I. Buying votes with corpses.
“These are transitional years and the dues
will be heavy.”
—Diane di Prima, “Revolutionary Letter #10”
I understand why many people are dazed, afraid, aghast. Trump will enter his second term with the backing of a Republican Senate, House, and Supreme Court. His Cabinet picks include a Defense Secretary covered with far-right Christian nationalist ink and a transphobic dog executioner slated to lead the Department of Homeland Security.
And while Trump’s 2016 victory sparked immediate left-liberal outrage and the mobilization, the response this time is so timid that it’s being referred to as “the great blue tune-out of 2024.” Rather than fashion themselves The Resistance, liberals are now debating whether they lost the election because they weren’t transphobic and pro-genocide enough.
Things appear quite dire. There is a whole cottage industry producing thinkpieces and reels and fundraising appeals outlining exactly how dire things might become.
This post will do something different. It is an argument against despair, and not because I think Trump will be Good, Actually. And it begins with a provocative claim:
If Trump had been president on October 7th, 2023, I think there would have been a US arms embargo on Israel months ago.
I think that the Democrats would have mobilized against the genocide to turn out 2024 voters. Out of pure calculating self-interest, they’d cite each image coming out of Gaza as another example of Trump’s inhumanity. The DNC got so much mileage out of denouncing “Trump’s kids in cages” despite Biden literally kicking out more migrants than Trump did; imagine the field day Democratic propagandists would have with “Trump’s kids getting burned alive under rubble.”
I could be wrong. Trump of course bragged about being a “big protector” of Israel who’d save the nuclear-armed ethnostate from “total annihilation” before assembling the most rabidly pro-Israel cabinet in American history. But he’s pretty transparently motivated by a desire to shore up evangelical and pro-Israel votes and campaign donations, not some deep-seated moral commitment to the Zionist political project. If unreserved support for Israel became a liability, I don’t think Trump would have any particular scruples about cutting off weapons shipments to save his own skin.
Instead, a Democratic administration led by a longstanding Zionist freak tried its darnedest to out-maneuver their Republican opponents by facilitating the slaughter of an estimated 186,000 people (and counting) through an “extraordinary flow” of weapons shipments and diplomatic cover.
This doesn’t mean that I wish Trump had won in 2020, that I’m particularly optimistic about his next term, or that I don’t think the fears that so many peoples have are unjustified because frankly—they aren’t.
But on the most urgent issue of the past year—the campaign of televised, publicly-funded mass murder directed indiscriminately against a population of 2.3 million colonized people—I think a Trump presidency may well have led to fewer Palestinian and Lebanese deaths. I think the Democrats in opposition would have cynically and self-interestedly promoted the Palestine solidarity movement in an attempt to march militants to the ballot box, and that President Trump, out of equal cynicism and self-interest, would face electoral incentives to institute an arms embargo that Biden didn’t.
II. A catalogue of horrors.
“We must be prepared to wage a long struggle… Things appear to be at low ebb, but actually what’s happening is a period of regroupment, a period in which we step back and learn from the mistakes made during the preceding cycle.”
—George Jackson
I hope it’s clear that I’m by no means saying that Trump was (or is) the “better option,” whatever that means. But for the record, I also don’t think you can reasonably describe the Democrats as “better option” for the simple reason that I don’t think burning alive and starving to death more people than the entire population of the capital of the state of Oregon is morally or politically inconsequential just because they’re Arab, because I’m not a fucking ghoul.
The Trump or Harris campaigns winning are, in fact, both worse.
An authoritarian national chauvinist getting unrestrained political and military power alongside a clique of far-right monstrosities is obviously worse.
A Democratic administration taking office on the back of a “racial reckoning,” engineering a literal genocide for over a year, running a re-election campaign for the shambling, quasi-animate corpse of one of the chief engineers of mass incarceration until his sole remaining neuron blew out on national television, and then getting rewarded with another four years in power would also be obviously worse.
Those disappointed that the pro-cop, pro-genocide candidate won can take heart that the pro-cop, pro-genocide candidate also lost? Because every cloud has a silver lining? And, actually, because every US presidential administration has a propensity to do unimaginable horrors if we let it. I mean… what did you think American global hegemony was built on, rainbows and unicorns and the “rule of law”?
While Democratic and Republican administrations aren’t the same, a lot of the Republican policies that Democrats stoke righteous indignation against are stuff that the Democrats also do: an international network of torture sites, a domestic paramilitary machine that hunts down over a quarter million US residents without valid papers each year, the “steadfast support for Israel’s security [that] has been a cornerstone of American foreign policy for every U.S. Administration since the presidency of Harry S. Truman” (source: the literal government).
That means that looking for justice in presidential platforms means settling for a kind of justice that not only accepts but depends upon capitalist exploitation, mass incarceration, and neocolonial war. I don’t think any “justice” of this sort deserves its name. Even if it gives you Medicare for All, the Workplace Democracy Act, or a Pride parade in Tel Aviv. Settling for such perverted justice is what allowed the President who campaigned upon “most progressive platform of any Democratic nominee in the modern history of the party” to methodically turn the most densely populated region on the planet into a mass grave.
