A Weekly Column by historian and author Paul Street
It’s hard to keep up with the fascism that is unfolding as the Trump MAGA regime and party bid to consolidate a new form of governance atop the United States. Here are some of the most important recent developments.
“More Bloodshed Unless They Shut Their Mouth”
After his boss Donald Trump ordered the reinstatement of Immigration and Customs Enforcement traffic stops despite two recent incidents in which those stops led to the extrajudicial execution of Latino immigrants, “Border Czar” Tom Homan told Fatherland (FOX) News that “it all goes back to the Dems who want to continually attack ICE and tell people …to resist, There’s going to be more bloodshed unless they shut their mouth …”. Department of Homeland Security director Markwayne Mullen added that “were turning up the heat on the streets,” boasting that “we’ve empowered our law enforcement to do their job.”
A Threat to “Exile” Leftists
Consistent with Trump’s July 3rd threat to send communists into “exile,” Trump’s fascist Department of [in]Justice last week undertook its first ever application to the never before-used Alien Terrorist Removal Court. This obscure body permits the regime to secretly deport anyone it deems an “alien terrorist” threat. The criteria for determining if someone is an “alien terrorist” is undefined, the power to designate people that way granted to Trump’s Secretary of State or Attorney General.
The threat to “exile” dissidents should not be laughed off. The regime has violated international law by deporting people to black box torture camps in remote nations. Leading up to the 2025 New York City mayoral election, Mein Trumpf threatened to “arrest Zohran Mamdani,” strip him of his citizenship, and “to deport him.”
Blowing Off the War Powers Resolution
The Trump regime has resumed its criminal, brazenly imperialist war on Iran in defiance of a June 24 joint Congressional Resolution directing Trump to remove US forces from hostilities with Iran. (The Senate’s vote for this measure marked the first time that both chambers of Congress have approved a concurrent resolution instructing a president to end a military action since the War Powers Resolution of 1973 was enacted.) The US Constitution reserves for Congress the power to declare war. Trump responded to the resolution by excoriating Republican senators for allowing the vote to take place.
Threatening New War Crimes and the International Criminal Court
Trump this week threatened collective punishment against the people of Iran in response to the death of three US soldiers. He said Tehran would pay “many times over.” Trump said the US would strike bridges and power plants in Iran if the Iranian military did not stop targeting ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Deliberate strikes on civilian infrastructure and collective punishment are major war crimes under international law.
That the Trump regime’s fascist war on the rule of law applies to international as well as domestic law was seen yet again in bold fashion in a blistering Rubio attack on the International Criminal Court (ICC) published in the Wall Street Journal last week. Rubio claimed that the ICC threatens “US soldiers, police officers, Border Patrol agents and elected leaders” under international laws that “we neither consent to nor control.” Calling the ICC “an intolerable threat to US sovereignty,” Rubio pledged the United States to an effort “to dismantle the ICC brick by brick.”
The ICC rules in accord with established international law on four crimes of which the Trump regime (and previous US administrations) are guilty: genocide, aggression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. International law is universally applicable to all states, something that is intolerable to the America First Trump regime, reflecting the takeover of the US government by a fascist section of the ruling class ready to abandon all pretense of legality abroad as well as at home.
The War on Iran and the War on Elections
We should bear in mind what the resumed war on Iran means for the mid-term elections. Since everyone knows it will send gas and other prices back up, as is happening, the re-escalation is another among many signals that Trump aims to win the coming midterm elections through massive federal interference, perhaps even cancellation, not by anything remotely like normal campaign appeals to voters’ interests. At the same time, a state of war is congruent with designs to declare a state of emergency meant to cancel the midterms or refuse to honor their outcomes.
Testosterone Pete
In other news last week, Trump’s “Secretary of War,” the open Christian white nationalist Pete Hegseth, channeled the hyper-masculinism at the heart of fascism by ordering the military to test its soldiers’ testosterone levels. Hegseth is concerned that the American “warrior class” (his term) is not demonstrating enough manliness to perform its core tasks: “kill people and break things” and “unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy.”
Never Forget What They Said in Quantico
And who is the main enemy? We should also never forget what Trump and Hegseth said to 800 top military officers they brought to Quantico, Virginia, last September 30th. Hegseth instructed the commanders that US forces must not let their mission of ruling the world through “maximum lethality” be hampered by what Hegseth called “politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.” Trump told the officers that the nation’s top adversary is “the enemy within…We’re under invasion from within,” Trump intoned, “no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms. At least when they’re wearing a uniform, you can take them out.” The invaders are to be found in cities “run by radical left Democrats… San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles; we’re going to straighten them out one by one.” This is a job for the US military, said the depraved commander-in-chief: “A major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. A war from within.”
This is fascism.