Trump and the US empire's political violence

Trump stands for all the worst in capitalist society: racism, Islamophobia, misogyny, corruption, devotion to the police and military. He also gleefully encourages violence, especially the violence of the far right. 

 

It’s not so long ago that his supporters were chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”. In 2017 Nazis marching in Charlottesville chanted “Jews will not replace us!” and then murdered anti-fascist Heather Heyer, and injured 35 others when a white supremacist drove his car into them. 

 

Trump responded that there were "very fine people on both sides.” During his four years as President of the US, they dropped nearly 75,000 bombs on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. 

 

Nothing in Trump’s record would have lead us to shed a single tear at his demise. The hypocrisy of the professed shock and horror by politicians and media pundits on both sides of the border is nauseating. We have heard again and again over the last few hours, “political violence has no place in American politics.” 

 

What were the January 6 attacks on the Capitol by Trump’s supporters? Where is the outrage over the US supplying the bombs that Israel is using in its genocidein Palestine?  According to Reuters, “Between the war's start last October and recent days, the United States has transferred at least 14,000 of the MK-84 2,000-pound bombs, 6,500 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, 1,000 bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 air-dropped small-diameter bombs, and other munitions to Israel.”

 

And wasn’t the US created on the basis of several varieties of political violence: enslaved labour, genocide against Indigenous people and an insurrection against British rule? 

 

But Trump’s assassination would solve nothing. There are hundreds more lined up behind Trump to carry his project forward.

 

The political project that Trump represents is not the product of his towering intellect. It is the response of a portion of the American ruling class to the despair so many feel after more than 30 years of neo-Liberalism that has enriched a very few at the expense of the rest of us. 

 

There is a section of the ruling class that looks to racism, misogyny, anti-LGBTQ+ hatred and anti-immigrant politics to win support for their aims to build US capitalism at the expense of its global competitors and on the backs of its own working class. This is not radically different from broad goals of those who support Biden and the Democrats. 

 

Here and in the US we need class based politics that sees that all ruling class politicians share much more in common than what divides them. 

 

At the same time the vast majority of us, the working class, have more in common with each other internationally and at home than we do with our own ruling class and the politicians that they choose for us. The endless wars, the climate crisis, the lack of housing and crumbling health care and other infrastructure are all due to politicians united against us to preserve and protect profit. 

 

The assassination attempt will energize Trump’s far-right supporters in the US and internationally. But recent strikes and mass protests in solidarity with Palestine show the possibility of challenging the system that is producing these horrors.

 

We must confront the nationalism, racism, anti-trans and anti-immigrant hatred that all politicians hide behind, in order to sweep all of them away. And we must unmask the hypocrisy of our rulers, including Biden and Trudeau, who denounce “political violence” yet support Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.

 

No doubt Trump was scared when the bullet clipped his ear, but that is nothing compared to the fear he, Biden, Poilievre and Trudeau would feel facing mass strikes for housing, climate action, trans rights, an end to borders and a free Palestine. The strikes we have now and the global movement for Palestine gives us a glimpse of what that could look like.