Across the United States, hundreds of thousands are expected to demonstrate Saturday in opposition to the Trump administration. Protests are taking place in cities throughout the country, part of a broader mood of defiance and anger among workers and youth. 

Millions are horrified by the attacks on immigrants, the assault on free speech and the genocidal war in Gaza, and they want to fight back. But the determination to resist must be guided by a clear understanding of what is happening, what are its origins and what must be done to stop it.

The situation must be stated with absolute clarity: The Trump administration is moving systematically and deliberately to establish a dictatorship. It is implementing a fascist program aimed at abolishing basic democratic rights, consolidating unchecked executive power and crushing all opposition. This is targeting, above all, the working class. What is being tested today on students and immigrants will be used tomorrow to suppress striking workers, all social opposition and political dissent of all forms.

On college campuses across the country, a reign of terror is already underway. Peaceful protesters are being surveilled, seized, detained and deported for opposing the US-backed genocide in Gaza. Under “Catch and Revoke,” an AI-powered surveillance program, students’ social media posts and public statements are being monitored by the State Department to identify targets for removal.

Momodou Taal, a Cornell Ph.D. candidate, was forced to leave the country this week after federal agents attempted to seize him for challenging Trump’s executive orders in court. Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student and lawful permanent resident, remains in ICE custody. Others—including Fulbright scholar Rumeysa Öztürk—have been abducted in broad daylight by masked federal agents.

The Trump administration has invoked the Alien Enemies Act—a wartime statute never before used in this way—to carry out mass deportations and the expulsion of political opponents. It asserts the authority to defy court rulings, override existing laws and grant the president unrestrained executive power. The legal architecture being erected is modeled not on the Bill of Rights but on the authoritarian theories of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, who insisted that the sovereign rules through a permanent “state of exception.”

At home, the ruling class is carrying out a war on the working class: firing hundreds of thousands of federal workers, destroying social programs, dismantling public education, shredding workers’ contracts and expanding the powers of federal agents to target “insubordinate” workers. As for science and public health, the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been tasked with shutting down all Health and Human Services agencies amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the growing threat of an H5N1 “bird flu” pandemic.

Internationally, the Trump administration is preparing for world war. On Thursday, it announced sweeping new tariffs that amount to a declaration of economic war against the entire world. These measures, under the banner of “Made in America,” are aimed at crippling China and forcing every country into alignment with US imperialist interests. They will intensify global conflict and produce massive economic and social dislocation not only abroad but within the United States itself—fueling layoffs, inflation and deepening attacks on the working class. 

Trump has pledged to “finish” the ethnic cleansing of Gaza begun under Biden, “annihilate” Yemen, annex Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal, and wage all-out war on China. As Leon Trotsky, the great co-leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, explained during an earlier stage of imperialist crisis, the world is confronting the “volcanic eruption of American imperialism.”

Meanwhile, the billionaires—Trump, Musk, Bezos and the rest—have enriched themselves through fraud, insider dealing and open theft. Wall Street is a criminal cartel. Every institution in this country—political, economic, cultural—is rotting from within. The ruling elite is plumbing the depths of reaction.

The urgent question facing workers and youth is: What is to be done? 

It is first of all necessary to understand that Trump is not an alien force acting outside the system. He is the product of American capitalism, and he speaks for a ruling class that is determined to maintain its wealth and power by any means. Trump is not the devil that came out of nowhere. He is the personification of the oligarchy that is violently restructuring politics to correspond with the nature of American society.

The Democratic Party is not the opposition—It is a willing accomplice. It was under Biden that the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza began. It was under Biden that the persecution of student protesters began. It was the Democrats who ensured passage of the Republicans’ continuing resolution, financing the Trump administration to deepen its attacks on democratic rights.

Biden welcomed Trump into the White House in January, wishing him “success,” not long after Kamala Harris openly called Trump a fascist. The Democrats refuse to oppose Trump’s dictatorship because they agree with its fundamental aims: protecting American imperialism, suppressing social opposition and maintaining the dominance of Wall Street. The Democratic Party is a party of finance capital, of the military-intelligence apparatus, of the CIA and Pentagon, and of privileged sections of the upper middle class. Its main concern is not democracy but the preservation of US global hegemony and the war against Russia in Ukraine.

Trump will not be stopped by appeals to the Democratic Party. Nor will he be opposed through the empty stunts and token gestures promoted by the trade union apparatus, which has responded to mass firings with calls to “write your congressperson”—even as it embraces Trump’s nationalist economic war policies. Nor is it a matter of tinkering around the edges of a bankrupt system, as figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would have us believe. Their role is to pacify opposition and keep it corralled within the framework of the Democratic Party.

What is needed is a mass revolutionary movement of the working class, guided by a clear understanding that the threat of fascism arises out of the breakdown of the capitalist system itself.

This fight must be taken into the working class, the true constituency for the defense of democratic rights. The fight against dictatorship must become a mass political movement of the working class, armed with a program to take power, abolish capitalism and establish socialism.

The Socialist Equality Party calls on workers and youth to build rank-and-file committees in factories, workplaces and neighborhoods to mobilize mass resistance, including strikes and demonstrations. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) is developing a coordinated network of organizations, independent of the trade union bureaucracies, to carry out a real fight against the massive assault on the working class by the capitalist oligarchy. 

The SEP fights to infuse this emerging movement with a socialist and internationalist program and perspective. The struggle against dictatorship is inseparable from the struggle against the financial oligarchy and capitalism itself. The wealth of this oligarchy must be expropriated and society reorganized on the basis of social need and equality.

The fight against fascism, war and dictatorship cannot be waged within the limits of national borders. The global nature of the capitalist system requires an international strategy. Throughout the world, the ruling class is turning to fascism, dictatorship and war. At the same time, a growing wave of protests and strikes is emerging in every country—from the US to Germany, from France to Sri Lanka. The working class is an international class, and its struggles must be united across all national, ethnic and racial lines.

The ruling class has a plan: dictatorship, war and repression. The working class must have a plan too: to take power, end capitalism and build a socialist future based on genuine democracy, economic planning and the ending of imperialist war.

That is the program of the Socialist Equality Party and its youth movement, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE). Take up this fight. Join the SEP and the IYSSE! Build the revolutionary leadership needed to stop dictatorship, end war and reorganize society on the basis of human need, not private profit.

Stop Trump’s dictatorship! Break with the Democrats and Republicans! Build a movement of the working class for socialism!