Episode 259
Yesterday Refuse Fascism led marchers to the White House demanding Trump Must Go NOW, as Trump took federal control of the DC police and deployed national guard and other federal agencies onto the streets of the city to terrorize residents. Visit refusefascism.org for videos and coverage.
We share Sam’s speech from the kickoff rally at Dupont Circle that announced the new call to action:
Then, we share an interview with returning guest Sasha Abramsky. Follow his work at The Nation, read his latest article “This Is a Hunting of People”: LA Protesters Turn Out to Resist ICE and We’ve Officially Entered Kafka’s America
Continue to take part in protests near you and connect with the movement at RefuseFascism.org. Text NOTRUMP to 855-755-1314, follow @RefuseFascism on social media (@RefuseFashizm on TikTok) and our YouTube channel: @Refuse_Fascism. Support:
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- donate.refusefascism.org
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Music for this episode: Penny the Snitch by Ikebe Shakedown
Episode 259 Time for the Fall of the Trump Regime
Refuse Fascism podcast
Mon, Aug 18, 2025 11:12AM • 1:05:23
Sasha Abramsky 00:00
You look at what’s happening in America today, you can say: All right, we have a series of symptoms, and when you analyze what those symptoms are, the conclusion is you’re suffering from a bout of fascism. We’ve militarized law enforcement. We’re going after the independence of Universities. We’re going after museums and cultural institutions. We’re dismantling independent ombudsman structures, independent watchdog structures. We’re normalizing the presence of secret police. Every single one of those is a textbook symptom of a society falling into fascism. Unless we identify that, and unless we say, look, here’s why it’s fascism, then we’re not going to have any road map to get out of this nightmare.
Sam Goldman 00:56
Welcome to Episode 259, of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. This is Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show, and I’m so glad to be back with you after two weeks off. Refuse Fascism works to unite all who can be united to join in mass nonviolent protests and resistance in the streets and throughout society, growing to include millions, and refusing to stop until we create such a profound political crisis that Trump cannot impose his fascist program, or even maintain his hold on power. Much thanks to our patrons, everyone who rates, reviews, shares the show and reps our merch. Every bit helps connect more people with Refuse Fascism. So after listening to today’s episode, please give us a rating, write a review, check out our shop and become a patron, if you aren’t already.
Today, we’re sharing an interview with Sasha Abramsky, Western correspondent for The Nation. But first, the Trump fascist regime has federalized the D.C. police, deployed the National Guard and the FBI to patrol D.C.’s streets and threatened more military force to control and intimidate D.C., while ICE continues to carry out Gestapo terror on immigrants. We’ve seen all week how they’ve been harassing Black youth and bulldozing homeless encampments. Yesterday, Saturday, August 16, Refuse Fascism mobilized an estimated 2,000 protesters in marking the end of the first week of Trump’s fascist takeover of D.C. with a defiant march from Dupont Circle to and around the White House, blowing whistles and chanting Trump Must Go Now! Que se Vaya Trump! Free D.C.! Troops on the corner, Feds on the block, the fascist takeover must be stopped!
I was honored to be amongst them. And I was honored to speak at this protest, which included many other folks, including Reverend Graylan Scott Haigler, Senior Advisor for Fellowship for Reconciliation. Jolly Good Ginger — yes, that Jolly — and Corey Teague of the National Action Network, along with others, to be part of saying: No Fascist Takeover of D.C.! Trump Must Go Now! At the rally before the march, I was thrilled to share an urgent and audacious call from RefuseFascism.org, a bold plan that I believe measures up to what we face. It’s a call that’s open to everyone, initiated by Refuse Fascism, but one that can only succeed if we unite to carry it forward. I hope this will explain why my voice sounds like this right now. So have a listen.
The Trump fascist regime is illegitimate! [crowd cheers] Its power grab in Washington D.C. is illegitimate! [cheers] The militarization of the streets of the Capitol is illegitimate! [cheers] The attacks on our immigrant siblings, the homeless, the youth, on our whole community is illegitimate! [cheers] This beautiful person right there, has a sign that says History Has Its Eyes On Us! [cheers] And because it is illegitimate, we will not comply, [cheers] we will not be silent [cheers] and we will not stop until the whole Trump fascist regime is driven from power! [loud cheers]
So as Lucha said, I’m Sam Goldman. I’m the host of the Refuse Fascism podcast, and I’m a leader of Refuse Fascism. [cheers] I’m so glad to be with you here today to march on the White House to say NO to Trump’s fascist takeover of D.C. [cheers] I am here because the only real solution is for us to rise to the historic challenge, to drive this regime from power, not in 2026, not in 2028, but right fucking now. [big cheer] Trump Must Go Now! [crowd repeats] Trump Must Go Now! So today I’m going to lay out why we say this, and I’m also going to lay out what we need to do together to make that real.
Fascism has momentum and direction. Momentum: it’s moving fast by the day, advancing by the hour. Direction: always in one direction, more repression, more violence, more terror. Direction: Project 2025 on steroids. Hitler’s playbook, but with nuclear weapons. [crowd jeers] What’s happening right here in D.C. right now is their next leap–if they can lock this down, and if people get used to it, it becomes the model for the whole country, with ever increasing brutality and less and less space for us to stop it. Homeless encampments bulldozed, checkpoints in our neighborhoods, an occupying army of masked men with guns roaming the streets, hunting down black youth, dripping with their white supremacy. [cheers]
We have seen many beautiful people in D.C. rise up, and I want to make some noise for them! [cheers] Make some noise for the people, directing people away from checkpoints! [cheers] Make some noise for the people who hear about these checkpoints and walk out of the nightclubs and tell those fascists to get the fuck out! [cheers] Make some noise for the people doing neighborhood patrols and cop watches, alerting the community! [cheers] And some noise for the people that are banging their pots and pans every night at 8:00 p.m! [cheers] Make some noise for the veterans urging Guard members to refuse to obey unconstitutional orders! [cheers]
Now, as we make noise for those standing up, we’ve gotta also be honest. We here today, all of us are beautiful together, but when fascists take over the Capitol, when they send in the National Guard, the FBI, hunting down our youth, attacking the homeless, these streets should be flooded! [cheers]
Trump will not stop as long as he is allowed to remain in power. [person in crowd: Fuck Donald Trump!] That’s right… backed by a fascist regime that will not stop until everyone they hate is either locked up, disappeared or forced to their knees. We cannot allow this! We must drive this regime from power! Trump Must Go [crowd: Now!].
