One year into the second Trump administration, the debates over
whether the United States is moving toward a fascistic dictatorship have
been settled by the actions of the state itself. The events of January
2026 in Minneapolis have shocked the entire world and made clear that
the transformation of American democracy into a military-police state is
no longer a theoretical possibility. It is an unfolding reality.
On
January 6, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security deployed 2,000
federal agents to the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area in what
it called the largest immigration enforcement operation in American
history. What followed was the military occupation of an American city.
Masked agents in tactical gear swept through neighborhoods, transit
hubs, malls and parking lots, staging near churches, mosques and
schools. On January 7, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée
Nicole Good, a 37-year-old American mother of three, as she sat in her
car. Video footage, reviewed by multiple news organizations, directly
contradicted the administration’s claim that she had attacked the agent.
On January 24, Border Patrol agents murdered Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old
intensive care nurse and federal employee, as he attempted to shield a
woman whom agents had shoved to the ground. Bystander video verified by
Reuters, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal and the Associated
Press showed Pretti being wrestled to the ground by several agents and
shot at least 10 times in five seconds.
Countless
millions of people around the world witnessed not only these killings
but the president’s defense of them. Trump slandered Good as a “domestic
terrorist.” He accused local officials of “inciting insurrection” for
criticizing the operation. He threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act.
Vice President Vance declared that Good’s death was “a tragedy of her
own making.” The federal government refused to allow state law
enforcement to participate in the investigation. A federal judge found
that ICE had violated at least 96 court orders in Minnesota in January
alone. Schools closed or moved to remote learning. Businesses shut down.
Children were hospitalized after being tear-gassed by federal agents.
But
Minneapolis is only the most visible expression of a far broader
campaign of state terror directed against immigrant communities
throughout the United States. Since Trump’s return to office, federal
agents have conducted pre-dawn raids on homes, arrested people at
schools and workplaces, seized children from their parents and carried
out what can only be described as a systematic kidnapping operation
against immigrant families. At least 31 people died in ICE custody
during 2025—the highest annual toll in two decades—with additional
deaths in the first weeks of 2026. In Minneapolis, five-year-old Liam
Ramos was seized by federal agents as he returned home from pre-school,
still wearing his Spider-Man backpack and a blue hat with bunny ears,
and transported with his father—a legal asylum seeker with no criminal
record—to a detention facility in Dilley, Texas, more than a thousand
miles from his home.
It is at Dilley that one encounters a scene
that belongs in the annals of totalitarianism. At the South Texas Family
Residential Center—a facility holding 1,200 detainees, one-third of
them children, operated by a private prison corporation under federal
contract—scores of imprisoned children poured into the open areas of the
compound and began calling for freedom in their high-pitched voices
echoing across the razor-wire perimeter. Eighty percent of the
facility’s detainees joined the protest. Mothers and fathers held
hand-lettered signs reading “Libertad para los niños.” Immigration
attorney Eric Lee, who was on the scene as the protest began, reported
that the drinking water was putrid, that meals contained insects and
debris, that guards treated families with the same brutality applied in
adult prisons. A 13-year-old girl said, “There shouldn’t be cages for
children.” This is the reality in the center of the “free
world”—children imprisoned behind razor wire, crying out for their
freedom in a language their jailers do not speak and would not heed if
they did.
The international press has been compelled to report the
breakdown of democracy in the United States. The lead editorial in the
January 31–February 6, 2026 issue of The Economist stated that
federal action in the streets of Minneapolis “goes well beyond
immigration” and constitutes “a test of the government’s power to use
violence against its own citizens—a dividing line between liberty and
tyranny.” The editorial warned: “And it will not be the last.” During
the same week, the German television network ARD broadcast a detailed
report that drew explicit comparisons between the methods of the Trump
administration and those of the Nazi regime in the 1930s—an invocation
of Gleichschaltung, the forced alignment of institutions with
the Führer’s will, that would have been unthinkable from a major
European broadcaster even a year ago.
But even as the fascistic
character of the administration is increasingly acknowledged, most
analysis remains centered on the person of Trump—his psychology, his
temperament, his supposed uniqueness. The deeper causes of the breakdown
of American democracy are evaded. But the “bad Trump” theory of history
explains very little. It begs the question that must be answered: What
accounts for the elevation of this sociopathic individual to the most
powerful political office on earth? What are the social, economic, and
political processes that have produced this outcome? And what class
forces are at work?
Trotsky, in his writings on the rise of German
fascism, made the penetrating observation: “Not every exasperated petty
bourgeois could become Hitler. But a particle of Hitler is lodged in
every exasperated petty bourgeois.” One might adapt this insight to
contemporary American conditions: Not every businessman is a Trump. But
there is more than a particle of Trump in a substantial subset of the
American business class.
Among the executives of countless
commercial real estate operations, private equity firms, cryptocurrency
ventures, there are innumerable individuals whose personality,
mannerisms, objectives and methods replicate, to a lesser or greater
extent, those of the American president. Trump did not create this
culture. He is both the personification of the ruling
corporate-financial oligarchy and its criminal endpoint. In his persona
and modus operandi, the distinction between a CEO and mob boss is
obliterated.
In a career spanning half a century in the cesspools
of the New York real estate industry, the Atlantic City casino world and
reality television, Trump’s career has consisted of financial swindles,
stiffed contractors, serial bankruptcies, innumerable lawsuits, and
fraudulent universities. In his universe, negotiation and extortion are
first cousins. He recently declared, without a trace of irony, that the
only restraint on his exercise of presidential power is his own
morality. Indeed. But it is the “morality” of the oligarchy, which
accepts no restraints whatever on its pursuit of wealth and personal
power.
Trump is given to boasting about his superior intellect.
