We want to begin this week’s show speaking further to the federal indictment of Donald Trump—a former president and leading candidate for the fascist Republican nomination for president. Trump was indicted on four charges for what are alleged to be serious crimes in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election—including for actions connected to the attempted coup on January 6, 2021. And Trump is likely to be indicted again in Georgia in the coming weeks for violating election laws.

“Nothing even remotely close to this has ever happened in U.S. history before. No losing candidate had ever attempted to overturn the results through fraud, intimidation and force. And no leading presidential candidate has ever been indicted in the run-up to an election, let alone four times, let alone on counts related to fomenting a coup to overturn a previous election!”¹

The two most important things to understand about these indictments are:

# 1) That they represent a leap and sharpening of what is an unbridgeable divide at the very pinnacle of the U.S. ruling class, a divide between the two ruling class political parties—the fascist Republican Party of Trump, and the Democratic Party. This divide runs right through the whole country. It is a divide that is increasingly erupting in threats of and actual violence at school boards, in election centers, at libraries and more. Trump’s response to the multiple indictments is to double down and to rouse to a red-hot pitch his rabid base to see his persecution as their own, with the fascist Republican Party falling in line.

The Democrats have made this high-stakes indictment of Trump with the election of 2024 looming. They are countering Trump with, and counting on, relying on the legal processes in the courts. At the same time, they agonize over both their legal and election strategies. The indictments to hold Trump accountable through the legal process of trials will likely give rise to deepening the bitter divide that cleaves the country and will set a stage for increasing confrontation that could erupt into violence.

# 2) The second important thing to understand about these indictments is that because of the way that this will sharpen the divide particularly between the rulers of this country, this can heighten the potential for a revolutionary force that represents and is fighting for a radically better system and way of life for the masses of people to burst onto the political scene with the potential to geometrically grow in numbers and influence with the prospect of making an actual revolution to overthrow the capitalist-imperialist system we live under and establish a new socialist republic in North America.

Recognizing, acting on, and seizing this potential for a real revolution must become the understanding, the concern, and the active work of all who agonize about the future and who yearn for a world fit for humanity.

But spontaneously this is not clear to people, and very immediately, the indictments are heightening the pull that many people feel to cast their fate with the Democratic Party. This is dead wrong and a betrayal of the millions of oppressed within this country and the billions around the planet oppressed, exploited and murdered by U.S. imperialism, whichever party runs it. 

So, I want to speak to the many of you who agonize over the future, who care about humanity, who yearn for a world where there is justice. Too many of you either don’t or refuse to see beyond the elections. Or you’re just hoping that Trump gets convicted and sentenced to jail. Or you’re ignoring the storms barreling towards shore. 

This is the reality we face:

Trump has said “I am your retribution,” and “This is the final battle,” and “This is it. Either they win or we win.”

And, for his part, Biden has rallied Democrats and the NATO military alliance and all too many decent people to cheer them on as they continually escalate the proxy war with Russia over Ukraine bringing us closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation. And, while the fascists deny climate change and want to scrap all measures to reduce global warming while we have just had the warmest month in 120,000 years, the Democrats as the party of normalcy talk climate change while drilling, drilling, drilling… essentially fiddling while the world burns.

Shaping up before us now are two fundamentally opposed futures: Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating. Which future we get depends to a great extent on what we do.²

To understand this situation and the positive potential it holds requires a scientific method and approach of the new communism developed by Bob Avakian. It means analyzing reality as it actually exists; going beneath the surface to reveal and pull up the roots of what oppresses humanity today.

The indictments of Trump underscore why it is essential to see that the problem we face lies in the system that has given rise to this divide in the ruling class. And to recognize that within that divide lies the potential for masses of people to break with this system and get with the revolution that is working for a whole new emancipating way to live if we bring that alive for people.

