UNSURPRISINGLY, THE SHOCK and awe promised at the beginning of Trump’s second term has turned out to be a brazen assault on trans people, immigrants, public service workers, and Palestine solidarity activists. In a flurry of executive orders, equal parts quixotic and callous, Trump attempted to decree biological binary sexuality and banish trans people from public life; his Day One ICE raids spread fear across migrant communities; and the newly minted DOGE branch has raised its axe against numerous federal agencies which, despite their limitations, provide necessary support for poor and working-class people in the United States and beyond. All this was then compounded by a series of deportation orders, often in defiance of rulings by the courts. Especially egregious was the abduction of permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil, who was whisked away to a privatized detention center in Louisiana upon his arrest.
Trump’s actions clearly extend beyond the legal limits of the Constitution. His attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship runs against the conventional understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment, and DOGE’s cuts infringe on Congress’s institutionally enshrined power of the purse. In spite of this, these orders have already inflicted irreparable harm on those in the immediate crosshairs of Trump’s regime: trans people have been denied gender-affirming care; immigrant families have already been separated; payments to vital infrastructure, public service, and education institutions have been de facto suspended, despite judicial rulings to the contrary; people have been deported without due process.
With singular focus, many liberals have identified this assault by the Executive as a constitutional crisis.1Elie Mystal, “Trump Doesn’t Have the Authority: What Happens When He Does It Anyway?” Nation, February 11, 2025; Paul Blumenthal, “The MAGA Authority Provisional Coalition Has Plunged the Country into a Constitutional Crisis,” Huffpost, February 5, 2025; Jamelle Bouie, “There Is No Going Back,” New York Times, February 5, 2025. By framing our present historical conjuncture in these terms, these pundits depict the crisis as a threat to the ostensible rule of law, purportedly enshrined in the American constitutional order—a system of checks and balances meant to prevent the concentration of power and tyranny.
In response to this threat, they demand pushback from established institutions of power, such as the judiciary, the Democratic Party, or even the media.2To be fair, these demands are frequently accompanied by skepticism of those institutions. However, this skepticism usually revolves around their present ineffectiveness, rather than an overall critique of their function. Elie Mystal, “The Courts Can’t Stop the Trump–Musk Coup,” Nation, February 7, 2025. While acknowledging the novel and singular threat posed by the current regime to both US citizens and, equally importantly, to people around the world, it bears mentioning that this constitutional crisis points to dynamics that both preexist the Trump regime and that implicate the established institutions of power to which these commentators appeal.
The central challenge faced by the Trump administration remains the global crisis of profitability that began with the 2008–09 recession.
The central challenge faced by the Trump administration, and every regime since Obama, remains the ongoing global crisis of capitalist profitability that began with the recession of 2008–09. Trump’s agenda is an authoritarian attempt to resolve this crisis of profitability, one that plunges the state apparatus into dangerous disequilibrium. That is, constitutional crisis embodies a crisis of capitalist political representation. Our response and resistance—to which we turn below—need to be informed by this reality.
America First 2.0
Trump’s America First policy—manifested initially in his attempt to use tariffs against both US rivals like China and allies like Canada, Mexico, and the European Union—promised a break with neoliberalism that would reconfigure US dominance over the world. Neoliberalism was an institutionally embodied program to restore profitability and accumulation, which, after a period of considerable success (from 1982 to 2007) entered a massively destabilizing crisis in 2008–09.
Capitalists around the world turned to the state to resolve that crisis without triggering a global depression that could bankrupt uncompetitive firms. But the ostensible solutions that states put in place—bank bailouts, super-low interest rates, and attacks on living and working conditions—only produced a low-growth regime and intensified social and geopolitical antagonisms. Trumpism’s solution is to displace antagonisms onto “foreign threats,” both external and internal.
This protectionist response views the world economy as a zero–sum game in which larger shares of world revenues would flow to US capitalists—horizontally by increasing the exploitation of workers at home and abroad, and vertically by seizing market share from its capitalist rivals. Ultimately, this is a formula for a brutal stagnationism of sharpened intercapitalist competition in a low-growth economy.
The internal half of this plan—Trump’s plan to deport millions, purge the so-called deep state of “radical leftists,” crush social justice teaching in the universities, and strengthen the authority of the reformed Executive—is also riven with contradictions. To be sure, broad layers of capital and the middle classes support measures that restrict the ability of working and oppressed people to organize against capital and the state. It was Democratic Party federal, state, and local officials, after all, who launched much of the wave of repression against Palestine activism. However, Trump’s plan to quash any dissent within the capitalist state and concentrate presidential power without regard to the traditional prerogatives of Congress and the Courts undermines the classic role the capitalist state—in particular its “liberal democratic” variant—is expected to play in the political organization of the capitalist class.
