Life with Trump at the reins of the world’s biggest superpower feels like a series of nightmares; we jolt from one to another, but never wake.

Last year he handed an enormous tax cut to big businesses and their owners. Now he wants to slash more than half of the funding from the food stamp program – the sole food source for roughly 41 million people. Just weeks after his election, clampdowns began on the right to organise in workplaces.

He has threatened nuclear war, last September telling the UN General Assembly that he would be willing to “totally destroy” North Korea. 

His latest crime is separating refugee children from their parents as they cross the border into the United States, fleeing horrific violence in Central America and searching for a better life. 

The policy was overturned thanks to an outpouring of opposition, but thousands of families are yet to be reunited. Many parents don’t know where their children are.

Families crossing the border by land are not the only targets. Trump’s Muslim ban, approved by the Supreme Court in June, has had a similar effect. The ban prevents almost all travel to the US by citizens of five Muslim-majority countries: Libya, Syria, Iran, Somalia and Yemen. Many families from those countries now face the choice of permanent separation or exile. 

For Yemenis in particular, the policy dashes hopes of reunification for families torn apart while fleeing the more than 90,000 US-backed Saudi air strikes that have wreaked havoc in their country since 2015.

This cruelty is not just a Trump phenomenon; it’s not just a Republican phenomenon either. Trump came to power after eight years of Barack Obama – the Democratic president who was supposed to represent “hope” for a fairer United States.

But Obama’s term is remembered most vividly by the millions who lost their jobs and homes in mass lay-offs and evictions. 

Public school kids watched as their schools were shut: a key tenet of education policy under Obama. Nationwide, 1,929 were closed in 2010-11. These were predominantly in Black communities. 

At the same time, Obama helped funnel US$7.7 trillion of public money to the banks, money that could have been used to give “hope” to the 42 million people, including 13 million children, who are food insecure in the US. 

Nor were the Democrats inclined to reduce militarism. Obama was responsible for ordering missions in 150 countries between 2012 and 2014. More people were killed with drones during Obama’s first year in power than in former Republican president George Bush’s entire term. 

The Obama years similarly paved the way for the horrors of immigration policy under Trump. When Obama took over from Bush, he was handed an enormous machine designed to persecute refugees and immigrants. 

Did he try to dismantle it, as a professed supporter of immigration reform? No. He tripled the budget for immigration enforcement, doubled the numbers being prosecuted for re-entry and oversaw a record number of deportations. 

The Democrats built up what one contributor to the liberal, Democrat-leaning Nation magazine described as the “most sophisticated and well-funded human-expulsion machine in the history of the country”. Now Trump is wielding it.

The inhumanity of the Trump administration is capitalism without competent sales people. 

Capitalism is a system with brutality at its heart. A small elite make the major decisions that affect the lives of the rest of us. They decide how many workers to sack, which schools to close and who to persecute, detain and exploit. They are motivated only by profits. 

They make a buck off the workers who run our schools, factories, call centres and hospitals, by pushing through harsh wage cuts and attacks on working conditions. And they undermine workers’ ability to organise and fight back. We’re seeing vicious attacks on working people everywhere.

Across the world, borders are militarised to protect the wealth of the rich and powerful. New territories are invaded and occupied for their oil reserves or strategic location. The world we live in is dominated by a rich and powerful class that has no scruples about condemning millions to poverty, killing people in wars and punishing them for trying to flee across arbitrary borders. 

Trump represents a particularly gross and nightmarish chapter in the history of world capitalism, but the rest of the book remains a horror story.