This reality we face is concentrated in the Organizing for an Actual Revolution: 7 Key Points. It begins:

Brutal and murderous white supremacy, male supremacy, and other oppressive relations, the deepening crisis in society and the world overall, including the constant wars and the continuing destruction of the environment: all this cannot ultimately be resolved, in any positive way, within the confines of the system that rules in this country and dominates in the world as a whole—the system of capitalism-imperialism. Under the rule of this system, all this will only get worse….

Because of big changes in this country and the world overall, one part of the ruling class, represented by the Republican Party, has become fascist: they no longer believe in or feel bound by what have been the “norms” of “democratic” capitalist rule in this country. And the other section of the ruling class, represented by the Democratic Party, has no real answer to this—except trying to maintain the “normal way” that the oppressive rule of this system has been enforced for hundreds of years, while the fascists are determined to tear up those “norms” and rule through more openly and aggressively oppressive means, without the traditional disguise of supposed “democracy for all.”

This profound divide has just become deeper, sharper, and more volatile with the Indictments of Trump.

And, if the sight of armed fascists at polling places in Maricopa County in Arizona during the last two elections doesn’t portend the future, listen to this drawn from the actual indictment of Trump:

One of Trump’s Senior Advisors told one of Trump’s co-conspirators: “You’re going to cause riots in the streets.” Co-Conspirator 2 responded that there had previously been points in the nation’s history where “violence was necessary to protect the republic.”

It also tells of Jeffrey Clark of the Department of Justice who Trump wanted to make attorney general being warned that this attempt to override the election would lead to folks being out in the streets, would lead to riots. And the response was, “Well, that’s what the Insurrection Act is for.” In other words, call out the military to suppress and crush those rising up.

All of this coming to a pivotal point with the 2024 election. For Trump, the election is his way out of any conviction or prison sentence, and his indictments the red meat he’s feeding his followers. More fundamentally, the now fully fascist Republican Party, with theocratic fascists at its core who regard Trump as their messiah, who occupy positions of power from the Congress to the U.S. Supreme Court, down to school boards and the tens of millions of gun-toting, unthinking fascists throughout society who see this as their “last chance” to save their country and lock in their white supremacist, patriarchal America First vision for the future... all while the planet is on fire and the wheels of danger of nuclear war escalates.

BUT we must not let this stay as a fight between the fascists and those among the rulers who are fighting for the way things have been in this country; if we let this stay on the terms of this system, then that will be a terrible betrayal of the people of this planet and the oppressed within the U.S., as well as future generations whose very existence this system endangers.

We need to wage a ferocious struggle against the bourgeois electoral illusions that saturate the “decent” people. Sitting back and cheerleading the indictments and then the trials will squander the rare chance to get this system off the backs of humanity. 

All of this underscores the scientific depth and import of this paragraph from Bob Avakian which we have read many times on The RNL Show:

as “the normal way” society has been ruled is failing to hold things together—and society is increasingly being ripped apart—this can shake people’s belief that “the way things have always been” is the only way things can be. It can make people more open to questioning—in a real sense it can force people to question—the way things have been, and whether they have to stay that way. And this is all the more likely to happen if the revolutionary forces are out among the people shining a light on the deeper reality of what is happening, and why, and bringing out that there IS an alternative to living this way.

That alternative is concentrated in what urgently needs to be seen and taken up now—right now—by thousands in this Declaration:

WE NEED AND WE DEMAND:

A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LIVE,

A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM

A whole different way of living is possible: a whole different way to organize society, with a radically different economic foundation and political system, emancipating relations among people and an uplifting culture—all of this oriented to meeting the basic needs and fulfilling the highest interests of the masses of people.

With the urgency the situation requires,

WE DECLARE AND DEMAND:

The Existing Capitalist-Imperialist System And Institutions Of Government In This Country Must Be Abolished And Dismantled—And Replaced By A New, Socialist System Based On The CONSTITUTION FOR THE NEW SOCIALIST REPUBLIC IN NORTH AMERICA.