A Weekly Column by historian and author Paul Street
Every week brings a new onslaught of fascist outrages from the Trump47 regime. It’s not easy to keep up. Here some of the leading Trump-fascist stories from this week, up through the time mentioned above. Who knows what will emerge later today and tomorrow?
The Trump High Court Sows Electoral Confusion
Last Monday, the Trump-crafted fascist Supreme Court gave the Trump regime a victory in his campaign to subvert the 2026 midterm elections by shooting down a lower court’s order that he stop implementing new federal controls over elections. The lower court’s ruling was consistent with the US Constitution, which denies the president power over how states run elections.
Just over two months from November’s elections, the Trump high court said in Trump v. California that the lower court order was “premature.” The fascist majority ruled that those who challenged the regime’s proposed rules (23 US states plus the District of Columbia) have no legal standing until the rules are formally announced (Never mind that the United States Post Office formally announced its plans to do precisely what Trump wants — follow his direction on who is eligible to receive mail-in ballots – last Friday.)
This means legal challenges can come only after the regime has already subverted the elections. In a strong dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accused the fascist majority of missing “the Government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections.” Jackson observed that the ruling conflicts with other rulings under the longstanding judicial Purcell principle, which warns against last-minute election changes that unduly burden election administrators and voters.
The legal commentator Jay Willis notes that “The result in Trump v. California…shows just how far this six-justice conservative [try fascist] supermajority is willing to go to help its favorite president’s political movement—all while reserving for itself the right to decide how much of the Constitution remains in place for the midterms, and how much Trump gets to rewrite as he sees fit.”
ICE Arrest Escalation
It was proudly reported on Fatherland/FOX News last Monday that ICE “quietly” arrested “a jaw- dropping number” — 1,328 — of predominantly Latino immigrants over the previous two weeks in the suburbs around Washington DC. This is just one example of a massive escalation in the Trump regime’s ethnic cleansing operation, a vicious sweep that has deported 540,000 people during Trump’s first year back in power.
The Associated Press reported last Tuesday that ICE arrested 49,571 people in July, a new monthly record. “The administration,” the AP reports, “has continued to advance its mass deportations agenda despite a shift in approach earlier this year from high-profile operations in large American cities that sparked a public outcry to arrests that have garnered less attention.”
ICE Torture
Judith Levine reported in The Guardian last Monday that “ICE tactics, already sadistic, are looking increasingly like torture.” Levine noted the following practices on the part of Trump’s Gestapo: the use of electric shock gloves on detainees; forced feeding (used against hunger strikers protesting miserable conditions in ICE concentration camps); solitary confinement; beatings, sleep deprivation; the sending of asylum seekers back to nations they fled under threat of execution, torture, and incarceration; “releasing detainees into the cold without adequate money or clothing (at least two – a Haitian woman, Daphy Michael, and a blind Rohingya man, Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a refugee from Myanmar – have frozen to death)”; the denial of legal representation to unaccompanied children; detaining infants and toddlers; denial of health care; sickening children nearly to death.
The Magic Deportation Bus
Last Monday the Trump White House’s Website posted a “Magic Deportation Bus” meme styled after the 1990s PBS educational series The Magic School Bus. The meme depicts a smiling “Miss Frizzle” driving a small school bus containing five handcuffed Latino men with their heads down – a brazen effort to enlist small children in the regime’s fascist “remigration” campaign.
Mass Revocation of Visas Coming
The AP reported Tuesday that the Trump regime is preparing to revoke the business and tourism visa of 200,000 people seeking asylum in the US – the “the largest single mass revocation of visas in U.S. history.” It’s another move in what American Immigration Council fellow Dara Lind calls “the Great Delegalization” — top fascist White House advisor Stephen Miller’s campaign to expel nonwhite immigrants from lives they have constructed over years of hard work and following the rules in the United States.
Detaining the Spouses and Parents of Military Personnel
Numerous news outlets last Sundary reported a disturbing story. Mired in a grueling, record-setting nine-month deployment marked by miserable conditions for naval personnel enlisted in Trump’s criminal war on Iran, USS Abraham Lincoln sailor Joshua Avilles learned last week that his hard-working father had been seized by ICE during a traffic stop. Avilles’ father is one of dozens of military spouses and parents stung by Trump’s reversal of a longstanding policy exempting undocumented immediate family members of military service members from “immigration enforcement” – an example of how the Trump regime privileges racist ethnic cleansing even over imperial calculation.
Texas’s Fascist Governor Defies Minnesota’s Attempted Extradition of an ICE Officer
Christian Castro, a former ICE agent, was released from jail in Brownsville, Texas, after that’s state’s fascist governor Greg Abbott refused to sign off on an extradition warrant for Castro to face charges for shooting a man during Trump’s immigrant raids in Minneapolis last winter. This is a remarkable development. “The standoff between the two states is highly unusual,” the AP reports. “Under federal law, states have little discretion to reject extradition requests from fellow states. Thousands of fugitives are sent to other states each year as a matter of routine.” Abbott, who pardoned a man who was convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester in Austin, Texas in the summer of 2020, is defying the rules and a fascist federal judge has backed him up.
“Do You Remain Loyal?”
The Department of Homeland Security posted a photo of Mein Trumpf on Monday with a chilling caption directed at those who dare to oppose the regime: “Do you remain loyal?”
“Give Us Our Renaming Or We’ll Tear it Down”
The Trump administration is now threatening to tear down the venerable federal Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts unless it permitted to renovate the facility with Trump’s name on top.
Resurrecting Measles
It was reported Tuesday that two people died from the measles in Pennsylvania, a reflection of the Trump regime’s anti-science, pandemo-fascist-eugenicist war on vaccines, which has resurrected a disease previously thought to have been eradicated in the US. .
“Lake America”
Shocking new details about the collapse of US-Canada trade negotiations emerged last Sunday. Trump’s wild last-minute demands on Canada, including the requirement that “Canada change its French language” and rules that would restrict Canada’s ability to make trade agreements with other nations, amount to de-facto annexation. It’s part of his fascist project of American expansion – a 21st Century version of mid-19th Century Manifest Destiny. Last Tuesday, Trump threatened to rename Lake Ontario (which borders both Canada and the US) “Lake America.” Trump signed an executive order to that effect on Thursday.
Postscript: Essential Reading
It’s not a quick read and it fails to properly identify the Trump regime as fascist, but I highly recommend the following remarkable report on ten different and interrelated ways in which the regime is moving to subvert the 2026 mid-term elections: Mark Medish and Joel McCleary, “It’s the Power Stupid,” The Washington Spectator, August 17, 2026: https://washingtonspectator.org/its-the-power-stupid-dancing-in-the-dark-part-4/
This is fascism. The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go Now!