The US presidential election is now two months away. More than three years after former President Donald Trump and his Republican co-conspirators organized a violent insurrection aimed at overturning the 2020 presidential election, all the conditions that led to the coup not only remain but have metastasized.

Laying the groundwork to reject the results of the 2024 elections, Trump and the Republicans have embarked on a campaign combining election denialism and anti-immigrant agitation based on the neo-Nazi “Great Replacement Theory.” They are claiming that due to Biden’s and Harris’s supposed “open border” policies, millions of “illegal aliens” and “non-citizens” will vote in the upcoming elections. In addition, Trump has repeatedly refused to state that he will accept the results.

The Republican National Committee and other Trump-aligned groups have begun filing a series of lawsuits in “battleground” states aimed at suppressing the vote.

• In North Carolina, the RNC and the North Carolina GOP have already sued the State Board of Elections twice in the last few weeks over alleged failures to remove “noncitizens” from voter rolls. The Republicans are calling on the Board of Elections to drop 225,000 people from the voter rolls and force them to cast provisional ballots in November.
• In Arizona, America First Legal, the Washington D.C.-based law firm led by Trump’s fascist adviser Stephen Miller, filed a lawsuit targeting all 15 counties in the state for allegedly failing to rid voter rolls of noncitizens. Miller’s group had originally only sued Maricopa County, the fourth largest county in the United States with over 4.5 million people. In a statement issued Wednesday, Miller said “we are now suing 14 additional counties in Arizona for refusing to remove illegal aliens and non-citizens from their voter rolls.”

Several other states led by Republicans, including Texas, Tennessee, Virginia and Alabama, have boasted in recent weeks of purging thousands or, in the case of Texas, 1.1 million voters from registration rolls since 2021. While many of these people may have been removed for legitimate reasons, such as moving from the state or dying, others are being removed despite being legal voters who had not voted recently or had errors in paperwork.

Nevertheless, Republicans are presenting nearly all of the cases as examples of malicious activity by “illegal aliens,” even though the number of such votes actually cast in the state can be counted on one hand.

The efforts to suppress the vote extend beyond purging voter rolls. In Texas last month, Attorney General Ken Paxton signed off on a series of Gestapo-style raids targeting the homes of campaign workers and Democratic Party politicians across three counties. Despite claims by Paxton of illegal voter registration operations, as of this writing no charges have been filed. This did not prevent police agents from seizing the phones and laptops of four Latina women targeted in the raid. Three of the women are in their 70s, while the other is an 87-year-old retired school teacher.

In Georgia, one of the states where Trump launched his most aggressive campaign to overturn the vote in 2020, last month the Republican-controlled State Election Board in a 3-2 vote adopted rules that allow local election officials to conduct “reasonable inquiries” of alleged voter fraud and examine “all election-related documentation created during the conduct of elections” prior to certifying results.

For over 100 years, the certification of election results by local election officials has been a “ministerial duty,” one that is done by non-partisan officials who have no independent role. Their purpose has simply been to record the completed vote total.

The new rules in Georgia are not being implemented to ensure the “integrity” of the US election system but to suppress and delay the outcome of election results in order to assist Trump’s efforts to return to power. The rule in Georgia was advanced by Julie Adams, a regional director for the Election Integrity Network (EIN) and member of the Fulton County election board who has already refused, with the support of the America First Policy Institute, the legal combat arm of the Trump campaign, to certify election results twice in Georgia this year alone.

The EIN is led by none other than Cleta Mitchell, a longtime Republican operative and “very dear friend” of Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of arch-reactionary Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Prior to and after the November 2020 election, Mitchell worked alongside Ginni Thomas and Trump coup lawyer John Eastman to advance an authoritarian legal theory that claimed state legislatures, not voters, choose presidential electors.

Following Trump’s 2020 defeat, Virginia Thomas sent emails to Republicans in “battleground” states such Wisconsin and Arizona, imploring them to toss out the electors chosen by popular vote and, instead, install their own slate of pro-Trump electors.

The efforts by Trump and the Republicans to suppress the vote are being undertaken with ample monetary support from sections of the financial oligarchy that, in the face of mounting class antagonisms within the United States, are promoting Trump’s efforts to build up a fascistic movement.

That Trump is free to make a second bid for dictatorship is entirely the responsibility of President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party. The central priority of the Democratic Party is the escalation of war, including the US-NATO war against Russia, the genocide in Gaza and the developing conflict with China.

To advance their joint war agenda, the Democrats have joined hands with their “Republican colleagues” to pass massive military budgets and slash social spending, impoverishing workers and fueling social grievances, which Trump and the far right exploit, mainly through scapegoating immigrants as the cause of the deepening social crisis. Seeking to “divide and conquer” the working class using nationalism, the Republicans are joined by the Democrats and the corporatist trade unions.

As the Republicans under Trump plot a second coup, the Democrats are hailing the endorsement of Harris by Republican Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, the leading architect of the 2003 war against Iraq.

Harris and the Democrats are doing everything in their power to downplay the danger of a return of Trump to power. The Democrats and the media have completely ignored the statements by Biden himself at the DNC last month that Trump is preparing a “bloodbath” if he loses and will be “a dictator on day one” if he returns to the White House.

Harris and her running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz characterize the Republicans merely as “weird,” while at the same time pledging to work with them to enact Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, in the process strengthening Trump and the far right.

Commenting on the non-response to Biden’s statements, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North stated in remarks at the second international commemoration of the work of Leon Trotsky on Büyükada, Turkey on August 25:

The silence expressed the indifference of the American ruling class to the preservation of democracy. In fact, there is a growing consensus within the ruling oligarchs in the United States but not only there, in fact, in countries throughout the world, that their interests, domestically and internationally, are incompatible with democracy. The ruling elites are fully aware that the staggering level of social inequality is provoking growing popular anger, and that the attacks on living conditions required by imperialist militarism will lead to a tremendous escalation of class conflict. The turn of the ruling class to fascism is an attempt to preempt and suppress, with violence, the political radicalization of the working class and its turn to socialism.

The danger posed by Trump and the Republican Party is very real. There is, however, no significant constituency within the ruling class for the preservation of democratic forms of rule. 

The defense and expansion of democratic rights require the mobilization of the working class in opposition to both the Democrats and Republicans, the two parties of the corporate and financial oligarchy. Dictatorship is the response of the ruling class to the threat of socialism. The fight for socialism must be the response of the working class to the turn of the ruling elites toward dictatorship.