There is no living with this. There is no making peace with this. There is no waiting it out, doing our best to protect some people for some time, while it only gets worse and worse and worse. Let’s be real, we’ve already let it go way too far! [crowd: Yeah! cheers] To this end, I am honored to share an audacious, urgent call to act initiated by RefuseFascism.org, and open to all. A bold plan that measures up to what we face. A bold plan that everyone needs to come together to realize. The time has come for the Fall of the Trump fascist regime! [cheers]
Beginning November 5, 2025, Washington, D.C.: Fascism is not a looming threat. It is upon us now. [small cheer] Humanity’s only hope is for the decent people of this country to rise in our millions. We cannot wait for future and rigged elections. We must drive out the Trump fascist regime from power. [cheers] Beginning November 5, the one year anniversary of Trump’s election, flood D.C. in determined and nonviolent protest. Surround the White House, surround the Capitol, surround the illegitimate fascist packed Supreme Court! Come back again and again and again! [cheers]
Across the country, refuse to comply. Every person of conscience, millions of us together, grind the machinery of this fascist regime to a halt! [large cheers]
Don’t stop until Trump is removed. The Trump fascist regime is illegitimate. Say it with me, illegitimate! [crowd: illegitimate] What it is demanding we become unconscionable. At every level of society, in every institution, tens of millions of us know this in our very bones. If we dare, we can defeat a horror that threatens humanity’s very survival. [someone yells: It’s despicable!] It is. If we fail to even try, future generations — if they exist — will never forgive us.
The Trump fascist regime is shredding the rule of law, making a mockery of due process, illegitimately deploying the military on U.S. soil, disappearing immigrants and other brown skinned citizens into brutal concentration camps, [boos] aggressively resurrecting genocidal white supremacy, [boos] reversing the gains, not only of the 1960s, but even of the Civil War and Reconstruction, enslaving women, through the brutality and suffocation of forced motherhood, [boos] trying to erase our LGBTQ siblings with particular venom, [boos] trampling democratic rights, violating international law, assaulting and threatening politicians and judges, paving the way for boundless terror against the people, accelerating climate collapse, cutting science and medicine, [scattered boos] costing millions of lives, depleting humanity’s store of knowledge, destroying truth, drowning out reason, subjugating the arts to fascist cruelty and conformity, targeting everything that is decent, moral and good — all at the whim of a debased, lunatic tyrant. [cheers] Hopes of waiting this out are illusion.
Every accommodation, even in the name of preserving some ability to do some good, only fuels Trump’s demand for ever more slavish submission. [small cheer] Every capitulation by universities, by law firms, by agencies, only feeds the regime’s ravenous hunger to remake all of society in its grotesque image. [boos] This is fascism, a different form of brutal rule. It cannot be lived with. It must be defeated. It must be. [cheers], The elections are way too late. Besides, no honest person can expect the tyrant who instigated and then pardoned the January 6 insurrectionists to respect any election he loses. [cheers]
But there is a way. We have protested, marched, defended neighbors from ICE, decried genocide. Some of us have resigned or blown the whistle. This shows we are millions — many more of us than there are of them. [cheers]
Now we must take this higher. We must direct all of this and more towards the only thing that truly measures up to the existential threat humanity faces. The whole Trump fascist regime must be driven from power! [large cheer]
This can be done. By refusing to surrender the future and our humanity to a vengeful fascist maniac; by rising in our millions, unrelenting in nonviolent protest and resistance starting now; [cheers] by defying and refusing to comply with fascist dictate. [cheers] This must begin now. [cheers] By walking out, by shutting down, starting now. [cheers] By fearlessly using our platforms and influence to inspire and challenge others to join us, beginning now. [cheers] Then we come back from all across the country, from every corner of this nation, and we Flood D.C.
We get on that bus, we get on that plane, we get on that automobile, that unicycle, that hot air balloon, we get our butts to D.C., and we do so with such determination, [cheers] with such growing numbers that all of society and the whole world takes note and takes heart, and it is the fascists who cower in fear, [cheers] and we create such a political crisis, through our civil uprising so great that Trump cannot govern, that he cannot carry out his program of terror, that he cannot remain in power. [cheers]
By doing all of this day after day, coming back stronger In the face of attack and repression, uniting, not dividing, coming together across many viewpoints — the religious and the atheist, the Never Trumpers and the Democrats, the anarchists, the communists and everybody in between — [cheers] bringing people together from all different backgrounds, from the students to the octogenarians to people of all nationalities, fostering a collective spirit of courage and righteous fury. Willing to sacrifice for the greater good of defeating this fascism. [cheers]
This starts with us. This starts today. This starts with you. So there are at that table or coming around, there are flyers with this call. You’ve gotta come and get stacks of it, and you’ve gotta take it to your place of worship. That was my cue for my friends by the table to get those flyers out to everyone. We’ve gotta fill our backpacks. We’ve gotta go and bring them to our place of worship, our neighborhood, our schools. We’ve gotta sign up at RefuseFascism.org so we know what’s happening. We’ve gotta follow @RefuseFascism on social media. You are needed to bring your perspective, your voice, your talent, your network, your resources — yes, your fun, your moral conviction and commitment to the future into this fight today. [cheers]
If we’re able to do this, if we’re able to drive this regime out, it will be, because you helped make that happen. [cheers] History is in our hands. We have watched as instance, after institution has lined up to capitulate like dominoes… but we can. And that can be part of the national strike. It will take a lot of strikes and walk outs and all sorts of things to make it happen. But part of that is instead of people and institutions capitulating like dominoes, we create a domino effect of our own, [cheers] where we force the regime to fall; where institution after institution says enough; where we inspire more courage and more refusal; where schools, hospitals, government agencies, national parks, scientific research centers, every sector doesn’t cooperate, doesn’t comply, and connects this with the demand that the Trump Fascist Regime Must Go! [cheers]
As I said before: We are the majority. There are millions of us, tens of millions of us strong, and we are in agencies and in the hospitals, in the schools, in the law firms, in the corporations across the country that this regime needs to carry out their program, and we can shut it all down. [cheers] We have to make a leap from scattered acts of resistance, individual acts that are heroic, but we have to turn it where whole institutions are standing together and saying: No!
