YESTERDAY evening, former US president Donald Trump, accompanied by a US Secret Service Motorcade, swept up to Fulton county jail and handed himself in over racketeering and conspiracy charges after his attempts to overturn the 2020 election result in the state of Georgia.
Far from any shamefaced contrition over his arrest, Trump displayed all the arrogance and contempt for the process of bourgeois law that has resulted in a 41-count indictment by the Fulton county district attorney that charges Trump and 18 of his co-defendants as having engaged in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Indeed, Trump is revelling in what he calls a ‘witch hunt’ using every opportunity to promote himself as the victim of a giant conspiracy by the ‘elite’ to destroy his political ambitions.
None of the numerous charges brought against Trump over his brazen attempts to subvert the presidential election have dented his support and he now records a massive lead in the race to become the Republican candidate in next year’s presidential election.
The farce that has emerged in the US is the probability that in that election a convicted criminal will be running against the incumbent Democratic president 80-year-old Joe Biden.
In fact, Biden and his family are themselves mired in allegations of corruption over dealing in Ukrainian banks before the right-wing coup in 2014, providing Trump with the golden opportunity to say in an interview, released on Thursday to coincide with his court appearance, ‘Crooked Joe Biden is so bad’, before adding ‘I don’t think he’s going to make it to the gate.’
In the same interview on X (formerly twitter), Trump responded to a question about the possibility of a new Civil War in America saying: ‘There’s a level of passion that I’ve never seen. There’s a level of hatred that I’ve never seen. That’s a bad combination.’
Trump got that right – there is a level of passion amongst the working class in America that is experiencing an increase in interest rates by the Federal Reserve Bank to a record high in an attempt to hold down inflation.
This policy has driven the cost of everything from mortgages, loans and food sky-high.
Interest rate hikes have produced a massive crisis for the once mighty US economy with three banks going bust this year and the Biden administration forced to increase the national debt limit to keep the US from defaulting on its debt.
This crisis has resulted in a huge wave of strike action by workers determined not to be driven into the gutter by a US capitalist system that, despite all protestations to the contrary, is in recession and only kept alive by debt.
Over 323,000 workers – including nurses, actors, screenwriters, hotel cleaners and restaurant servers – took strike action during the first eight months of 2023.
150,000 auto workers are poised for a strike of massive proportions in mid-September, unless a new contract with manufacturers is agreed.
The economic crisis engulfing the US has produced an explosive political crisis in the two main bourgeois parties, the Democrats and the Republicans.
Trump’s appeal is not confined to a fanatical following of right-wing militias.
He has the support of a substantial section of the American ruling class who have decided the geriatric Biden is too weak to carry out a civil war to impose the capitalist crisis on the backs of an increasingly revolutionary working class.
Trump, with his contempt for bourgeois laws, has positioned himself as the candidate to lead an all-out war on the US working class on behalf of the bankers and bosses.
Only the working class is powerful enough to put an end to the political and economic crisis engulfing America, by demanding the trade unions break from the Democrats and build an independent Labour Party.
This Labour Party will not act as a social-democratic electoral rival to the parties of the ruling class, but as the mobiliser of the masses to carry out a socialist revolution, for the working class to take the power and build a planned socialist economy.
For this task a revolutionary party, a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, must be founded and built in the USA without delay. We urge US workers and youth to immediately form a US section of the Fourth international to lead the developing American Socialist revolution!
