinking deeper into debt. Their external debt – money owed to foreign creditors – has quadrupled in two decades to a record $11.4 trillion in 2023, equivalent to 99% of their export earnings. (UN trade and Development – UNCTAD 17/03/25). Approximately 60% of low-income countries are at high risk of or already in debt distress.

    This was how the post-WW2 order was designed as US vice-president Vance remarked at a summit organized by the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The US-led West wants to maintain a strict international division of labour, in which poor countries in the periphery produce low value-added goods (with lots of competition and therefore low profits), whereas rich nations extract exorbitant monopoly rents through control over high value-added technologies reinforced by strict intellectual property rights.

    In Africa especially, the “appetiser” before the tariffs Trump served up through aid cuts have already threatened before the massive job losses, greater poverty and disease that will follow. These include US’s moves to shut down the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), the agency behind the Lesotho Health and Horticulture Compact that was to benefit approximately 2.5-million people over the next 20 years and generate over 90,000 direct and indirect jobs over five years.

    Trump singled SA out for both economic and political attack, expelling the SA’s ambassador for describing him as a white supremacist. It is threatening not to renew SA’s membership of the Africa Growth and Opportunities Act and the duty free exports to the US it allows. This will affect the auto and agriculture sectors potentially affecting tens of thousands of jobs. It is pressurising SA to withdraw its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. It has supported false claims of a white genocide and land expropriation of white-owned land by a racist pressure Group Afri-Forum and even passed legislation to provide asylum to Afrikaners. The foreign aid freeze and the cancellation of the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has put more than 15,300 healthcare workers’ jobs on the line and could lead to hundreds of thousands of new HIV infections by the end of 2028.

    Trump 2.0 has emboldened the far right, xenophobes and misogynists worldwide. Argentina’s Melei, El Salvador’s Bukele, India’s Modi, Hungary’s Orban, Italy’s Meloni, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and the UK’s Farage, now have a model in the White House. The visit by South African political parties to Israel represented the different strands of Trump’s ideological offensive. The Democratic Alliance’s desperate attempt to exorcise its racist ancestry, the xenophobic Patriotic Alliance, the Christian fundamentalism of the African Christian Democratic Party all declared Israel free from apartheid, in effect condoning genocide.

    The class can expect nothing more than continued attacks on living standards and democratic rights. In the midst of eg the DRC war, it has just “closed a deal” – minerals for military help with the Kinsasha regime. This demonstrates once again the same cold blooded indifference towards the suffering masses of the DRC as toward those of both Russia and Ukraine. Ukraine’s surrender of its mineral resources to the US amounts to colonisation while the war Trump had promised to end “in 24 hours” continues.

    Peter Taaffe points out further that it was not the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese alone that defeated US imperialism. As crucial, in some senses even more so, was the revolt of the troops and the US people against the war. The implacability of the Vietnamese, their refusal to bow to the US’s military might, lit a fire under the US ruling class in the form of the mass anti-war movement. It showed that the US population was not one reactionary mass. This youth-led movement sparked a worldwide movement of hundreds of thousands. In its wake followed the 1968 general strike in France and the 1974 revolution in Portugal which in turn sped up the collapse of the last of remnants of its colonial empire In Guinea Bissau, Mozambique and Angola. Trump, both with his tariff war, the Gaza holocaust and ideological counter-revolution against democratic rights is creating the grounds for similar movements worldwide today.

    Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! For mass workers parties on a socialist programme in every country!
    https://marxistworkersparty.org.za/?p=5969

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