Feyzi Ismail spoke to activist and historian August Nimtz about his reaction to Trump’s second presidency on 3 February 2025

It is an extraordinary state of affairs that Trump is back in the White House but hardly surprising when you look at the state of the opposition – not only their inability, but refusal, to address the concerns of working people over such a long period of time. It reveals much about the state of America and the world. How do you see Trump’s comeback in general terms?

I think the most positive aspect about the situation is that millions of working people have said no more to the Democratic Party. And for me, that’s the beginning of wisdom. It’s not the sufficient condition but it’s a necessary condition for working people to begin thinking about having their own party. This abusive relationship for over six decades at least, between the working class and the Democratic Party, has really encumbered independent working-class political action. So it seems to me that this is the beginning of the break of millions of workers with the Democratic Party. That to me is the silver lining in this. I have said in the past, since 2007, when I encountered the impeach Bush movement, that if we don’t impeach the system that gave us Bush, we will have someone in the White House who will make us long for Bush. So we shouldn’t be surprised that Trump came into office in 2017. The fact that he’s back testifies to the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party and bourgeois politics as a whole.

Trump’s recent comments about moving all the Palestinians from Gaza to neighbouring Egypt and Jordan, effectively calling for ethnic cleansing, were particularly outrageous and unhinged, even for Trump. Such an idea is both immoral and delusional, not to mention lawless, and will undoubtedly be resisted by the Palestinians and the global Palestine movement. How do you see this provocation?

My immediate reaction was this is Trump being Trump, specifically, the capitalist real-estate magnate: ‘demolition’ to make way for Trump golf courses in Gaza. Republican politician and Trump ally Mike Kelly got it right when he said that Trump treats everything like another business venture. What to expect from a septuagenarian who has never had any other job? For us, communists, it’s an excellent teaching opportunity, what is to be expected from capitalism. Here is the most authentic capitalist to have ever occupied the White House and this chicken, along with his other capitalist buddy Musk, have come home to roost. This is something that the liberals can never admit because they have no desire to get rid of capitalism.

The range and scale of executive orders that Trump pushed through in the first few days of his presidency is, can we say unprecedented? The establishment of the Department of Government Efficiency, mandated effectively to restructure the civil service and deregulate anything that hasn’t already been deregulated, seems particularly threatening to democracy, not to mention jobs. How far do you think Trump will go in open attacks on workers and on democratic institutions?

Executive orders have been prevalent since Obama. Obama couldn’t get along with the Republican Congress, so he used them liberally. Then Biden increased the number. So in some sense, Trump has license that has been granted by both Obama and Biden to do this. I don’t think it represents any qualitative change in use of executive orders. My overall perspective about Trump and his authoritarian tendencies is that we have an obligation to think dialectically: it’s not only about what the ruling class is doing but what the working class is doing. For me, the union fights, the victories that workers are winning in terms of contracts, the recent Costco workers’ Teamsters victory, that’s the important thing to keep our eyes on. It’s true, liberal handwringing is very prevalent at the moment. But, for example, we had an immigrant-rights demonstration recently in Minneapolis which I think was symbolic. It was maybe 2,000 people, but a lot of immigrant families came out and I suspect that was repeated throughout the country. It’s significant that undocumented workers were willing to come out to resist. That’s the other side of the Trump offensive.

Canada, Mexico and China – the US’s top-three trading partners – are being threatened with hefty new tariffs. Trump also has his sights set on the EU. The line is that these tariffs will create jobs and improve living standards for ordinary people. But we know this won’t happen because production can be shifted elsewhere. What is Trump trying to do here and what are the implications of such a confrontational move?

Trump is strongarming his so-called partners because of a crisis of capitalism. A profits crisis. He is trying to make US imperialism profitable again by being willing to deploy a beggar-thy-neighbour policy, which capitalists always deploy in moments of crisis. It speaks volumes about the reality of the US economy, which is supposed to be the best that capitalism has to offer. That he is doing this is extremely instructive. And we know from history that tariff wars can become shooting wars. We have to consider this, especially with China. I think he is doing this from a position of weakness and he’s willing to sacrifice so-called allies. But we know this is what capitalists have always done.

On Greenland – international law, national sovereignty and such things don’t seem to bother Trump. But it clearly puts the EU and Nato states in a difficult position given their own intervention in Ukraine. How far do you think Trump will pursue Greenland for its resources and how do you think the EU and Nato will respond?

