On Tuesday, congressional Democrats published two articles of impeachment against US President Donald Trump, centering on claims that the president “compromised the national security of the United States.”
The fascist in the White House is being impeached not for ripping thousands of immigrant children from the hands of their parents, persecuting political dissidents Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, or presiding over a global apparatus of extrajudicial murder. Rather, the impeachment is over Trump’s failure to pursue with sufficient vigor the conflict with Russia.
The impeachment drive and the anti-Russia campaign that predated it have involved an enormous intervention by the CIA and FBI in domestic politics. The impeachment inquiry was itself triggered by a CIA agent working at the White House, while a recently-released report shows that the FBI justified a wiretap of a former Trump aide by citing a Ukraine policy change in the Republican Party’s platform. This process is the first time—with the possible exception of the dark and murky events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy—that the CIA and associated intelligence agencies have sought to remove a sitting president.
Anyone who supports the Democrats’ impeachment operation, in the hope that removing Trump on these grounds can have some sort of progressive consequence, is simply ignoring everything the Democrats and their CIA allies have done and said.
But faced with this enormous series of setbacks and debacles, US imperialism is doubling down, replacing the “war on terror” with preparations for “great-power conflict.” The intractable crisis of American imperialism has generated deep conflicts within the ruling class. But the relative disinterest in the proceedings among the broad mass of the population underscores the fundamentally undemocratic and reactionary character of the operation. Regardless of its outcome, the results will be a further shift to the right. Its success will intensify the confrontation with Russia, with incalculably dangerous consequences. Its failure could actually strengthen Trump.
The fight against the Trump administration is inseparable from the struggle against the capitalist system and the war plots of both parties. It must be conducted completely independent of and in opposition to the Democratic Party. The objective social basis for the fight against the Trump administration is the global upsurge of the class struggle. The growing wave of strikes and protests by the working class, if united internationally and armed with a socialist perspective, is the means of opposing not only the Trump administration, but the capitalist system, of which it is the corrupt excrescence.
Contributed by: Andre Damon
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