Klansman-in-Chief Donald Trump’s latest racist rant, his characterization of Haiti, El Salvador, and most or all of Africa as “shithole countries,” has been treated by the capitalist bosses’ media as an extraordinary event—“the lowest ebb of a presidency defined by a series of low ebbs and defining of the presidency downward” (cnn.com, 1/12).  Former CIA Director and torture defender John Brennan tweeted that “Lady Liberty, our founding fathers, and generations of right-thinking Americans are all weeping tonight.” Former Haitian President Laurent Lamothe declared that the world had witnessed “a new low today….never seen before in the recent history of the U.S. by any President!”
In reality, history—recent and otherwise—tells a different story.  The United States was born out of the genocide of native populations. Its wealth was created through the mass murder and enslavement of Black people from Africa. Its rulers have thrived from super-profits generated by imperialism and racism in the U.S. and around the world. Without racism, capitalism couldn’t effectively exploit, oppress, and divide the working class. Without racism, capitalism could not survive.
As CEO of the capitalist ruling class, the U.S. president both implements and rallies support for the bosses’ racist policies—it’s part of the job description. Trump is crude, vile, cartoonishly ignorant, and exceptionally transparent in his spewing of racist ideas. But the content of that ideology isn’t exceptional at all; it’s strictly business as usual. From the Founding Fathers through Barack Obama, every U.S. president has shared Trump’s ruling-class loyalties and his commitment to racism as the bosses’ essential weapon. Here are some examples, in their own words:

George Washington (U.S. president from 1789-1797): Indians and wolves are both beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.
One of eight presidents to hold slaves while serving in the Oval Office, Washington owned 300 human beings at his plantation in Mount Vernon, Virginia. He promoted the U.S. rulers’ rationale for the genocide of the indigenous, and in particular for extermination of the Iroquois, paving the way for the early expansion of U.S. empire.

Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809): [I]n memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior…and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous….I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind (“Notes on the State of Virginia,” 1785).
The author of the Declaration of Independence held more than 600 Black people captive over his lifetime. DNA testing shows that he raped the “mixed-race” adolescent Sally Hemings, who bore him six children (Atlanta Black Star, 2/25/17).

Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865): There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races ... A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together (speech in Springfield, Illinois, June 26, 1857).
Convinced that Black people could never live on a basis of “equality with the white race,” the Great Emancipator campaigned relentlessly for the “colonization” of freed slaves to Central America and the Caribbean. In December 1862, the day before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, he met with a contractor to finalize plans to move 5,000 “colonists” to an uninhabited island off the cost of Haiti. After the first group of settlers was decimated by smallpox, and the survivors revolted, Lincoln’s ethnic cleansing project was abandoned (New York Times, 4/12/13).

Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909): The problem is … that the backward race [Black people] be trained so that it may enter into the possession of true freedom while the forward race [white people] is enabled to preserve unharmed the high civilization wrought out by its forefathers…. or to confer the priceless boons of freedom, industrial efficiency, political capacity, and domestic morality (speech to the New York City Republican Club, February 13, 1905.)
Rivaling Trump’s gutter racism toward Muslims and Mexican workers, among others, this “progressive” Republican also said: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth” (smithsonianmag.com, 11/9/12).

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945): Anyone who has traveled to the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results (Macon Daily Telegraph, 1925).
In 1942, this liberal icon ordered the imprisonment of more than 100,000 U.S. residents of Japanese descent, most of them U.S. citizens, into hellhole concentration camps. He appointed Hugo Black, a former lawyer for the Ku Klux Klan, to the U.S. Supreme Court. A notorious anti-Jewish racist, Roosevelt collaborated in Hitler’s genocidal “Final Solution” by actively blocking Jewish immigration from Germany and other Axis-dominated countries, and by refusing to bomb the railway routes to Auschwitz and other death camps.

Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969): These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference (Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, by Robert A. Caro).
Widely hailed for pushing through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson was famous for his habitual use of the N-word and proudly voted against an anti-lynching bill in 1948. According to biographer Caro, he spent the late 1940s railing against the “hordes of barbaric yellow dwarves” in East Asia.

Bill Clinton (1993-2001): A few years ago, this guy [Barack Obama] would have been getting us coffee (remark to Ted Kennedy in Game Change, 2008, by John Heileman and Mark Helpurin.)
Hillary Clinton: But we also have to have an organized effort against gangs….They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators—no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel (1996 speech in New Hampshire).
This husband-and-wife team beat the drum for the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which directly led to the mass incarceration of generations of Black and Latin youth. They’re also responsible for the 1996 reform “to end welfare as we know it,” cataclysmic legislation that played to racist stereotypes, shredded the federal safety net, and doubled extreme poverty in the U.S. over the following 15 years (thenation.com, 2/10/16).

