The United States was just one delayed Donald Trump head tilt away from Civil War 2.0. Had the bullet intended for Trump hit its target, the US and the rest of us would have woken up in a world where all bets are off.
Now that Trump has seized upon this opportunity to paint himself as Captain America in contrast to the confused, doddering old man named Joe Biden, chances are that Trump will win by a landslide.
None of that changes the absurd nature of the most important, comedic, and ridiculous electoral contest in a generation.
There is an overwhelming sense of the macabre and the ridiculous as one observes from afar, the spectacle that is the United States of America’s presidential election race. This year, Americans have an unenviable binary choice. The comic genius, John Stewart terms this as choosing “between a megalomaniac and a suffocating gerontocracy”.
Trump, who lost to Biden in the 2022, has never fully accepted the outcome of that election.
His refusal to do so, ultimately led to him encouraging supporters to storm the United States Capitol building on January 6, 2021. This attempted coup took place a few weeks after the election, and was a vain attempt to stop the certification of the election results, in order to prevent the inauguration of Joe Biden. However, this insurrection failed and Biden was duly inaugurated a few weeks later.
While Biden was governing, Trump never stopped campaigning. The numerous criminal and civil cases he has faced subsequently have only served to grow his platform, and solidify his support amongst the rabidly racist supporters in the Republican Party.
Biden’s term has a few notable domestic successes, but his international record makes for dismal reading. Normally, during the election cycle, American voters pay scant regard to the president’s international dalliances. However, this year, according to polling, Biden has lost support among young people.
They are among many American voters of conscience who are demonstrating their disapproval of Biden’s support for Israel’s on-going genocide of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.
Biden’s aiding and abetting of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extreme right wing government, combined with the historic high cost of living, caused by failing neo-liberal economic policies, have heavily impacted his polling numbers, and have brought the prospect of a second Trump presidency into reality.
Project 2025
Trump, for his part, has not hidden his sweeping future plans for America. They are contained in a plan called “Project 2025”, which has its roots in 2016 when he won the White House, which surprised everyone, including Trump and his team. During his term in office, he was stymied by a layer of civil servants, limitations of the executive, partisan gridlock in the House and the Senate, and norms and conventions of previous administrations.
This time, the Trump team has a plan for the complete upending of American ‘democracy’.
Trump’s re-ascendance to power is due to the failure of capitalism to improve the lives of the majority of people. Trump has successfully presented himself as an outsider who will ‘drain the swamp’, a slur coined by Trump to define the elite capitalist class, which has benefited from the quasi democracy of Democrat and Republican rule, (and of which he himself, as a conservative billionaire, is a beneficiary).
Far from improving the lives of the majority of people, Project 2025 will entrench Trump’s power and it is the completion of the Supreme Court’s recent work to coronate Trump, as the God-king of the US.
Project 2025 calls for the sacking of thousands of civil servants, expanding the power of the president, dismantling the Department of Education, sweeping tax cuts, a ban on pornography, halting sales of the abortion pill, and many other conservative moral crusades.
His plans are undergirded by a vein of retribution against his perceived enemies. He also plans to use the Department of Justice to prosecute any and all of his perceived enemies.
He plans to drastically change the US immigration system, and to continue to build his border wall, which is part of his solution to the problem of illegal immigration at the US- Mexican border.
Trump also plans to gut all “Equity Projects’, which is code for all policies of redress for black people such as Affirmative Action, and Biden’s “Gender” Agenda, which is code for all policies that seek to recognise and affirm the right for individuals to choose their gender identity.
In spite of Trump’s dark vision for America, he is leading Joe Biden in most credible polls, and is predicted to win the election in November 2024.
He has achieved what Lincoln and JFK could not do – unwittingly dodging a bullet like Neo from the Matrix thus narrowly escaping death. Trump himself has said he survived through divine intervention, and in Bible country, this heavenly endorsement takes on a scriptural dimension, and it is likely to boost his support even more.