It will undermine Nato. Trump’s first presidency was a lot of huff and puff, often times there were a lot of threats and not a lot of action. So we have to be calm and see what’s real and what’s not. But it’s potentially destabilising. The Nato project was always inherently flawed. These are capitalist powers always in competition with one another. And with the collapse of the USSR and its regime, Nato became increasingly less important for the imperialist world. This is the slow outcome of that development. We shouldn’t be surprised that Trump again wants Nato member states to pay up and pay more; that is where US imperialism is at, it’s no longer willing to subsidise its allies. That is what is represented by Trump leading this campaign to effectively undermine Nato and we should shed no tears about that. You can imagine what all the allies are thinking: is this what we really want to be a part of? But given the crisis within European capitalism, they are stuck with Trump. European capitalism is not what it used to be, and it’s been exposed for what it is, and Trump recognises that. He has his allies by the neck and is willing to squeeze them. Those are the lessons we know from the tragic moments that preceded the First World War. And then it was repeated in the Second World War. I think that it represents the weaknesses of the capitalist mode of production, that a particular wing in Washington is willing to sacrifice its allies. And there’s no opposition in Washington to what Trump is doing. All they can do is scream and shout about it in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, but they have no alternative.

The crux of all of this is always the ‘what is to be done’ question. How has the left in America responded to Trump and where are they concentrating activity? What should the international left be doing to counter Trump’s ruthless authoritarianism?

Right now, to the extent that the left is wedded to the Democratic Party, they are in real crisis. If you think about Trump’s first presidency, the day after the inauguration the broad left went to the streets in Washington. The demonstration was all over the place, with no central demands and, in essence, a knee jerk reaction to the election. It was easy for all the left to be outraged. But at least they came out. Not this time. This says a lot about the crisis within the left, especially the sections in thrall to the Democratic Party. The fact that Trump won again suggests to the left that something more fundamental is at play, but which they have not come to grips with. In part, this is because they subscribe in one way or another to identity politics, as opposed to thinking about the working class. Thus, there is a kind of paralysis and, hopefully, a rethinking of prior positions. This makes the immigrant-rights protests around the country that much more important. That’s the future in my opinion.

As for the Democratic Party, I can’t wait until it crumbles. It’s the main obstacle to independent working-class political action. At a certain moment, all of those workers who voted for Trump will realise that he is no solution to their grievances and demands. The question for us is whether there will be a real working-class alternative in place when they realise that. That’s our task, to put this alternative in place. We know from history what happens when workers become disillusioned. They will look for solutions not only on the left but also on the right. What progressive movements should be doing is thinking about how we put together an independent working-class political perspective. In reality, I don’t see any major forces on the left thinking about that. The most positive thing has been the working-class union efforts, fights around contracts, this recent victory of the Costco workers. Workers are fighting and they are still willing to go the streets. It’s out of that reality that the potential for an alternative exists.

Remember that the winner in the election was Nota: none of the above. Nearly ninety million potential voters stayed at home; they didn’t vote. But in that mix, there are lots of workers who are fighting. Trade-union issues are fundamentally political issues, but most workers don’t necessarily see that. They won’t come to the political conclusion of what they are doing because they have to go through the experience of the fights. It’s through trial and error, that’s how we all learn. There are no shortcuts to political clarity.

One of the challenges that progressives have to deal with is the efforts on the part of the Democratic Party to seduce workers again; that’s what we have to be very careful of. I’m not being overly optimistic, but I think this is a historical moment. That abusive relationship began in the 1930s, when the trade-union leadership got wedded to the Democratic Party. But the trade unions have nothing to show for that. Now millions of workers have said no more. Again, it’s not a sufficient but it is a necessary condition, for workers to realise that we don’t have our own political party. The reasons the US never had its own working-class party, as explained by Marx and Engels, had a lot to do with the potential for upward mobility, the American Dream; the divisions within the working-class, those who were born inside and outside America; and the race question. And Engels also added to that the electoral system, the winner-take-all system, which makes it very different for a third party to get off the ground. One of those conditions is over: the American Dream. That is what Trump’s movement is about.

Workers who had voted twice for Obama broke in 2016 and voted for Trump because they had nothing to show for eight years of the Democratic Party. Clinton was even worse, the epitome of all that is so problematic with the Democratic Party. And Harris was, in many ways, a continuation of Clinton. And now, the Democrats are trying to figure out what to do. The latest news from bourgeois politics here is that the head of the Minnesota Farmer Labour Party is now the head of the Democratic Party. He was just elected, and that speaks to the history of the Democratic Party, which co-opted the Farmer Labour Party in 1944. In Minnesota, the official name is the Democratic Farmer Labour Party. It was the fusion between the Democratic Party and the Farmer Labour Party, which had been a spent force, not unlike Social Democracy in Europe – it represents an illusion in elections and so on.

Anybody who calls themselves progressive, what is important now is joining and advancing the strikes and helping workers think about class consciousness, not just trade-union consciousness. I admit that the perspective I stand for is difficult for a lot of people to see. Few people alive today in an advanced capitalist economy have experienced the working class in motion and, following the Second World War, the revolutionary initiative passed to the colonial world. The high watermark for that period, in my view, was the Cuban Revolution, which is struggling. But just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. That’s modern science. We need to look at the lessons of history and look at what the working class has done in the past. In the US, the American Dream and the post-WWII economic boom was a crucial factor in understanding why working-class mobilisations came to an end. The other factor was the nationalism associated with the Second World War. Workers who had been in the streets were able to realise the American Dream after the war. But that’s over now.