The State of the Resistance in Trump’s America 

Ashley Smith reviews the state of the American resistance against Trump and argues that only mass working-class struggle and a new workers’ party, not reliance on Democrats, can defeat him and the system that produced him. 

Trump’s relentless attacks have produced mass popular resistance from below in the US and opposition by states internationally. These have delivered two devastating defeats. The people of Minneapolis rose and forced him to retreat from his mass deployment of ICE in cities across the country. And Iran’s asymmetric war in response to Trump’s unprovoked blitzkrieg has thrown his government, the Middle East, and the world economy into crisis.

As a result, Trump is a wounded beast. That, however, makes him even more dangerous. Now more than ever, workers and the oppressed in the US must build the mass popular resistance against his regime and the system that spawned him.  

Racialised Class War at Home and Predatory Empire Abroad

Trump has imposed extreme neoliberalism through his One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBBA) and Musk’s Department of Government Effeciency (DOGE). He’s gutted whole departments like education, cut taxes for the rich, abolished regulations, revoked unions’ rights for federal workers, and decimated social programs. 

To deflect attention from this unabashed class war, he has scapegoated immigrants, the trans and queer community, and people of colour, especially Black people. His main line of attack has been on migrants. 

He has ploughed $75 billion into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over his term, giving it an annual budget of nearly $28 billion, roughly the size of Canada’s annual defence spending. He has hired thousands of new ICE and Border Patrol agents to arrest and deport undocumented workers. 

His rule through executive orders has put an already undemocratic constitutional order in jeopardy. At times, his regime seems little more than a smash and grab operation to enrich his family and cronies. He alone has raked in $1.4 billion in just his first year in office.

Abroad, Trump has abandoned Washington’s grand strategy of superintending global capitalism. He replaced free trade with protectionism, launching a tariff war against all the world’s states. He downgraded traditional alliance structures like NATO, opting for a transactional relationship with both friends and foes. 

To re-impose US domination, Trump has adopted a strategy of predatory imperialism, the so-called ‘Donroe Doctrine’. He aims to carve out a sphere of influence in Latin America and exclude Washington’s rivals, all but conceding similar spheres to China and Russia. 

Such an imperial carve-up will not bring peace. Remember, the last epoch of several great powers competing for spheres of influence ended in two world wars. Thus, Trump’s coup in Venezuela and war on Iran are a taste of potentially far worse things to come. 

The Capitalist Establishment Capitulates

The capital class has taken a transactional posture toward Trump. They are eager to profit off his domestic class war and donate to his various vanity projects, like his gaudy “Arc de Trump”, to lobby for their interests and to secure carveouts from his tariffs. 

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has offered little to no resistance. It adopted James Carville’s possum strategy of literally doing nothing while Trump discredits himself in the eyes of the electorate. The Democrats hope to reap the benefits and win the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential election. 

The federal bureaucracy did nothing as whole sections of the state were gutted. The courts initially let him get away with his semi-constitutional rule. Elite universities practised preemptive capitulation and compliance, censoring faculty and students, abolishing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and adapting to deep cuts in federal funding. 

The establishment only started to oppose Trump after the rise of the mass popular resistance. Courts then ruled against Trump his violation of immigrant rights and unconstitutional bypassing of Congress in imposing tariffs. The Democrats began to fight Trump on his own undemocratic terms, matching his gerrymandering of congressional districts with a similar campaign of their own. 

Mass Popular Resistance

The resistance has emerged from below, not above. Trump’s racialised class war and predatory imperialism have driven the majority of the population to oppose him. Nearly 60 per cent disapprove of his government, including his previously popular economic and immigration policies. 

That shift has triggered a mass popular protest across the country. It has three main expressions. First and foremost, the resistance exploded in big cities against Trump’s deployment of ICE. In preparation for this expected assault, immigrant rights organisers built emergency response networks in almost every city to track ICE, mobilise against its deployment, and build mass protests to defend anyone under attack. 

Everyone bought whistles and set up signal chats to alert their co-workers and neighbours of ICE patrols and raids. So, when Trump deployed his legions of goons, a multiracial working class resistance rose everywhere from LA to Chicago and, most importantly, Minneapolis. Even in tiny Burlington, Vermont, activists staged mass rallies and direct actions to defend migrants. 

No Kings and May Day 

The second expression of the resistance is Indivisible. Two Democratic Party activists, Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, built this organisation during the first Trump administration, put it on ice during the Biden administration, and resuscitated it over the last two years. 

Indivisible has spearheaded the three “No Kings” marches over the last two years. These have been the largest single days of protest in US history, with millions of people taking to the streets in cities across the country. 

Like its founders, the leaders of Indivisible’s 2,500 chapters are largely Democratic Party loyalists. As a result, they restrict their demands to ones against Trump alone, do not include opposition to bipartisan policies like the genocide in Gaza, and offer no larger vision of social transformation.

They disproportionately promote Democratic Party politicians as speakers and attract mainly older, whiter, and better off people to their marches. They aim to funnel these attendees into campaigns for Democrats in 2026 and 2028. 

The third and perhaps most significant expression of the resistance is the May Day Strong coalition. It was spearheaded by the Chicago Teachers Union, which has led militant strikes for economic and social justice demands. 

May Day Strong has been endorsed by the major unions as well as immigrant rights organisations, left wing NGOs, and Indivisible. It has called for mass union-led protests each of the last two May Days. 

This May Day, it adopted the slogan of the Minneapolis mass strike, “No Work! No School! No Shopping!” and paired it with another, “Workers over Billionaires!” These marches brought out the country’s unionised and multiracial working class. In some places, like Madison and North Carolina, teachers and other workers shut down their workplaces. 