Another Trump presidency is bad for the working class
The two-way race for the presidency is a reflection of the quagmire American ‘democracy’ finds itself deeply mired in. Americans have been bamboozled by an embedded, corporate mega media machinery to believe that there are only two candidates vying for this election.
This is due to a deeply biased media that is actively embedded in the capitalist system and therefore it promotes the narrative of the ruling class of America. The two party system limits choice for voters.
It also encourages polarisation, and it has led to legislative gridlocks and an inability to make progress in key factors that affect many working American families, such the minimum wage, which shamefully, was last increased in 2009, to $7.25.
The Democratic Party, which historically, while centrist, has been a home for some progressive policies such as universal healthcare access, has found itself drifting first to the centre, and now increasingly to the right.
This is due to the fact that the Republicans themselves, especially under Trump’s leadership, have drifted to the extreme right. Certainly Trump’s policy proposals firmly ensconce the party amongst the rising extreme right threat that the West is currently facing.
Meanwhile Joe Biden has adopted and continues some of Trump’s most right wing immigration policies, going so far as to stop all asylum applications at the US-Mexico border, just as Trump had done during the Covid pandemic. Joe Biden’s fulsome backing of the Zionist genocidal Netanyahu regime has also fully framed him as a right-wing war hawk.
Biden’s faltering performance at the first presidential debate has further drawn attention to his inadequacy as a candidate, with many within the Democratic Party calling for him to pull out of the race.
Worth noting, is the fact that there are calls for Biden, the individual, to be replaced, but the policies that the Democrats stand for, are to remain unchanged. In response, the Democrat establishment has doubled down on their man, emulating the cult of personality that has cemented Trump’s strangle-hold over the Republicans.
Is there life outside the Democratic and Republican Uniparty?
One has to look beyond the mainstream media to find information about all the other candidates that are running for the presidency in the US because the American media has deliberately censored alternative candidates.
Some of the most notable candidates are Dr Cornel West, Marianne Williamson and Claudia De La Cruz, whom I was fortunate to speak with during NUMSA’s Dilemma’s conference in October 2023.
De La Cruz’s radical election manifesto is a breath of fresh air, compared to the stink of the swamp. De La Cruz and her running mate Karina Garcia do not hide that their goal is to implement Socialism in America. The manifesto for their political party, the Party for Socialism, sets out how this can be achieved by:
● Overthrowing the ‘dictatorship of the rich’ in order to build a democracy that serves the working class by creating a new system of government, which would be based on the “direct exercise of power by workers”.
● Seizing ownership and control of the biggest 100 corporations and “turning them into public property” to be used for the benefit of workers and their families.
● Outlawing corporate lobbying, which is a mechanism of the ultra-rich to shape public policy in order to compel the state to pass legislation and state policies which empower and enrich a tiny wealthy corporate minority.
● Ending all funding for Apartheid Israel and its genocidal war against the people of Palestine.
● Cutting the military budget by 90% in order to end all of America’s destructive wars and imperialist campaigns all over the globe.
It is a pity that most Americans don’t know much about De La Cruz and Garcia. Both the Party for Socialism and Dr Cornel West, who is running as an independent candidate, have progressive policies.
West’s progressive politics are as well-known as his scathing criticism of America’s support for Israel. These candidates should be considered as real alternatives from the depressing, and frankly unappealing choice that Americans must make in November 2024.
Due to the decades-long dominance of the two party system, which has only served the interests of the billionaire class, the erosion of American democracy has long been in the making. Trump is just the catalyst that will hasten its ultimate decline.
The establishment would rather brace itself for another Trump term, which will be characterised by regressive policies that will worsen conditions for workers and their families, whilst consolidating the power of the extreme right, instead of allowing the public to be exposed to Left alternatives that would deepen democracy by expanding the power of the working class, and genuinely transforming the lives of the majority of people in a meaningful way.
* Phakamile Hlubi-Majola is a socialist and former journalist. These are her personal views.
** The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of IOL or Independent Media.