Competition and accumulation make the capitalists a “band of warring brothers”—united in sharing the fruits of exploitation but divided by the battle for market share. In order to secure a stable, predictable political and juridical environment in the midst of the turbulence of competition and accumulation, capitalists typically require a public authority that is institutionally separate from, but subordinated to, the private sphere of capitalist exploitation.
Trump’s plans to replace the federal civil service with his loyal flunkies, and the consolidation of a unitary Executive which can enact policy without regard to capitalists represented in other branches, threatens this public authority. His agenda replaces a predictable legal-juridical framework for the volatile process of capitalist competition with an ever-shifting set of rules. It also replaces a professional civil service committed to ensuring the rule of law with a gaggle of political loyalists who are free to use state resources for their personal accumulation of wealth. It is these threats to capitalist political stability that underlie Democratic state governments’ limited and feeble “resistance.”
The legally defined process of resolving differences among these branches of the state and its administration by a professionalized civil service allows capitalists to forge a relative consensus on key political questions. The US state—with its various barriers to democratic majorities (the bicameral legislature with an unrepresentative Senate, the Electoral College, and unelected and unaccountable judiciary and officialdom)—has provided a model for capitalist states across the world in this regard.
These barriers to democracy also serve as the checks and balances that prevent any segment of capital (or the working classes) from using the state apparatus for particularly narrow goals. Trump’s flouting of political convention has supplanted this relatively stable process with a transactional politics of patronage. In the domestic sphere, this shift is marked by the naked looting, destruction, and politicization of purportedly neutral governmental institutions.
Trump’s strategy has been to abandon the fig leaf of ‘soft power’ in favor of the return to Great Power realpolitik.
In the international sphere, Trump’s strategy has been to abandon the fig leaf of “soft power” in favor of the return to Great Power realpolitik, as evidenced by his rapprochement with Russia over the fate of Ukraine and his designs on the territorial annexation of Gaza. These strategies, increasingly, put capitalists at odds with one another.
Contradictions in Trump’s Regime
MAGA’s new class bloc is not as unified or unstoppable as it wants people to believe. Despite Trump’s and the Republicans’ claim of a popular mandate from the election, the reality is quite different. Trump’s margin of victory in the popular vote was one of the smallest in recent history—in an election in which one third of those eligible did not bother to vote. The key to Trump’s victory was not the strength of his support, but the collapse of the Democratic vote, in no small part because that party had presided over the genocide in Gaza.
The unity of Trump’s support—built upon a hostility to the limited social gains won by oppressed groups in the twentieth century—is fragile. In particular, the implementation of Trump’s authoritarian America First policies, and the reorganization of the capitalist state it requires, encompasses a minefield of potential conflicts that could blow up the MAGA coalition.
While Project 2025 gives Trump and his team a blueprint for authoritarian rule, it is unclear how much of that program will be realized and at what cost, both to Trump’s coalition and to capitalist stability.
Trump’s agenda unites contradictory interests that fall short of a coherent economic policy. This is evident in Trump’s deployment of tariffs against both friends and foes of the US ruling class. On the one hand, there is broad support among capitalists in both parties for tariffs directed at China. However, Trump’s initial round of tariffs against Mexico and Canada sparked instability in the financial markets and opposition from major capitalist organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the Business Roundtable.
They object that imposing tariffs on imported metal products will increase costs of production for US industry and will only accelerate inflation by making imported goods more expensive. Tariffs on the European Union could also undermine some of Trump’s allies on the European far right. While European white nationalists support Trump’s authoritarian political project, the French and Italian right is committed to the EU as an economic project to strengthen European capital in relation to both China and the United States.
Similar contradictions are evident in Trump’s and Musk’s attempt to massively slash nonmilitary federal spending and personnel. Whatever tactical disagreements they have with the methods and pace of these cuts, the Democrats also seek to further dismantle and privatize the anemic US welfare state and weaken job security for federal employees. However, Trump’s arbitrary freeze on all federal spending threatens programs that capital itself needs—such as infrastructure projects and the scientific research that fuel capitalist innovation.
The same tensions mark Trump’s immigration policy. His shock and awe campaign of ICE terror against workers without legal status has yet to surpass the Obama and Biden administrations’ weekly average deportations (likely in large part due to the infrastructures of resistance, such as sanctuary city policies, that arose as a response to Obama’s aggressive use of Executive power to facilitate deportations).3Chris Newman (“Deportation Nation w/ Chris Newman”), interview with Daniel Denvir, The Dig, podcast audio, 19:10–24:30, 37:50–46:20, February 9, 2025; Josh Gerstein, “Obama Administration Rebukes Sanctuary Cities,” Politico, February 24, 2016. However, if the administration actually deported the masses of undocumented agricultural and food processing workers, the result would be severe food shortages and even sharper inflation.
