Election WSA

Post-Inauguration Statement

By the WSA

On January 20, 2017, on a rainy day in Washington DC, Donald Trump was sworn into office as the 45th president of the United States. It’s a day that ultimately brought shock to many who fully expected Hillary Clinton to take the office easily as polls predicted. The inauguration in DC was met with massive protests against an incredibly unpopular political figure and what many folks see as a dangerous ultra-right populist and potentially proto-fascist regime.

The Bad News

Trump has hit the ground running by signing executive orders that directly attack human rights, executive powers which were unfortunately expanded previously by Barack Obama. These include massive travel bans on people from various foreign countries visiting the United States. In addition, Trump has put Steve Bannon, a white nationalist associated with Breitbart News and the “alt-right” at the head of his security council and has decided to go ahead with the DAPL and KXL pipelines which Obama had previously rejected. While these changes are resulting in massive protesting, emergency court decisions and lawsuits galore including by the ACLU against the government, the next four-plus years will very likely be a fight for the human rights of the working class against the far-right Trump regime.

The Good News

While there’s much work to be done, the U.S. response to Trump is largely very encouraging. The inauguration protests were heavily attended and more than 1% of the country was out in protest for the post-inauguration women’s marches. After Trump’s travel restrictions were enforced, international airports across the country including JFK, O’Hare, DFW, SFO, BOS, SEA, Dulles, DEN, LAX, SAN and PHL were occupied by protestors, ultimately forcing many of them to allow entry for people subject to what Trump has called “extreme vetting” into the country. These occupations have not let up and activists and community members are continuing to organize and figure out ways to fight the Trump regime directly.

WSA’s Take on the Situation

We are encouraged by the mass protests which have taken place to counter the Trump regime. We believe it’s especially important at this time to organize mass libertarian working class organizations to provide rapid response community defense to protect minorities as well as to directly battle the bosses of U.S. capitalism. We especially want to consider the many working class folks who sell their labor to Trump himself, as they are employed at his various resorts, hotels and other businesses. We need to collectively organize ways to figure out how best to hit Trump and his allies hard and where it will hurt most. And we need to use mass collective organizing to make it too costly for Trump to continue to threaten the rights of the U.S. and international working class during his tenure. Ultimately, Trump is the culmination of the nastiness of the capitalist system and organizing to abolish capitalism is a long-term goal. But ultimately the particularly odious and dangerous nature of Trump’s regime increases the urgency for us to work towards replacing capitalism with a positive alternative.

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