Trump has announced many of his Cabinet picks, revealing a circus of unqualified loyalists, including corporate executives, wealthy elites, and far-right reactionaries, all intent on giving handouts to the rich, while attacking workers and the poor.
He has selected people ready to shred the Environmental Protection Agency to benefit the fossil fuel companies. He has put far-right white supremacists in charge of immigration policy, in order to drive deeper wedges between native-born and foreign-born workers. His Cabinet is ready to further cut women’s reproductive health care, possibly banning medication abortions and birth control, which will hurt working class women the most. And all of these various cuts and attacks will be matched with enormous tax breaks for the super rich.
Trump hopes to slash the budget of the Department of Education, where he has appointed the billionaire Linda McMahon, one of the largest donors to Trump’s campaign, who has no real experience in education, and who made her money in the entertainment industry, co-founding the World Wrestling Federation. With McMahon at the helm, Trump has promised to dismantle the agency, which provides funding for education in the poorest neighborhoods in the country, and also oversees legislation that was won during the Civil Rights movement to protect against the discrimination of students based on race or sex. Trump wants to eliminate these protections, and McMahon is ready to carry it out. They plan to use the agency to divert federal funding from public to private schools, and help advance far-right Christian-based schools.
Trump has also selected Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and another of Trump’s biggest campaign donors, to help lead a new effort to massively cut government spending and regulation. Musk has threatened to cut thousands of programs, including healthcare, workplace safety, environmental protection, and more. Musk suggested cutting all funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides healthcare to low-income families.
Even though Musk pretends to be against government funding, his companies, Tesla and SpaceX, have benefitted from billions of dollars in government funds over the years. These benefits will only continue to grow under the Trump administration. The hypocrisy couldn’t be any clearer — Musk is in favor of government funding when it supports his class of super wealthy capitalists. He’s only against it when it goes to the working class.
Many of these policies and attacks have already been happening in Republican-controlled states across the country. Now they will become accelerated by the federal government under Trump.
The Democrats will surely seize this opportunity to say that voting for them is the only way to defend ourselves. But they’ve been in power 12 of the last 16 years, and have done nothing to stop these attacks spreading in states across the country. Democrats, just like Republicans, support the interests of corporations and their wealthy owners. Voting for them hasn’t done anything to protect the interests of the working class.
Trump’s Cabinet gives us a glimpse of the sort of attacks against workers that are coming. But the truth is, none of these limited, yet much-needed protections were handed to us by the government — whether they be minor legal protections for immigrant workers, education funding for the poor, protections for the environment, basic safety protections for workers on the job, or minimal access to reproductive health care. They were all won through hard-fought social movements involving ordinary working-class people. The ballot box wasn’t enough to win these gains, and it won’t be enough to defend them either. To do that, it will take the same kind of collective struggles that won them to begin with.
No matter what the Trump administration brings, the only response that can defend the interests of working-class people is a unified collective struggle, one that includes all workers — immigrants, U.S.-born, those who voted for Trump, those who voted for Harris, and those that didn’t vote at all. In the face of these attacks, we can’t afford to sit back. It is up to us to overcome our divisions, and come together to build up the kind of unity we will need for what lies ahead.
