Trump’s massive election to the US presidency is neither accident, nor a coincidence, nor the result of a crisis or deep division, let alone chaos, within the American bourgeoisie and its political and state system. Nor is it the result of any madness on the part of the voters, nor of any irrationality taking hold of the world’s leading imperialist power. His massive victory demonstrates the mastery of the electoral game and its political system by the American state apparatus. If there were any doubts, the immediate acknowledgment of defeat by the Democrats and Kamala Harris herself, and the assurance that the transition to the presidency will be as smooth as possible, would be enough to remove them definitively.

The election – or re-election – of the outrageous and vulgar Trump is simply an expression of the acuteness of the economic and historic impasse and the pressure it exerts towards war. Fifteen years after the financial crisis of 2008, the level of the crisis is forcing into ever more exacerbated competition, into a fight to the death for the survival of each national capital, which in turn can only provoke and aggravate imperialist rivalries and polarization.

The election of Trump indicates that the race towards generalized war is gathering momentum and that the American bourgeoisie is committed to it with determination. The main fractions of the American bourgeoisie feel that time is running out. They have agreed on the urgent need to speed up the adaptation of the entire U.S. military-industrial apparatus to the demands of “high-intensity” warfare. They have agreed on the need to step up the pressure on China, to exert even greater “containment” on it and, incidentally, on the countries of the European Union, by stepping up the trade war and protectionism. Time is running out for the American bourgeoisie, and it needs to shake up both American society itself and “international relations”, i.e. imperialist relations.

Given the pace of the spiral into which the economic contradictions and imperialist rivalries are throwing the capitalist world, it has to move even faster and with even greater determination. Trump’s election victory does not herald a break with the Democratic policies pursued since 2020. Nor does it call into question the protectionist economic policy aimed at repatriating on American soil a large part of the production apparatus for so-called essential goods - “essential” for war. Still less is it a challenge to the American imperialist policy pursued by the Democrats and Biden. Just as the Bidenomics and the imperialist policies pursued by Biden did not call into question the protectionist measures launched by Trump during his first presidency from 2016 to 2020 and his imperialist focus on China, the economic and imperialist policies to be pursued by the new Trump administration will not break with those of the Biden years. There is not, nor will there be, a break. There is continuity, and there will be continuity around the central axes of the imperialist policies of American capital. On the other hand, and this is the reason for choosing Trump and not Kamala Harris, the new Trump presidency heralds a violent and brutal acceleration, assumed and decided by US imperialism, of the trade war, imperialist pressures, and above all military competition on the one hand; and an acceleration of the reorganization of the entire industrial production apparatus – already underway with Bidenomics – and especially the military-industrial one. This “acceleration” must, paradoxically, mean gaining time to raise military production to the level required for “high-intensity” warfare, as expressed by Trump and the “isolationist” Republican Party.

To rush and provoke, to engage the whole of American society in the decided preparation and march to war, a disruptive, provocative, outrageous, brutal and even vulgar figure is needed. A character, no matter how ridiculous, who embodies strong power and who does not hesitate to break free from the rules – understood as shackles – of classical democracy. For the American bourgeoisie, time is of the essence, and fate and rivals must be forced. Harris could not embody this character. Trump could. Did not he prove himself in this four years ago? Preparing for all-out war requires political personnel who are adapted to the situation and able to free themselves from the shackles of democratic and diplomatic decorum. “Talking about his enemies as the enemy within, talking about using the expression vermin or poison blood – these are terms that are directly taken from the 1930s.” (Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, November 7, 2024)

The election result seems to have settled the issue of the strategy to be employed to reassert American supremacy with force and violence. Trump’s re-election corresponds to the choice of both accelerating internal preparations for war and stepping up the offensive of “countainment” against imperialist rivals. This accelerated adaptation could – we use the conditional tense, these are only hypotheses – pass for American imperialism through:

 acknowledge Ukraine’s powerlessness in the face of the Russian army and halt massive support for it;

 allow, in other words encourage, Israel to extend its regional war to Iran.

And it will certainly go through:

 impose an intensified trade war on China – and to an already weakened Europe – through protectionism brandished like a banner;

 force European countries to assume the costs of maintaining NATO, and by the way, to buy American armaments, at the risk of disengagement and the end of the American nuclear umbrella.

Rising tariffs and open protectionism can only rekindle the global trade war. It can only exacerbate China’s current economic difficulties and its feeling of being caught in the vice of American policies, which in turn can only provoke increasingly aggressive, even military reactions on its part – Chinese naval and air pressure is steadily increasing on Taiwan. Just as it frightens the European bourgeoisie, starting with Germany.

“Trump’s re-election (...) is also a game-changer for America’s allies.” (Financial Times, Nov. 6) [1] Trump’s victory has already caused, or at least accelerated, the break-up of the coalition government in Germany. And this at a time when France itself has entered a period of governmental instability. As soon as it was announced, Trump’s victory exacerbated contradictions and polarized positions. The stakes are becoming clearer. And the European bourgeoisies seem to have been seized with a veritable panic at what Trump’s second term heralds for capital and imperialism of the Europeans: the continuation of the historic weakening, already all but definitive.

The real historical interrogation has to do with the American and international proletariat and the level of adherence of the great masses to the nationalist, racist, xenophobic, etc. theses carried by Trump. The same applies, of course, to those proletarian masses who follow the far-right parties in Europe and elsewhere. Is there a particular dynamic – and one that would be worrying – of widespread support for nationalism and war among the great proletarian masses?

Let us note that there was no gain in the number of voters who voted for Trump in 2024 compared to 2020. [2] More broadly, and at all times since the post-war period, significant fractions of the working class have voted for right-wing parties – on the order of 30% in both the USA and Western Europe. In itself, the pro-Trump workers’ vote therefore gives no indication of any particular new dynamic of adherence to a genuine march to war that would break with previous years. Similarly, and in the other direction, no significant indication can be drawn from recent expressions of proletarian combativeness. Breaking with a decade-old sluggishness, this combativeness, even if still well framed by the unions, has expressed itself and developed significantly over the last two or three years in the United States, even during the election campaign, among dockworkers and at Boeing, for example.

That is the real question. Therein lies the real calculation. Will there emerge a fraction of the American, or even international, proletariat capable of offering a class alternative, i.e. one of struggle, and a revolutionary perspective, to the false, bourgeois choices, to that of Trump... or the Democrats and to repugnant nationalism? Will they be able to lead the rest of the working class to the defense of its living conditions and internationalism? Thus forcing it away from the stultification and intoxication of nationalism, sometimes hateful and racist, and the collective stupor of shouting USA! USA!... ?

Acceleration of war preparation, we have qualified the meaning of Trump’s electoral victory. In the U.S. bourgeoisie’s equation, does not imposing on the proletariat the sacrifices necessary for trade war and war preparation also require acceleration, to gain speed over any vestige of proletarian response?

Whether vis-à-vis imperialist rivals or the proletariat, Trump’s electoral victory means that the American bourgeoisie wants to accelerate the tempo and win everyone over with speed. Kamala Harris was right about one thing: “we are not going back”.