Barack Obama (2009-2017): Too many fathers are M.I.A., too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it….You and I know how true this is in the African-American community (Father’s Day speech at the Apostolic Church of God on Chicago’s South Side, New York Times, 6/16/08.)
Michelle Obama: But today, more than 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, more than 50 years after the end of “separate but equal,” when it comes to getting an education, too many of our young people just can’t be bothered. Today, instead of walking miles every day to school, they’re sitting on couches for hours playing video games, watching TV. Instead of dreaming to be a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they’re fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper (commencement address at Bowie State University, a predominantly Black college in Maryland, 5/17/13).
As the first Black U.S. president, Barack Obama was especially useful to the bosses for running their old con game of blaming the victims of capitalism and racism. Even as Obama lectured Black workers to stop making “excuses” for their problems, he was bailing out the big banks while ignoring and devastating Black homeowners in the housing foreclosure crisis. Michelle Obama’s denigration of Black youth is especially despicable in an era when public schools are more segregated than they were in the late 1960s, with racist inequalities in resources growing larger by the year.

There’s a word for the Obamas’ scapegoating. It’s the same term the bosses’ media now widely applies to Trump, whose crime—in the rulers’ eyes—is to be too obvious about what their system is really about. The word is racist. And Trump is far from the first U.S. president to fit the description—and he won’t be the last.

The newly enacted tax bill will add, by the most conservative estimate, 1.5 trillion dollars to the U.S. deficit. This was a huge setback for the ruling class. Many of their own politicians put their personal financial and political interest to staying in office ahead of the needs of the main wing bosses to prepare for war.
The politicians lack of discipline is a forewarning of more fascist measures on the horizon. The main wing ruling class response will try to force individual bosses, politicians, and the working class to fall in line on their march towards war.
Tax bill & infighting
In a blatant attempt to buy votes in the 2018 elections, the tax bill will give a small bump in take-home pay to a large section of the working class. The meat of the bill however is a massive reduction in the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. Unlike the personal tax cuts which will expire in 2025, the corporate cuts are permanent. The bill depended on the votes of main wing Republicans like Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitch McConnell serving their personal interests in doing so.
The Tea Party domestic capitalists have shown little to no interest in keeping the U.S. top dog in the world. Their goal in supporting the tax bill is to set the stage for massive cuts to social welfare programs, making this bill a large-scale attack on the working class.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has already announced that the GOP plans to cut federal health care and anti-poverty programs because of a deficit that his party is about to balloon. “We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform,” he said on a talk-radio show, “which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit (Atlantic 12/19/17).
This is a volatile situation. The liberal bosses fear those cuts will increase the political problems for the ruling class in trying to win people to go along with a large-scale war and draft. The infighting will likely lead to the development of fascism in the U.S., most probably under the leadership of the liberals who are desperate to keep up with growing Chinese imperialism.
War looms
As the U.S. bosses have ceded ground to Russia in the Middle-East and China in Asia, war looms as the only path for the desperate U.S. bosses to try to regain their world dominance. War demands the U.S. beef up its military to stay ahead of the Chinese and be able to fight a multi-front war as well as repair the U.S.’s crumbling infrastructure.
Neither of these can happen without huge amounts of money being taken from the working class. The disarray evident in the fight over the tax bill will make that more difficult for the main wing bosses creating a very volatile situation within the U.S. ruling class.
Military might of China
The Chinese have significantly trailed the U.S. from a military stand point. That is changing pretty rapidly. Beside the construction of several new bases on man-made islands in the South China Sea, the Chinese imperialists are investing heavily in a military that can greatly expand its sphere of operations.
The late draft of the annual report by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission contains a chapter on Beijing’s power projection development…
China is building military capabilities to deal with hostile air, surface, and subsurface operational environments in the ‘far seas,’ … the operations expand the focus beyond the two island chains off China’s eastern and southern coasts.
Given its enhanced strategic lift capability, strengthened employment of special operations forces, increasing capabilities of surface vessels and aircraft, and more frequent and sophisticated experience operating abroad, China may also be more inclined to use force to protect its core interests”(Nationalinterest.org 11/7/2016).
Failing U.S. infrastructure
A problem even bigger than the challenge posed by China’s military growth is the rapidly deteriorating infrastructure within the U.S. The bosses are trillions of dollars short in repairing the basic systems that keep the country functioning. Expansion of infrastructure to serve a major war would necessitate new roads, rail, bridges, ports, airports and the infrastructure necessary to facilitate a draft. That means trillions of more dollars that the bosses will need.
The working class has no champions among any of the bosses. We must build a communist movement to fight our way out of this mess on our own. The domestic oriented Tea Party bosses seek to starve us. Democratic Party led fascism, with a diverse face is an equally bad and more powerful threat to the working class. Liberal led world war is on the horizon as the bosses prepare by building a mass movement to try to discipline the rogue bosses and politicians and lead the attacks on the working class across the globe.