But the most notable feature of his habitual logorrhea is the complete
absence of anything resembling systematic thought. Trump’s frequent
reply to questions about his policies and intentions is the revealing
phrase: “Let’s see what happens,” indicating that the man has little
comprehension of the consequences of his own actions, which are guided
by a sort of improvised and impulsive viciousness. His public utterances
consist of an endless repetition of self-congratulating
superlatives—“tremendous,” “incredible,” “the likes of which nobody has
ever seen”—strung together without logical connection, without factual
content, and without any evidence that the speaker has ever read a book,
other than Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
And then there is the
cast of misfits and miscreants with which he has surrounded himself.
Caligula joked of appointing his horse as consul. Trump, without the mad
Roman emperor’s sense of humor, has been even more shameless in the
selection of his administration’s leading personnel.
Stephen
Miller, the Goebbels impersonator; Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News
weekend anchor who is strangely obsessed with the waist measurements of
his generals and colonels; Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary,
who once boasted of shooting her own dog; Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the
anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist placed in charge of the nation’s
health; Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, whose
qualifications for overseeing 17 intelligence agencies remain a mystery
to the CIA itself. Kash Patel at the FBI, a Trump loyalist whose primary
credential is obsequious devotion to his Fuehrer.
It is
precisely because the “bad Trump” theory of history is so inadequate
that a deeper analysis is required. And it is in this context that the
revelations of the intersection of the life of Jeffrey Epstein, the sex
trafficking mega-millionaire, with that of Trump and countless other
powerful and celebrated individuals acquires its full significance.
The
release by the United States Department of Justice of more than 3
million pages of documents, thousands of videos, and hundreds of
thousands of images relating to the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein is a major
political event. But its significance extends far beyond the sordid
details of one man’s sexual predation, however monstrous those crimes
were. The Epstein files reveal the social physiognomy of a degenerate
ruling class and oligarchical society in an advanced state of
decomposition. Their offenses are rank; they smell to heaven.
The
documents confirm what has long been suspected and what millions of
working people have instinctively grasped: that the most powerful
individuals in American society—the presidents and former presidents,
the billionaire financiers, the titans of Silicon Valley, the celebrated
intellectuals, the princes and diplomats—moved freely and knowingly in
the orbit of a convicted child sex offender. They did so not in
ignorance of his crimes, but in indifference to them, and, in many
cases, participation in them. The social world they inhabit operates
according to rules entirely different from those that govern the lives
of ordinary people.
Jeffrey Epstein cultivated relationships
across every sector of the American and international elite. Trump, his
close friend for nearly two decades, described Epstein as a “teriffic
guy.” Epstein’s circle included former president Bill Clinton; Prince
Andrew of the British royal family, who has since been stripped of his
titles; Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin,
Larry Page and Reid Hoffman—that is to say, the men who control the
digital infrastructure of modern life; Larry Summers, the former
Treasury secretary and president of Harvard University, who has now been
compelled to take a leave from teaching; Steve Bannon, the leading
ideologist of American fascism and Trump’s behind-the-scene éminence
grise; Noam Chomsky, widely celebrated as the most prominent liberal
intellectual in the United States, who described Epstein in a letter as
his “best friend”; Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College; Richard
Branson, Peter Thiel, Alan Dershowitz and Leon Black. Epstein’s phone
books contained more than 1,700 names, encompassing media executives,
politicians, entrepreneurs, actors and academics.
2011
photo taken at Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion. From left: James E.
Staley, at the time a senior JPMorgan executive; former Treasury
Secretary Lawrence Summers; Epstein; Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder;
and Boris Nikolic, who was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s
science adviser.
The network extended beyond the
United States: to the Norwegian Crown Princess, to Israeli political
figures like Ehud Barak, to Emirati businessmen, to British politicians
and aristocrats. It was, in the fullest sense, a seedy international
network of the capitalist elite.
The conventional treatment of the
Epstein scandal in the bourgeois media focuses on the question of
individual guilt. Which specific individuals committed crimes? Can
prosecutions be brought? Is there a “client list”? These questions are
important. But they are, in a fundamental sense, secondary. They should
not obscure the more significant political question: What does the
Epstein network reveal about the nature of the society that produced it?
It
is not as though Epstein concealed his activities with great skill. He
was convicted of sex crimes in 2008. He was a registered sex offender.
And yet—and this is the essential point—the doors of elite society
remained open to him. Universities continued to accept his money.
Academics continued to attend his salons. Literary agent John Brockman
continued to organize intellectual gatherings at which Epstein could
mingle with scientists and technology executives. The entertainment
publicist Peggy Siegal continued to invite him to private events.
Harvard professors met with him in their offices. He was offered the use
of apartments, invited to private islands, consulted on matters ranging
from oil prices to dating.
In
the world these people inhabit, wealth overrides all other
considerations—including the sexual abuse of children. The moral
universe of the American and international ruling class has been so
thoroughly corroded by the worship of money that a convicted sex
offender, provided he remained sufficiently rich and well-connected,
could continue to function as a respected member of elite society. The
Epstein case is not an aberration within this social milieu. It is its
most concentrated and sordid expression.
One of the most
politically significant features of the Epstein network is its
bipartisan character. It included Democrats and Republicans alike.
Clinton and Trump. Summers and Bannon. Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel.
Liberal academics and right-wing operatives. The same people who face
each other across the paper-thin “partisan divide” in the theater of
official politics dined with Epstein and, in an as yet unknown number of
cases, took part in the abuse of children that he orchestrated.
Bipartisan
perversion mirrors bipartisan politics. The ease with which these
figures moved across partisan lines in their private lives reflects a
deeper political reality: that the division between the two major
parties, Democrats and Republicans, which absorbs the overwhelming
majority of political energy in the United States, is in decisive
respects superficial. It is a division within a single ruling class over
questions of style, emphasis and the management of public opinion—not a
fundamental disagreement over the economic organization of society.
