In his second term, President Donald Trump’s overriding aim thus far appears to be a power grab for himself, on behalf of all billionaires, with devastating consequences for the entire working class.

Trump seemingly wants to surpass Ronald Reagan, who famously fired all members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) when they went on strike in 1981—thus giving a green light for corporations to likewise fire striking workers and permanently replace them with strikebreakers.

Many a union was destroyed in this manner during the 1980s and 1990s. Reagan thereby ushered in an era of union busting that strangles the U.S. labor movement to this day.

Reagan’s union busting was also a key component of what has since become known as neoliberalism: a bipartisan agenda that combines austerity and slashing workplace rights for the working class with the limitless enrichment of the corporate class, through privatization and tax cuts.

From its beginning, the neoliberal project has been embraced by both major corporate parties, which explains why even today the Democrats are unwilling and unable to challenge even the worst Republican Party excesses. The Democrats have been equal partners in the ruling-class assault on workers’ wages and working conditions, while vastly increasing the fortunes of the wealthiest 1 percent of the population.

It must also be remembered that Joe Biden launched the wave of police violence against thousands of peaceful pro-Palestine campus protesters across the U.S. a year ago—which has now ballooned into a full-scale crackdown on free speech, including university expulsions and poliitical deportations.

Ratcheting up racism, scapegoating and deporting migrants, cracking down on free speech, and massive police repression have all been integral components of the war on the working class that has been raging for the last 50 years. It was, after all, Bill Clinton, not Reagan, who dismantled the already meager welfare state through the 1996 “Personal Responsibility Act” and navigated the mass incarceration of non-violent drug offenders through the 1994 federal crime bill.

As the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reported, “the best survey data show that the share of wealth held by the top 1 percent rose from 30 percent in 1989 to 39 percent in 2016 [the year Trump first won the presidency], while the share held by the bottom 90 percent fell from 33 percent to 23 percent.”

“PATCO on steroids”

By the time Trump took office for the second time in 2025, the neoliberal order had already devastated the labor movement, leaving just 10 percent of the workforce unionized—and only 6 percent in the private sector. Trump would, of course, like to reduce that figure as close to zero as possible. Since public sector workers make up almost half of the labor movement today, Trump likely believes that zeroing in on public sector unions will be the most effective way to achieve his aims.

Trump’s second term marks not only a continuation but also a break with the neoliberal order. At a certain point, quantity becomes quality. If Reagan targeted striking workers, Trump is now intent on doing away with unions themselves. Just as Reagan scapegoated “welfare queens” to slash government assistance for the poor, the Trump administration expresses nothing but contempt for workers unable to make ends meet while facing rising cost of living expenses.

In March, he re-posted a link to an article on Truth Social entitled “Shut Up About Egg Prices”—which have increased by 60 percent just over the last year. He also said he “couldn’t care less” if auto prices rise because of his tariffs on foreign-made cars.

Meanwhile, Trump’s attack dog, Elon Musk, assailed the Social Security system, which provides a monthly check to elderly people barely enough to keep them alive as “a Ponzi scheme”. (For what it’s worth, social security is not a “gift” from the government: U.S. workers pre-pay their social security benefits through deductions from their paychecks during their entire working lives.)

Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants, recently remarked, “What we’re seeing is PATCO on steroids.” She continued, “This is the president saying even the idea of having a union contract and having something in black and white to protect workers and having collective bargaining—he’s saying none of this should exist.”

A return to the Gilded Age—of tariffs?

But Trump’s nostalgia reaches back much further than the Reagan administration. Trump’s own policies thus far hark back to the Gilded Age, before workers won the right to organize unions and still lived in abject poverty; when robber barons like the Carnegies and the Rockefellers transparently manipulated the legal system to suit their needs; before income taxes came into being, and the U.S. government used tariffs on foreign imports to fill its coffers.

“We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,” Trump reminisced. “That’s when we were a tariff country. And then they went to an income tax concept. It’s fine. It’s OK. But it would have been very much better” to have stuck with tariffs instead of introducing income taxes.

As Harold Meyerson noted in the American Prospect,

He has argued, after all, that the income from tariffs will close much of the roughly $5 trillion hole created by renewing his tax cuts for the rich in the Republican budget now beginning to move through Congress. This, of course, is ridiculous, but it also requires us to look more closely at the president whom Trump takes as a model: William McKinley.

As the head of a House committee in his pre-presidential days, McKinley authored the bill that imposed the highest tariffs ever levied on imports, 49.5 percent. As president, he also built America’s first transoceanic empire, making war on Spain to take over not just parts of the Caribbean but the Philippines as well.

However, Meyerson also pointed out,

But the notion that “we were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,” and the belief that this was the result of tariffs, requires a level of historic idiocy that’s hard to fathom. To be sure, those were the years when America became a manufacturing power, with huge growth in the railroad, steel, oil, and meatpacking industries. The great fortunes of that age were concentrated in those industries: railroad (Huntington, Fisk, Gould, Vanderbilt, Harriman), steel (Carnegie, Frick), oil (Rockefeller), meatpacking (Armour, Swift). None of those were industries, however, that were threatened by foreign imports. No one was shipping railroads, oil, steel, or meat across the oceans to our shores.

