What can they do about Trump?

Will he pardon himself?

 "We still have some reasonable people here. Some are just a little too quiet".

Sen Joe Manchin, West Virginia  Democrat

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

Following Peggy Noonan these past 6 months or so has been interesting. Early on, recognizing the Predator in Chief for the buffoon that he is she called on the body politic, her class, to rally round the man, help him out. Like other bourgeois strategists she hoped Trump could be reined in, perhaps he would learn. She has had a hard 6 months of transition and uncertainty and now: "Republicans on the hill need a popular president with the quasi-mystical clout presidential popularity brings. Mr. Trump does not have it.”  she writes in her WSJ column this weekend*

Noonan says of Trump, “He is a man alone, independent and ungoverned. He freelances not because circumstances dictate it but because he is by nature a freelancer. He doesn’t want to ne enmeshed in an institution, he doesn’t want to have to bolster and defend it and see to its life. He wants to preserve his freedom to tweet, to pop off, to play this way or that.”

Oh my, it’s come to this.  But what can they do?  It’s hard to imagine Trump lasting four years, capitalism can’t abide by it surely. But what of the virus he’s implanted in to their precious state machine, the unqualified, the sycophants, the nepotism? Not the “Best and the Brightest” by any means from the bourgeois point of view.  “Baseline competence” will matter at some point writes Noonan, “But if the president continues to show he doesn’t have the toolbox for this job, he’s going to go from not gaining support, which is where he’s at now, to losing support. He’s not magic and they’re not stupid”

The health bill is dead. Much praise is being doled out to the women that halted it in Congress. But it is the fear of the working class that halts it. It is the fear of the working class, of social protest and upheaval that is behind it. They have seen and felt the anger at the town hall meetings, in the streets, in the occupations of politician’s offices and protests against austerity throughout the country.  They don’t need stuff like that to intensify and  come on the heels of the BLM movement and the war at Standing Rock. Their greatest fear is the linking up of these developments in to a more centralized national movement.

Both bourgeois parties in the US are in crisis, are more irrelevant as each day passes. Noonan’s argument that “Democratic presidential hopefuls, will be campaigning two years from now on single payer, whatever happens to this bill” is a good bet but the assault on the working class will continue, US capitalism is driven by the laws of the system to take back all we have won in the past.  Who they may be is anyone’s guess, the dashing former San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, or the fraud Bernie Sanders? Who knows other than it will not be Hillary Clinton.

This won’t change the continued decline and fragmentation of the twin parties of capitalism that have dominated political life in the US for over a century.  That the present Democratic and Republican parties are consumed over health care legislation and unable to pass any due to a real fear of social protests says something about the absence of any real alternative politically.

Trump has accomplished nothing of any substance. His promise of a massive infrastructure investment has, as the Financial Times points out, ”…been punted off in to the indefinite future.”  

Where is the Green Party at such a favorable moment in time? It cannot escape its irrelevance, the strong petite bourgeois influence and leadership within the party and its undemocratic structure. It is not taken seriously by working class people and why should it be?

The trade union leadership at the highest levels sits atop a potentially powerful organization ensuring that no real threat to the status quo arises from within their increasingly alienated and angry ranks.  The relationship they have built with the 1% based on labor peace must be maintained at all costs for the alternative, a militant working class and trade union movement can only lead to chaos as they see it.

The movement against the capitalist offensive in the US will not be a passive one, it will be confused and violent as the US bourgeois uses their heavily armed state apparatus to put down resistance. Organized labor will not be able to stand outside of these struggles but will also be consumed by them.

Peggy Noonan is in for a many more surprises including the growing working class resistance at all levels. We’ll see just how nasty her column can be then.

 * Trump, ObamaCare and the Art of the Fail  WSJ 7-22-17