PRESIDENT Trump’s racist comments, made while speaking privately to US lawmakers in the Oval Office on Thursday, in fact show a bourgeois leader who is frightened of the masses of the world and actually wants to hide away from them in his ‘Fortress America’, complete with its high walls and electronic fences.
Trump wondered why the United States would want to have immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African nations, referring to some as ‘shithole countries’, and suggested America should welcome more people from nations like Norway instead.
In fact, the emergence of Trump with his ‘America First’ and ‘keep-them-out’ policies completes the evolution of the US bourgeoise, who at one time ‘welcomed the huddled masses of the planet’, before developing into a major imperialist power, and then post-1945 into the self-declared world’s policeman, only to now attempt to retreat into isolation under the banner of ‘America First’ and keeping the world at bay with batteries of nuclear weapons. Trump is the opposite of the spirit of the American revolution.
For all the appearances of bellicose posing, he represents a parasitic US ruling class that is desperate to secure untold riches through massive tax cuts and the superexploitation of the US working class, while seeking to further the myth that it is only Donald Trump that stands between the US and disaster at the hands of the hundreds of millions of workers of the ‘shithole countries’ of the world.
This despair is the opposite of the revolutionary spirit of the American revolution. It is the US ruling class getting on its knees. The early US colonists would not put up with being a ‘shithole’ colony of England, and insisted and demanded ‘no taxation without representation’ and fought a revolutionary war to achieve it.
Their Declaration of Independence bravely declared, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.’
Their allies in the fight against the English ruling class, which returned to the United States to burn down the White House in 1814, were the revolutionary people of Haiti who, under the leadership of the ‘Black Jacobin’, Toussaint L’Ouverture, defeated French and English armies to found their revolutionary state of Haiti.
The Statue of Liberty, a gift by the French people to the United States, dedicated in 1886, declared in its inscription, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.’
This was the American bourgeoisie in its great revolutionary period. They welcomed the ‘huddled masses’, true, to superexploit them, but they definitely welcomed them. Trump fears them! In fact, the US ruling class did not break easily with-anti-imperialism. As late as 1956, the US government opposed the UK-French-Israeli assault in Egypt and helped to halt it.
Now 62 years later, and with the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghan war disasters under its belt, and facing new challenges from the EU and from the working people of the world and the USA itself, the US ruling class is retreating to fortress America. Instead of welcoming the world’s huddled masses it now sends them to Guantanamo Bay or threatens them with nuclear annihilation.
In fact, Africa, Asia and the Middle East are all undergoing revolutionary upheavals. Tunisia is celebrating its 2011 revolution with another mass revolutionary uprising that is now taking place. The people of Zimbabwe and South Africa have got rid of the Mugabe and Zuma stooge regimes.
The Palestinian people are ready to liberate Jerusalem through revolution and the Syrian people have taken back their whole country! No wonder Trump wants to keep the masses well away from the USA.
He will be rewarded for his concern by the masses of the world, led by the international working class, leading the world socialist revolution to smash capitalism and imperialism. No doubt the US working class will enter into this struggle with great vigour. That the US will not be the last capitalist redoubt to fall is absolutely certain.