For all their mutual
mudslinging, the extent of the differences between the Democrats and
Republicans is remarkably small. It is, for the most part, “full of
sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Obama, with unusual candor,
declared within hours of Trump’s first election victory that there was
no cause for alarm and described the jostling between the two parties as
nothing more than an “intramural” conflict. In the final analysis,
everyone is on the same side. Just three days after Trump’s attempted
coup d’état of January 6, 2021, President-elect Joe Biden declared in a
press conference: “We need a Republican Party. We need an opposition
that is principled and strong.”
To the extent that there are
serious differences, they are for the most part over aspects of foreign
policy and imperialist tactics. The conflict over Trump’s insufficient
zeal for the imperialist proxy war in Ukraine has been exceptionally
intense. But the Democrats’ denunciations of Trump’s reactionary
domestic policies amount to little more than play acting. Democrats and
Republicans do not differ seriously over the distribution of wealth, the
power of finance capital, and the perpetuation of militarism.
Financial
deregulation was advanced by Reagan and completed by Clinton. The wars
in the Middle East were initiated by Bush and expanded by Obama. The
bank bailout of 2008–2009 was a bipartisan operation from start to
finish—Wall Street was rescued while millions of working people lost
their homes. The surveillance state constructed after September 11, 2001
was built by both parties. They have collaborated in the smashing of
strikes and the effective illegalization of the working class’s right to
defend itself against the corporate assault on its living standards.
It
has been generally forgotten that Reagan’s firing of PATCO air traffic
controllers implemented a plan drawn up by the previous Democratic Party
administration of President Jimmy Carter. It was the Democratic
governor of Arizona, Bruce Babbitt, who deployed the state police in
1983 against the copper miners who struck the Phelps Dodge copper
conglomerate. Countless other examples of bipartisan strikebreaking,
right up to the present day, could be given.
Thus, from the
vantage point of Epstein’s dining room, bedroom and massage table, the
partisan warfare that is presented to the American public as “politics”
was a sideshow. The people with whom he networked understood this, even
if the public did not. They shared a class position, a set of material
interests, and—as the documents now make clear—a set of moral standards,
or rather the complete absence of them.
The intense cultural and
identity-based conflicts that distinguish the two parties serve an
objective function: they conceal the essential divisions of social class
and absorb political energy that might otherwise be directed at the
capitalist system itself. As long as the working class is divided
between Democrats and Republicans, arguing about culture war
provocations, it is not united against the class that both parties
serve. It is a structural feature of a political system in which both
parties are funded by and dependent upon the same class of wealthy
donors—the very class that circulated through Epstein’s world.
The
Epstein scandal provides an essential context for understanding the
political significance of the Trump presidency. He is the quintessential
political expression, at the very summit of power, of the putrefaction
of American “free enterprise.”
Trump’s well-documented
characteristics—the pathological dishonesty, the open sexual predation,
the contempt for legal norms, the vindictive deployment of state power
against political opponents, the narcissism that subordinates all
questions of policy to personal loyalty—are not concealed. But this is
the man who has dominated American political life for more than a
decade. He has been nominated as the presidential candidate of the
Republican Party three times, and elected to the presidency twice. Two
impeachment trials and a felony conviction failed to bring his political
career to an end, let alone keep him out of the White House.
Trump’s
own entanglement with Epstein is itself instructive. He maintained a
long social relationship with this criminal. His administration’s
handling of the Epstein files has been transparently
selective—weaponizing them against political opponents while seeking to
minimize his own exposure. The fact that none of this is politically
disqualifying lays bare the squalid state of the American political
system.
The relationship between Trump and the process of American
decline is encapsulated in the MAGA slogan itself. “Make America Great
Again” evokes a sort of reactionary nostalgia—a yearning for a lost and
largely imagined golden age that can never be restored.
There
is a biographical dimension to this that is worth noting, for Trump’s
own lifespan encompasses the entire trajectory of postwar American
capitalism, from its zenith to its present state of unacknowledged but
very real bankruptcy. Donald Trump was born on June 14, 1946—just two
years after the Bretton Woods conference of July 1944 established a new
international monetary system based on the convertibility of the United
States dollar into gold at the fixed rate of $35 per ounce. That
arrangement was not an abstraction. It was grounded in the overwhelming
industrial dominance of the United States, which emerged from the war
commanding approximately half of global manufacturing output, holding
the vast preponderance of the world’s gold reserves, and possessing a
military and economic apparatus without historical parallel.
But
the steady erosion of that industrial dominance in the course of the
1950s and 1960s compelled the Nixon administration to repudiate the
Bretton Woods system. On August 15, 1971—only two months after Trump
celebrated his 25th birthday—Nixon suspended the convertibility of the
dollar into gold, an action that marked the effective end of the postwar
economic order and an acknowledgment that American capitalism could no
longer sustain the global arrangements it had created.
The measure
of what has happened since is captured in a single figure. In 1971,
gold was valued at $35 per ounce. Today it trades at approximately
$5,000 per ounce—a more than 140-fold depreciation of the dollar against
the historically established measure of value. This is the monetary
expression of the protracted decline of American economic power, a
decline that no amount of military spending, financial engineering or
nationalist rhetoric can reverse.
MAGA promises restoration
through tariffs, immigration restrictions and the intimidation of allies
and adversaries alike—while the underlying economic processes that
produced the decline continue to operate with inexorable force. Trump
himself is the embodiment of this contradiction: a man born into the
apex of American power who has spent his entire adult life in a society
whose economic foundations have been progressively hollowed out, and who
now proposes to reverse this historical process through raw violence.
Trump’s
policies are a reckless and violent response to the deterioration of
the global position of American capitalism. In the 1950s, real GDP grew
at an average annual rate of 4.2 percent. In the 1960s, it was 4.5
percent. Manufacturing comprised between 21 and 25 percent of GDP.
Bureau of Labor Statistics payroll data show that at the postwar peak in
September 1953, manufacturing employed 16.4 million workers, which
amounted to one-third of all jobs.
