By Larry Holmes
February 18, 2025

The writer is Workers World Party’s First Secretary.

The plans that Trump and his inner circle of billionaires and extreme-right reactionaries have for saving U.S. imperialism’s world domination and the capitalist system will not work. They will blow up in Trump’s face and split the ruling alliance that he has patched together, probably sooner rather than later.

Trump and his people seem to realize that U.S. imperialism can no longer maintain the global hegemony that it has held since the end of World War II – and more particularly – since the collapse of the Soviet Union nearly 35 years ago. So, for the moment, they have abandoned the alliances and norms that have been the rules and pillars of their world order for the last 80 years.

Trump’s imperialism is, in a sense, a revival of 19th century “manifest destiny.” This is a throwback to a time when the U.S. ruling class maintained that its number one priority was to rule through invasions and occupations over everything between what is now Alaska to the southernmost tip of Chile, including the Caribbean, as well as a wide swath of the Pacific Ocean. Trump has abandoned all pretense of U.S. imperialism being motivated by spreading democracy in favor of an in-your-face “we will wage economic and military war to steal what we want” posture.

This new strategy is to counter what most of the U.S. ruling class considers to be an existential threat. That’s the coming into being of a multipolar world — as differentiated from a U.S.-dominated unipolar world — with China at the center of a rival world order in a complex alliance with much of the Global South, along with Russia.

Class war at home

And then there’s Trump’s dramatic escalation of the war against the workers and oppressed in this country. Trump’s actions over the past month have created a political crisis in the U.S. that, even in its early stage, is without precedent. This much can be said: This crisis is going to get much bigger, and this crisis is symptomatic of a more severe phase of end-stage capitalism.

Trump’s extreme and desperate measures mean that the magnitude of the crisis is such that it is impossible for the ruling class to rule in the old way. Nothing that is reported in the capitalist media about the fight over Trump’s executive orders and his measures to take over and reshape the federal government will illuminate what this is all about. It is about the class struggle and how to open a big assault on the working class and prevent the working class from rebelling against it.

To the sections of the ruling class that remain tied to the Democratic Party, what the Trump regime is doing is either illegal, unconstitutional or an attack on democracy. The Democrats’ opposition to Trump’s actions is based on their view of self-serving bourgeois democracy. Their lawyers are taking Trump and his forces to court. Soon they will be having hearings and doing anything that they can out of fear of the loss of power — but also to circumvent the working class and prevent it from turning this into a class struggle, an anti-capitalist struggle.

In sharp distinction, our view and response to the crisis should be exposing and opposing its class character.

Among the distinguishing features of Trump’s program to save U.S. imperialism as well as the capitalist system itself is the launching of a white supremacist counterrevolution. This is the context of the war against migrant workers, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI),  Black History Month, trans people, women, public education, federal workers, science and anything else remotely progressive.

Workers not billionaires!

Even compared to all of this, the most distinguishing feature of the Trump regime — and this speaks directly to what the fight-back strategy must be — is the role of billionaires, the superrichest and most powerful people in the capitalist class who comprise such a tiny percentage of the population that they are statistically invisible.

It is customary in the norms of bourgeois rule to make some attempt, however shallow and transparent, to conceal the complete control that the superrich capitalists have over the government. Trump has tossed this norm overboard.

Trump’s government, including most cabinet members, is composed of billionaires, and the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, who has an open affinity to neofascists here and around the world. He is directly in charge of reorganizing the federal government.

We should not be dismissive of this crisis or act as though it does not affect the workers and the struggle. We would be wise to analyze it from a class perspective.

The Trump forces’ goal is to centralize power in his hands and strengthen the state repressive apparatus. But most importantly, the goal is to cut social programs

in order to pay for huge tax breaks for the superrich and to systematically eliminate any rules, regulations or checks and balances that get in the way of billionaires doing whatever they want.

These developments will only make the billionaires more hated by the people, and they are already very hated.

Fighting the billionaires is implicitly exposing and fighting the capitalist system. There is a palpable desire among many to open a fight against the superrich. The most astute forces in the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist movement can play a crucial role in bringing this about. It would help to illuminate all of what is happening, what it is really about – and that’s the class struggle. Ultimately, nothing can be a substitute for the working class awakening and entering the struggle against the capitalists and their system in a decisive way. Part of the preparation for that inevitability is the launching of a sharp struggle against the billionaires.

Undoubtedly, the opening phase of the struggle will be defensive struggles, defending migrant workers, defending trans people, defending people of color and defending the Palestinian people, etc. The importance of these struggles cannot be overemphasized. 

Still, we cannot confine our efforts exclusively to defensive struggles. The struggle against Trump — which is a struggle against the dictatorship of the billionaire class as well as a struggle against the danger of fascism — must be forward looking, anticipating where the struggle is going, where it must go and where we want it to go. That is in the direction of a class struggle that is explicitly against the capitalist system and its rulers.

It is time to open up a struggle against billionaire rule, a struggle that is not merely esoteric or rhetorical but tied to the class struggle of the workers and the oppressed in this country and everywhere. We need to begin organizing protests and mass mobilizations in front of the offices and homes of billionaires, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as others. Our efforts must be linked with the struggles of Amazon workers, Whole Foods workers, Tesla workers and government workers, etc.

There are approximately 800 billionaires in the U.S. with a combined wealth of nearly $70 trillion. It’s time to demand that their wealth be expropriated and made available for the needs of the working class, especially the poorest.

In our arsenal there should be signs with slogans like: “Deport billionaires, not migrant workers!” or “End U.S. billionaires, end genocide in Gaza!” or  “Gaza belongs to Palestine, not billionaires!” Other slogans might be: “Abolish Trump, Musk and all the billionaires, not health care!” “No more wars for billionaires’ profits!” “Bust billionaires, not unions!” and “ $25 minimum wage paid for by the billionaires!”

More possibilities could be “Target billionaires, not transgender people!” “Disabled people, not billionaires!” and “Workers, not Trump and the billionaires!” The simple “Workers not billionaires,” which is already becoming popular, may be the most direct and politically clear slogan. It may very well be the theme of the struggle versus the billionaires.

Rising to the occasion is not in question; the questions are: Who? How? And when will we get started?