EDITORIAL
Election Promises, Made to Be Broken – Turned into Super Patriotism

Jan 12, 2025

Before the election, Trump promised he would create good-paying jobs by imposing 25% tariffs on all goods shipped to the U.S. And, campaign stop after campaign stop, he promised to end inflation. “Prices will come down,” he said in North Carolina, “you just watch. They'll come down, and they'll come down fast.” In Pennsylvania, he proclaimed: “Vote Trump and your groceries will be cheaper.”

Even as he said it, most of his listeners must have known that these were “election promises.”

But only just talking about the economy was enough to get him votes in a time period when people's lives were increasingly hard, when their paychecks didn't keep up with their grocery bills, when young adults had to work two or three jobs just to survive – and especially when Democrats wouldn't even admit there were problems, claiming inflation was going away.

It was the usual election gamble vote against the party in office, hope for the better.

Well, there is no better. And Trump quickly made that clear. One after the other, he tore up his promises. Yes, of course, he did – to impose them would have cut into the profits of some of the biggest corporations in the world. So Trump, whose billions come from that same corporate world, pulled back, just as Biden had pulled back after he was elected. Neither party is ready to cut into capitalist profit.

So Trump shifted gears. He took to pushing the same grandiose patriotic garbage he had pushed during his last hold on office, when he claimed he would build a fence all along the Mexican border.

This time, his ambition is bigger. Trump demanded to buy Greenland from Denmark. He threatened to take the Panama Canal, using military force. Symbolic of his aims, he gave a new name to the Gulf of Mexico, calling it the Gulf of America. He even wants to turn Canada, which is bigger than the whole U.S., into the 51st U.S. state.

What is this? Is Trump aiming at becoming a dictator, a king of the world? Who knows? But whatever Trump's ego wants, this super-patriotism he is pushing is aimed squarely at working people.

And Trump is not the only one to push it. He may be more crude and more open about it. But there are others, luring us to take our eyes off the prize: forget jobs, forget food prices, forget wars going on all over the world that U.S. money, its military and its diplomats are fueling. Forget that money spent on wars destroys schools and public services in this country. Forget all that.

The super-patriots push the rabid idea that workers in this country can do well, when U.S. military force imposes low wages on the rest of the world. And, just like Trump, they insist that immigrants are to blame for all the problems faced by the rest of the workers in this country.

Workers who accept these views weaken their own class. If we turn our anger against other people just like ourselves, we cut ourselves off from what should be our natural allies. They work for the same multinational corporations that make superprofits by shutting down factories in this country, and keeping them going in countries where the U.S. military and diplomats help maintain desperately low wages. Kept in illegal status in this country, they must work in low-wage parts plants and the low-wage sectors of the service industry, driving down other wages.

No, this is stupid. The working class – which has the forces, when it is unified, and works in the very center of the economy – could throw out the political class headed by Trump and Biden. It could get rid of the capitalists who run things today to serve themselves. And the working class could build its own society. But to get there, workers have to hold their forces together – and that starts with recognizing that we are all one single class.