Donald Trump’s speech at his inauguration as US president on Monday did not include a number of the crucial measures he insisted would be enacted on Day One.
Many were expecting the announcement of an immediate tariff war on China, Canada, Mexico and every other country on the planet.
None were announced during his speech. Instead, Trump told reporters in the White House after the ceremony that he was ‘thinking’ about introducing 25% US tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada as soon as 1st February.
This is a sharp change in tone from all the ranting and pledges that from the first day of his presidency Trump would impose 60% tariffs on Chinese imports and at least 20% on the rest of the world.
In a speech crammed with fantastic delusional aspirations – including restoring America as ‘history’s greatest civilisation’ and colonising Mars – there was precious little of the detail that Trump had proclaimed in the run up to assuming the mantle of president.
He did immediately sign a memorandum on inflation and multiple orders aimed at lowering energy prices in the US but, during a press conference on Monday morning, his advisors refused to outline the steps he would take to bring down the rocketing cost of living for American workers.
On tariffs, all Trump issued was a broad memorandum directing US agencies to examine trade policies with nations like China, but stopped short of issuing direct increases.
It was obvious that a trade war on the rest of the world would rebound dramatically on the US working and middle classes as tariff increases were passed on in the form of higher prices for the imported goods both industry and consumers rely on.
The fantasy of building a ‘fortress America’ waging economic war on all its capitalist rivals along with China and Russia brought the support of the US ruling class – as did the prospect of invading Greenland, Mexico and Canada for colonial exploitation as part of a military strategy to cement the US as the ‘greatest civilisation’ in the world.
However, Trump is running headlong into the reality that US capitalism is in a massive historic crisis – a crisis that is engulfing the entire capitalist world.
If Trump believes that as the strongest capitalist nation the US can be rescued by economic and military war on the rest of the world without revolutionary consequences both in the US and abroad, then he is even more deluded than previously thought.
The idea that the US is somehow an economic powerhouse waiting to be unleashed by Trump, tearing up rules, rounding up and expelling millions of migrant workers, while handing billions in tax cuts to the billionaires, is sheer fantasy.
An article in The Telegraph yesterday, while broadly supporting Trump as a necessary disrupter to the old regimes that had gone before, pointed out: ‘The irony is that America’s situation is more serious than Trump’s critics realise. The point is not so much that America risks going backwards but rather that it threatens to collapse like a house of cards,’ adding: ‘It is a decaying superpower that has no choice but to radically alter the status quo.’
Altering the status quo for Trump and the US ruling class is the necessity to take on and inflict the huge economic crisis on the backs of workers and youth.
A trade war against the rest of the world must be accompanied by a class war at home to force the powerful American working class and its trade unions to accept extreme poverty and unemployment.
The US ruling class are banking on Trump to make good his pledge to be a dictator ‘from day one’ to crush all resistance in order to keep a decaying US capitalist system from collapsing.
The truth is that capitalism is in its greatest crisis ever, its death agony, and the only solution for the working class in the US, Britain and Europe is to resolve this crisis by putting an end to capitalism with the victory of the world socialist revolution.
Now is the time to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to provide the leadership required to smash capitalism and go forward to World Socialism.