This past weekend, cities across the United States hosted protests under the No Kings Day banner. Nearly nine million people were drawn to the protests that have targeted US president Donald Trump specifically and his increasingly authoritarian and antidemocratic second term. But what they hope to accomplish must go beyond simply removing Trump from office.
We’ve all seen those “If Kamala were president, I would be at brunch ” signs. There is no returning to the liberal establishment that gave us Trump in the first place. The decades of deregulation, privatisation, and wage stagnation that hollowed out working-class communities were not Trump’s doing; they were the bipartisan consensus of the neoliberal order he inherited and exploited. This must be clear for those taking to the streets.
It is now blatantly obvious that the first Trump term in no way offered a window into what the second term would bring. I will admit, I felt that much of the preaching from the liberal establishment that the existential threat of a second term was overblown. This time, the forces around Trump were better organised, better equipped and clearer-eyed in their dark agenda than before – from the ICE raids, the invasions, the kidnapping of heads of state. and the Orwellian ‘Board of Peace’.
I have written before about how the 2024 election presented Americans with no good options. Against the backdrop of a genocide, neither candidate presented an alternative vision to US imperialism. Though Trump obviously fooled his MAGA base into thinking he would not intervene militarily in a conflict resembling exactly the war that is happening in Iran right now.
But I would urge my fellow Americans not to give in to the temptation that if Trump had lost the election and Kamala Harris had prevailed, things would be better. ‘Better’ being a relative term, I believe they would have resumed a sense of ‘normalcy’ at least the liberal classes are most comfortable with, where the narrative of Empire is at least dressed in terminology meant to soften its brutality. So instead of Operation Epic Fury, we had Operation Iraqi Freedom. The results are the same, but one allows at least some in the US to argue that the bloody, merciless means justify the ends. And that is at the heart of the difference. Both Harris and Trump would have allowed for the racist undercurrent of US foreign policy to continue. One just says the quiet part out loud.
We can’t know for certain whether or not Harris would have been provoked into the devastating conflict that is happening in Iran right now. We do know that even the Israelis were surprised by the carte blanche they were handed by the Biden administration while Harris was VP, to carry out the genocide in Gaza. She also refused to distance herself from those very policies on the campaign trail. That same administration was also dangerously escalating the conflict in Ukraine. Depending on the administration, American Imperialism may choose different targets. The indiscriminate nature of the violence is the same.
If we return to the domestic front, where contrasts can be drawn more sharply, I would question how well the argument that a Democrat in office would be better holds up under further examination. Barack Obama deported more immigrants than Trump. There was the operation in Libya and targeted drone strikes across the Middle East and Africa. The difference between Democrats and Republicans lies not in policy but in aesthetics. The deployment of Trump’s own private militia echoes the black shirts in fascist Italy. The brutality of the ICE detention centres, resembling concentration camps, is startling for some who have had the good fortune to be untouched by the inhumanity of either party’s foreign policy. ‘How could it happen here?’ is really saying you are fine with it happening elsewhere – in Chile or Serbia, Iraq or Afghanistan. Or in Iran.
Like Zionism, American exceptionalism is a racist ideology built on the delusion that borders, race, or religion can prescribe a group of people’s moral superiority. In some ways, it makes sense that people search for a narrative to explain why such atrocities must be permitted. Trump has shown the American people the true face of what it means to be part of the Empire. The mask is off, and now we must finally look plainly and clearly at our mirror image. And what stares back at us is death and destruction in the name of global capital and the military-industrial complex.
Who knows what will happen in the midterms and beyond. The lack of any meaningful opposition party in the US to its own hegemony means that either party would likely continue down the same path it has since its inception. Even a leading progressive like Bernie Sanders, who likes to use the word Benjamin Netanyahu in place of Israel, insinuates the same sentiment. Remove one problematic player, and we can go back to brunch while the world explodes elsewhere. But the world is a different place now. The empire is ending, and the people of the US must decide what that means as their place shifts from the centre to the peripheries.
What DiEM25 offers is an internationalist vision. One thing the US desperately needs right now. An understanding that domestic policy and US foreign policy go hand in hand. One that doesn’t justify children dying from bombs elsewhere so that a woman in the US can access abortion safely at home. One that sees that both are the same struggle. One that understands that there but for fortune go you or I.
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