Bureau of Economic Analysis
data from the corporate profits tables show that in 1962, manufacturing
generated 46.1 percent of all corporate profits, while the financial
sector accounted for just 15.1 percent.
The deceleration of
economic growth has been continuous and relentless. Average annual GDP
growth fell from above 4 percent in the 1950s and 1960s to approximately
3 percent in the 1970s and 1980s, and to below 2.5 percent in the
decades since. The 2000s were particularly devastating, averaging barely
1.9 percent, dragged down by the collapse of the dot-com bubble and the
catastrophic financial crisis of 2008. Meanwhile, the share of
manufacturing in GDP has plummeted from 25 percent to approximately 10
percent.
The trajectory
of manufacturing employment is equally devastating. BLS payroll data
trace the decline with pitiless precision: from 32.5 percent of nonfarm
employment in 1953, manufacturing fell to 25.7 percent by 1970, to 16.2
percent by 1990, to 8.7 percent by 2010, and to just 8.0 percent as of
January 2025—roughly one-twelfth of the workforce.
The share of
corporate profits tells the same story from the other side: in 1962,
manufacturing generated 46.1 percent of all corporate profits and
finance 15.1 percent. By 1990, the lines had nearly
converged—manufacturing at 27.8 percent, finance at 29.7 percent. By
2010, finance stood at 23.9 percent and manufacturing had fallen to 15.4
percent. Manufacturing has fallen from nearly half of all profits at
mid-century to a fraction, while the financial sector’s share roughly
doubled. The deindustrialization of America is the result of the
interaction of powerful objective economic forces and deliberate policy
decisions by the ruling class, pursued by both parties, in the interest
of short-term financial returns.
The
ruling class response to this crisis was not irrational from the
standpoint of capital. If the economic surplus was no longer growing
fast enough to sustain both corporate profits and social concessions,
then concessions had to be withdrawn. The assault on the trade unions,
the deregulation of finance, the slashing of taxes on the wealthy, the
gutting of social programs, the offshoring of manufacturing—all of this,
pursued with increasing intensity from Reagan onward by both parties,
represented a coherent class strategy for restoring the rate of profit
at the direct expense of the working class.
The results of this
class strategy are written in the statistics of wealth concentration and
social inequality—figures so extreme that they would be dismissed as
the inventions of socialist propagandists, were they not drawn from the
databases of the Federal Reserve itself.
Federal Reserve data for
the third quarter of 2025 show that the top 1 percent of American
households controlled 31.7 percent of the nation’s total wealth—the
highest share on record since the Federal Reserve began tracking
household wealth in 1989. That 1 percent held approximately $55 trillion
in assets—a sum roughly equal to the wealth held by the entire bottom
90 percent of the American population combined. The top 10 percent
controlled more than two-thirds of all household wealth. At the other
end of the spectrum, the bottom 50 percent of American households—some
66 million families—held just 2.5 percent of total wealth. The richest 1
percent of the population owns more than the bottom 90 percent. Let
that figure be absorbed.
The trajectory of this concentration over
time is equally damning. In 1989, the bottom 50 percent held 3.4
percent of total wealth—already a paltry share. By 2025, even that
meager portion had been further eroded. Meanwhile, the share held by the
top 0.1 percent grew by nearly 60 percent over the same period. The 905
billionaires in the United States now hold a combined $7.8
trillion—nearly double the total wealth of the bottom half of the entire
population. Three individuals possess more wealth than the bottom 160
million Americans combined.
The chasm between those who own and
those who labor is captured with particular vividness in the ratio of
CEO compensation to the pay of ordinary workers. According to the
Economic Policy Institute, CEOs of the 350 largest publicly traded
American firms received, on average, $23 million in total compensation
in 2024—281 times the pay of a typical worker. In 1965, this ratio was
21 to 1. In 1978, it was 31 to 1. It has since grown nearly tenfold. At
the most egregious companies, the ratio defies comprehension: the CEO of
Starbucks received $97.8 million in 2024—6,666 times the median pay of
the company’s workers.
Since
1978, realized CEO compensation has increased by 1,094 percent. Over
the same period, the compensation of a typical worker has risen by just
26 percent—while net productivity grew by more than 80 percent.
Virtually all gains in labor productivity since the 1970s have been
expropriated by the capitalist class.
The consequences of this
inequality pervade every dimension of American life. The top 10 percent
of income earners now account for nearly half of all consumer spending
in the United States—a proportion that has grown from 43 percent in 2020
to 49 percent in 2025. The American economy is increasingly dependent
on the consumption patterns of the wealthy, while the majority of the
population struggles with stagnant wages, mounting debt and the rising
cost of housing, healthcare and education.
Life expectancy among
working-class Americans has actually declined—a phenomenon virtually
without precedent in an advanced industrial nation. The opioid epidemic
and the accompanying “deaths of despair” from suicide, alcoholism and
drug overdose are the physiological consequences of a social order that
has consigned tens of millions of people to lives of economic
insecurity, social degradation, and hopelessness.
The bipartisan
response to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in January 2020
exposed the prioritization of profits over life. Under the direct
pressure of the working class, the ruling class acceded for a very short
time to demands for factory shutdowns to stop the spread of the
SARS-CoV-2 virus. But as soon as the Congress had voted for a massive
bailout of Wall Street, attention was shifted to forcing a return to
work regardless of the cost in lives.
Liberal New York Times columnist
and “imperial messenger” Thomas Friedman provided the slogan for the
repudiation of effective and well-established public health measures:
“Don’t let the cure [i.e., stopping viral transmission at the expense of
profits] be worse than the disease.” The results have been devastating:
more than 1.5 million preventable deaths in the United States and at
least 30 million preventable deaths internationally. Six years have
passed and the pandemic continues to gravely undermine public health.
But the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average have more than
doubled their 2020 level.
