Trump’s threat to deport anti-genocide protesters and the bipartisan assault on democratic rights

As the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for president, I denounce Trump’s threat to crush protests against the genocide in Gaza. According to a report in the Washington Post published Monday, Trump told a group of wealthy donors, “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country.” If re-elected, Trump said, he would “set that movement back 25 or 30 years.”

Trump’s pledge to crack down on protesters is part of a massive military-police deployment that he is planning. An article published in Time last month, based on interviews with Trump, outlined a program of wholesale arrests and detentions of immigrants and refugees. 

Time’s Eric Cortellessa wrote, “To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland.” If the National Guard was not able to carry out these mass arrests, “then I’d use [other parts of] the military,” Trump said.

The article continued, “When I ask if that means he would override the Posse Comitatus Act—an 1878 law that prohibits the use of military force on civilians—Trump seems unmoved by the weight of the statute. ‘Well, these aren’t civilians,’ he says.”

What Trump is speaking about is a program of martial law. In the same interview, Trump refers to sending National Guard troops into major US cities to restore “law and order.” They would in fact be used to crush all opposition to the policies of the corporate and financial elite.

Trump’s fascistic and authoritarian agenda has the support of significant sections of the financial oligarchy, including figures like Blackstone CEO Steve Schwartzman (net worth $38.3 billion). A recent report in the Washington Post notes that Trump is receiving tens of millions in donations from individual donors. 

The entire political establishment is careening violently to the right. In the 2024 elections, Biden and the Democrats do not represent a “lesser evil” in relation to Trump.

First, Trump’s statements are in continuity with the actual policy of the Biden administration, which has overseen the nationwide crackdown on protests against the genocide, including the arrest of more than 3,000 protesters, mainly students.

Since the beginning of the Biden administration, the Democrats have worked to rehabilitate a “strong Republican Party,” as Biden called for three days after the January 6 coup. The Democrats are now operating in a coalition government with Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, a key Trump ally. 

The political basis for this alignment is support for the US-NATO war against Russia over Ukraine, which is the principal political priority of the Democratic Party. Democrats and Republicans joined hands earlier this year to pass a record military budget, followed by a supplementary bill including $61 billion for the war against Russia and $17 billion for the genocide in Gaza.

Over the past two weeks, Biden has called for Congress to pass anti-immigrant legislation that includes a massive expansion of border police and presidential authority to shut down the ports of entry entirely.

Third, the Democrats’ opposition to Trump has always been centered not on his threat to democratic rights, but on differences over foreign policy. In its conflict with Trump, the Democrats have appealed to the military and intelligence agencies to serve as the arbiter of American politics.

In a commencement speech at West Point this weekend, Biden presented the military as the guarantor of democracy. “The defenders of freedom, champions of liberty, guardians of American democracy. You must keep us free at this time, like none before.”

Biden declared that the military had to be prepared for a vast escalation of global war. “There’s never been a time in history when we’ve asked our military to do so many many different things in so many different places around the world, all at the same time,” he said. 

In particular, the White House is overseeing a vast escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia, including preparations for Ukraine to use US weapons to target Russian territory and the direct intervention of NATO troops, even at the risk of a nuclear exchange. The genocide in Gaza is part of this global war, including the developing conflict with China.

World war is incompatible with democratic forms of rule. While Biden implies that the military is the guarantor of democracy against Trump, the Democrats could just as well oversee a direct intervention of the military into domestic politics to enforce the war policy of the ruling class. 

Most importantly, the basic and urgent task is the independent intervention of the working class. The defense of democratic rights and opposition to fascism and authoritarianism requires the development of a movement of the working class, in the US and internationally, against the capitalist system. 

Trotsky once compared democracy to “a system of safety switches and circuit breakers for the protection against currents overloaded by the national or social struggle… Under the impact of class and international contradictions that are too highly charged, the safety switches of democracy either burn out or explode. That is what the short circuit of dictatorship represents.”

The contradictions short-circuiting the safety switches of democracy are global war and the extreme growth of social inequality.

The defense and indeed vast expansion of democratic rights requires a frontal assault on the wealth and power of the capitalist oligarchs. The wealth of the billionaires must be expropriated and the gigantic corporations must be transformed, without compensation to the large shareholders, into publicly controlled utilities, run on the basis of social need, not private profit. 

The anti-democratic institutions and repressive organs of the capitalist state (the professional military, police and intelligence agencies) must be abolished and replaced by organizations of workers’ control and power, to establish a democratic and planned economy on a world scale.

The growing struggles of workers throughout the world is the objective basis for the development of a mass, international movement for socialism. The transformation of this objective movement into a conscious struggle for power requires the development in the working class of a mass international socialist movement. 

This is the aim of the Socialist Equality Party election campaign.