Not even into his one hundred days in office, second-term US president and convicted felon Donald Trump has already earned the outrage of the American people and condemnation of the people worldwide.
His announced policies and recent actions are a glimpse into his four-year rule as chief political representative of US imperialism. His rule will predictably be marked by more aggression, violence, and attacks on democracy and democratic rights, unmasking the true nature of US imperialism. His populist slogan of “making America great again”, is a woeful admission that US imperialism is collapsing in its own crises and is desperate to revive itself amid strategic decline, expand its control over important natural resources, commercial trade routes, and further fatten the business interests and profits of American monopoly capitalists. Even during Trump’s first presidency, the American working class did not enjoy any of the crumbs that have fallen off from his economic and welfare policies.
During his first term as President, Trump strengthened military ties with the Philippine reactionary state by continuing joint military exercises and providing military aid to help combat Muslim resistance particularly during the 2017 Marawi siege where US intelligence and special forces provided support to operations against the Muslim militants. Trump praised former president Duterte for his fascist leadership, and avoided human rights issues. The latter is now charged with crimes against humanity in the ICC for the killing of 30,000 Filipinos.
Trump will certainly continue to deploy US military forces and its weapons of mass destruction to establish a significant presence in Asia, particularly around China, and to use the puppet regime of Marcos Jr., to further advance its militarist schemes in the region and contain the growing power of its imperialist rival China.
The direct impact on Filipinos in the US of another Trump presidency is best told by Filipinos and Filipino-Americans living and struggling in the belly of the beast.
In a recent interview conducted by Liberation with the US chapter of Compatriots, NDFP allied organization representing Filipinos overseas, Compatriots-US emphasized that given Trump’s anti-people platform, his policies would marked by mass deportations, union repression, attacks on democratic rights, and the intensification of war and “counterinsurgency” in the Philippines and abroad.
In recent weeks, Trump has begun to attack migrants and immigrants, with a broad crackdown on the undocumented and even those holding residency status, by deporting hundreds, which in two such cases, two US judges have ruled as unconstitutional. This crackdown threatens not only tens of thousands of American immigrants, but also more than one million undocumented Filipino workers and their families in the US. Trump has deported 1.5 million people during his first term, and has promised to deport millions every year during his term.
Compatriots-US strongly denounced the Marcos Jr. regime’s anti-migrant response to these deportations. The cruel admonition of the reactionary state to undocumented Filipinos to “self-deport” is a call to commit economic suicide and covers-up the fact that many Filipino migrants were forced to look for employment overseas because of the failure of the Philippine government to provide gainful employment. At the very root of this forced migration is the semicolonial and semifeudal character of Philippine society that has kept the country economically backward, politically and socially pro-imperialist and anti-people.
Compatriots-US also emphasized that the Trump regime will make good use of chauvinism, xenophobia, racism, patriarchalism, and anti-communism—to continue to mislead the American working people on the roots of its economic crisis.
Trump has begun his war on this “enemy within”, appointing as co-president Big Tech billionaire Elon Musk to attack the US bureaucracy, firing thousands of federal workers, and targeting civil servants critical of his rule, slashing more Medicare and social security benefits, including closing down Social Security offices, ordering the dismantling of the Department of Education, and curtailing protections for transgender persons, among others.
In response to this, Compats-US has vowed to “continue to arouse, organize, and mobilize among Filipino migrants to address their immediate welfare and protection from Trump’s mass deportation plans”.
“Trump will ….. advance imperialism’s agenda of economic plunder, militarism, and counterinsurgency in the Philippines. And if we are to believe that his administration will implement large chunks of Project 2025 (Trump’s right-wing wish list), it will be even more rabidly anti-communist. We should expect it to throw even more support behind the fascist Marcos regime’s counterinsurgency operations meant to crush the Filipino people’s democratic revolution, which remains the strongest opposition and barrier to U.S. imperialism’s dragging the entire country and people into its war against China.
“The compatriots mass movement here in the U.S. must boldly struggle and intensify its work from within the belly of the beast. Compatriots USA must reach Filipinos in the millions, organize those who will be most threatened by Trump, and raise their consciousness to direct their collective fight to overturning the semi-colonial and semi-feudal system at the root of their suffering. This will be our greatest contribution to advancing our people’s war, which will rage even more fiercely in the Philippine countryside once Trump assumes office,” Compatriots-US vowed.#
The National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) is the revolutionary united front organization of the Filipino people fighting for national freedom and for the democratic rights of the people. The NDFP seeks to develop and coordinate all progressive classes, sectors and forces in the Filipino people’s struggle to end the rule of US imperialism and its local allies of big landlords and compradors, and attain national and social liberation.