The U.S. economy today is both dramatically larger and far more integrated with the global economy than it was in 1913. Furthermore, Congress established an income tax system by passing the 16th Amendment in 1913, which was then ratified by 36 (of 48) states. Even then, tariffs were not enough to sustain necessary government funding.

Paving the way for massive privatization

Trump has claimed, without a shred of evidence, that many of the two million federal workers in the U.S. deserve to be fired because, “Many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work.”

As is well known, Trump and Musk have, in the first two months of his administration, fired tens of thousands of federal workers and ripped up the union contract of 50,000 airport screeners. Since then, they have eliminated union contracts for roughly one million federal workers at nearly 20 agencies, falsely claiming the needs of “national security”, while liquidating the Department of Education, cutting more than 80,000 workers from the Department of Veteran Affairs and 10,000 workers from the Department of Health and Human Services.

This is not just an attack on federal workers’ right to collective bargaining, but also a direct assault on all public sector workers. Already, Utah’s governor has signed a law that prohibits unions representing teachers, firefighters, and other government employees from bargaining for better pay and working conditions. The conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a prescription for this Trump administration, proposed that Congress “consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place.” The Trump administration has certainly moved a large step closer to making this a reality.

Since Musk’s DOGE overhaul of the Social Security Administration, which fired at least 7,000 workers and reduced the number of field offices from 10 to six, the system is in “shambles”.  As the LA Times described, “[T]here is rising frustration across Southern California and the nation as many seniors experience crashed webpages, endure jammed phone lines and are turned away at offices.”

One woman featured in the LA Times report waited two hours on the phone before being disconnected. When she called back, she waited six hours without reaching anyone at Social Security. After phone frustration, many elderly and disabled people who then go to the offices in person (often great distances from their homes) are turned away.

Besides slashing government programs that have helped to at least marginally better the lives of working-class people, retirees, veterans and poor people, there is an obvious additional motivation for hacking away at federal funding: paving the way for further privatization.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is not actually about making the federal government more efficient—quite the opposite.

As Meagan Day argued at Jacobin, All the smashing and breaking and outright ruining is not accidental. It serves a higher purpose: breaking public institutions to make way for private sector alternatives.

Speaking at a Morgan Stanley conference in March, Musk was open about this ambition, saying the government should privatize “everything we possibly can.”

…[T]he Washington Post appears wise to DOGE’s raison d’être, asserting that the task force is “paving the way for a new shift to the private sector,” and that its “ultimate goal is to limit the scope of government and privatize what is left.”

Musk himself stands to personally benefit, as his various companies pick up new contracts when federal agencies collapse. In just one example, although the National Weather Service has proven itself to be consistently efficient at forecasting the weather, the Federal Aviation Administration is now testing Musk’s Starlink satellites to replace it, claiming it might be more effective in “remote regions”. Project 2025 advocated “fully commercializing” weather forecasting.

The trouble with Trump’s tariffs

Trump’s political agenda is part of a package—far advanced from the early days of neoliberalism—aimed at moving U.S. society even further backward, to the time when white supremacy was the rule of law; before women won basic reproductive rights; when gender non-conforming people feared for their lives; and when deportation was used to criminalize dissent.

Until now, the billionaire class has been more than happy to tolerate Trump’s “idiosyncrasies” because they have a continued long-term interest in more tax cuts and further deregulation. And Corporate America, with a long record of viciously opposing workers’ right to collective bargaining, stands to gain from Trump’s aggressive assault on labor unions.

And perhaps they hoped that Trump’s aggressive tariff policies were just a negotiating tactic that would soon recede. Unfortunately, Trump—always the sandbox bully—has only escalated the tariffs as other countries retaliate, launching a full-blown trade war.

But even the billionaires have had enough of the chaos enveloping the economy.

CNN reported on April 7, “Wealthy business leaders are turning on US President Donald Trump over his plan to impose a colossal set of tariffs on America’s trading partners, as losses mount on stock markets around the world.”

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman, one of Trump’s most enthusiastic reelection supporters, called Trump’s tariffs tantamount to launching “economic nuclear war.” Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, stated, “The recent tariffs will likely increase inflation and are causing many to consider a greater probability of a recession.” Even Musk called for a “zero-tariff situation” between Europe and the US.

At the time of this writing—presumably feeling the pressure from billionaires—Trump has paused the tariffs on most countries for ninety days—but has actually increased tariffs on China to 125 percent after China announced it would reciprocate.

Thus, the chaos continues.

How do we stop Trump?

On April 5, hundreds of thousands of people rallied against Trump in at least 1,400 locales across all 50 states. Organized by the “Indivisible” organization and other liberal groups, together known as “50501”, the demonstrations drew large numbers of working-class people—many carrying handmade signs in a show of solidarity against Trump’s agenda.

Unfortunately, opposition to Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians was not part of Indivisible’s extensive set of demands. But other Palestine solidarity organizations—including Jewish Voice for Peace—mobilized a visible presence at most of the protests. Excluding Palestine from Indivisible’s list of demands must be challenged, forcefully. The entire movement will be drastically weakened if it doesn’t include the fight against U.S. imperialism and its enthusiastic material support for Israeli genocide.

