Week of September 20

This Week in Fascism

A Weekly Column by historian and author Paul Street

As of Friday, September 25, 2026, 11 AM*

It’s hard to keep up with the endless madness and atrocities of the zone-flooding Trump fascist regime. Here is an abbreviated compilation from the last week.

 

MAD DICTATOR STUFF

Three Mainstream Media Outlets Banned from White House

Last Saturday morning, reporters from three mainstream media outlets – CNN, MSNOW, and Politico – were barred entry to the White House because Trump doesn’t like their “negative,” meaning insufficiently flattering, coverage (what he called “fake news”) of his fascist presidency. 

Mein Trumpf claimed he was “instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States.”  This common Trump term, “fake news,” is more than vaguely reminiscent of the German Nazi party’s “Lügenpresse” a German term meaning “lying press,” historically used to discredit the media and currently associated with far-right political rhetoric.

The MSNOW, CNN, and Politico reporters were still locked out of the White House Thursday morning even as Chinese state media were welcomed on to the grounds to cover President Xi Jinping’s meeting with Trump. In defiance of two federal court orders against his ban, including one just hours before, Trump banned the three media firms from his state dinner honoring Xi Thursday night.  

A “Triumphal Arch” Trump Wants to Double as a “Military Complex”

Trump claimed on Truth Social last Sunday that the bizarre America First arch he wants  built in the nation’s capital will be “convert[ed] …into a top-grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas.” Speculation is widespread that the intended targets of this imagined weaponry are those who might protest his regime.

“Like a Wild Animal”

Last Monday, the conservative former federal judge J. Michael Luttig reasonably warned on MSNOW  that Trump is “like a wild animal that’s trapped” thanks to collapsing public approval. Luttig said Trump “will be desperate between now and the midterm elections and then the certification of the new Congress in January,” doing everything he can to keep unchecked power. “That should worry all of us. And it should worry the world.” Luttig’s comments built on a recent New Republic article  in which he predicted  that Trump and his party will lose the US House in the midterms but refuse to concede, with Trump toy and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) —no Mike Pence – conducting the steal next January 3rd.

The One-Year Anniversary of NSPM-7

Today (Friday, 9/25/2026) is the one-year anniversary of a critical piece of the regime’s fascist war on dissent: National Security Presidential Memo 7, which essentially designates leftist and antifascist action and thought as “domestic terrorism,” subject to investigation and prosecution.  NSPM7 has already guided the arch-repressive federal prosecution and draconian sentencing of ICE protesters in Texas  (the “Prairieland” defendants) and lay behind the upcoming fascist federal prosecution of immigrant and community protectors (the “Minnesota 15”) in Minneapolis.

“Annihilate the Islamic Republic…Quickly”

Speaking of the world beyond the US, Trump gave a wild America First campaign-style speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. In this deranged oration, Trump absurdly claimed  that the United States has emerged from a “Dark Age” under Biden to a “Golden Age” under Trump.  He preposterously professed to have “made peace” and then  said this:

“I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran…Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”

The fascist president of the United States got up in front of the only planet-wide deliberative and rule of law body and threatened to “annihilate” a nation of 90 million. 

There’s a translation for “do it quickly”: use tactical nuclear weapons, as advocated by the number three person in Trump’s fascist-run Pentagon – a threat to be taken seriously as Trump’s failed war on Iran has significantly the American Empire’s conventional weapons stocks while humiliating the Malignant Narcissist-in-chief.

Among other wild and grandiose imperialist statements, Trump boasted about his military seizure of Venezuela’s former head of state and oil resources and claimed that Cuba has “spent decades coordinating with the left-wing radicals and communist networks here in the United States… cultivat[ing] ties to subversive …radical groups such as the Communist Party USA, Antifa and the Democrat Socialists of America.”

The ecofascist Trump further informed UN delegates that the planet is cooling, not warming.

“His Hemisphere”

Last Sunday, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform an image depicting himself  glaring menacingly across a portion of a globe depicting the Northern Hemisphere and prominently featuring Greenland. A caption above the image reads “His Hemisphere.”

 ETHNIC CLEANSING

The Office of Remigration

The New Republic reported Thursday that a little-known State Department agency called the Office of Remigration has paid $400 million to authoritarian governments mainly in Africa and Latin America for accepting Ice kidnapping victims (“deportees”) who lack any connection to those countries.  This office operates with 15 staffers under the command of the fascist White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen “Camp of the Saints” Miller’s direction. The term “remigration” is taken from European neofascist movements and is code language for “ expelling nonwhite populations en masse” — that is, for full on racial and ethnic cleansing.