This is the social reality that lies
behind the soaring stock market indices. The ruling class vomited up
both Trump and Epstein and elevated them to positions of immense power
and influence. The accumulation of obscene wealth at the top is
inseparable from the exploitation and immiseration of the broad mass of
the population. The connection between the two is structural. The same
processes that have enriched the capitalist class—the destruction of the
trade unions, the deregulation of finance, the gutting of social
programs, the offshoring of production—have simultaneously impoverished
the working class and created the conditions of social despair upon
which authoritarian demagogues like Trump feed.
As returns on
productive investment declined, capital increasingly migrated into
financial speculation—derivatives, leveraged buyouts, asset bubbles, and
the entire apparatus of Wall Street speculation that extracts wealth
without producing anything. Trump’s personal venality exemplifies this
world.
But for all his bluster, there is no sign whatsoever of
the economic miracle promised by Trump. Instead, the process of decay
proceeds as relentlessly and visibly as Trump’s own physical and mental
deterioration. The Wall Street Journal reported on February 2, 2026:
The
manufacturing boom President Trump promised would usher in a golden age
for America is going in reverse. After years of economic interventions
by the Trump and Biden administrations, fewer Americans work in
manufacturing than any point since the pandemic ended.
Manufacturers
shed workers in each of the eight months after Trump unveiled
“Liberation Day” tariffs, according to federal figures, extending a
contraction that has seen more than 200,000 roles [jobs] disappear since
2023.
It is not only in the sphere of industrial
production that the bankruptcy of Trumpism is exposed. The delusional
character of the MAGA slogan is revealed even more precisely in the
state of the greenback, the measurement in hard currency of US decline.
Far from making the dollar great again, it continues to lose value. In
the lead article titled “The dangerous dollar,” posted in its February
6–13 edition, The Economist reports:
Since a
peak in January 2025 [when Trump returned to office], the dollar has
lost a tenth of its value against a basket of currencies. As a result,
in foreign-currency terms, the performance of American assets has been
poor. When denominated in euros, for example, American stocks have
barely risen over the past year.
Trump believed that
he could escape the consequence of the decline of the dollar—and enrich
himself and his family—by promoting bitcoin as an alternative and even
superior store of value. His marketing of this elixir was initially
successful. The price of bitcoin zoomed to over $120,000. But reality
has taken its toll. The crypto mania is receding and bitcoin has crashed
back to $65,000-$70,000 range, where it was prior to Trump’s reelection
in November 2024. And the suspicion is growing that it is nowhere near
its potential bottom. Holders of bitcoin may be compelled in the future
to measure their value in the number of tulips they can be exchanged
for.
The connection between economic decline, parasitism and the
increasingly unrestrained reliance on military violence is undeniable.
The resort to violence and the growing repudiation of legality by the US
state is rooted in acute economic and financial fragility. A towering
public-debt burden and structurally persistent deficits narrow policy
options and make the system increasingly dependent on continuous
refinancing, low real borrowing costs and uninterrupted global demand
for dollar assets. At the same time, equity markets—above all the major
technology companies—rest on valuations that assume indefinite earnings
growth and permanently favorable liquidity conditions; any sustained
repricing threatens a negative wealth effect, corporate retrenchment and
banking- and credit-market stress.
The federal state is
operating under a debt-and-interest load that sharply narrows room for
maneuver: total US public debt stood at $38.43 trillion on January 7,
2026(including $30.81 trillion held by the public),
while net interest costs were about $970 billion in fiscal year
2025—roughly 3.2 percent of GDP and 13.8 percent of federal spending.
Under
these conditions, coercion and extra-legal methods become instruments
for defending asset inflation, enforcing external financing channels,
and suppressing domestic opposition to austerity and war.
The
situation confronting the Trump administration—a massive national debt,
deteriorating currency, declining industrial production, loss of global
markets, etc.—bears resemblance to the conditions that confronted the
Nazi regime in 1937–38. As the brilliant historian of the Third Reich,
Tim Mason, wrote:
The only “solution” open to this
regime of the structural tensions and crises produced by dictatorship
and rearmament was more dictatorship and more rearmament, then
expansion, then war and terror, then plunder and enslavement. The stark,
ever-present alternative was collapse and chaos, and so all solutions
were temporary, hectic, hand-to-mouth affairs, increasingly barbaric
improvisations around a brutal theme. … A war for the plunder of
manpower and materials lay square in the dreadful logic of German
economic development under National Socialist rule. [Nazism, Fascism, and the Working Class (Cambridge, 1995), p.51]
As
American capitalism has become less competitive in productive terms, it
has relied increasingly on military force and coercion to maintain its
global position. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria were not
aberrations but expressions of a system that can no longer secure its
interests through economic dynamism alone. The normalization of
permanent war, drone assassination, torture and extrajudicial detention
represents a coarsening of political life that inevitably flows back
into domestic politics.
Trump is applying to foreign policy the
methods of the Mafia in the days of Prohibition. Having been placed in
power by the American ruling class, he has at his disposal not merely
the Thompson submachine guns used by Al Capone, but the entire arsenal
of American imperialism—the most destructive military force in human
history, including thousands of nuclear warheads capable of ending
civilization. This is the essential danger of the present situation: the
methods of a gangster, backed by the weaponry of a superpower, deployed
in the service of a ruling class that has lost the capacity for
rational decision making.
The
eruption of American imperialist aggression under Trump—the invasion of
Venezuela, the open threats to annex Canada and Greenland, the
preparations for a military onslaught against Iran—represents a
qualitative escalation that has stunned the European allies of NATO, who
did not foresee the abruptness of the shift in American policy. They
were caught off guard.
But the volcanic eruption of American
imperialism was foreseen long ago—with remarkable precision—by Trotsky
and by the movement he founded. As far back as 1928, writing in the
aftermath of the postwar boom and on the eve of the Great Depression,
Trotsky warned:
In the period of crisis the hegemony
of the United States will operate more completely, more openly, and more
ruthlessly than in the period of boom. The United States will seek to
overcome and extricate herself from her difficulties and maladies
primarily at the expense of Europe, regardless of whether this occurs in
Asia, Canada, South America, Australia, or Europe itself, or whether
this takes place peacefully or through war.