The massive turnout on April 5 gave us all a glimpse of what is possible. There is another day of protests called for April 19. Time will tell if this marks the beginning of a new era of social movements. All of the rights now in Trump’s crosshairs were earned through mass struggle. And only mass struggle can win them back.

But what is most sorely needed is a rise in explicitly class struggle, which can achieve what mass protests alone cannot. Five decades of neoliberalism have crippled the union movement, and its leaders, who typically earn yearly salaries comparable to corporate CEOs, long ago lost their yearn for fighting—if they ever had any.

Like the Democrats in Congress, labor leaders have been big on issuing statements about “fighting”, but short on calling for any concrete action. As Marc Kagan wrote in Jacobin,

The AFL-CIO’s home page blames Trump for attacking federal workers’ bargaining rights but then only proposes that people call Congress to complain. Elsewhere, it writes, “now is the time to be even louder” — but suggests no other action. In a similar vein, AFSCME president Lee Saunders declares that his members “are prepared to fight.” RWDSU will “stand with federal workers . . . and we will not remain silent.” LIUNA members “will rise up together to defend our rights.” The IAM “will fight this attack on our nation’s heroes and continue to uplift our dedicated public servants”; it also boasts of filing two lawsuits. OPEIU “call[s] on Congress to take the action necessary to stymie this unilateral undermining of workers’ rights.” The Steelworkers don’t even offer rhetorical solidarity but merely point out that “this executive order undermines our federal institutions and invites true waste.”

The most “combative” union response on the part of most federal unions has been filing lawsuits. But now that Trump has stripped one million federal workers of union representation, these lawsuits could very well be null and void in federal courts.

Kagan continued, “Today, with potentially far greater consequences, unions are practicing the policies they know all too well. The rationalizations are easy to make: It’s too bad what is happening to federal workers, but we are too weak to fight Trump. Better to keep our heads down, mitigate risk, minimize our losses, and hope to staunch the pain by electing Democrats in 2026 and 2028.”

Kagan rightly concludes,

As other institutions of liberal democracy continue to shy from a real fight, unions — still the largest organized component of the US working class — are desperately needed. Yet in truth, rallying their members in the streets won’t be enough; for the labor “movement” to actually help stop Trumpism, it needs to be preparing now for political strikes in support of democratic as well as union rights, laws, and norms. Because Trump, Elon Musk, and their corporate and Christian nationalist supporters likely won’t be thwarted by lawsuits. And their first response to hundreds of thousands or even millions in the streets may very well be an even quicker tempo and more repression, not less.

It is painfully obvious that the vast majority of labor leaders are lacking in the kind of determination that Kagan (and we all) hope for. Even Shawn Fain, the UAW leader who led the victorious “Stand up” strikes of 2023, thereby proving his own willingness to struggle, and who vehemently opposed Trump in 2024, has supported Trump’s 25 percent on all imported cars–including those from Canada and Mexico. In so doing, he is adhering to the union’s decades-long support for protectionism, despite its proven failure as a strategy.

As if to prove this point, Stellantis laid off 900 autoworkers at five U.S. Stellantis plants “because their jobs producing powertrains and stampings for plants in Canada and Mexico have been temporarily idled due to the tariffs.

Thinking outside the box

U.S. employers have over the last two centuries perfected the strategy of declaring labor actions “illegal” in order to unleash police repression to defeat striking workers.

But that strategy has failed many times. Unfortunately, after generations have passed between labor upsurges in U.S. history—the last one took place in the late 1960s and the early 1970s—today’s working class has little knowledge of its own militant history and the lessons it bears.

For example, federal workers have never been given the legal right to strike. Yet in 1970, 210,000 Postal Service letter carriers in 30 cities went on strike, in a walkout that paralyzed mail service in key cities such as New York, Detroit and Philadelphia. Their own union officials condemned their strike action, meaning that this strike was a “wildcat strike

The strike lasted just one week and ended in victory for the postal workers.

Blair L. M. Kelley wrote in Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class:

On March 18, 1970, postal workers in New York City began to walk out, forming picket lines outside the Grand Central Station Post office. Their strike was technically illegal; the Lloyd-La Follette Act gave federal employees the right to form unions but expressly forbade them to strike. The unions, and Black union organizers in particular, had made strides over the hundred-plus years that Black workers had been employed by the U.S. Post Office, but by the 1970s the good pay postal workers received had not kept up with inflation. . . .

Starting in New York City, where 30 percent of the postal workers were Black, the wildcat strike of 1970 tapped into the experience that came from years of fighting white supremacy in the ranks of the postal service.

As we enter what we hope will develop into a new stage of class struggle, we must bear in mind that the road ahead is very difficult, but well worth travelling.

The flight attendants’ Nelson argued recently, “It’s on all of us to use the power we have to stop this before everything is broken and every safety net is stolen by the oligarchs,” including Musk. Nelson said the labor movement has very few options at this point except to mobilize for a general strike.

Nelson is absolutely right. The big question we face now is how we get from here to there.