More Lethal ICE Violence and Death

Last Sunday thugs with Trump’s Gestapo, ICE.  crashed into a Door Dash driver’s car and shot the driver. ,  Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, 28, between his shoulder blades. They took Mr. Garces Perez, who entered the country legally two years ago, into ICE detention, rushing him out of a hospital with the bullet still inside him.  “Since September”, The New York Times reports,  “more than 20 people have been fired on by ICE across the country, some fatally. Nearly all were in their vehicles.”

ICE Storm troopers assaulted, sat on, and beat a Black man in Evanston, Illinois as he walked to pick up a prescription at a pharmacy. After determining that their victim was a citizen, the ICE goons just drove away, leaving the injured man bleeding in the street. Local citizens called an ambulance. An eyewitness told the Associated Press that Trump’s thugs left the man bleeding on the ground after realizing their mistake. The man ended up in a hospital with injuries to his head, neck and teeth.

An attempted traffic stop by ICE thugs in Grand Rapids, Michigan Sunday ended in the death of the Guatemalan immigrant Mario David Coronado, 36.  Trump’s racist “immigration enforcement” Gestapo has been unwilling to cooperate with local authorities investigating the incident.

A 36-year-old Costa Rican man who repeatedly complained about missed insulin injections, skipped meal critical to managing his diabetes and lack of water became the third detainee to die within six months at an ICE death camp in Louisiana.

The Guardian reported Wednesday that federal ethnic cleansing authorities (ICE)  prevented US House member Veronica Escobar (D-TX) from fully conducting her legally mandated congressional oversight duties at the nation’s largest ICE concentration camp.. “Since Camp East Montana opened last summer,” The Guardian reports, “it has been plagued with accusations …human rights and constitutional violations, including physical abuse, sexual harassment, inedible food and medical neglect…At least three people detained at the site have died in ICE custody, including a 55-year-old man whose January death was ruled a homicide after security guards beat him.”

$100 Million for Enhanced ICE Targeting

It was reported Wednesday that the Trump regime is going to spend $100 million to “radically expand” ICE’s “espionage and surveillance” capacities for identifying targets for removal from the US.

Ethnic Cleansing “Quietly Soared to Record Highs” This Summer

The New York Times today published a chilling account  of “how the most effective escalation of President Trump’s mass deportation” – really ethnic cleansing and human trafficking — “campaign happened quietly” in the summer of 2026:

“Unlike earlier high-profile raids that drew thousands of protesters into the streets of Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis, the surge in arrests in June, July and August was captured mostly by grainy security camera footage, through cracked blinds and from behind closed doors….Arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement this summer soared to record highs [in July and August as] “Federal agents appeared in nearly every corner of daily life, carrying out operations at hospitals and airports, outside suburban schools and along rural construction sites and truck stops” and “fanned out from coastal cities in Maine to desert towns in Arizona, across the open plains of Wyoming and down through the southern borderlands.”

Trump has mimicked Adolph Hitler’s promise and question for territorial expansion of the German Reich by proclaiming his desire to annex Greenland and all of North America, much of the Caribbean, and Venezuela.

Racist Praise for Trump at Fatherland News

On Wednesday, Fatherland (FOX) News host Sean Hannity provided his viewers with a bizarre list of “Trump’s Accomplishments” that included: “Restored Nine Military Bases to Rightful Names” – a reference to the renaming of Pentagon bases after military commanders and soldiers who fought to defend the system of Black chattel slavery with the Confederacy during the US Civil War.

*I time-stamp these weekly reports because of the rapid, dizzying, and zone-flooding pace at which Trumpism-fascism is now moving. Between the time when this report is sent and when it can go up numerous outrages will occur.  

The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go Now!

 

IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY, WE REFUSE TO ACCEPT A FASCIST AMERICA!

NOW IS the TIME WHEN WE MUST RISE UP and ACT to STOP the CONSOLIDATION of TRUMP MAGA FASCISM. For the lives of people here and around the world we must refuse unlawful and inhumane orders… we must fill the streets and town squares in non-violent protest—not stopping until we become millions — not relenting until this regime is no longer able to implement its program or maintain its hold on power.