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While incoming United States President Donald Trump’s inauguration is still a month-and-a-half away, he is preparing the ground for his second term.

Trump plans to continue Democratic President Joe Biden’s drive to ramp up the production of fossil fuels and has named Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright as his incoming Secretary of Energy.

He says climate change is a hoax, while incoming Vice President JD Vance thinks it is real. However, they are both committed to continuing fossil fuel production, regardless of the threat posed by rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Trump has also announced that he will fire any top army generals who are proponents of diversity, equality and inclusiveness of Black people, other people of colour and women in the armed forces. He wants generals who agree with his racism and misogyny, and who are loyal to him.

This is a part of the Republican Party’s drive against diversity, equality and inclusiveness, including affirmative action, in education, employment and other spheres of society.

The ruling capitalist class majority want to move against these gains and other victories of the mass civil rights and women’s liberation movements. The silence of the Democratic Party in response to this Republican drive exposes their complicity and illustrates the move to the right by both parties.

Immigration

During the election campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats made it clear they, like the Republicans, intended to go all out in “sealing the border” with Mexico against mostly non-white immigrants fleeing harsh economic and political conditions caused by US imperialist exploitation, sanctions and interventions in the region.

During the campaign, Trump announced that “on the first day” of his presidency, he would order all immigrants without documents be rounded up and deported. Taken literally, mass deportations on this scale are not operationally feasible and not in the interests of the US capitalist class.

Stephen Miller has been named as Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff for policy. Miller helped orchestrate Trump’s Muslim ban, pushed for separation of migrant families at the border, and backed ending protections granted to undocumented people brought into the country as children.

Miller told the Conservative Political Action Conference last February: “Seal the border, no illegals in, everyone goes out.” He said this would be accomplished “by a series of interlocking domestic and foreign policies”, including with Mexico, to send immigrants back much further into Mexico than the border. He also supports “more muscular” travel bans, and “establish[ing] large-scale staging grounds” for migrants to be placed on planes and deported.

Thomas Homan was picked to be Trump’s “border czar”. Homan was acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term and helped shape Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy that, among other things, separated children from their parents at the border.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem will be Trump’s secretary of homeland security, and was praised by Trump for deploying the National Guard along her state’s southern border.

Undocumented migrants make up three-quarters of the country’s agricultural workers. They comprise more than one-fifth of construction workers. They play a large role in food processing, including comprising about 30‒50% of workers in meatpacking.

The capitalist owners of these industries rely on the fear of deportation to keep these workers docile and accepting of their extremely low wages and harsh working conditions.

However, they need these workers, and this will put limits on what Trump can do, to minimise the impact on the economy.

Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Immigrants’ Rights Project told Democracy Now! the ACLU has been preparing for legal fights against Trump’s plans.

“One thing I would stress that this cannot be done solely through the courts … It needs to be a national effort similar what happened to family separation [in Trump’s first term] where the public said ‘Wait. Enough is enough. That’s a red line, taking babies away’ and went out to the streets to peacefully protest.”

There were demonstrations of more than a million people in 2006 during George W Bush’s presidency to defend immigrant rights.

Is Trump a fascist?

During the election campaign, many progressives, including some socialists, claimed that Trump is a fascist and the only way to stop the fascist threat is to vote for Harris. Harris also once said that, although she usually made the vague claim that Trump is a “threat to democracy”.

But using this label of fascism to describe Trumpism reveals a lack of knowledge. We saw fascism in action in Benito Mussolini’s Italy, Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Francisco Franco’s Spain.

Fascism in Italy was analysed by the Communist International in the early 20th century during the time of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. Hitler’s rise matched the pattern. That analysis was further developed in the 1930s by exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. These analyses laid the foundation of a Marxist understanding of fascism and how to fight it.

In these historical experiences, fascism was understood as an extreme form of capitalist rule, which the ruling capitalist class seeks to avoid, except when the working class threatens to overthrow it.

When fascism arises, it cannot be stopped by electing “democratic” capitalist parties, but by united working-class combat in the streets, in a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

Fascists are a mass, armed movement of combat against working-class mass organisations, including socialist parties.

This was seen in the uniformed battalions of “black shirts” and “brown shirts” in Italy and Germany. The police and army provided many combatants and came to support them as organisations. In Spain, fascism had its origin in the army and in the fascist political organisation known as the Falange.

Fascism takes power in a civil war, unless stopped by the working class. Such resistance requires adequate leadership, which was lacking in Italy, Germany and Spain.

In the US today, the overthrow of capitalism is not imminent, and there is no need for the extreme of fascism to prevent it.

There are many forms of capitalist class rule between bourgeois democracy and fascism.

One is military dictatorship. Authoritarian governments with a bourgeois-democratic veneer are also an example — which we see today in Hungary and Poland, where there is one-party rule.

Bonapartism

Another is what Marxists call Bonapartism, which originates in Karl Marx’s analysis of the overthrow of bourgeois democracy and establishment of one-man rule by Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (1808‒73) — a pale reflection of his uncle.

Bonaparte presented himself as a strongman who could “save” France from a period of factional political turmoil among and within the capitalist parties in parliament in mid-19th century France.

A revolution against the existing monarchy, supported by all classes, took place in February 1848.

The exploited classes initially thought their interests would be met and a social republic would be established. When this turned out not to be true, a workers’ revolution erupted in Paris in July that year. It was the first such revolution in history, but it was defeated.

Subsequently, a period of political and social instability developed, before and especially after Louis was elected at the end of 1848.

Louis began to project himself as the one who could lead the country out of the mess. He worked to win support in the army and won support among criminal circles. He led the overthrow of parliament in December 1852 and declared himself emperor, unsuccessfully trying to emulate his famous uncle.

The situation in the US today is not like France in the mid-19th century. However, the lessons of 1852 describe a situation where, in a period of political and factional struggle among capitalist parties leading to paralysis, a strongman emerged, promising to “save” the nation from the mess and took power.

Trumpism has aspects of Bonapartism. In a period of factional struggle within and between the two capitalist parties, he projected in his 2020 campaign and again this time, that he was the strongman who could “save the nation”.

In the years following Trump’s defeat in the 2020 elections — in which he led an unsuccessful attempt to cast the election into doubt on January 6, 2021 — Trump has captured the Republican Party and quelled the factional struggle within it.

Meanwhile, the opposition Democratic Party remains in internal turmoil.

In the period ahead, Trump will use his control of Congress to further his agenda. The Supreme Court is already behind him.

The Democratic Party has proven it is not the vehicle to stop Trump. Only mass action against Trump’s reactionary policies can stop them, or block whatever moves Trump makes in a Bonapartist direction.