The stated aim of many in and around May Day Strong is a general strike against the Trump administration, which the UAW has already called for in 2028. To prepare for this, the coalition has organised Solidarity Schools for unions to make them strike ready. 

Minneapolis Defeats Trump

The domestic resistance and international opposition to Trump have dealt him two pivotal defeats. The first at the hands of the multiracial working class of Minneapolis, a city with a militant history of everything from union strikes to the George Floyd Uprising and indigenous struggles. 

When Trump deployed thousands of ICE agents, the whole city rose up. Organised in community-based emergency response networks, working class people confronted ICE in defence of their immigrant neighbours. Migrant workers resisted by refusing to work, hampering industries that depend on their labour.

After ICE agents murdered Rene Good and Alex Pretti, the working class shut down the entire city in mass protests and strikes. Those disruptive actions drove corporations and politicians to call on Trump to withdraw ICE, which he soon did. 

He fired the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, as well as the Commander-at-Large of the Border Patrol, Gregory Bovino, a wannabe Nazi and now a declared presidential candidate. Trump replaced them with his “Border Czar” Tom Homan, who has led a retreat to the tactics he used as Obama’s head of ICE – surveillance, targeted arrest, incarceration in Trump’s new concentration camps, and mass deportation. 

The Iranian Regime Strikes Back

Trump suffered an even more humiliating defeat at the hands of the Iranian regime. Flush with the success of his coup in Venezuela, he delusionally thought he could do the same in Tehran. But Iran is not Venezuela. 

It is a battle-tested state that has crushed every wave of popular resistance, most recently this January, when it massacred thousands of its own people. It is also a regional imperialist that worked with its ally Russia to drown the Syrian Revolution in blood. 

After Trump launched his war, Iran attacked US bases and its regional allies. It shut down the Strait of Hormuz, blocking shipment of oil, natural gas, petrochemicals, and fertilisers, thereby threatening the world economy.

Faced with geopolitical and economic disaster, Trump agreed to a ceasefire and seems to have cut a deal with Iran that achieves none of his war aims. The best outcome he can currently hope for is Iran’s reopening of the Strait of Hormuz – a restoration of the same situation the region was in before. 

Even if this deal holds, it will not undo the damage done to Trump. Over 60 per cent of the population turned against him on this war. Right wing leaders like antisemite Tucker Carlson attacked him for launching it at the behest of Israel. Even his MAGA base now complains about inflation and Trump’s broken promise of never launching a forever war. 

Trump Cornered and Dangerous

As a result, the Trump administration, already reeling from the horrific Epstein scandal, has been thrown into its worst crisis yet. If free and fair elections are held in November, the Republican Party could lose not only the House of Representatives but also the Senate. Then the Democrats would impeach Trump, block any legislation, and tie his administration down in endless hearings.

Fearing this result, Trump is trying to rig the midterms. He ordered Republicans to gerrymander their state districts to guarantee victory for their candidates. The Supreme Court gave ammunition for this project when it overruled Louisiana’s creation of a new district recently won by a Black Democrat. 

In doing so, it gutted the Voting Rights Act. Immediately, Republicans moved to create white majority districts in several states to ensure that their MAGA candidates would defeat Black Democrats. Even worse, Steve Bannon, among others, has called for Trump to deploy ICE agents at the polls to deter Blacks and Latinos from voting. 

Despite all this, the GOP could still lose the midterms. Trump would then face a choice: fight or flight. He’s laid the foundations for both. On the one hand, he is yet again questioning the integrity of US elections, stirring his followers to prepare another January 6-style putsch. 

On the other hand, despite court rulings against him, he still wants to cut a deal with the Justice Department for a $1.8 billion slush fund to pay off his convicted minions and grant him and his family immunity from investigation and prosecution for their unprecedented graft and tax evasion. Either way, Trump will not go quietly into the night as a senile lame duck. 

Like Israel’s Netanyahu, he faces an existential fight to stay in power and out of jail. So, he will become more authoritarian, rule by executive decree, and throw red meat to his MAGA minions, giving them the bread of bigotry and the circus of UFC bloodsports on the lawn of the White House. 

Whither the Resistance?

This situation will open up a strategic debate in the resistance. The vast bulk of both the leadership and rank and file of the movement will focus on electing Democrats in the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential elections. 

That’s Indivisible’s whole strategy. May Day Strong’s union officials, NGO bureaucracy, and movement leaders will also tend in that direction. In a sign of this, the slogan of the coalition’s recent national conference was “All Roads Lead to November.”

But, truth be told, the Democrats will not stop Trump and the new right. This self-declared capitalist party is tightly controlled by corporate donors and offers no program to address the grievances of workers and the oppressed, but Biden’s imperialist Keynesianism. 

In fact, the party’s failure to address the grievances of the vast majority paved the way for Trump to win the presidency twice. Their return to power will only open the door for a new incarnation of the authoritarian nationalist right. 

The left of the party, represented by Bernie Sanders and AOC, is trapped, loyal to the establishment, and pulled to the right in practice, whatever their left wing rhetoric and doomed legislative initiatives. Without a party of their own, they are inevitably forced to toe the establishment’s line. 

Thus, the Democratic Party is a strategic dead end for the resistance, and almost everyone knows it, despite the fact that a majority will vote for it. In fact, at 59 per cent, the Democrats have a higher disapproval rating than the Republicans. 

Regardless of the outcome of the midterms, Trump will not relent. He will rule by executive decree and escalate attacks at home and abroad, forcing people to fight back. In this situation, the left must argue for the resistance to rely on itself, build more militant mass protests and strikes, fight for positive reforms like May Day Strong’s “Real Affordability Agenda,” and build a new workers’ party to fight for a political and social revolution.