11 April 2018
Following Monday’s FBI raid on President Donald Trump’s personal
lawyer Michael Cohen, the survival of the Trump presidency appears increasingly
problematic.
The use of tactics against a sitting president normally reserved
for mafia dons or alleged terrorists takes the months-long conflict within the
ruling class and the state to an entirely new level. The fact that the raid was
carried out as Trump was meeting with his generals to discuss military action
against Syria underscores the explosive level of tensions within the ruling
elite.
On the basis of a referral from Special Counsel Robert Mueller,
whose investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election and
possible Trump collusion has been the focus of the campaign by sections of the
intelligence establishment and the Democratic Party against the White House,
FBI agents seized Cohen’s computer, phone and personal financial records. They
also took documents relating to hush money paid during the 2016 election
campaign to a porn star and a former Playboy playmate who claim to have had
affairs with Trump. The FBI swept up a wealth of data, including privileged
communications between Trump and his lawyer.
Cohen, a longtime lawyer and confidant of Trump, boasts of being
the president’s “fixer.” Mueller and the anti-Trump camp within the ruling
elite know very well that the billionaire New York real estate and gambling
speculator-turned president is mired in criminal activity, which is certain to
be reflected in the material seized from Cohen.
They have Trump by the throat, and Trump knows it.
Mueller executed a calculated maneuver to immunize himself from
charges of overreach. He referred a criminal investigation of Cohen on charges
of banking and wire fraud and election campaign violations to the US attorney’s
office, which executed the warrants and oversaw the FBI raid. This indicates
that Mueller is working toward an indictment not only against Cohen, but also
against Trump.
The extraordinary events of Monday suggest that a criminal
indictment or the threat of one is overtaking a strategy based on impeachment,
which would be difficult to obtain in a Republican-controlled Congress. Even if
a sitting president cannot be prosecuted and must first be removed from office,
the calculation may be that the threat of massive fines and jail time will
convince Trump to resign.
Trump’s rambling tirade Monday in advance of a meeting with his
national security team on Syria, in which he denounced Mueller, his attorney
general Jeff Sessions and his deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who has
authority over the special counsel, reflected his own crisis and the dilemma in
which he finds himself.
His talk of possibly firing Mueller and/or his top Justice
Department officials evoked a sharp rebuke from some leading Republicans in
Congress. The Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck
Grassley, warned Tuesday that it would be “political suicide” for Trump to take
that route.
These extraordinary events are part of a ferocious conflict within
the highest levels of the ruling elite and its state apparatus. The battle
concerns fundamental issues of US imperialist foreign policy. Trump’s
opponents, spearheaded by the Democratic Party and the bulk of the corporate
media, are allied with the dominant sections of the intelligence establishment,
which consider Trump to be insufficiently aggressive in waging war in Syria and
confronting Russia.
They have been using the Mueller investigation and the phony
narrative of “Russian meddling” and Moscow-inspired “fake news” to pressure
Trump to escalate the US offensive against Russia. But Monday’s raid indicates
that decisive sections of the ruling class have lost confidence in Trump’s
ability to manage their foreign policy or deal with the increasingly tense
internal situation.
The political turmoil in Washington is being intensified by the
convergence of crises on a number of fronts. The US is facing a deepening
geopolitical crisis, most sharply expressed in the failure of its proxy war in
Syria. Its economic crisis is intensifying, with Trump’s trade war measures
against China threatening unknown consequences, the financial markets in
turmoil, trade deficits growing and budget deficits heading for $1 trillion a
year.
Most dangerous of all is the growth of working-class opposition,
with teachers’ strikes, protests and rebellions against the corporatist unions
spreading from West Virginia to Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona and other states.
The fact that most of these strikes are taking place in states that voted for
Trump is seen as an indication that the ability of Trump to disorient the
working class with his social demagogy has drastically eroded.
It is the class struggle, not the palace intrigues within the
ruling elite, that provides the basis for a progressive and democratic—that is,
revolutionary—solution to the crisis of American capitalism. Left to its own
devices, the ruling elite will resolve its problems with Trump by shifting the
political system even further to the right, with or without the current
president. Were Trump to be removed by impeachment or forced to resign, he
would be replaced by Vice President Mike Pence, a more polished but no less
reactionary enemy of the working class.
The same forces, including virtually the entire Democratic Party,
that are rushing to defend Mueller and the raid on Trump’s lawyer are demanding
that Trump carry out a major military attack on Syria, far beyond the one-off
missile strike he ordered last April, and that the confrontation with Russia be
escalated even to the point of military conflict.
The New York Times’
Tuesday edition carried an editorial demanding that Trump massively escalate
the US military intervention in Syria. That evening, it posted an editorial
defending the FBI raid and excoriating Trump for diverting attention from the
supposed Syrian gas attack by denouncing the raid on his lawyer.
It stated: “Among the grotesqueries that faded into the background
of Mr. Trump’s carnival of misgovernment during the past 24 hours was that
Monday’s [national security] meeting was ostensibly called to discuss a matter
of global significance: a reported chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians.
Mr. Trump instead made it about him…”
One thing that is striking is the utter inability of the
Democratic Party—which helped push through Trump’s tax cuts for the rich, voted
for his record Pentagon budget and dropped any defense of DACA recipients
facing the threat of deportation—to make any genuine appeal to the broader
population. In its conflict with Trump it relies entirely on the FBI and the
CIA.
Last June, the World
Socialist Web Site published a Perspective column titled
“Palace coup or class struggle: The political crisis in Washington and the
strategy of the working class.” It stated, in part:
The working class confronts in Trump and his administration a
vicious enemy, dedicated to the destruction of its democratic rights and a
further lowering of its living standards. It is a government that is pursuing
an international agenda based on “America First” chauvinism. The working class
must oppose this government and seek its removal. But this task must not be
entrusted to Trump’s factional opponents in the ruling class. The working class
cannot remain a bystander in the fight between Trump and the Democrats. Rather,
it must develop its struggle against Trump under its own banner and with its
own program…
The interaction of objective conditions of crisis, both within the
United States and internationally, and the radicalization of mass social
consciousness will find expression in the eruption of class struggle. The
decades-long suppression of the class struggle by the trade union bureaucracy,
the Democratic Party and the affluent sponsors of various forms of identity
politics is coming to an end…
Mass struggles are on the agenda in the United States. Protest
rallies, demonstrations and strikes will tend to acquire a general nationwide
character. The political conclusion that flows from this analysis is that the
fight of the working class against Trump and all that he represents will raise
ever more urgently the necessity of a political mass movement, independent of
and opposed to both the Republicans and the Democrats, against the capitalist
system and its state.
This analysis is being vindicated by the deepening of the
political crisis, which now confronts a growing wave of social opposition in
the working class. The confirmation of our analysis makes it all the more
urgent that workers and young people take up the fight for the revolutionary
socialist perspective of the Socialist Equality Party.
Barry Grey
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