A movement against Trump is starting to develop. This coincides with the general decline in his support as seen in the opinion polls. The question is what general direction such a movement can take in order to win. Let’s start with some of the polls themselves:

One of several opinion polls showing Trump’s slipping approval ratings.

According to a Ugov opinion poll taken between April 19-22, Trump‘s approval rating is down to 41%, while 54% disapprove. This is the lowest approval rating for any president at this stage in his presidency since 1953. Other opinion polls show relevant statistics. For instance, a Pew research poll found that 59% of Americans disapprove of Trump‘s tariff increases while only 39% approve, and 55% oppose Trump‘s cuts in the federal government agencies while 44% approve.

It would seem an obvious strategy, therefore, would be to focus almost entirely on the economic harm being done by the Trump administration. That, in effect, is what the long time Democratic strategist, James Carville, advises. Carville, it may be remembered, was the main strategist behind Bill Clinton‘s successful presidential campaign of 1992, and Carville retains a lot of credibility within the Democratic Party to this day. He starts with a simple proposition: political parties “exist for one reason, and that is to win election elections.” Two recent op-eds that Carville wrote in the New York Times further clarify what he means by that: not just to “win elections”, but to win the next election, in 2026. That seems obvious when one considers the enormous threats that Trump and Maga pose not just for this country, but for the entire world.

James Carville

Here is Carville’s prescription for how to win the election elections of 2026:

In February, Carville published an op-ed in the New York Times. At that time, he advocated for the Democrats to practice “the art of strategic retreat”. He followed that up with the New York Times op ed of mid April in which he wrote, “in the coming weeks and months, many Americans are going to experience pressure and pain with the tariff on China and the remaining tariffs on an array of goods and countries….” He continued “it’s time we transform our party into a projector for the economic pain of the American people“ and he advocated focusing on three issues: prices, a decline in the value of 401(k)s and making the issue “local”, whatever that means. Carville advocated following the “rope-a-dope” strategy that Muhhammed Ali used to defeat George Foreman. In that fight, Ali allowed Foreman to punch himself out and then he knocked Foreman out. In this case, Carville advocates lying low and allowing the Republicans to fully expose themselves through their economic attacks on working class and middle class people.

Carville’s strategy is that of the right wing of the Democratic Party. The “progressive” wing of the

Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez on their “fighting the oligarchy” tour. It’s better than the approach of Carville/Schumer et al, but it suffers from the same narrow focus.

Democrats is represented by the nominally independent Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. They are conducting an “anti-oligarchy” tour of the United States. They are far more aggressive than are the followers of Carville’s strategy. They attack the “billionaires” and the “1%”. They explain how these billionaires are looting all of society. All of this is to be welcomed, but at its roots it is not essentially different from what Carville advocates – focus on the economic issues while at best minimizing almost everything else. Here we will focus on Carville, but the same points apply to Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez and company. His  “fighting the oligarchy tour”, while an improvement over Carville’s approach, is not fundamentally different.

There are several reasons why Carville’s arguments, which seem entirely reasonable and practical on the surface, fall on their face when examined more closely. The first reason is the matter of the perspectives for the 2026 election:

The 2026 mid term election
The argument against the narrow economic focus, and in relation to this the focus purely on  winning the 2026 elections which James Carville advocates, is strengthened by an additional issue: the fact that it seems increasingly likely that the 2026 elections will be unlike any elections we have seen outside of the deep South before the civil rights movement. We must remember that Trump wanted to declare Marshall law in 2020, put the troops onto the streets and thereby overturn that election result. He was restrained from doing that by “his generals”, first and foremost. General Mike Milley, who was the chair of the joint chief staff during Trump‘s first term in office. Milley and other generals made it clear that they would actually disobey any order by Trump to declare martial law at that time. Trump learned from that experience, and this time round he has made sure to appoint people who are loyal to him, and to him alone, rather than to the US Constitution. People like Pete Hegseth, secretary of defense, and Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, and Pam Bondi, head of the Department of (in)Justice, are examples of this. (Although it could be argued that Gabbard is more loyal to Putin than she is to Trump, but there is not really a major contradiction there.)

In his first hundred days in office, Trump has increasingly tended to rule by executive fiat, also known as executive orders. That is what he has done as far as his unconstitutional deportation of immigrants to El Salvador. It is the same thing that he has done with his unilateral ending of U.S. AID. He has compounded his tendency by in effect ending habeas corpus and openly defying the judiciary. We also see it in his attacks on the media, including banning the Associated Press from White House press conferences, his attacks on major law firms, and his attacks on higher education.

The MAGA majority on the Supreme Court will go along with overturning the election in 2026 if they find it necessary and think they can get away with it.

