by Jeff Mackler, published on Socialist Action, July 22, 2024
As with France’s newly moderated and re-imaged proto-fascist Marine Le Pen a few weeks earlier, Donald J. Trump took the floor of the Republican National Convention for a 93-minute “unifying” nomination acceptance speech.
Friendly, relaxed, complementary, “family-oriented,” thanking God for saving his life five days earlier from an assassin’s near fatal bullet, Trump lied on virtually every major political point he raised. But he did it with more finesse and a bit less overt racism, sexism and warmongering than usual. His last-minute rewritten speech, with full knowledge that the Biden campaign was within days of collapse, mentioned Biden in passing only once. [Editor: As we go to press Biden has announced his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race.] 1
Trump’s new persona notwithstanding, there was zero doubt that his projected politics were fully consistent with the needs and objective of a US imperialism in deep crisis. Indeed, rhetoric and personalities aside, they were close to if not indistinguishable from those of Genocide Joe and the Democratic Party.
To the dismay of the 100-plus delegates who assumed that they would write the Republican Platform, Trump sequestered their cell phones to prevent leaks, and informed them that the draft they were to work on was inconsequential, too long, and irrelevant. He handed them a short text that he basically ordered them to approve. It included a provision that abortion rights would be left to the states, whereas the original draft would have virtually outlawed it.
Trump poses as a man of peace
Trump characterized Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan as a “disgrace,” citing US losses of some 24 troops. He neglected to record that some two million Afghans were slaughtered during the 20-year US imperialist war of devastation and failed conquest that he supported. Nor did he mention that the world’s most powerful military was defeated by an ill-armed but deeply rooted and popular Taliban that had also beaten the corrupt Afghan puppet government that the US had imposed and both Trump and the Democrats had supported.
Trump, now posing as a “peace” candidate boasted that the US had been engaged in only one war during his administration – in Syria, where he claimed “we were just fighting ISIS” not the Syrians. In truth, the ten-year war in Syria was a slaughter of some one million Syrians, including 500,000 Syrian soldiers, funded by the US, NATO, and the Gulf State monarchies and aimed at the overthrow of the Syrian government, an effort that continues to this day. Under Trump’s presidency and Biden’s today, the US has 5,000 troops in Syria, occupying one-third of that country, their role being to dominate that country’s vast fossil fuel and agricultural resources.
Today US sanctions deprive Syria of nearly all commerce. They have destroyed its currency. Medical and industrial equipment is falling apart and a large segment of the population is undernourished. The sanctions and theft of Syria’s oil, combined with the occupation, have caused Syrians to die from cold during the winter for lack of fuel and the inability to import needed construction materials to rebuild damaged housing.
Trump’s claim that under his reign there were no US wars except for Syria is patently false. With 1,100 US military bases in 110 countries, the US is at war daily around the world. Its tactics vary from overt wars to different forms of covert wars such as “special operations” wars, assassination wars, regime change wars, and proxy wars (as in Palestine). Then there are the daily, military-enforced embargo and blockade wars. Economic blockades and sanctions—acts of war under international law—are now imposed on some 44 countries, all with devastating financial and social repercussions that take the lives of millions. A recent UN report demonstrated that US sanctions against Venezuela alone cost the lives of 50,000 people in that country. In contrast, Trump’s twisted convention speech credited Venezuela with the “lowest crime rate in the world” because, he said, they send all their criminals to the US.
Trump’s version of Star Wars
Trump surprised some observers with an incredible proposal for a new project – to place a “protective iron shield,” akin to Israel’s “Iron Dome” (now proven ineffective by Hezbollah and the Houthis), over the entire US! Unlike the “Star Wars” proposals of the mid-1980s for a laser-based weaponization of outer space, which Trump explained were not technologically feasible at that time, “today we have the technology to make it happen.” (See Robert Bowman’s Star Wars: a defense insider’s case against the Strategic Defense Initiative, 1986).
Both Trump and Biden raised US military spending to new heights with near zero congressional opposition. Military spending, now at $1 trillion annually, has a dual purpose under capitalism, to further boost the already bloated profits of the military-industrial complex and to carry out US imperialism’s basic policies.
Endless US wars are the daily deeds of US imperialism. Beyond and apart from the uniformed US troops spread out across the world’s continents, air space and oceans are the dozen or so plain-clothes organizations that constitute the US National Security State—five million agents of the CIA, NSA, FBI, and other organizations “protecting” US military, political and financial “interests” everywhere.
The Ukraine War
Trump claimed that he could end the Ukraine War in a day by talking with Russian President Putin, as if war in the modern era was a product of the personal skills of any individual negotiator or president rather than the inherent result of the endless drives of competing imperialists for profit and control of the world marketplace. Trump and Putin were personal and financial friends when Putin and his Soviet-era Stalinist friends frequented Trump’s Atlantic City gambling casino, not to mention when Putin, then the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), facilitated Trump’s lucrative real estate investments in New York and Russia. But Trump bravado aside, personal friendships never govern the world’s politics, wars included, and Ukraine is no exception.