click image for a pdf copy of the bookOn January 25, 1990 the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations had concluded that “racial and ethnic intolerance seems to be firmly entrenched” in Philadelphia.
“I can tell you,” said the Commission Chairman, “race relations are getting worse, not better.” The Executive Director of the Commission commented that racism is a “systemic problem” in the U.S. and that “what is happening locally today is a reflection of what’s happening nationally. What happens in Washington affects how people behave in Philadelphia.”
This report may not be telling us anything we don’t know, but it does bring up an idea many people believe: “Racism will always be here.”
Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) understand that racism is a part of capitalism and that once we destroy capitalism, with communist revolution, we destroy the basis and the need for racism.
In 1925, a Black communist named Harry Haywood, born in the U.S., went to Moscow. Here’s a brief excerpt from his book Black Bolshevik, which tells of his experience with racism in Russia only eight years after the revolution.

During my entire stay in the Soviet Union, I encountered only one incident of racial hostility. It was on a Moscow streetcar. Several of us Black students had boarded the car on our way to spend an evening with our friend MacCloud. It was after rush hour and the car was only about half filled with Russian passengers. As usual, we were the objects of friendly curiosity. At one stop, a drunken Russian staggered aboard. Seeing us, he muttered (but loud enough for the whole car to hear) something about “Black devils in our country.”
A group of outraged Russian passengers thereupon seized him and ordered the motorman to stop the car. It was a citizen’s arrest, the first l had ever witnessed. “How dare you, you scum, insult people who are the guests of our country!”
What then occurred was an impromptu, on-the-spot meeting, where they debated what to do with the man … It was decided to take the culprit to the police station … there, they hustled the drunk out of the car and insisted that we Blacks, as the injured parties, come along to make the charges.
At first we demurred, saying that the man was obviously drunk and not responsible for his remarks. “No, citizens,” said a young man (who had done most of the talking), “drunk or not, we don’t allow this sort of thing in our country. You must come with us to the militia (police) station and prefer charges against this man.’
The poor drunk was hustled off and all the passengers came along. The defendant had sobered up somewhat by this time and began apologizing before we had even entered the building. We got to the commandant of the station.
The drunk swore that he didn’t mean what he’d said. “I was drunk and angry about something else. I swear to you citizens that I have no race prejudice against those Black gospoda (gentlemen).
We actually felt sorry for the poor fellow and we accepted his apology. We didn’t want to press the matter.
“No,” said the commandant, “we’ll keep him overnight. Perhaps this will be a lesson to him.” (170-171)

What makes this story of anti-racism even more exceptional is that, at the same time, in 1925, in the capital of the U.S., Washington, D.C., thousands of racist Ku Klux Klan members freely marched through the streets. Lynchings (racist mob hangings and other forms of cruel murder) of Black workers and youth were common. In fact, after the end of World War I, into the 1930s, race riots were common and murderous in the U.S. At this time, “race riot” always mean white attacking Black.
Communist Poet Langston Hughes was impressed with the anti-racism of the Russian communists. In 1946 he wrote:

When I was in Tashkent, the regional capital of the Republic of Soviet Central Asia, there were funny little old street cards running about the size of the cable cars in San Francisco. I noticed a partition in the center of these streetcars, and asked a brown-skin Uzbek friend why it was there. He explained to me that in the Tsarist days that partition separated the Europeans from the Asiatics.
I said, ‘You mean the white people from the colored people?’
He said, ‘Yes, before the Revolution, we would have to sit in the back. But now everybody sits anywhere.’
I thought to myself how many white Americans say it will take a hundred years, or two or three generations, to wipe out segregation … But in Tashkent it has taken only a few years … (“The Soviet Union and Color”)

This is pretty amazing, when you think that it wasn’t until many years later that Rosa Parks helped break segregated bus seating in Montgomery, Alabama, in the U.S.

The reversal of the fight Against racism
There are many more stories like these about how far communists had gone towards eliminating racism. Unfortunately, many mistakes were made during and after the revolutions in the Soviet Union and China—not going straight to communism and, instead, maintaining aspects of capitalism, such as money and wages, under socialism. As a result, “free enterprise” capitalism, and with it nationalism and racism,  has been restored.
Of course we in PLP have an advantage over comrades of the past. We have their experience, including both successes and errors, to study and to learn from. We now understand that the stage of socialism is a mistake. Our commitment to go immediately to communism after the revolution can only mean greater progress in smashing racism once and for all.

