President Donald Trump turned a White House bill signing ceremony on Friday into a ruling class celebration of militarism and social counterrevolution, enshrined in the sweeping tax and spending bill passed by Congress the day before.
Staging this grotesque display of reaction and militarism on July 4—the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—Trump hailed his “big, beautiful bill” as the largest tax cut, the largest spending cut and the largest investment in “border security” in American history. The measure will have devastating consequences for millions of people, as it funnels trillions more into the pockets of the top 1 and 0.1 percent.
The previous day, Trump delivered a fascistic rant—threatening political opponents, denouncing socialism, and referring to bankers as “Shylocks,” an open appeal to antisemitism.
The bill signed by Trump is the biggest redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top in US history. It makes permanent $3.8 trillion in tax cuts, overwhelmingly benefiting corporations and the super-rich, while slashing $930 billion from Medicaid and $285 billion from food assistance.
Untold numbers of people will become sick, impoverished and die as a direct result. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 11.8 million low-income and disabled people will lose health coverage, and nearly 11 million—including 4 million children—could lose access to food aid. The legislation also eliminates $320 billion in student debt relief.
The bill passed the House by a 218–214 vote, with only two Republicans voting “no,” while the Democrats offered mere token opposition. It allocates an additional $170 billion for so-called “immigration security” and Homeland Security, along with $150 billion in military spending this year—on top of the record near-trillion-dollar Pentagon budget already approved.
It also provides tens of billions to expand the network of immigrant detention camps and authorizes the hiring of 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and 3,000 new Border Patrol officers, who are presently engaged in mass roundups and terror operations throughout the country.
The White House event on Friday reflected the ruling class’s enthusiastic support for Trump’s bill, viewing it as a down payment on the destruction of what remains of the social safety net, including Medicare and Social Security. Amid rising stock markets, Trump declared that the bill proved his administration was “winning, winning, winning.”
The connection between the social counterrevolution at home and the eruption of US imperialist violence abroad was on full display. Alongside Republican congressional leaders, Trump welcomed military personnel from Whiteman Air Force Base, including the pilots and crew of the B-2 bombers that attacked Iran last month. B-2s roared over the White House in a chilling spectacle of militarism.
In his speech prior to the signing of the bill, Trump praised the “big, beautiful” military and the “spectacular display of military power” and “total obliteration” in the illegal bombing of Iran. Beyond the financial oligarchy, Trump appeals to the apparatus of violence and repression, including the police and immigration Gestapo, as the primary basis for his regime.
The night before, following final passage of the bill, Trump held a campaign-style rally in Des Moines, Iowa, where he unleashed the fascistic rhetoric and criminalization of political opposition that define his regime. Speaking of the Democrats, he declared:
I hate them. I cannot stand them because I really believe they hate our country…they’re criminals on the other side that tried to put your president in jail and went after him…
In concluding his rant, Trump denounced socialism and Marxism, once again targeting the Democratic nominee for New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who ran on a mild reformist program. Implicitly threatening physical violence, he said:
In New York, they’re trying to elect a communist, Zohran Mamdani, the guy who wants to defund the police, take over the stores and run the stores, and have the people hand out goods… This guy is a communist at the highest level, and he wants to destroy New York. I love New York, and we’re not going to let him do that.
Generations of Americans before us did not shed their blood only so that we could surrender our country to Marxist lunatics on the eve of our 250th year. As president of the United States, I’m proclaiming here and now that America is never going to be communist in any way, shape, form, and that includes New York City.
Trump did not limit his threats to Mamdani. At the rally, he escalated his attack on all opposition, declaring: “Members of Congress and even former presidents have been openly embracing vile creeds such as socialism, Marxism, and straight-up communism.”
These hysterics express the underlying fear—beneath all the bombast and boasting—within the capitalist oligarchy of the growing support for socialism and the deepening desire among broad layers of workers and youth for a fundamental reckoning with the entire capitalist system.
The media has echoed Trump’s boasting. The New York Times published a fawning article yesterday—under the headline “From Court to Congress to the Mideast, Trump Tallies His Wins”—stating that there is “no doubt that, at least on his terms, Mr. Trump can claim accomplishments one after another.”
While there are a few “asterisks — dissenting views and serious questions about the wisdom and durability of the path on which he has set the nation,” the Times wrote, “there is little argument that, in fewer than six months since returning to office, Mr. Trump, for better or worse, has driven the nation in new directions through muscular use of presidential and political power, with neither Congress nor the courts serving as much of a check on him.”
Trump’s ability to implement his class-war agenda and erect a political dictatorship (the Times’ “asterisks”) is due to the absence of any opposition within the political establishment and from the Democratic Party.
For all their rhetorical criticisms and nominal votes against Trump’s bill, they support its aims: tax cuts for the rich and the destruction of social programs. They made no call for mass protests, let alone strike action, against this frontal assault on the working class. Instead, they issued empty appeals to “reasonable” Republicans, knowing full well that the party would fall in line behind Trump.
The Democratic Party’s complicity was underscored last March when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer joined Republicans in passing a continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown—thereby ensuring the uninterrupted functioning of Trump’s dictatorial regime. Again, just last month, the House Democratic leadership led a majority of Democrats in voting down a resolution to impeach Trump for launching an unprovoked and illegal attack on Iran without congressional authorization.
The media and Democratic Party narrative of an “all-powerful Trump” was shattered by the mass demonstrations on “No Kings” day, which brought record numbers into the streets across the country to oppose his erection of a presidential dictatorship.
The growing radicalization of broad layers of workers and youth was likewise reflected in the upset victory of Mamdani in the New York mayoral primary—despite the dangerous futility of Mamdani and the DSA’s perspective of “pushing” the Democratic Party, a party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, to the left.
Trump is increasingly isolated from the broad mass of the population, which is moving into struggle and seeking a new perspective to fight back against the oligarchy. The strike by 9,000 municipal workers in Philadelphia, which shut down the city’s July 4th celebrations yesterday, is an initial indication of the emergence of the working class.
Under the two-party monopoly through which the financial elite rules, the vast majority of the population is completely disenfranchised. What is needed is a break with the Democrats and the entire framework of capitalist politics, and the building of a mass, independent movement of the working class fighting for socialism—a society based on equality and the expropriation of the corporations and financial oligarchs.
The lesson of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is the need to prepare a revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system. This is the fight being led by the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site.