While it is righteous that people have resigned publicly in protest, we need people to stay and fight. [cheers] We need people to tell their colleagues to join them, to stop making excuses, to demand that they stand up to fascism. [cheers] This has everything to do with flooding D.C. on November 5, because this is the resistance that needs to start now. Where capitulation has gone on, we must demand reversal. Fascists shouldn’t be the only ones that drive out a college president. [cheers] If Columbia doesn’t reverse, faculty and students should drive their president, Shipman, out of power. [cheers] Where they haven’t yet capitulated, we’ve gotta demand that administrators don’t bow down, as the thousands are doing right now, the Harvard administration. It’s time to make clear that if they fall, they will face the demands for their removal from the People. [cheers] Same in all the institutions and all of this combined with the demand that this regime must be driven from power. [cheers]
So who can remind me when are we flooding D.C. [crowd: “now” mixed with “November 5”] Every day, and then in our millions, we’re starting November 5. So we’ve gotta get our plane tickets, our train tickets. We gotta organize busses now, we’ve gotta make our carpool plans, because from that day forward, it’s on. We don’t stop until the Trump regime is removed. [cheers]
The hope for humanity, for the future, is riding on what we do. Think about the songs and poems that inspire us, the civil rights icons we look up to. They’re not people who just skated by in the face of atrocity. They are the people who are willing to risk it all, to change their lives, to stop great horror. You cannot tell yourself the lie that this cannot be done. We cannot give ourselves the excuse before we even dare to try, as humanity and the planet hang in the balance. When our grandchildren or the generations yet to come ask you: What did you do during the Trump regime? [cheers]
When they ask you: Gramps, Grandma, what did you do when masked men rounded up your neighbors and sent them to concentration camps? When they kidnapped asylum seekers and dropped them into war zones they had no connection to, they didn’t speak the language where they were sent to be tortured or killed? What did you do when dissidents were jailed, journalists silenced, books banned, history rewritten? — What will you say? I hated it. I posted a Tiktok. I cried, I seethed in private, believing it was intolerable, but doing nothing.? Fuck no. [cheers] We must be able to say: We refused to compromise. We moved heaven and Earth to drive this regime from power.
To see more sights and sounds from the protest, visit RefuseFascism.org or check out our social media, @RefuseFascism. A salute to everyone who was out on the streets with me and Refuse Fascism. If you took video, photos, we want to see it all, so be sure to tag us, if you haven’t already, in your photos and videos from yesterday. See the show notes or visit RefuseFascism.org to read and spread the call for relentless nonviolent protests beginning in D.C. on November 5, and not stopping until this regime is driven from power. While you’re there, you can sign up to commit to being there starting November 5 and donate to make this effort possible. Now here’s my conversation with Sasha Abramsky.
I’ll end with this: History is full of examples where people who had right on their side fought against tremendous odds and were victorious. It is also full of examples of people passively hoping to wait it out, only to get swallowed up by a horror beyond what they ever imagined. [uncertain crowd noise] The future is unwritten. Which one we get is up to us. [cheers]
We’re gonna make this pledge together to make it real. We’re gonna spread this everywhere. In the name of humanity. [crowd repeats] In the Name of humanity, we refuse to accept so accept [crowd repeats new part] a fascist America. [repeats] The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go Now! [repeats] Trump Must Go Now! [repeats 3x] Alright! [cheers]
Today we’re honored to welcome back on the show acclaimed journalist and author Sasha Abromsky. Sasha serves as the Western correspondent for The Nation. You’ve probably read him other places as well, and is the author of Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far Right Takeover of Small Town America. This summer, we have relied on Sasha’s consistent presence in The Nation for pivotal analysis on court rulings, Trump’s executive orders, and threats to civil and democratic rights. It continues to shape the critical narrative that we bring you each week. One of the things that we really appreciate about Sasha’s writing, especially this summer, is the moral urgency that he puts forward to understanding our fascist world that we’re now living in in the United States. Welcome, Sasha, thanks so much for coming back on.
Sasha Abramsky 27:29
It’s good to be on Sam, thanks for having me.
Sam Goldman 27:31
I guess I want to start with a discussion about distraction that kind of relates to an ongoing discussion that you address in your writing around normalization of this fascism that we face. Much of the analysis and even much of the mainstream criticism of Trump in major media outlets — and I would say, from the DNC overall — is focused on normalizing and rationalizing the threat Trump poses, still in August 2025, where we’ve seen months of this nightmare. The logic, I think, seems to go that: He’s a bad guy, he’s a bad dude, but he isn’t fundamentally changing anything; There’s no fascist movement, and there’s certainly not a consolidation of fascism.
I think that we see this when people stubbornly insist on analyzing every new development, takeover of D.C., in isolation from everything else he’s doing, or saying. That one thing, like ramping up ICE actions, is a distraction from another, like burying information on Epstein. But I get the sense that if we understand their vision of government, it’s much easier to see what’sactually developing. I wanted to get your take on what is the big picture that all these elements are a part of, and how should that inform our understanding of these different moves that we’ve seen, even just this past week.
