Resist the racist system that spawned Trump

Donald Trump

Less than a week after his victory, Donald Trump was busy stuffing his cabinet with far right and racist conspiracy theorists. His latest appointment—Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff—believes a “white genocide” is taking place.

He is one of the far right contributors to Project 2025, a 922-page plan for Trump’s second term. It proposes a radical restructuring of the federal government’s apparatus to serve Trump’s right wing agenda.

This includes mass deportations of millions of people, using the armed forces against protesters and clamping down on free speech in schools. Trump was careful to deny that he knew about the plan, but is now appointing key supporters of it.

His presidency represents a qualitative shift to the right. But Trump is not, as liberals like to tell themselves, an aberration or exception—he is a product of a system dripping from head to toe in racism.

Trump is part of the global rise of the far right and, just like in Britain, France and Germany, the “centre” is fuelling that rise. 

Mainstream politicians push racism against migrants and Muslims and open the door to the far right. They then concede to the far right who demand to go further—and this process pulls politics further rightwards. Very quickly, far right and racist forces are setting the agenda.

The Democratic Party laid the ground for Trump’s return through neoliberal policies that failed working class people and by perpetuating racist scapegoating.

When Trump supporters invaded the Capitol in January 2021, then president-elect Joe Biden called it an “assault on the citadel of liberty”. But United States institutions are far from citadels of liberty. The US is a world leader in putting people in prison—it incarcerates four times as many black people as white people.

Biden kept open detention centres for people trying to cross the southern border with Mexico, including centres for detaining unaccompanied children.

It’s a similar story in Britain where Labour home secretary Yvette Cooper has pledged to deport 14,500 migrants. She has expanded hated detention centres, including reopening Campsfield House in Oxfordshire which was shut down in 2018.

Labour’s scapegoating of refugees, migrants and Muslims boosts the far right Reform UK party and supporters of Nazi Tommy Robinson. It gives credence to the idea that immigration is a “problem”.

In Germany, the ruling coalition has now collapsed. Here too, mainstream parties embraced racism and normalised the far right’s fantasies of mass deportations.

The coalition government, led by the Labour-type SPD, ramped up border controls and increasingly detained migrants in holding pens in airports. And Friedrich Merz of the conservative CDU, who will likely be part of the next government, called for an end to refugee admissions from Syria and Afghanistan. 

This is a gift for the fascists of the Alternative for Germany (AfD)—as it can claim it is setting the agenda, and it is the only force “tough” enough actually to stop migrants.

Racist border policies kill people and normalise anti-migrant ideas in society, which helps far right figures like Trump to grow. We need an international movement that can beat back the far right and all the racist politicians and their system.