The stakes in Ukraine were and remain high, amounting to trillions of dollars in fossil fuel revenue that the US, via its installation of the 2014 fascist-led coup government, sought to steal from Ukraine’s oil rich east. Russia wanted to maintain its decades long contractual agreements with Ukraine regarding the processing, exploitation and transportation of Ukraine’s fossil fuel reserves, agreements made with the previous, pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych, agreements in force for decades before the US sponsored coup.
The same stakes govern the US sanction wars against Venezuela and Iran – nations with the world’s largest oil reserves. Revolutions or working class mobilizations in both Iran (1979) and Venezuela (1998) had led to the nationalization or partial nationalization of the oil industries in those countries, previously dominated by US corporations. The same can be said of oil in Iraq, lithium in Bolivia, the vast natural resources of the Congo and Nigeria—all countries where the US has intervened in one form or another. The same would be the case with any Latin America nation that tried to distribute corporate-owned land to the oppressed peasantry.
Trump also bragged that he had met with North Korean president Kim Jong Un. “When we get back [in the White House],” he said, “I get along with him. He’d like to see me back, too. I think he misses me if you wanna know the truth.”
Trump bravado aside, direct conversations between US presidents and other top officials with world leaders are the rule not the exception. Trump also bragged about his calls to the Mexican president about Mexican immigrants entering the US. According to Trump’s version, when Lopez-Obrador responded that it was impossible to reduce the flow, according to Trump’s version, he called back to inform AMLO that the US was preparing massive sanctions unless Mexico altered its policies. He said he was informed the very next day that Mexico had acceded to his “request.” Or so Trump told the cheering RNC delegates. That the US bullies other nationals with sanctions and threats of war is the norm, not the exception.
Trump tempered his usual racist rants about immigrants “poisoning the blood of the nation” with appeals for “equality for Blacks, Latinos and Asians,” attempting to take the sting out of his racist policies. The same can be said of his various references to “free speech,” “democracy” and “freedom.” The same with his call for “clean and safe streets.” No doubt the Trump camp has learned a few lessons from France’s Le Pen about cleaning up or camouflaging some of the more overt reactionary rhetoric.
His remarks on the Civil War battle at Gettysburg and George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, coupled with references to settlers bravely crossing the “frontier” and the need to respect “historic Civil War monuments” were also softened comments. They were aimed at countering a new and broad consciousness in the country – a product of the Black Lives Matter movement that brought five million people into the streets – to protest America’s systemic racism and origins in chattel slavery as well its genocide of the native peoples. Sensing that he was closing in on a November election victory the usually open racist demagogue, now posing as the “broad-minded mainstream” USA politician, guarded some of his worst formulations. But again, rhetoric side, Trump’s policies on most key issues facing a declining US capitalism, differ little from Biden’s, or for that matter, from those of any other capitalist politician in the country. Trump felt safe praising the cops and opposing calls to defund the police when Biden had already introduced and passed bi-partisan legislation to the same effect.
Trump’s RNC remark denying the existence of the oncoming climate cataclysm as a “Green New Scam” was accompanied by his deadly refrain, “Drill, Baby Drill!” Indeed, the Biden administration, and Obama’s before it, had set new records in delivering drilling permits to corporate America’s fossil fuel behemoths.
He posed the rampant and crippling inflation that plagues all working class communities today as a product of oil shortages. Maximizing oil production was a sure cure for lowering inflation, he said. Like Biden, Trump is well aware that a chief cause of inflation today is the uncontrolled capacity of monopolistic corporations to raise prices at will. The same corporations preside over stagnant wages, making sure that they are kept as low as possible. They show no such restraint when it comes to raising prices.
Following the 1979 Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, US leaders “spoke” with Nicaraguan leaders to express their “concern” that the revolution would take the Cuban road and enact large scale land reform, that is, nationalize the capitalist-owned land and distribute it to the masses of landless peasantry, not to mention nationalizing the factories, whether US-owned or owned by the indigenous capitalist class. Following the defeat of the US-led invasion of Cuba in 1962, Fidel Castro, speaking for Cuba’s revolutionary government, announced Cuba’s socialist project, including his famous statement, “We are going to nationalize the Cuban and US capitalists down to the nails in the boots of their shoes.”
Cuba’s land reform, the largest in the world since the 1917 Russian Revolution, was accompanied by an unprecedented literacy campaign that saw thousands of Cuba’s university youth traveling to the countryside, by day working in the fields with Cuba’s peasants and by night teaching them to read. And all this was accompanied by the establishment of a national system that brought free quality healthcare, as well as free education from the cradle to the grave, to the entire Cuban population. Much of this was paid for by the revenue obtained from nationalizing the wealth of now-abolished capitalist class, much of which fled to the US.