Sasha Abramsky 28:56
When you say there’s no fascist movement, that is true only if you define fascism as being a movement that uses the word fascism in its label. So yes, the MAGA movement does not have an ‘F’ in it. It is not Make America Fascist Again, it’s Make America Great Again. But if you actually look at what MAGA is doing, if you look at what Trump is doing, if you look at, as you said, what is being normalized, it fits a series of check boxes that we recognize as fascism. The way I think of it is: There are plenty of diseases that, when doctors are analyzing a patient and trying to work out what that patient has, there’s no single assay, there’s no single test — you can do a blood test and you can say you’ve got this disease.
You can do that for some diseases, but there are many other diseases you just reach by a diagnosis that, you have a set of symptoms, the doctor looks at those symptoms, they eliminate all the other causes, and they say: Well, we think you have this because you meet the symptoms. Well, if you look at what’s happening in America today, you can say: All right, we have a series of symptoms, and when you analyze what those symptoms are, the conclusion is you’re suffering from a bout of fascism. What are those symptoms? What are being normalized? Well, we’ve militarized law enforcement.
So we’re putting National Guard and Marines into American cities. Well, that’s a) unconstitutional and b) it’s textbook authoritarianism. We’re going after the independence of University. We’re saying that you have to enforce a code of conduct, you have to enforce an ideological purity test, otherwise you’re going to lose your funding. We’re going after museums and cultural institutions, and saying unless the Smithsonian meets purity tests, ideological purity tests, its leadership is going to be fired. We’re dismantling independent ombudsman structures, independent watchdog structure. We’re normalizing the presence of secret police, wearing masks, unidentified, not carrying badges, who arrest people in broad daylight and chuck them into unmarked police vans.
Well, every single one of those things that I’m identifying, and there are many, many more that I haven’t talked about, every single one of those is a textbook symptom of a society falling into fascism. So they don’t have to use the word ‘fascism.’ The Republican Party doesn’t have to use the word ‘fascism.’ MAGA doesn’t have to use the word ‘fascism.’ But on a daily basis, we are normalizing things that are so far removed from any enlightenment constitutional concept of democracy, that they can only be understood as fascist. I was talking to you earlier, and we were talking about the country of Portugal. Portugal had a fascist leadership for nearly half a century.
Spain had a fascist leadership for nearly half a century. You can fall into a slow moving fascist leadership. It doesn’t have to have all the pyrotechnics of Nazism or of Mussolini’s fascism in Italy. You can fall into a slow rolling fascist calamity that ruins the Society for decades. That’s what happened in Portugal. It’s what happened in Spain. It’s what happened in Chile under Pinochet, and it looks like it’s what’s happening under Trump’s America. Unless we identify that, and unless we say: Look, here’s why it’s fascism, then we are not going to have any roadmap to get out of this nightmare.
Sam Goldman 31:53
I think that’s really helpful. If we continue to obscure the threat and every escalation or tightening of the fascist grip that we see, we chalk up to a distraction of other crimes of the regime, then we’re always going to be coming from behind in addressing it. If everything is minimized, in a way we’re learning to live with every day, more and more of this open terror in terms of a form of rule, and we’re going to be further and further along the road. One of the points that you made about some of what we begin to see, I think just to any decent person, should also smack of total illegitimacy. Everything that this regime has done is completely illegitimate.
Sasha Abramsky 32:44
Let me use stronger language, because illegitimate sort of implies that it’s sort of, you know, reasonable political discourse, but we just think you’re a little bit on the edge. What these guys are doing is normalizing behavior that is shameful and degrading and involves everybody who gets co-opted into it in rolling around in the moral mud. So when you’re talking about the creation of Alligator Alcatraz, you can use a funny name and call it Alligator Alcatraz, and it sort of sounds like a Disney theme park thing… What is Alligator Alcatraz? Alligator Alcatraz is a concentration camp. We don’t call it a concentration camp, but to all intents and purposes, it is a concentration camp in the Everglades.
It would have been familiar to the residents of Dachau, which was the early concentration camp in Nazi Germany. When we have armed, masked, nameless officers taking old men from their workplaces, wrestling them to the ground and throwing them into vans, and I’ve seen videos of this from L.A. in the last few days, that is not just mildly illegitimate. Anyone who is involved in that operation is as morally culpable as the torturers of apartheid South Africa, the disappearance people, the specialists who drop people from helicopters and everything else in dictatorships in Latin America. It is not just that it’s marginally illegitimate, it’s that they are creating a political spectacle that falls outside the boundaries of anything that is morally acceptable in any Western democracy.
So if we’re going to have a concept of democracy, and if we’re going to have a meaningful concept of the Western world with what it implies, a sort of values, adhering to the enlightenment, a rationalist political debate, a pluralist, democratic, tolerant political culture, if that’s going to mean anything, we have to find a way to explain to the American public, not just that Trump’s administration is mildly illegitimate, but that it is pushing thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people to do things that are deeply, deeply, morally corrosive.
These are things that we can say: Oh, well, they’re just doing their jobs. They’re doing their jobs in the worst conceivable way. They are obeying illegitimate orders, and they are behaving in a shameful way, like the good denizens of other fascist dictatorships in bygone decades, people who said: Well, it’s not my decision, I’m just obeying orders. Well, yes, you are just obeying orders — you happen to be obeying orders that are putting your fellow residents into places like Alligator Alcatraz, and that is morally shameful.
Sam Goldman 35:06
I couldn’t agree more, and I think that we have to be uncompromising in that language. I think that there’s two sides of it, and they’re connected. There’s the moral repugnancy, and there’s also the political illegitimacy. The illegitimate I was speaking to that this does not fall into any form of you want to call yourself a constitutional republic. This is completely outside of that. And I think your point on, not just complicity, but what amounts to collaboration…
Sasha Abramsky 35:36
I want to follow up on that, because one of the things I forgot to mention at the beginning was: One of the hallmarks of a fascist state is the manipulation of information. If you’re gonna say, let’s have a policy debate on tariffs, that’s fine. That’s within the Democratic sort of rubric. You can have that debate. I can say to you: I think your tariff policy is completely insane. You can say to me: Well, I believe in McKinley’s vision of America, and we’re going to, you know, use tariffs to build a wall around our economy.