But Biden didn’t dig up that “most progressive platform” from the depths of his old-ass racist heart. The DNC cobbled it together because Biden’s function in 2020 was to defuse the broadest, most militant revolutionary movement in the United States in generations. The tough-on-crime dog-whistling that’d been Biden’s brand for decades wouldn’t help corral an abolitionist proto-insurgency back to the voting booths.
Biden didn’t become a progressive because he was getting soft in his old age. He was forced to act like one because the system was in crisis after high school kids burned down a police station with the support of a majority of Americans.
The bureaucratic machinery of the federal government is not a prize we offer to the most rewarding candidate. It is the enemy, the target, the adversary. The enemy of the Palestinian people over 76 years of uninterrupted American support for Israeli ethnic cleansing since the Nakba. The enemy of the colonized and exploited and invaded peoples of the Americas and the Third World. The enemy of every minimum wage worker coming home to her hungry children in the “richest country in the world.” We don’t get justice from the imperial state, but what concessions we do win are the result of militant social movements.
From this perspective, Trump’s re-election is not a cause to despair, any more than it is a cause to rejoice. It is cause to prepare ourselves. To protect our people, to identify new targets, to elaborate new strategies, to fortify ourselves for the horrors and opportunities to come.
“There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”
Or the say the same thing more plainly:
We keep us safe.
III. Historical protagonism.
“Len says one steady pull more ought to do it.
He says the best way out is always through.”
—Robert Frost, “A Servant to Servants”
We can expect the second Trump administration to immediately attempt mass deportations, abortion restrictions, anti-trans measures, and political repression domestically, as well as support radical settler expansionism in Palestine. The Trump transition team has been very transparent about their desire to do all manner of fucked up shit. If you don’t think these things are particularly desirable, the time to gather friends and make concrete plans for what you, your crew, and your community can do to stop them is actually right now, not when they start rolling out next January. (Especially since all this might be happening while tariffs kneecap the US economy.) Distributing abortion medication or stopping an ICE van doesn’t require any great amount of people or resources. It requires a crew and a plan.
These efforts are likely to get at least token support from the liberal media-party-NGO complex now that the Democrats are in opposition. We should take it. But we should be clear: these things are not the product of one aberrant Republican president. Not his expanded executive power, not his bigotry, not his genocides or war. That he is particularly uncompromising in his application of authoritarian power is a curse. That he is particularly uncouth as he does so is a gift. Because it shows the true face of American state power as it has always been. Because the human catastrophes that are spun by the Democrats as “lesser evils” when they occupy the Oval Office are revealed as the abominations they are.
The historic mistake in the coming years would be to demand a return to decorum, to procedure, to international norms and legitimacy. Quite the opposite. We should not want empire to go on to hide behind the honeyed words of a more polite figurehead in 2028, be it Newsom or Shapiro or Buttigieg. We want its abolition. Trump’s second term will present unique challenges as well as opportunities for creating revolutionary opposition. Building such a movement, the real protagonist in social transformation, is our task regardless of who is in office.
Because the problem is not that the United States occasionally elects leaders who are uncultured or gauche. The problem, in my estimation, is a bipartisan consensus on growing an immense pile of human corpses underneath plumes of white phosphorous and industrial runoff. Among other things.
The politicians and think tanks and talking heads want us to think of politics as something that happens to us, a series of White House press conferences and breaking news stories to which we subsequently our agreement or dissent. But I’m not interested in comparing Trump’s second term to a hypothetical Harris administration or what I think an ideal US president would do. I want to think through what’s coming from the perspective of where I am.
I don’t have status or a fancy title or any particular degree of financial stability. (Though you can take direct action against the latter by becoming a paid subscriber at the link below.) Fundamentally, I’m just some schmuck.
But I do recognize a rich history of community resistance to oppression, exploitation, and empire going back centuries on the land where I live and around the world. I understand that my life might be immeasurably worse today were it not for generations of ordinary people who struggled and fought and won despite also not having status, fancy titles, or any particular degree of financial stability. I’ve seen street kids push back lines of riot cops. I’ve seen high school drop-outs and retirees out-organize multinational corporations. I know I keep leaning on this example but for the love of God I lived through a majority of Americans watching a police station go up in flames and deciding they supported the fire and, unless you’re a precociously literate toddler, so have you.
My perspective is that of social movements, which is to say anyone trying to make things different without having the Official Positions or inter-generational wealth that typically qualifies someone to have meaningful opinions on social issues. My perspective is that of victory, which is to say I want oppressed communities to not just Speak Truth to Power or register their displeasure but to win—to win stability, resources, freedom, self-determination. Food, clothes, and shelter. Tierra y libertad.
No presidential candidate has been prepared to actually grant such things. May the the coming years forge the movement necessary to win them for real.
This post has been syndicated from In Struggle, where it was published under this address.