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 just three of the important recent developments in the accelerating Trump fascist assault on humanity.
New Attacks on Birthright Citizenship
Two days ago, Trump made a second attempt to defy the US Constitution’s unambiguous granting of citizenship to all persons born on United States soil. Just five weeks after the Supreme Court shot down his January 20, 2025 (day one in his second term) executive order purporting to dictatorially nullify that right for children born to undocumented immigrants and temporary residents, Trump handed down two new orders attacking birthright citizenship.
The first order broadens the category of those already ineligible for birthright citizenship under US law from:
- children born to foreign occupiers and children born to foreign diplomats and others enjoying “foreign sovereign” immunity
- children of members of “foreign terrorist organizations”
- children whose parents are determined by the federal the government to be “alien enemies” or members of “terrorist groups”
- children of foreign government employees
- children born to parents who “engaged in fraudulent actions to obtain citizenship”
This is dangerously vague and open-ended language designed to open the door to massive nativist and ideologically selective denaturalization. The Trump regime has repeatedly referred to immigrants as alien invaders, suggested that immigrants are occupying sacred US soil at the direction of enemy governments, and linked immigration to terrorism.
The second order targets the supposed great menace of “birth tourism,” with Trump claiming without a hint of evidence that “hundreds of thousands” have engaged in defiance of already existing federal legislation making it illegal to travel to the US under the cloak of tourism to give birth with the intent of giving your child US citizenship.
Both of these orders reflect the Trump regime’s determination to defy the rule of clearly stated law – in this case the explicit and unequivocal language of the Fourteenth Amendment – to enforce their militantly racist and nativist ethnic cleansing agenda.
During an Oval Office event on Thursday, Trump tried to justify this noxious attempt at an end run around judicial review (a core principle of constitutional checks and balances) by telling reporters that the June 30th Supreme Court ruling upholding birthright citizenship was a “very, very unfortunate decision.” Adding absurdity to insult in accord with fascism’s war on basic facts, Trump regaled reporters with the following nonsense: “You have one man came in with a family head said he had 56 children. Another one had 98 children… This was not what [birthright citizenship] was for. This was meant for the babies of slaves. It was…right after one week or two weeks after the Civil War ended.”
Nope. No such “birth tourists” exist and birthright citizenship was ratified as part of the 14th Amendment more than three years after the conclusion of the Civil War.
Attorney General Todd Blanche: So Dobbs “Becomes Permanent in Every Single State”
In a call to the Christian fascist organization Intercessors for America from the White House Faith Office last week, Trump’s personal attorney and Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Department of Justice and White House are working with federal health agencies “to get permanent solutions so the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state” – that is, to enforce a national abortion ban. “We will have victory and it will be soon and it will be permanent,” Blanche said.
Blanche’s pledge was weak on specifics beyond suggesting restoration of a federal regulation requiring in-person dispensing of abortion drugs currently available through mail. Still, Blanche’s threat should not be laughed off. As Refuse Fascism leader Coco Das explains, “people didn’t think they were serious about overturning Roe [women’s half-century constitutional right to an abortion] and look what happened. Despite an election that Trump lost, Roe was overturned [in the Trump Supreme Court’s June 24, 2022 Dobbs decision] and these fascists are preparing for their next abortion victory.” As Coco Das elaborates:
“The fight around abortion rights isn’t about the rights of the unborn. These fascists make it clear every day they don’t give a fuck about actual children. This fight is about the role of women in society and whether they will be free to control their own lives and reproduction or whether they will be subject to the domination of a patriarchy based on male supremacy and white Christian nationalism. For these fascists, Make America Great Again means turning women into breeders, subservient to their husbands and fathers, and to the church and the fascist state…This is fascism.”
Trump: “They’re All Dirty, Filthy Dirty”
Then there’s the wild city-trashing language of Mein Trumpf himself, who slammed “blue cities” during an Oval Office press gaggle last Monday. Trump said that “The blue cities have something in common: crime, high crime, vicious, violent crime…But what [else] do they have in common? They’re all filthy dirty.” Trump added that “blue cities…smell” and have “broken storefronts” and “gross trees… any city led by a Democratic official is disgusting.”
Never mind the ongoing decline in urban crime rates and the abundance of cheerful, clean, beautiful and inspiring spaces in Urban America – alongside vast misery imposed by savage racial and socioeconomic inequalities and oppression that are unmentionable in fascist discourse.
There’s more than partisan hatred of the Democrats and their disproportionately urban constituents behind these anti-metropolitan comments. As the liberal scholar Jason Stanley noted in his widely read book How Fascism Works: The Politics of US and Them, anti-urbanism is a key ideological pillar of fascist ideology. Fascist politics idealize rural life as “morally pure and central to national strength.” Fascism sees cities as corrupt, racially polluted, sexually transgressive, disease-spreading, dangerously cosmopolitan, outsider-influenced sites of nation-weakening leftism, liberalism, terrorism, and foreign “contamination.”
Never forget what Trump said to 800-plus top military officers said when he and Hegseth called the imperial brass to Quantico, Virginia, last September 30th: America’s leading adversary is “the enemy within” and the US military needs to understand the nation’s predominantly nonwhite and Democratic-run cities as war zones. “That’s a war too,” Trump proclaimed.
This is fascism.