That’s a legitimate policy debate. Where it becomes beyond legitimate, where it goes into a dark, dark realm is if you produce a whole bunch of tariff policies, those tariff policies lead to inflation and unemployment, your statisticians deliver you the verdict, saying: You might want to look at this data, the unemployment rate’s ticking up again. And your response is, you fire the messenger and you bring in client statisticians who are going to give you the data that you want to present to the public. That’s when it ceases to be a democratic debate, because it’s not based on real information anymore. It’s based on raw, naked propaganda and the threat of the state to make break and ruin people’s careers if they deliver the “wrong information.”
That’s what we’re seeing at the moment. We’re seeing what could be legitimate policy debates slide into this deeply, deeply totalitarian idea, whereas if you say the wrong thing, if you deliver the wrong news, if you provide the wrong piece of information or data, that makes the big boss unhappy, you will pay with your career. Well, there’s nothing democratic about that. Thank God, we have not reached the point where we’re summarily executing people. Hopefully we never will. We have most certainly reached the point where we are grabbing people off the street. We are ruining their lives if we think they’re saying the wrong things or doing the wrong things. We’re deporting people not for criminal activities, but for what they have written in opinion pieces if they happen to be non citizens and at universities.
The government is targeting, we are expelling scientists from their workplaces, not for criminal activities, but for daring to research things like climate change or women’s health or differences in the ways that different races respond to different medications and so on. We are making it essentially a criminal act to think outside of the methods of approved thinking that the government has signed off on. Well, again, that’s quintessential authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
The label doesn’t quite matter. You can call it fascism.You can call it state authoritarianism, whatever you want to call it. It isn’t democracy. So maybe that’s the best way of talking about this, the absence of what it is. There’s an absence of an understanding of democracy in this administration, and that absence is permeating through every level of American civic life at this point.
Sam Goldman 38:09
I wanted to talk about something that you recently wrote about. You recently wrote about a Libyan man living in North Carolina who was seized by ICE, interrogated about a country he has no connection with, detained and whose release had to be mandated by courts multiple times before he was let out. I’m wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about this “zero release” policy, as one immigration lawyer called it, the role of ICE and law enforcement, the courts and the law in Trump’s America.
Sasha Abramsky 38:40
Yes, one of the I guess, benefits of being a journalist who’s writing about all of this is, the more I write about it, the more sources contact me from all over the country and say: Hey, you may want to look at this story. A friend of mine in North Carolina who works in immigration issues contacted me a couple weeks ago and said: Look, there’s this case here where there’s this guy, he’s a Libyan National, he’s been in the country for 15 years, he came here on a legitimate visa. He claimed asylum when he got here, this was under Qadaffi’s regime. He’s been a member of the Greensboro Community for 15 years, and suddenly, the other day, he was arrested, and was sort of secretively detained, and ICE didn’t say where he was, etc, etc.
I phoned his lawyer. He’d ended up with an immigration lawyer after being detained, his family had hired one. The community had come together — ot all immigrants, the community as a whole had come together because he was respected member of the neighborhood. They’d raised a GoFundMe, and they had started publicizing what was going on. By the time I got notice of this case, he’d been in ICE holding for — I can’t remember the exact number of days — quite a long time. There were many, many local clergy who had gotten involved in his case, local immigration rights advocates, and a large number of state political elected officials.
So this was not sort of some guy who was just on the margins, nobody was paying attention to. He was a respected member of the community, and when he got arrested and detained, large numbers of people got involved in seeking his release. Well, the immigration attorney told me that what ICE had told her, or the agents interrogating her told her, was that they had been ordered — this was just around the period when America and Israel were bombing Tehran and the nuclear facilities in Iran — they said they’d basically been ordered to ask any detained Arab about their knowledge of Iranian spy activities in the U.S. and knowledge of Iranian plans to shut the Strait of Hormuz, and knowledge of sleeper cells in the U.S.?
There was no evidence that this guy had any connection to Iran, none at all. I’m not the one saying that, that is what the immigration community had concluded, that’s what the lawyers had concluded, that’s what the judges had concluded. But ICE wouldn’t release him. The attorney said: Why aren’t you releasing my guy? You’ve clearly got the wrong person, his is a misunderstanding, you picked someone up thinking he was someone else. He’s not the Iranian spy you think he is, he’s a Libyan guy working on repairing refrigerator units for Wendy’s fast food restaurants. Can you release him?
She told me that what she was basically told was, under Trump, we have a zero release policy: Once we get our hands on an immigrant, even if we’ve detained them for the wrong reason, we’re not going to release them. That’s an outrageous thing to say. It literally is the hunting of human beings. It’s very similar to the Fugitive Slave hunting of the pre Civil War period. Anyway, this guy remained in detention for days and days and days. Finally, as you said, under court order, because the court had ordered him released on bond and the government had refused to release him.
Finally, under court order and immense public pressure, he was released, but he’s now facing removal proceedings. So this is a guy who’s been in the country for 15 years, he’s playing by the rules. He’s trying to get asylum. He’s attending his mandated court hearings. He’s doing everything he is supposed to be doing. He’s an upstanding member of the community. He is working to support his family. Now, because he was accidentally ensnared in this dragnet, and because Trump has this sort of policy of always pushing back harder. S
o, if you have some guy and he’s the wrong guy and it makes the government look bad, you double down. That’s what they did with Garcia when they accidentally deported him to CECOT in El Salvador, and then they brought him back and they trumped up these human trafficking charges against him. Now it’s what they’re doing to this man in North Carolina. Once you get a guy, you can’t admit your mistake. So this guy, who’s been in the country for 15 years, is now facing deportation and removal, not because he did anything wrong, but because the government screwed up and caught him in a dragnet and thought he was somebody else. Well, again, the mark of any morally decent institution or individual is the ability to admit when you make a mistake — humility, humbleness, empathy.