That Cuba has been sanctioned for some six decades, invaded, its hotels and infrastructure bombed, its banana plantations poisoned and its president, Fidel Castro subjected to some 37 US assassination attempts, is the norm for any nation that resists. During a brief “thaw” in US-Cuban relations the Castro government sent the CIA a list of all the assassination attempts against Fidel Castro’s life. The CIA director confirmed that the vast majority were of US government origin.
In the case of Nicaragua, the Sandinistas, relatively more isolated from world support than the Cubans twenty years earlier, sought to avoid these horrors and backed off on their original promise to distribute the lands and factories to the Nicaraguan masses. Even then, the modest reform measures untaken brought on today’s deadly sanctions and the US-attempted coup of a few years ago.
Trillions in tax reductions and tariffs to protect super rich
Trump bragged with a vaguely-worded statement implying that that his administration had lowered taxes on working people. Nothing could be further from the truth! The trillion dollar tax cut programs approved by the Trump and Biden administrations, not to mention those under Obama and Clinton, were approved almost unanimously by both US capitalist parties. Most all such “cuts” went to the top one percent. At the same time Trump’s and Biden’s tariff programs have been nearly identical, with every tariff imposed on foreign products aimed at protecting an increasingly weakened US capitalist class unable to effectively compete in world markets.
Genocide and Zionist Israel
Support for past and present genocidal policies violently imposed on the Palestinian people has been bi-partisan ever since British Mandate Palestine (colonial Palestine) was partitioned in 1948 without reference to the indigenous Palestinian population.
Immigration and instant deportation
Trump saw no need to temporize his usually racist remarks against immigrants, knowing full well that he had been joined to the hip by Biden’s proposed new legislation that aimed at unprecedented massive deportations. Neither racist imperialist politician dared to explain that the central reason for the dramatic increase in immigration to the US is the devastation wrought on the economies of all poor, oppressed and exploited nations by the policies of the neo-colonial imperialists that dominate the world economy.
Trump and Covid
Trump, a Covid denier during his presidency, opposed government mandated mask wearing, lockdowns, and social distancing. As a result the US lost over one million people to the Covid pandemic, a horror that was central to his election loss in 2020 and to Biden’s victory. At that time, Trump’s pandemic science adviser, Stanford University Hoover Institute’s Dr. Scott Atlas, put his name to the so-called Great Barrington [Mass.] conference and its infamous declaration that proposed allowing Covid-19 to spread “naturally” in order to achieve “herd immunity.” That was the point at which enough people had been infected, and supposedly then become immune, that it would effectively stall transmission of the pathogen in the general community.
“Herd immunity” notwithstanding, the US government was soon compelled to expend billions in funds to find an effective vaccine. Trump’s handling of the search involved five major giant corporations, financed by billions in federal grants, competing against each other to secure the lion’s share of the expected future billions in profits. The simple notion that scientific research in a sane society should operate as a collective endeavor, wherein all discoveries are immediately shared by everyone for the common good, is unknown under capitalism. Neither Biden nor Trump uttered a word on this matter.
We conclude this assessment of Trump’s speech and the overall state of US capitalist politics with the following:
1) On every key question of the day, as always, there are few if any fundamental differences between any of the candidates of the US political duopoly. Indeed, all their selected candidates are chosen in multi-billionaire corporate funded, corporate media dominated campaigns from which working people are excluded.
2) Working people need their own independent mass working class party based on qualitatively expanded democratically organized trade unions in alliance with all the oppressed and exploited.
3) Today, the organization of independent united front type democratic mass action coalitions to bring the working class and its allies into the streets is a critical first step with the mass mobilizations against the US-backed genocidal war against the Palestinian people being first rate examples.
4) To help make the above a reality the active participation in every critical struggle of a deeply-rooted mass revolutionary socialist party is essential. Join us! Join Socialist Action!
*Featured Image: ‘I don’t care’: I’ll never be able to retire and I’m broke. What difference would Donald Trump or Kamala Harris in the White House make to my finances? © Getty Images src ~oped on msn
Editor’s note: Joseph Biden’s 50 years in US government “service” included his central role as the Democratic Party’s liaison between its openly racist/segregationist wing, the heirs of the slavocracy, and its Northern corporate “liberals.” Biden was dismissive of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s sexual harassment charges brought by Anita Hill (1991), wrote the most racist and punitive crime law in US history (1994), wrote a counterterrorism bill that expanded the federal death penalty against people who hadn’t committed murder and became a model for the Patriot Act (1996), proposed cutting Social Security (1995), voted against gay marriage (1996), backed the gutting of welfare (1996), voted to repeal Glass-Steagel, setting the stage for the financial crisis (1999), voted for the Patriot Act (2001) and the Iraq War (2002/3), voted against bankruptcy protections for students (2005) and armed a genocide (2023/4) ^