The following is an interview with Monica Moorehead, a Workers World managing editor who has been a member of Workers World Party for 50 years, by the blogger Óscar Díaz at his blog El Bloque del Este, published in Spain on June 15.

Óscar Díaz: How does WWP view Donald Trump’s rise to power? 

Monica Moorehead: Trump’s rise to power for the second time is tied to a deepening global economic crisis based on our party’s premise that capitalism is at a dead end. U.S. imperialist hegemony is weakening as each day passes, as is shown by events in Gaza accompanied by the heroic Palestinian resistance and the rest of West Asia rising up; by China’s rise as an economic power based on its socialist perspective; and by the growing BRICS alliance that challenges the declining U.S. dollar and much more. 

Confronted with these global challenges, the Democratic Party offered no real alternatives during the 2024 election for the vast majority of people in the U.S., who face threats to their already declining living standards. Another important factor to Trump’s rise to power was that the “Genocide Joe” Biden administration bankrolled the racist ethnic cleansing in Gaza with tens of billions of dollars of deadly weapons, which the U.S. provided to the Zionist, settler-colonial Israeli regime. 

The presidential campaign of Kamala Harris, a former California prosecutor of poor, Black, single mothers, not only failed to condemn this genocide but publicly declared her staunch support for the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu. 

In summary, the rise of the ultraright, white supremacist, neo-fascist forces Trump represents is in large part because the Democratic Party leadership abandoned even the pretense of defending the working class from the neoliberal assault on wages and social services. It was telling that at a time when the overwhelming majority of the U.S. working class is one paycheck away from ruin, the Democratic political leaders said nothing substantially meaningful about wages, health care and housing. 

Many white U.S. voters viewed the demagogue Trump as a candidate representing their interests, when in reality Trump represents the interests of the billionaires’ ruling class. 

 OD: Are there really significant differences in the treatment of immigrants between the Republican and Democratic administrations? 

 MM: In essence, there are no fundamental differences between the Democrats and Republicans. Consider the fact that under the Barack Obama two-term administration, there were more deportations of migrants — an estimated two million — compared to any other administration, Republican or Democrat. 

There are certainly some tactical differences that exist between these two pro-capitalist parties. Trump is indiscriminately targeting migrants from Central and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, be they documented or undocumented. He has unleashed terrorist ICE agents on workplaces, schools, health care facilities, places of worship under the guise of deporting people he slanders, calling them “criminals,” “rapists” and “drug dealers.” 

The Democrats seek a more “humane” immigration policy of deporting migrants without documentation and setting up quotas for who will be accepted as citizens. The fact is historically that U.S. immigration policy is rooted in the U.S. history of a state built on land stolen from the First People, the Indigenous nations, and also the U.S. enslavement of African peoples. 

OD: The WWP has Spanish-speaking members. What criticism does the WWP maintain against the United States’ use of ICE detention centers against Mexican, Salvadoran, Colombian and Caribbean immigration? 

MM: These detention centers are privately run by Wall Street corporations that make lucrative profits from repressive conditions of overcrowding, lack of hygiene and health care, horrible food and guard brutality. There was a recent rebellion against inhumane conditions that took place at an ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey, where four detainees escaped. 

Ever since the early 1970s, our party worked with the Prisoners Solidarity Committee and declared that the prisons inside the U.S. are nothing more than concentration camps for the poor, people of color and the workers.

Today, we should say that detention centers are also concentration camps on a global scale. Why? Mass incarceration is a global crisis for the working class, especially with the Trump administration deporting migrants to Guantanamo — Cuban soil illegally occupied by the U.S. — and also the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador.

OD: Donald Trump has already threatened Iceland, Canada and the immigrant population of the United States. Could this further exacerbate the problems faced by countries invaded or destabilized by the United States in the last century? Haiti, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, the economic blockade of Cuba and Venezuela, etc.

MM: Trump has targeted Canada and Greenland for expansion of the U.S. empire. He has delusions of grandeur with dreams of becoming the emperor of the vast majority of the world by capturing whole countries to exploit their peoples and resources, reminiscent of the days of the Roman Empire. It is no coincidence that Canada and Greenland are home to Indigenous peoples who are still fighting for their right to sovereignty and self-determination. 

And yes, if Trump were able to get his wish, it would greatly negatively impact countries like Haiti, Puerto Rico, Panamá and the Philippines with populations who are living under the thumb of neo-colonial status created by U.S. imperialism. And then there are Cuba and Venezuela whose economies and sovereignty are under attack by decades-long U.S.-enforced economic blockades, sanctions and other forms of economic and political sabotage.

OD: Is Trump leading the United States toward fascism, or have similar cases of repression like those currently being experienced in California already been seen?