Trotsky
did not only predict a general tendency toward imperialist conflict. He
identified, with extraordinary specificity, the geographic scope of
American imperialism’s predatory ambitions and the ruthlessness with
which they would be pursued. Nearly a century later, Trump threatens the
sovereignty of Canada, seizes control of the Panama Canal, invades
Venezuela, demands the cession of Greenland from Denmark and menaces
Iran with military destruction.
In
1934, with the rise of German fascism and the approach of a second
world war, Trotsky sharpened this analysis further: “The world is
divided? It must be redivided. For Germany it was a question of
‘organizing Europe.’ The United States must ‘organize’ the world.
History is bringing humanity face to face with the volcanic eruption of
American imperialism.” That phrase—the volcanic eruption of American
imperialism—is not a metaphor that has aged. It is a scientific
prognosis that is being fulfilled.
The analysis we have presented
thus far has documented, in considerable detail, the decay and
putrefaction of the capitalist system and its ruling class. But it would
be a profound political error—a capitulation to demoralization and
pessimism—to see only the threat in the present situation. The crisis
brings with it not only the danger of fascism and war, but also the
objective possibility of social revolution. Indeed, the same
contradictions that are driving the ruling class toward authoritarianism
and militarism are simultaneously creating the conditions for a
revolutionary movement of the working class on an international scale.
What
is the fundamental cause of the crisis? It is not, as bourgeois
commentators endlessly suggest, a failure of leadership, a deficit of
civility, or a breakdown of democratic norms. These are symptoms. The
cause is structural and systemic: the irreconcilable contradiction
between the private ownership of the means of production and the
increasingly social character of the process of production itself. This
is the central contradiction identified by Marx, and its operation in
the present epoch has reached an intensity without historical precedent.
To
this must be added a second, closely related contradiction: between the
growth of the world economy—the development of a genuinely global
system of production, exchange and communication—and the obsolete
nation-state system within which political power remains organized. The
emergence of transnational production networks, global supply chains
spanning dozens of countries, and instantaneous worldwide communication
has rendered the nation-state a fetter on the rational development of
the productive forces. Capital flows freely across borders; labor is
organized transnationally; a disruption in a semiconductor factory in
Taiwan reverberates through automobile plants in Michigan, electronics
assembly lines in Guangdong and server farms in Virginia. And yet
political power remains imprisoned within national boundaries, wielded
by ruling classes whose strategic calculations are dictated by the
competitive interests of rival national capitalisms.
The
American imperialist bourgeoisie seeks to resolve this contradiction
through the assertion of military power—through the violent
reorganization of global economic relations in its favor. This is the
essential content of Trump’s foreign policy, stripped of its usual
“defense of the free world” packaging.
There is, however, another
force that this same process of globalization has created—a force that
the bourgeoisie did not intend to bring into existence and whose
revolutionary implications it does not yet fully comprehend. The global
integration of production has created a massive global working class of a
size, concentration and objective interconnection without precedent in
human history.
During the past half century, the urbanization and
proletarianization of the world’s population has undergone a
transformation of staggering dimensions. In Latin America, the urban
population has risen from 57 percent in 1970 to over 80 percent today,
creating enormous concentrations of working-class population in cities
like São Paulo, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Bogotá and Lima. In Africa,
urban population has grown from approximately 80 million in 1970 to more
than 700 million, a nearly ninefold increase. Across Asia—in China,
India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, the Philippines—hundreds of
millions of peasants have been drawn into industrial production within a
single generation. China alone has witnessed the largest migration in
human history, with some 300 million people moving from rural areas to
industrial cities since the 1980s. The global working class today
numbers in the billions.
The transnational character of modern
production and global supply chain objectively unifies this working
class in ways that have no historical parallel. A strike at a port in
Los Angeles affects assembly plants in Wuhan. A walkout by miners in
South Africa disrupts manufacturing in Germany. The workers who produce a
single smartphone—from the mining of rare earth minerals in the Congo,
to the refining of lithium in Chile, to the fabrication of chips in
South Korea, to the assembly in Shenzhen, to the software development in
Bangalore and Cupertino—are bound together by a chain of production
that spans continents and renders national boundaries technically
obsolete. This objective integration of the global working class creates
historically unprecedented revolutionary possibilities. What is
required is the conscious political expression of this objective
unity—an international socialist program and an international
revolutionary party.
Moreover, despite the political dominance of
reaction, the past half century has witnessed what can justly be
described as the greatest scientific and technological revolution in
human history. Every sphere of science has undergone an extraordinary
transformation.
In biology, the sequencing of the human genome,
the development of CRISPR gene-editing technology and the revolution in
mRNA therapeutics—demonstrated with world-historical speed during the
COVID-19 pandemic—have opened possibilities for the conquest of disease
that would have seemed fantastical a generation ago.
In astronomy
and physics, the detection of gravitational waves, the imaging of black
holes, the discovery of thousands of exoplanets and the extraordinary
precision of the James Webb Space Telescope have transformed our
understanding of the universe.
Technicians lift
the mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope using a crane, April 13,
2017, at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. [AP Photo/Laura Betz/NASA]
In
chemistry and materials science, the development of new catalysts,
nanomaterials and sustainable energy technologies—including dramatic
advances in solar cell efficiency and battery storage—have demonstrated
that the technical basis exists for a transition away from fossil
fuels.
In medicine, advances in immunotherapy, organ
transplantation, diagnostic imaging and the understanding of the
microbiome have fundamentally expanded the horizons of human health.
