Trump. Must. Go.

There’s no other way

by ANDREW DOBBS

We are now only a few days — hours really — until a man despised and opposed by the overwhelming of U.S. adults and youth is sworn in as president of the United States.

Donald Trump’s unthinkable victory has led to an unprecedented opposition to his victory. Protests are likely in Washington, D.C. and around the country — student walkouts, strikes, civil disobedience and other disruptions.

Yet despite this opposition and the clear grounds for rejecting the legitimacy of his election — if not on constitutional grounds, then on the grounds of the very values the constitution claims to be rooted in — the public and political class have assumed that the best we can hope for is an electoral victory for the Democratic Party in four years, and that we should act as though the liberal political order is still a valid tool for resisting Trump, not directly culpable for his ascension.

These messages are reactionary, wrong and destructive of the very force that will bring Trump’s reign to an end one way or the other. The only realistic and legitimate demand is his immediate removal, and the immediate removal of all his allies and enablers from power.

To sum it up in a hashtag — as we must nowadays — the demand needs to be #TrumpMustGo.

I cannot overstate the power and importance of this demand and slogan. The government exists to resolve conflicts within the ruling class and to keep all other classes down, especially the working class.

Wealth has concentrated into fewer and fewer hands in recent years, and thus the ruling class has gotten smaller and smaller. At the same time we have seen the system’s ability to produce ever-increasing levels of surplus and profit slow down, and so divisions within the ruling class have become dangerously inefficient for them — they threaten the future of the profit system altogether.

Unity of the ruling class becomes increasingly possible and necessary, and while to this point its various factions have contended with one another by mobilizing different parts of the working class with electoral promises and politics, now their tasks at hand are totally anathema to working people at large.

Their continued power and wealth demands a unitary elite political position that opposes liberal democracy.

This fascist necessity is upon us now, of course, and there is now a single ruling-class political demand — act as if things are normal. Everyone from Sen. Elizabeth Warren to the Ku Klux Klan demanded that we “give Trump a chance,” and Pres. Barack Obama helped ease his “peaceful” transition. “Peaceful” insofar as we ignore the spike in hate crimes since Trump’s election.

Mainstream liberals tell us that the solutions are writing to our members of Congress, hoping for impeachment if things get bad enough and winning elections in two or four years. But proponents of conventional means of resistance forget that Trump is wildly popular in the party in charge of Congress and could easily use executive power and the Justice Department to suppress voters enough to actually rig elections.

The message from every corner of the ruling class — from the most politely “progressive” to the most stomach-churningly fascist — is that we must resign ourselves to Trump’s rule.

This unified ruling-class position, however, begs for a unified position from the classes Trump’s regime leaves out of power. This position must arise from material interests, and at this point there is no interest more acute than the need to end threats to individual survival and security for members of oppressed communities.