None of that is here. What we are seeing instead is this completely Kafkaesque situation where if you get caught in a dragnet definitionally, you become the bad guy, and once you’ve been identified as the bad guy, all rules are off, and the government can do whatever it likes. Well, again, if someone can explain to me how that is in any meaningful sense, democratic or pluralistic, let me know. But I don’t think you’re going to be able to, because it isn’t. It’s definitionally antithetical to the values of democracy. That’s where we are. We’ve got the most powerful people in the world with the vast apparatus of the federal U.S. government behind it, working not for the betterment of ordinary people, but working to humiliate, punish and act the acts of sadism out against those individuals.
You don’t have to take my word for it. You can read the New York Times, you can read the Washington Post. You can read testimony from the thousands of immigrants caught up in these dragnets. All you have to do is have an open enough mind to actually listen to and watch these stories. If you don’t, if you say it’s all fake news, anything that disagrees with the Trump narrative is fake news, then you’re not going to get there, you’re not going to see it. But you’re short changing yourself intellectually, you’re living in a bubble. Republicans are very good at saying: Well, you’re snowflakes because you can’t take criticism. God damn it, the people who can’t take criticism at the moment are the most powerful people on Earth who are so thin skinned that if anybody, a journalist, a student, an immigration rights advocate, a garment worker, if anybody dares to say: You know what, you guys have done something wrong — they double down and they use the might of the state against them. That’s snowflake politics, and it’s coming not from the left. It’s coming from the authoritarian, scared, right.
Sam Goldman 44:03
I think that that’s a really important point. I wanted to ask you a little bit more about… we had mentioned D.C. previously in terms of what’s developing, and I wanted to talk about that development a little bit more, because I think it concentrates so much and in terms of parallels to fascist projects, I think it is extremely stark — in particular, parallels to Nazi Germany and Hitler’s “cosmetic changes” that were needed to society and what that led to and Pinochet’s role in Chile. In D.C., we have this total takeover happening.
I don’t need to tell you about what they’ve done, but for listeners, it’s the federalizing of the police, it’s the sending in the National Guard, it’s the threatening for this to be a takeover that is not temporary, but is permanent. Just, I think, yesterday, you know, [eighty]-four people were arrested based on this totally illegitimate crackdown on crime, targeting, in particular, homeless, youth, and Black folks — that’s really what this is about. This targeting of the homeless is what I wanted to talk to you in particular about. What is this about? What does “the homeless” have to do with their strategy and their vision?
Sasha Abramsky 45:25
I’ve been involved in criminal justice reform organizations, writing about them, thinking about mass incarceration and so on, for thirty years. It’s how I started my journalistic career. I don’t know anybody in the criminal justice reform community who gets up in the morning and says: High crime is a good thing. No one. There’s nobody who gets up and says: We love having high crime, we love having homelessness, we love having drug addiction. Nobody gets up in the morning and says that. Anybody who’s credible, who’s thinking about criminal justice issues, gets up in the morning and they say: How can we reduce crime, how can we reduce homelessness, how can we reduce drug addiction?
We’ve got a lot of things that we know through trial and error that work and a lot of things that don’t work. We know that if you want to reduce homelessness, build more affordable housing. We know that, it worked. We know that if you want to help people who are mentally ill and drug addicted and living on the streets, provide wraparound social services, make it easier for them to enroll in drug treatment, make it easier for mental health outreach people to reach them. There are things that work, that have track records. You can look at the data. I know Trump doesn’t really look at data unless it sort of backs his vision, but you can look at data, and you can find programs that have taken high crime communities and reduced the crime rate spectacularly through massive intervention.
But those interventions don’t tend to be law enforcement first. They involve law enforcement, sure — you’ve got to have police on the streets, you’ve got to have credible threat of arrest. If somebody is brandishing a gun or somebody is hurting people, absolutely, you arrest them, you take them through the criminal justice system, and those people are going to go to prison. I know almost nobody — I mean, there are a few prison abolitionists out there, but almost nobody — is going to tell you, if somebody is a danger to society, they should just be left to be a danger to society. Nobody is going to say that. But Trump is taking shortcuts here. If Trump was really interested in a sensible criminal justice policy, he wouldn’t have defunded, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, anti-crime strategies around the country that work.
But he has defunded them. He’s taken away money from re-entry programs, job training programs, affordable housing programs, mental health services, addiction treatment. He’s reduced the services available to veterans suffering PTSD and living on the streets. At every level, Trump’s policies are going to make crime worse, homelessness worse, drug addiction and mental illness worse. The shortcut he’s taking is he’s then going to say: Well, we’re going to come in and we’re going to sweep the streets of homeless, and we’re going to come in and we’re going to have federal law enforcement and military officers setting up checkpoints and arresting people, not because of what they’ve done, but because of what they look like. He says to the police: If they spit at you, you hit them.
That’s an almost direct quote from him the other day. Well, if you’re saying to the police: Police violence is now officially condoned from the White House — well, then you’re going to get police violence. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that these are all shortcuts. If you “liberate the police,” to act more violently, you don’t make communities safer, you make communities more resentful. If you send the military onto American streets, you don’t make those streets safer, you make the flash points more likely, because people, not surprisingly, are going to get angry that their civil rights are being trodden on, and that in a society that has laws against the domestic deployment of the military. Trump is ignoring those laws, and he’s putting up military checkpoints in cities.
The biggest thing here is, look at where this is happening. This isn’t happening in conservative run cities. This is happening in L.A. where they sent in the Marines and National Guard. It’s happening in D.C., which conservatives have long hated. You can argue that’s racial, there are many ways you can argue what it’s about, but they’ve hated D.C. and its home rule for decades. He’s talked about bringing in federal troops into New York, Chicago, and a handful of other democratic run cities. What he has not talked about, and you will not hear him talk about, is sending in those federal troops into conservative parts of the country, which in many cases have far higher crime rates.