And
now there is artificial (or, as it should be known, augmented)
intelligence. The development of large language models, machine learning
systems capable of protein structure prediction, AI-assisted drug
discovery, and autonomous systems represents a technological revolution
whose implications are only beginning to be understood. Under
capitalism, AI is being developed primarily as an instrument of profit
extraction—for the intensification of labor exploitation, the expansion
of surveillance, the manipulation of consumer behavior and the
replacement of workers without any provision for their livelihoods.
But
consider for a moment what augmented intelligence could accomplish if
it were severed from the imperatives of capitalist profit and placed
under the democratic control of the working class. The possibilities for
social planning—for the rational allocation of resources, the
optimization of production to meet human needs rather than maximize
private wealth, the reduction of waste and environmental destruction,
the liberation of human beings from repetitive and degrading labor—are
extraordinary. AI under workers’ control could serve as an instrument
not of exploitation but of emancipation—making possible a level of
economic planning and coordination that the socialist movement has long
envisioned but never before had the technical means to realize.
The
contradiction is glaring. Humanity possesses, for the first time in its
history, the scientific knowledge and technological capacity to solve
the most fundamental problems of material existence—hunger, disease,
environmental degradation, the drudgery of exploitative labor. And yet
these capabilities are imprisoned within a social system that
subordinates them to the accumulation of private profit, that channels
scientific genius into financial engineering and weapons development,
that allows children to starve while algorithms optimize advertising
revenue. This is the indictment not of technology but of the social
system within which technology is deployed. The liberation of science
and technology from the stranglehold of private capitalist ownership is a
critical task of the socialist revolution.
AI technology
controlled by the ruling oligarchy poses immense dangers. But its
utilization by the Marxist and socialist movement also opens up
unprecedented possibility for the political enlightenment of the working
class. As the World Socialist Web Site explained when it launched Socialism AI in December 2025:
The
decisive significance of Socialism AI lies in its ability to bridge the
gap between the objective movement of the working class and the
subjective level of socialist consciousness. Marxism has always insisted
that the spontaneous struggles of workers, however powerful, do not by
themselves produce a coherent revolutionary perspective. Consciousness
must be developed; historical experience must be assimilated;
theoretical insight must be achieved. The technological developments of
the present era now permit the rapid transmission of ideas on a global
scale, enabling the working class to develop its political understanding
at a pace suited to the objective crisis.
The global crisis of the present day ancien régime—the
decay of the ruling class, economic breakdown, the eruption of American
imperialism, the rise of fascistic politics, the destruction of
democratic forms—has not only been analyzed by the International
Committee of the Fourth International and the World Socialist Web Site. It was predicted, with remarkable precision, years before the events now unfolding.
In March 2016, in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s sweep of the Super Tuesday primaries, the World Socialist Web Sitepublished a perspective article that stated:
The
candidacy of Donald Trump can no longer be dismissed—as it has been
until very recently by so many pundits—as merely a bizarre and even
somewhat entertaining sideshow. While the outcome remains uncertain, the
front-runner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination is a
candidate whose persona and appeal are of a distinctly fascistic
character.
The article identified the material roots
of Trump’s appeal in the economic devastation of the working class and
warned that the failure of the pseudo-left and the Democratic Party to
address the social crisis was creating the conditions for right-wing
demagogy.
Two months later, in May 2016, the WSWS published a further analysis
warning that Trump’s emergence as the presumptive Republican nominee
marked “a dangerous watershed for US and world politics,” and that “the
selection of a fascistic demagogue as the candidate of one of the two
major capitalist parties is indisputable proof of the advanced stage of
the putrefaction of American democracy.” The article drew a broader
historical conclusion: “The Trump nomination is not an episodic or
accidental event. It is rooted in the protracted crisis of American
capitalism and the related breakdown of its historic
bourgeois-democratic framework.”
The WSWS warned—in May of 2016,
six months before the election—that even if Trump did not win, “the
stage will be set for an even more threatening figure. And whether Trump
is at its head or not, the government that assumes power in January
will be the most reactionary, violent and authoritarian in American
history.” These words, written nearly a decade ago, read today not as
predictions but as descriptions of established fact. The ICFI did not
stumble upon these insights by accident or arrive at them through
inspired guesswork. They flowed from the application of the Marxist
method—from an analysis grounded in the objective contradictions of the
capitalist system, the historical experience of the international
working class, and the theoretical heritage of the Trotskyist movement.
It
is through the building of a Marxist-Trotskyist party that the working
class can develop a conscious understanding of the historical situation
and carry out the socialist transformation of society. The fact that the
ICFI, the Socialist Equality Party and the WSWS anticipated the present
crisis, identified its class character, and formulated a program for
the independent political mobilization of the working class demonstrates
that the theoretical and political instruments for this task exist.
They do not need to be invented from scratch. They need to be taken up,
studied and applied.
What conclusions, then, must be drawn?
Trump
is not the disease. He is the most advanced symptom. And it would be
the most dangerous of illusions to believe that the crisis can be
resolved by removing him from office through elections. It is hardly
likely that the 2026 midterm elections—let alone any future presidential
election—will be conducted under conditions resembling democratic
norms. Trump is already laying the groundwork for the suppression or
manipulation of elections. It is evident that he will deploy state
forces—the same ICE agents and federal officers who occupied
Minneapolis—to intimidate voters and keep them from the polls. Having
had sufficient time to prepare, he has learned a great deal from the
failure of his January 6, 2021, coup. The next attempt will not be an
improvised riot by a mob of disorganized zealots. It will be executed
with the full apparatus of the federal government at his disposal.
And
even if biology intervenes and Trump is removed from the scene, the
descent into dictatorship will not be halted. A new “Trump”, perhaps one
more polished but no less sinister, will be found. The objective forces
that created Trump—the crisis of American capitalism, the decay of its
productive base, the domination of financial parasitism, the
disintegration of democratic institutions under the weight of social
inequality—will shape the policies of his successor.
