The Answer To Trump’s Victory Is Radical Action

By Natasha Lennard, The Intercept

I learned that Donald Trump would be president of the United States of America in 2016 while attending a memorial service for my friend, Clark Fitzgerald, who had died in a car accident on his way to protest the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock, North Dakota.

The night of his memorial, his best friend read some of Fitzgerald’s writing; the Trump presidency had seemed unlikely to many of us then, but Fitzgerald, among others on the anti-fascist left, had an acute awareness that we could not rely on establishment politicians as a bulwark against oppression.

“Account for real needs and desires whilst making a million and one sacrifices,” wrote Fitzgerald, a radical New York-based organizer who I first met during Occupy Wall Street. “Fight so hard that we don’t feel as if we’re going to explode all the time, make that the great American pastime again.”

Eight years later, it appears that Trump has won again.

Democrats bet on appeals to neoconservatives — including war criminals like Dick Cheney — and touted harsh border policies, bolstering rather than challenging Republican anti-immigrant frameworks.

Kamala Harris may have relied on women to vote for abortion rights, but she promised little more than a potential return to the flawed and insufficient norm of Roe v. Wade, at best. Like President Joe Biden, she supported a genocide and failed to distinguish herself from extremist Zionists like Trump.