You want to look at where the murder rates are higher? Rates are highest, not L.A. and it’s not D.C., it’s Louisiana, it’s Mississippi, and it’s a handful of other states in the deep South, which have absolutely no gun control, which are run by deeply conservative administrations, which have defunded all the social service and intervention programs that we know work. Those are the states that have the high crime rates, but Trump and his allies in Congress, none of them are talking about sending in the military into their own backyards. What they’re talking about is sending in the military as an occupation force into Democratic run cities, counties and states in America. That’s not democracy. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a bill of goods.
Sam Goldman 49:39
I really appreciate you pulling back about, if this is about crime, this is what you would do, and the reality that the biggest criminal, let’s be clear, in D.C. right now, is not the youth he despises or the people who are unhoused — the biggest criminal in the White House is the genocidal racist in the White House. That is the biggest criminal. Your point about, if we were really concerned about where crime is the highest, let’s look about where that is — I’m not saying we should send the military, to be clear, to these cities is the solution, but that it’s not consistent. I do think that people have the question about: Okay, well, if it’s, what is this really about? What is he trying to do here with D.C.? I think that there’s two targets. One of the targets is the masses of people that he is going after — he is going after those who he hates, and his regime hates those who he sees undesirable and eliminating them. But it also is, he’s going after Democratic Party leadership. It’s two, it’s going after his opposition and going after the mass of people. I wanted your take on what this is about.
Sasha Abramsky 50:44
He’s springing a trap. Partly it’s animus. He clearly doesn’t like Democratic run cities, and he really doesn’t like Democratic run majority African American cities. He’s made that abundantly clear in statements going all the way back to the 70s and 80s. There’s an animus there. But I think the other thing is, he’s politically savvy, and he sprung a political trap here, because the danger is that he frames it as a crime and punishment issue, and Democrats push back, and he can then paint Democrats as being soft on crime. Which is why I think it’s so important, and why I opened the answer by saying:
Look, it’s not about soft on crime, because there are far more effective crime responses that don’t involve militarizing law enforcement. The Democrats have to be careful here, because if they just say: We don’t want the military and everything else — Trump’s gonna say: You’re soft on crime, you’re not looking after Americans. What they have to say is: We don’t want the military, a) because it’s unconstitutional, and b) because it’s counterproductive; if you militarize the police response to everything, you don’t get lower crime in the end, you just get a more sullen, resentful population. A lot of the issues get pushed underground, and a lot of the cooperation that law enforcement needs from the community vanishes, because law enforcement needs a community to cooperate, to identify where the trouble spots are, or where the gang activity is, or everything else.
But if the community regards itself as being under occupation, as being a sort of colonized people under occupation by a military, that cooperation stops. So in the long run, if you surge enough people into D.C., you may get a short term decline in crime, but in the long run, you’re actually setting up very dangerous, very unstable social conditions. Democrats have to work out a way to frame this. Trump is basically using every lever of government for short term political advantage or short term economic advantage. Changing the conversation a bit, but you could say the exact same thing about climate change. In the short term, it makes sense for an anti environmental presidency like Trump’s to fire all the climate scientists and get rid of all the climate data.
You can, in the short term, have a bonanza for the fossil fuel industry and everything else. You can put all these punitive taxes on solar energy and all the other renewable energies you can try and wreck the development of the EV infrastructure. You can do all that in the short term, you may create, as I said, a short term binge for the fossil fuel industry. In the short term, energy prices may become cheaper for consumers. Then in the long run, you have accelerated climate change and all the damage that goes with that. You have environmental degradation. You have communities being hit by harder and harder hurricanes and droughts and forest fires, everything else that goes with that, and the infrastructure to deal with it has been destroyed. I think everything about the decisions that are being made are short-term-ism.
They’re all about producing bang for the buck today and tomorrow, producing a TV spectacle today and tomorrow, and none of them involve long term, coherent thinking. That goes for whether it’s crime and punishment in D.C., or whether it’s climate change, or whether it’s universities, or whether it’s immigration, because we’re going to get rid of so many immigrants. We’re not going to have home health workers, we’re not going to have construction workers, we’re not going to have farm laborers. We’re going to have a whole bunch of industries that are going to cease to function properly in the next few years because so many workers have either been deported or are in hiding.
That’s not going to make for a richer, wealthier, stabler economy. That’s going to make for chaos. But it’s all done for the photo op and the moment — the fact that you can then send out to your MAGA base propaganda showing this clamp down on undocumented immigrants, everything about this moment is short-term-ism, and everything about this moment is designed for the TV and social media spectacle. That might make good politics… makes lousy policy. It makes for a dumbed down Idiocracy, essentially, where all of the intellectual thought that goes into sensible policy making has vanished and everything becomes about for the moment and the propaganda spectacle.
It doesn’t make for a stable, secure society in any way, shape or form. But I don’t think Trump’s interested in this, interested in the stable, secure society. He wants chaos because chaos is the medium that he thrives in. It’s his petri dish. It’s where his particular rancid form of political life flourishes. It’s in a petri dish where he can have one chaotic element after another, after another added into the ingredient mix. It doesn’t work, you know, it works maybe for a short term electoral boost.It doesn’t work in terms of a stable society.
Sam Goldman 54:47
I think that it’s incredibly clarifying. For all they talk about, like, strength and stability.. okay, maybe strength and stability, but not for the kind of world that any decent person wants to live in. The more that we accept the terms of debate that they set — crime and punishment, whatever that is — the more detached from reality we become, because these are not — I definitely agree with you about like the fascist spectacle of how they advance, and the getting people to go along with things that even a day before, you would think were intolerable. Would we think six months ago, we’d have the National Guard in the streets of the nation’s capital, and people would just go on with their life as usual? That’s, to me, a big part of it.
Sasha Abramsky 55:33
You’re absolutely right, that we normalize the unnormalized at our peril. Because the longer we normalize the un-normalizeable, the harder it’s going to be to get back to a civic society. This is what I was saying earlier, about the sort of moral swamp. If you make enough people roll around in the mud, then you end up with a muddy society. If you fire all the decent people, then, you know, there’s that pungent phrase about what rises to the top. It’s not the good stuff that rises to the top. That’s what we’re doing. We’re basically privileging the most morally malleable people.