The Trump
administration represents a decisive breakdown of bourgeois democratic
traditions and an ever more overt transition to dictatorship. But this
signifies a vast escalation of open class conflict and the transition to
social revolution.
No solution to the crisis of American
capitalism will emerge from the existing institutions and framework of
bourgeois politics. It can and will develop only outside of and
in uncompromising opposition to the existing political framework and
the capitalist economic order it defends.
This is not a utopian
perspective. The response of millions of people throughout the United
States to the attack on democratic rights has revealed that a process of
political radicalization is already underway.
The question posed in the title of this book, Where is America Going?
will not be decided in academic debate but in class struggle. It is
irresponsible to underestimate the scale of the counter-revolutionary
ruthlessness of the American ruling class. But it is catastrophically
short sighted, not to mention self-defeating, to discount the latent
power and revolutionary potential of the working class. From the
standpoint of objective conditions, the dominant tendency of development
is undoubtedly toward socialism. But this objective potential must find
expression in the subjective consciousness of the revolutionary class.
It
is of immense political significance that the mass demonstrations
against the Trump administration have adopted, almost spontaneously, the
slogan “No Kings.” In June 2025, millions marched under this banner. In
October, more than 7 million people joined over 2,700 protests in all
50 states. The January 23 demonstrations in Minneapolis, where over
100,000 people braved sub-zero temperatures to protest the federal
occupation of their city, were among the most remarkable expressions of
popular resistance in recent American history. A television editorial in
Boston drew an explicit parallel between Minneapolis in 2026 and Boston
in 1775—between the armed occupation of an American city by federal
agents and the British military occupation that sparked the War of
Independence.
The
American working class does not enter this struggle without a
revolutionary tradition. On the contrary, the democratic and
revolutionary heritage of the United States is among the deepest and
most powerful in the world. The American Revolution of 1775–1783 and the
Civil War of 1861–1865—two of the great revolutionary upheavals of
modern history—still live in the consciousness of the American people.
The Declaration of Independence, with its proclamation that all men are
created equal and endowed with unalienable rights; the Constitution’s
Bill of Rights, with its guarantees of free speech, assembly and due
process; the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th, and 15th
Amendments, which codified in law what had been achieved on the
battlefield: the Second American Revolution’s overthrow of slavery.
These
historical documents are living traditions, deeply embedded in the
popular consciousness, that provide a powerful foundation for the
struggle against dictatorship.
The invocation of the revolutionary
past in mass protest demonstrations is of the greatest importance. It
demonstrates that the democratic traditions of the American Revolution
and the Civil War have not been extinguished. They are being activated
by millions of people who sense, correctly, that the principles for
which their ancestors fought are under mortal threat.
But that democratic tradition is,
by itself, insufficient. The age of national democratic revolutions
belongs to the now distant past. The present historic epoch is that of
world socialist revolution. The American working class must study and
learn from the experience of the conquest of power by the Russian
working class in the 1917 October Revolution and its aftermath. The
barrier between the instinctive militancy of American workers and the
immense theoretical and political heritage of Marxism must be overcome.
The
first American Revolution overthrew colonial rule and established
independence. The second American Revolution destroyed slavery. The task
of the third American Revolution, as a decisive component of the
international class struggle, is the overthrow of capitalism. What the
working class needs is a program and party to connect its deeply-felt
democratic aspirations with the struggle for socialism—to the
understanding that genuine democracy is incompatible with the
dictatorship of the financial oligarchy and can only be secured through
the socialist transformation of society.
This struggle is
international in character. The Epstein network was international. The
fascistic politics of Trump are by no means unique to the United States.
He is not without political impersonators throughout Europe: Meloni in
Italy, Le Pen in France, Farage in Britain, the AfD leaders in Germany.
Their undeclared slogan, 81 years after the fall of the Third Reich, is
“Make Europe Fascist Again.”
The crisis of capitalism is
international. The working class is an international class. No national
solution exists or can exist. The fight against the oligarchic
dictatorship that is consolidating itself in the United States—and in
country after country around the world—requires the building of an
international revolutionary movement, guided by the program and
principles of Marxism, rooted in the working class, and dedicated to the
overthrow of the capitalist system.
There exists at present a
significant gap between the monumental scale of the present crisis and
the prevailing level of consciousness. How could this not be the case in
a country where the ruling class has virtually elevated anti-communism
to the status of a state religion, and relentlessly promotes every form
of political and social backwardness? Everything possible is done to
deprive the public of any critical assessment of the real state of
society. The media is controlled by the most powerful corporations and
reactionary billionaires. Under their control and at their demand, the
objective reporting of news has been almost entirely replaced by
propaganda. The evening news programs are given over largely to weather
reports, human interest stories, sports and the marketing of
pharmaceuticals.
The objective situation is, as Lincoln observed
in another historical period of profound crisis, “piled high with
difficulties.” But the objective conditions that gave rise to the
problems also create the possibility for their solution. The great task
posed by the present situation is to raise the consciousness of the
working class to the level required by the objective crisis.
How
is this to be done? Leon Trotsky answered this question in a discussion
with his American supporters in 1938, in the midst of the Great
Depression and on the eve of the outbreak of the world war: “In the
first place,” he said, “give a clear, honest picture of the objective
situation, of the historic tasks which flow from this situation,
irrespective of whether or not the workers are today ripe for this. Our
tasks don’t depend on the mentality of the workers. The task is to
develop the mentality of the workers.”
These
words acquire today the most burning urgency. The challenge before us
is the building of the Socialist Equality Party, in solidarity with its
co-thinkers in the sections of the International Committee, as a new
revolutionary leadership in the working class. This is not a distant or
abstract goal. It is the most urgent practical necessity of our time.
The
analysis of the Marxist-Trotskyist movement has been vindicated by
events. Its program offers the only viable path forward. Build the
International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections.
Expand the work and influence of the World Socialist Web Site. The future of humanity depends upon it.