MM: There is no denying that Trump certainly has fascist tendencies when it comes to attacking the democratic rights — even under a bourgeois democracy — for migrants, other people of color, trans people, women, people with disabilities, federal workers, etc. These attacks extend to the working class on a global scale, when you include the Palestinians and the West Asian masses. 

But we are not living under a fascist state such as Germany starting in 1933 and Italy from the early 1920s, where the rights of the workers were abolished under a military-police dictatorship until the end of World War II, or Spain from the defeat of the Republic in 1939 until the late 1970s after the death of Francisco Franco. 

Everyone should be put on notice that Trump is attempting to fortify a police state in anticipation of workers and oppressed-led rebellions that will be inevitable in response to a worsening economic crisis. His deploying the National Guard and the Marines during the Los Angeles protests is a test case for such other rebellions. The strengthening of the repressive state apparatus made up of local, state and federal agencies could bring the country one step closer to martial law. 

OD: If the expulsion of immigrants was supposedly only for those considered “illegal,” why did ICE forces also detain Latin American workers who had been in the country for years, paying taxes and working?

MM: ICE was set up in 2003 as an extension of the Department of Homeland Security supposedly to safeguard “the United States from transnational crime and illegal immigration that threaten national security.” In reality, ICE is a repressive agency to terrorize migrants on the Mexican border and now in the cities. ICE has not differentiated citizens from non-citizens under Trump. 

ICE plays on racism and xenophobia to justify the arrest, detainment, deportation or even their killing anyone they deem as looking “foreign,” especially if they are from oppressed countries. There is a popular saying that says, “We did not cross the border. The border crossed us.” 

OD: How is the invasion of California by federal forces being experienced in the rest of the United States?

MM: Activists in cities, large and small, are facing the police and ICE in their own cities and refuse to be intimidated by this growing militarization. In fact, these activists have become inspired by the anti-ICE resilience on full display in Los Angeles, despite the attacks with batons, tear gas, flash grenades, etc. It is truly heartening to see all of the creative anti-ICE tactics being used to push back ICE, like the blocking of streets and highways, sit-ins, banner droppings and more. 

OD: Why do we see the Mexican flag in these riots?

MM: First to be clear, we don’t view the current situation in Los Angeles as being a riot. We either say uprising or rebellion, especially when the oppressed are leading it like the migrants or Black people who resist daily repression and oppression ignited by police brutality or deplorable living conditions on a daily basis. And whenever there is an uprising, bourgeois pundits and the mainstream media falsely characterize it as being a “riot” with senseless violence. 

The real violence under class society in the U.S. is rooted in state repression from the police, ICE, the prisons, the courts, the military, etc. that the billionaires’ ruling class must have at their disposal to hang on to their class rule over the oppressed. As Dr. King stated in 1966: “Violence is the language of the unheard.” The word “unheard” refers to oppressed people who are voiceless, disenfranchised and marginalized within the larger society. 

So the flying of the Mexican flag represents the voice of oppressed workers forced to leave their homeland to find work in the United States or other imperialist countries like France or Germany due to the superexploitation of developing countries by U.S. imperialism. Los Angeles and the state of California on the whole are historically part of Mexico, stolen in war by the U.S. in 1848. The origin of most of the migrants being targeted by ICE is Mexico and Central America.

OD: Far-right media and some sects are accusing these riots of being full of anarchy and “woke ideology.” What do you think of these accusations?

MM: These accusations are false diversions from the real issue of building class unity and solidarity to effectively fight a common enemy, which is the capitalist class and its repressive apparatus. The far-right media, which is part of the bourgeois state, wants to keep the working class divided and fighting amongst itself to maintain capitalist rule. 

OD: What do you think the labor movement in the U.S. lacks? From the outside, it seems incohesive.

MM: The impotence of the U.S. labor movement goes beyond being incohesive. The main problem is its political orientation. The severe anti-communist period in the 1950s pushed most communists out of the union movement. It left mostly anti-communists in the leadership of the AFL-CIO, and those remaining have been in the back pocket of the ruling class, especially connected to the Democratic Party since the end of that period, called McCarthyite because of its connection with Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. 

Every four years during the presidential election, millions of dollars of rank-and-file dues monies are diverted to support some Democrat that makes promises for higher wages and better benefits for the workers, which never happens. This leadership also tries to discourage its members from taking on important political issues like Gaza, but this hasn’t stopped millions of workers from expressing their solidarity with the demand to stop the genocide and to free Palestine.

It is important to show support for other workers’ formations that are to the left of the AFL-CIO leadership, like Starbucks Workers United, Amazon Labor Union and the Southern Workers Assembly that encourage independent political organizing away from the Democratic Party.