EDITORIAL
United States:
Trump “Orders” War & Impoverishment

Jan 26, 2025

The following is the editorial that appeared in all The Spark workplace newsletters, coming out in the week of Trump’s inauguration and his furious signing of executive orders.

Twenty-four—that’s the number of “Executive Orders” Trump issued on Inauguration Day. By the next day, it was 26. The signing of the “orders” was organized like a TV production. But behind all the hoopla was a deadly reality. Trump’s “orders” lay out the future capitalism holds. There will be more war, more enrichment of the capitalist class, and more shit and mud for what Trump in his campaign had called “the forgotten man and woman of the working class.”

Several of these 26 “orders” declared “national emergencies”—which, Trump explained, gives him the “right to do whatever I want.”

Well, what Trump wants is to act in the service of his fellow billionaires, like the ones who joined him at the inauguration—oligarchs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, as well as the “tech boyz”—Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichet, Tim Cook and Shou Zi Chew, not to mention the oil barons.

Surrounded by all that wealth, Trump forgot about “the forgotten man and woman,” whom he had courted during his campaign. He issued no “executive order” to bar the growth of inflation. No order to prevent layoffs. Nothing to raise the minimum wage in a time when some have to work two or three jobs just to survive.

Trump may have adopted a populist way of speaking, but just like other bourgeois politicians, he seemed to make promises before the election to working people, only to work afterwards to serve the capitalist class. Just like Biden and Harris and Obama and Bush did.

But there is one important difference with Trump. Trump aspires to be the dictator the capitalist class might want in a period of growing economic crisis and of spreading wars.

A number of Trump’s “orders” eliminate anything that might reduce capitalist profit. For example, he cut regulations that protect workers’ health and safety on industrial jobs.

Almost one-third of the orders are designed to reduce the tax money going for the needs of the population. Some will cut the number of federal employees in departments that service people, for example, working to correct problems in Social Security checks and Medicare benefits.

The money from cuts in those programs will cover money lost in Trump’s new tax cut for the very wealthy. It will provide for more corporate subsidies. Musk will get his space rockets paid for.

Trump’s orders envision an increase in military spending—already higher than the money spent by the next 13 military powers in the world. Forgotten was his promise to end the war in Ukraine war on Day One. Forgotten was his promise to bring troops back from “foreign wars.”

Name changes—what’s that about? On Trump’s map, the Gulf of Mexico becomes the Gulf of America, Alaska’s Mount Denali becomes Mount McKinley. Trump said these names would mark the return of America to a time “when it was great,” the time of President William McKinley.

America under McKinley was the time of the “robber barons,” who accumulated enormous wealth from the sweat, blood and tears of a driven working class, when even eight-year olds slaved in factories and mines. In McKinley’s time, the United States pushed its way onto the imperialist stage, preparing for more than a century of war. It’s the period when the U.S. went to war to take Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama and the Philippines, using them as bases in its drive to control Latin America and Asia.

During the time of McKinley, the government worked to divide the working class against itself, trying to set its parts against each other, by race, ethnic origin, sex and age. Trump aspires to do the same.

Trump’s 26 orders were a statement of intent: a warning of a more bitter class war to come, and of the push into a new global war by the chief imperialist power in the world.

The working class needs no return to such a destructive past. Through its own mobilization, through its unifying struggles, it can embody a humane future, one without capitalists and the dictators who serve them.