Paul Street 9.4.2026 4:01 pm CST
Trump fascism inflicts atrocities “deliberately at a rapid dizzying pace, in order to disorient and demoralize those who would oppose this” (Bob Avakian). It’s not easy to keep up. This column seeks to identify the most significant latest examples each week in a way meant to orient readers to the broader Trump fascist project and fuel opposition to it.
Trump’s Secret Postal Portal of Disenfranchisement
Recall that Trump last March signed an executive order directing his administration to construct a registry of US citizens and commanding the United States Postal Service (USPS) to deliver mail-in voting ballots only to persons on the list – an order the Trumpist Supreme Court refused to halt last week. This is a brazen attempt to meddle with elections the federal government has no power to control under the US Constitution.
Three days ago, it was reported that an official with direct knowledge of the scheme has filed a whistleblower report warning that the “portal” being developed by the USPS to implement Trump’s order has been secretly pushed ahead in defiance of judicial rulings. The whistleblower says the portal hasn’t been properly tested and is “fundamentally flawed” in ways that will result in the “catastrophic” disenfranchisement of masses of voters during the 2026 midterms.
Electorate Shrinkage in Texas
Also reflecting the core Trump fascist agenda of shrinking the electorate in advance of the midterms is news that the majority-Republi-fascist county board of Tarrant County in Texas voted this week to drastically cut the number of polling sites available to the county’s 1.3 million registered voters this November. The closings particularly target majority-minority precincts in Arlington and Fort Worth. This is a shameless move to suppress Democratic and nonwhite votes ahead of a key, closely contested US Senate race in Texas. At the same time, Texas’s neo-Confederate Republi-fascist governor Greg Abbott is disenfranchising more than 800,000 voters by refusing to hold a special election to fill a vacant US House seat in a district that stretches from San Antonio to El Paso – a district likely to vote for a Democrat thanks to public outrage over Trump’s “border wall” attack on Big Bend National Park.
“Common Sense v. Communism”
Three days ago, the Christian Fascist on the down low and Trumpist Speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson held a press briefing in which he preposterously claimed that “the radical Left Democrats” are seeking to “turn the greatest nation in the history of the world over to communism, big government socialism…This is common sense versus communism….Rs vs. Ds and now the Ds are being taken over by communism,” Johnson intoned. “The barbarians,” Johnson added, “are now inside the gates,” claiming that “by our count there are almost 40 openly avowed Marxists, communists, socialists on the Democratic Congression ballot this year. “This is a serious issue, a serious threat to us,” Johnson warned.
Johnson and his fascist party are trying to set up future MAGA efforts to subvert the midterms by demonizing the other establishment political party as the radical “enemy within.” At the same time, paranoic anti-Marxism/-socialism/-communism is so central to their ideology that fascists like Trump, JD Vance, Stephen “We are the Storm” Miller (Trump’s top domestic policy adviser), and Johnson feel compelled to wield it even against an openly capitalist party.
“They Treated Us Like Cattle”
The New York Times last Sunday published a harrowing report of the hellish treatment experienced by immigrants who have been detained under miserable conditions in ICE torture camps for months before being sent to small African nations where they have no ties. “They didn’t treat us like human beings,” said Carlos Téllez-Sanchez, a Venezuelan who was expelled to Liberia by ICE while being denied medical care for a serious ailment: “They can say or do anything to you and there’s nothing you can do.”
“Paola Dos Santos, a Brazilian national who was deported to Liberia” was “detained for 15 months in two separate U.S. facilities [and] recounted detainees routinely being denied medical care, including pregnant women. One woman who pleaded for information about her son, who had been separated from her, had her hands and ankles tied together, Ms. Dos Santos said: ‘They tied her like she was cattle.’”
This is fascism, which combines genocidal racism with virulent nativism and sadism.
ICE Descends on Indianapolis
From Black Indy Live:
“Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett and the City of Indianapolis are now responding to the massive federal immigration enforcement activity unfolding across the city… local government was given no warning…[This] comes after reports, videos and eyewitness accounts of federal immigration agents appearing across Indianapolis over the past two days. Residents have reported stops and detentions at apartment complexes, businesses, gas stations and along major roads, with activity reported across multiple parts of the city.”
(In Indiana as in other “red” [Republi-fascist-run] states, new state law mandates increased state and local cooperation with federal ethnic cleansing agents.)
RIP Pierre Damas Bel
Overcome by depression over ankle monitor that fascist ICE shackled him with last July, the 20-year-old Haitian immigrant Pierre Damas Bel committed suicide by throwing himself under a truck on Interstate 70 last Monday. The cumbersome device prevented him from playing soccer, stopped him from getting a new ROTC uniform, and sparked bullying by classmates at Wright State University.
“Protect the Border from the Coming Horde”
US News and World Report reports today that “the White House has released a new ‘arcade’ website where users play 1980s-style video games that block ‘the coming horde’ at the U.S.-Mexico border…and pursue other priorities of President Donald Trump.” Further:
In the ‘Build the Wall’ game, players facing a ‘zombie border siege’ stack Tetris-style bricks to “protect the border from the coming horde.” When the bricks pile up, the screen flashes the message ‘border breached.’ In a separate game called “Rio Run,” players maneuver a white figure to ‘patrol the line along the river,’ moving to block and deport figures appearing to depict immigrants.”
As with last week’s news of the White House’s “Magic Deportation Bus,” we see the Trump fascist regime working to inculcate racist nativism in the hearts and minds of US children.
In Other Fascist News This Week…
+ The “Tech Reich” mega-giant Google demonstrated its reflexive allegiance to the fascist Dear Leader by immediately acting on the president’s Canada-bullying call to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” on Google Maps. Another “Nerd Reich” goliath, Apple, joined in this atrocity on “Apple Maps” last Tuesday.
+ Reuters reported Wednesday that the Trump regime is threatening to cut federal funding for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Supplementary Security Income (SSI) to states that do not enlist every one of their government agencies in the regime’s ethnic cleansing project by reporting all known “illegal” immigrants to the regime. “Previously,” Reuters reports, “only the state agencies that administered the funding for those programs had to [report ‘illegals’]. Other state agencies that might know of such immigrants, including universities and departments of motor vehicles, did not.”
+ In a letter made public this week, the Trump administration threatened to stop federal support for the venerable Smithsonian Institution if it does not fully align its leadership and its presentation of American history with the fascist MAGA world view, which rejects honest depictions of foundational American crimes and horrors like the Native American genocide, and Black chattel slavery,
+ ICE indiscriminately arrested 121 people in a major ethnic cleansing sweep of a nightclub popular with Latino people in Memphis, Tennessee, last Sunday night.
This is fascism. The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go Now!