After a failed coup attempt following his defeat four years ago, Donald Trump has now staged a dramatic comeback in the US presidential election with the biggest ever Republican victory in last two decades. He has also become the first Republican President to win in terms of the popular vote too. Coupled with the Republican control over the Senate and the Congress, this will make Trump 2.0 much stronger than Trump 1.0, putting him in a more advantageous position to aggressively pursue his rabidly racist and imperialist rightwing agenda. As far as the Democratic Party is concerned, the result is clearly one of their worst electoral debacles. In three successive contests with Trump, this is the Democratic Party's second and more decisive and comprehensive defeat. The American people will now have to find an effective answer to the Trump presidency and its ominous implications beyond the limited and declining wherewithal of the Democratic Party.
If Trump's pandemic mismanagement played a major role in his narrow 2020 defeat, the debacle of the Democratic Party this time has much to do with the dismal economic record of the Biden-Harris administration. The statistical claims of post-pandemic macro-economic recovery had little resonance among the American working people reeling under escalating cost of living and stagnant income, not to mention the share of the population haunted by growing poverty, homelessness and deep social and economic insecurity. A smug Democratic Party establishment did not care to address the anger and anxiety of the working people and left it open for the Trump campaign to tap into this insecurity and pit it against the bogey of illegal immigration. The result is now there for the whole world to see. The American people which already had the bitter taste of Trump 1.0 has now been exposed to a bigger disaster in the form of Trump 2.0.
Trump's biggest agenda is of course his promise to carry out mass deportations by deploying a bigger machinery and invoking all kinds of laws including the archaic 1798 Alien Enemies Act, and targets of tens of millions are being projected. Such scale of deportation may not be easy to achieve given the institutional checks of America's federal system, but the xenophobia, racism and Islamophobia it will unleash will make Black people, Muslims, people of colour and immigrants in general even more vulnerable to white supremacist hate and violence. The victory of Trump with his brazenly misogynistic politics, first over Hillary Clinton in 2016 and now over Kamala Harris eight years later, also reveals a deep-seated patriarchal bias in US politics.
Presidential election in the United States of America of course continues to have ramifications across the world. In spite of its economic decline over the years, the US remains the biggest military power in the world and its policy of global hegemony revolves around its politico-military strategy of sponsoring wars, genocides and repressive regimes across the world. A major reason for the disillusionment of the Democratic electorate is the bipartisan agreement between Republicans and Democrats on this aggressive imperialist and hegemonic foreign policy as evidenced in the continuing genocide of Palestinians by Israel. Even during the election campaign, former US President Bill Clinton rationalised the genocide in Gaza as a 'forced' Israeli response, blaming Hamas for inviting it. No wonder, the popular vote of the Democratic Party dropped drastically from 81 million in 2020 to 70 million in 2024.
The Sangh brigade in India and the pro-Modi section of the Indian diaspora in the US have been vocal supporters of the Trump campaign and are visibly elated over the Trump comeback to White House. Even though people of Indian origin including existing and aspiring immigrants are prime targets of Trump's anti-immigrant policies and politics, the Modi government seeks to imitate the same rhetoric and pursue a similar agenda in India. And the Trump-Modi bonhomie will underpin the Indo-US strategic partnership in terms of support to Israel in its genocidal war on Palestine and in the pursuit of the neo-conservative social agenda, neo-liberal economic direction and fascist governance that defines the global far-right in today's world.
The forces of democracy and social, economic and climate justice in both US and India have major lessons to learn from the Democratic debacle and Trump triumph. If fascist forces are to be dethroned or kept away from grabbing power, anti-fascist politics cannot remain content with wishful platitudes about democracy, it can succeed only when it is anchored in transformative visions and priorities and draws on the energy of the popular quest for peace, justice, human welfare and human rights. If the Trump-Modi-Netanyahu triumvirate is out to inflict the disastrous package of imperialism, genocide, xenophobia, corporate plunder and tyrannical rule, the forces of democracy worldwide will have to forge closer ties of solidarity to save the world from this perilous course.