No Time for Illusions in the Democratic Party
Again, we need to be clear that the Democrats’ defense of the constitutional order is not a defense of democratic rights or gains of working-class and oppressed people. In fact, there is an international consensus in the ruling classes for greater political authoritarianism—as evidenced in the French president’s imposition of an increase in the retirement age against the will of parliament. In the United States, the Democrats’ lackluster opposition to Trump is limited by the political position of the capitalists they represent.
They are not interested in a defense of the democratic gains of workers, people of color, queer and trans folks, or immigrants. The Democrats long ago abandoned affirmative action and easily jettisoned the mostly symbolic DEI initiatives adopted after the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising; they also threw trans people under the bus during the Harris campaign and have been active participants in the bipartisan attack on immigrants from the Obama years through the Harris campaign.4Adam McGourney and Nicholas Nehemas, “Harris Loss Has Democrats Fighting Over How to Talk about Transgender Rights,” November 20, 2024; Justin Akers Chacón, “Capitalist Politics in Crisis,” Spectre (online), November 15, 2024; Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, “All Rights for All, Without Borders: The Movement We Need,” Spectre (online), February 25, 2025.To top things off, they presided over a genocide against the people of Gaza.
Whatever opposition they voice to the most outrageous Trump attacks on our side in the class war will be feeble and give ground to the right—increased funding for police “protecting” communities of color, “reasonable” restrictions on gender-affirming healthcare, immigration reform that creates a guest worker program, and perhaps labor law reforms that will further eviscerate the National Labor Relations Board. Nor will they be deterred from collaborating with the Trump regime in criminalizing and repressing Palestine solidarity activism.
In fact, Democratic-led attacks on Palestine solidarity activism accelerated the repressive turn against free speech and free assembly in ruling class circles. And they opened the door through which Trump is advancing. As Mahmoud Khalil wrote in March in his powerful letter from a Louisiana prison, “My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months.”5My Name is Mahmoud Khalil and I Am a Political Prisoner,” In These Times, March 18, 2025.
Despite the craven opportunism of the Democratic “resistance,” Trump is not invincible. His coalition is made up of potentially antagonistic elements, which may ultimately collide with one another. More than any other time in recent history, working people and the Left cannot look to the Democrats—from Chuck Schumer to AOC—to defend our democratic rights or to win new gains. Nor can we look to those forces that continue to rely on the Democrats—the labor bureaucracy and the liberal leaders of NGOs that claim to speak on behalf of women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, and labor. We can expect little from them other than business as usual: election campaigns, lobbying officials, and legal action.
Building the Independent Resistance
Defeating Trump and his minions, stopping the attacks on our side of the class war, and making real advances will take militant struggles that actually disrupt business as usual for our rulers. We will need not only mass, legal demonstrations protesting Trump’s policies, but also a new wave of strikes, occupations of public spaces, and other forms of social disruption on the level of the 2018 “Red State” teachers’ revolt and the George Floyd rebellion of 2020.
We need a new wave of strikes and occupations building unconditional solidarity with the working class and those suffering under all forms of oppression.
And these will require unconditional solidarity with the working class and those suffering under all forms of oppression, rather than the quisling adoption of right-wing talking points offered by both the Democrats and even some prominent voices on the Left. The poverty of their politics—rooted in those institutions that upheld the hitherto existing political order—cannot extinguish the possibility of transformative resistance emanating from those most endangered by the fallout of this constitutional crisis we all face.
We are beginning to see the green shoots of resistance beyond the filing of lawsuits—demonstrations in forty state capitols, the actions of thousands in NYC in support of gender-affirming healthcare for young trans people, the spontaneous demonstrations by undocumented immigrants in LA and Chicago (which led to the temporary shutdown of one of LA’s freeways for several hours), the upsurge in defense of Mahmoud Khalil, and the growing hostility to Musk and Tesla. We have also seen organized resistance to ICE raids in schools and neighborhoods across the United States by local networks of teachers, students, and community residents.
Organization is required to prevent these upsurges from dissipating like the 2020 uprising. Top-down unions and NGOs are not adequate to the task of rebuilding the infrastructures of resistance necessary to fight the repression both Democrats and Republicans will unleash. We need democratic, member-run organizations where people new to politics can learn and strategize together.
Spectre has no illusion that a journal of theory and strategic debates can be the basis of building a new socialist organization in the United States. But we will continue to make our contribution—the creation of a space to forge a new political common sense and a strategic orientation to the challenges before us. ×