So what possible reason is there to think for one minute that he would accept the loss of control over Congress in the 2026 mid term elections? The Democrats would challenge in court any Trump/Republican effort to prevent even a semblance of “free and fair elections” in 2026. What assurance is there that the Supreme Court majority would rule against Trump if they can possibly find any excuse, not to? Such excuses could include a claim that they don’t have jurisdiction over how elections are run. And even if they did rule against Trump, given his defiance of the court up until now, what reason is there to think that he would obey any negative court ruling? Yet the Democrats, including James Carville, and also including the “left “of the Democratic Party, such as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and the formally “independent“ Bernie Sanders, are not even discussing this serious danger. In other words, they have no plan to combat this threat other than go to the courts. 

Prisoners in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison where Trump is sending deportees. Carville would have us ignore this.

Mass deportations
Carville would have us ignore not only the inhuman, never mind illegal and unconstitutional, deportation of immigrants to El Salvador. If that weren’t bad enough, Trump has made it clear that he even intends to carry out such deportations of US citizens. Carville would have us ignore the Trump administration’s detention of green card holders who are protesting the horrific slaughter carried out in Gaza by the state of Israel.He would have us ignore both that slaughter as well as Trump‘s alliance with Putin against Ukraine.

Collapse in support for U.S. invasion of Iraq. It played a lot bigger role than Carville would admit.

International events
In regard to this last point, we should keep in mind that international events can play a lot bigger role in election outcomes than Carville seems to think. For example, while it is true that a recession towards the end of the presidency of George H. W. Bush help get Bill Clinton elected, it was not that recession alone. Bush, of course, was the one who orchestrated the US invasion of Iraq and at the time of the initial invasion And for sometime afterwards that invasion had widespread support in the United States. It was the unraveling of that invasion, the chaotic situation that developed Iraq after the invasion, that led to a collapse in support for the invasion, and therefore played a huge role in the electoral victory of Bill Clinton in 1994. The world situation also plays an important role in the case of Trump, who won in 2016 based in part on his Islamophobic rhetoric. This rhetoric was directed overwhelmingly against Arab peoples. And today Trump lives off the image of being an unstoppable, strong man. That includes the claim that he, and he alone, can make the United States “respected“ around the world today.

As they say, “everybody loves a winner“. In other words, especially in the United States people will not vote for somebody who appears weak. The strong man image plays a powerful role in US politics, especially in presidential election elections. That is why raising all of these points is essential in puncturing the Trump hot air balloon.

Trump pretending to pray with his hypocritical evangelical leaders. They are at the core of his base of support.

Furthermore, support for Trump is not based purely, or even mainly, an economic interest. Even many of those voters who claimed that they were voting for him because of high prices were just using that as an excuse to hide the reality, which was racism, nationalism, or sexism, as well as extreme religious bigotry. That is why Trump‘s most solid and powerful base is amongst the Christian evangelicals. Since he came into office, Trump has canceled almost all the construction projects that stand from Biden spending through the inflation reduction act and similar acts of the Biden administration. According to a recent New York Times article, 80% of the law’s investments so far have gone to mainly Republican districts. Yet Trump‘s cancellation of all of that spending created not a whisper of opposition amongst Trump supporters in those areas.

racism, sexism and homophobia
Trump has made racism, sexism and homophobia, in other words, bullying, not only legitimate today, but actually popular amongst significant demographics, first and foremost, amongst young white men. That is what the new slogan “your body, my choice“, represents. We also see this bullying in the form of Trump’s attacks on LGBTQ people, especially on trans people. It is simply picking on the apparently most vulnerable in society, and those who engage in it will not be convinced to do otherwise simply based on their economic interest. It is impossible to build a movement against Trump and against Maga if we ignore this mentality. 

In other words, to paraphrase the Bible, workers do not live by bread alone. Nor is their thinking based on bread alone. An appeal to class economic interests is the necessary basis, but we must connect that with all the other issues.

We cannot successfully combat this bullying mentality based on moral appeals, nor based on identity politics. It can only be successfully combated through an appeal to working class solidarity. How and why that attitude has collapsed in the United States and how to pose the matter is the second part of this discussion. The issue involves an understanding of why Maga is part of a historical international tendency that actually goes back 30 years. It is essential to understand this tendency and its historical roots. The second part of this series will discuss:

• The rise of the global far right:
• The role of Putin and what he represents, including the ideology of 21st century fascism – “Traditionalism”;
• The rise of nationalism as a result of the globalization of capitalism;
• Why international working class solidarity in action is the only practical alternative to nationalism;
• Why we cannot ignore the holocaust Israel is creating nor Russia’s invasion of Ukraine;
• A very practical conclusion to all of this;
• We will also make some suggested further reading.

One of several opinion polls showing Trump’s slipping approval ratings.