As Donald Trump proves increasingly incapable of defending U.S. finance capital’s interests in the next global war, these main-wing bosses are intensifying their efforts to discipline the unreliable president—or, if necessary, to prepare to move him out of office.
January 5 saw the publication of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, which painted Trump as ignorant, unfocused, an “idiot,” and a “dope”—in the words of his own senior Republican advisers. The book quoted white supremacist Steven Bannon, Trump’s former top henchman, as accusing Donald Trump Jr. of “treasonous” behavior for meeting with Russians connected to Vladimir Putin during the 2016 campaign. Two days earlier, after Trump boasted that his “nuclear button” was larger than North Korea President Kim Jong Un’s, an NBC news reporter openly questioned Trump’s “mental fitness” (thehill.com, 1/3).
Meanwhile, former FBI chief Robert Mueller was expanding his Justice Department probe of Russian collusion and obstruction of justice. After already indicting four Trump associates, Mueller indicated he was looking to interrogate the president himself (New York Daily News, 1/10). “The end game,” according to the right-wing National Review, “is the removal of Trump, either by impeachment or by publicly discrediting him and making his reelection politically impossible” (12/2/17).
Trump: unstable imperialist
But the bosses’ real concerns about Trump’s “fitness” have little to do with West Wing gossip or Russian operative intrigues. As inter-imperialist rivalries sharpen, the rulers’ fundamental worry is that Trump is unable and willing to prepare the U.S. for an inevitable World War III. As the U.S. sinks into a state of relative decline versus an ascendant China and a belligerent Russia, the bosses fear that the U.S.-dominated liberal order, a fact of life since the end of World War II, may be on its last legs.
A leading mouthpiece for the U.S. ruling class is Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the finance capitalists’ top think tank. In a new afterword for the recently published paperback edition of his cautionary book, A World in Disarray: American Foreign
Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order, Haass sums up the rulers’ anxieties in the Age of Trump:
[T]he United States is no longer taking the lead in maintaining alliances, or in building regional and global institutions that set the rules of how international relations are conducted. It is abdication from what has been a position of leadership in developing the rules and arrangements at the heart of any world order….
Trump is the first post-World War II American president to view the burdens of world leadership as outweighing the benefits. As a result, the United States has changed from the principal preserver of order to a principal disrupter.
Haass proceeds to tick off Trump’s many retreats from world leadership. The president withdrew from the Paris climate pact and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the main-wing Brookings Institute called “not just a trade agreement but also a crucial signal of U.S. commitment to the region in general” (Brookings, 9/16/17). He weakened the U.S. commitment to NATO, which represents the allies the U.S. will need in the next global war. He has threatened to pull out of the North America Free Trade Agreement and the nuclear accord with Iran while gutting of the State Department’s diplomatic corps. As the New York Times (12/28/17) put it,
Mr. Trump has transformed the world’s view of the United States from a reliable anchor of the liberal, rules-based international order into something more inward-looking and unpredictable. That is a seminal change from the role the country has played for 70 years, under presidents from both parties, and it has lasting implications for how other countries chart their futures.
Can the ruling class control Trump?
At the same time, there are signs that Trump is being brought to heel. He has stepped back from his initial attack on NATO and even convinced other NATO members to contribute more to the organization (Washington Post, 6/17/17). For all of Trump’s bluster, he has yet to actually decertify the Iran deal. Longer-term thinkers in the ruling class have successfully inserted their voices into the Trump administration. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was formerly the CEO of Exxon-Mobil, perhaps the company most reliant on U.S. imperialism’s long-term commitment to control over Middle East oil.
Capitalism offers workers war and fascism
At this point, it is hard to say for sure what will happen as the dogfight within the U.S. ruling class plays out. Trump may endure or he may be removed and replaced. The impact on the international working class is less difficult to predict, however. Whether Trump is impeached or finishes his term; whether Democrats win big in the 2018 mid-term elections or Republicans keep their majorities; whether a Democrat wins the 2020 election or Trump gets re-elected—none of these things will change the fundamental shape of the future. None will alter the racist, sexist, imperialist nature of capitalism, or the increasingly fascist conditions that workers face around the world. None will prevent the carnage of world war, where the rulers will be eager to sacrifice millions to preserve their filthy profit system.
For the workers of the world, no capitalist boss can ever be “fit” to lead society. It’s the task of Progressive Labor Party to put all of these warmongering mass murderers out of business—to turn the guns around and turn imperialist war into a war for revolutionary communism.