Those are the ones who are getting promoted under Trump. You want to lead an agency, sacrifice your understanding of the Constitution. You want to rise up the ranks of the military? Put aside your concerns about using the military for domestic law enforcement. You want to rise up the ranks of government agency like the EPA? Well, then you got to do absolute contortions, because you’ve got to ignore all the data that says that climate change is a reality. You want to rise up the ranks of the health system in this country now? Well, the fact that for 200 years, we’ve been vaccinating kids to pretty good effect.
We’ve eliminated diseases like smallpox, we’ve controlled diseases like measles and polio and all these other diseases that used to kill by the millions. But you want to rise up the ranks of Robert Kennedy’s health system? You’ve got to put aside all that knowledge. You’ve got to say: Hey, maybe vaccines aren’t such a good idea after all — maybe we should go back to the 17th or 18th century. Well, that’s insanity. It’s like, almost a quintessential definition of insanity. But in Trumpland, in Trumplandia, that’s the kind of person who’s going to succeed. It’s the doctors who put aside the Hippocratic Oath.
It’s the generals who put aside loyalty to the Constitution. It’s the Justice Department officials who put aside any obligation to the truth and fealty to the law. It’s the worst kind of people who thrive in an administration like this. The longer it goes on, the longer the damage. We’ve seen this in other countries. Poland had a similar experiment. They went through this intensely nationalistic, populist, irrationalist moment, and then there was eventually a voter reaction. But the problem was the entire apparatus of the civil service was now seeded with these populists.
The judges were nationalists and populists. The civil servants had been politicized. The scientists had scrubbed data. We’re going to see all those same problems at the back end of Trumpism. You’re gonna to have a federal administration that’s seeded with the worst kind of climbers, the lickspittles, the people who will do anything to secure the good graces of the boss, the people who have kissed the ring. Once they kissed that ring, they couldn’t stop kissing the ring, because it became seductive, because it gave them access to power. Again, I don’t care if you’re left wing or right wing — do you want the people who kiss the ring to be in charge of your lives and your wellbeing and your data and everything else for the next many, many decades? If you do, fine, you’re in a good space.
But if you’re worried about those kind of people having that amount of control over the most personal aspects of your life, then you need to be paying attention to what’s happening. There are thousands of people being employed by ICE at the moment, recruited by ICE, and those people have reportedly been given $50,000 signing bonuses. The New York Times reported a week or two back that the Trump administration was about to unveil a pilot program that was then quickly revoked once the oxygen, the publicity, was sent its way, but the New York Times reported there was this pilot program that was going to pay these new recruits $200 a pop for each immigrant they got deported without due process.
Well, that’s outrageous. You’re literally incentivizing illegal action where you short circuit people’s asylum claims, their refugee status, their temporary protected status, all the other things that have let them be in this country — you short circuit all of that, and you essentially dump them over the border, or you put them on a helicopter and send them somewhere, or an airplane and send them to South Sudan, or whatever it might be. You do that with a financial incentive, it’s literally bounty hunting. When you incentivize that kind of utterly immoral and probably illegal behavior, you’re gonna get the worst kind of elements of society applying for those jobs.
You’re not going to get the principled people. They’re gonna look at it, and they’re going to say: Thanks, but no thanks, I’m gonna sit this one out. But you are going to get people who are, at best, sort of morally dubious characters. You’re gonna get people who don’t actually think twice about hurting other human beings. They don’t care about the implications of separating family members. Those are the kind of people, at the moment, who are coming into government service and rising quickest up the rank. That’s dangerous. I’m working a lot on federal workers. I’ve been doing a lot of reporting on the firing of federal workers.
If the people who have principles, who are doing good scientific research get fired, the people who are doing worker protection get fired, the people who are working on really important health initiatives get fired. Well, the people who take their place tend to be the most malleable. They tend to be the ones who are gonna be like: You know what, I can tolerate this; This isn’t so bad. I’ll get a paycheck; I’ll get a bonus for signing on.;I’ll get some security. And they sign on, and they get that security from the government. They get a little bit of financial input. But it comes at this cost. You said: What’s it gonna do? I’m not religious, but if I were, I’d be asking: What’s it gonna do to these people’s souls? If I were religious, I’d be saying: These people are doing an awful lot of things that are stacking up some pretty bad karma against them.
In the grand scheme of the universe, when you do the kinds of things that we’re seeing these masked ICE agents doing in immigrant communities, your soul is gonna be corroded. You don’t really have to be religious to sort of understand that concept. You’re going to spend a lot of time later in your life thinking through what you did during the Trump years. And at some point, quite likely, your children or your grandchildren are gonna ask: Grandpa, you told me once you were an ICE agent in 2025, but that was during the Trump era, wasn’t it?
And they were putting people in concentration camps in cages. Were you involved in that, grandpa? And as an old man, you’re gonna be looking back, you’re gonna have to tell your grandkids: Yeah, in 2025 I accepted a signing bonus for a few thousand dollars, and I sold my soul to Trump. And then whatever Trump asked me to do, I couldn’t say no. When Trump asked me to arrest that old man working at the car wash, I couldn’t say no. When Trump asked me to put someone on an airplane and send them to a war torn zone in South Sudan, where they have no cultural connection, no language connection, no family connection, where they’ll probably die, either of violence or starvation, I no longer could say no.
When Trump asked me to round people up and put them in Guantanamo Bay, or send them to CECOT in El Salvador, or send them to Alligator Alcatraz, I couldn’t say no. T0heir grandkids are going to look at these old people, and they’re going to say, you were on the wrong side of history, Granddad. I love you anyway you’re my grandfather, but you were on the wrong side of history. That is what these men are gonna have to — it’s mainly men — that is what they are gonna have to live with for making this decision to go along with these unconstitutional and illegal acts.
Sasha Abramsky 1:01:55
You’re seeing an increasing number of people who, in creative, peaceful ways, are bearing witness. We’re seeing people turning up at courts as volunteers. We’re seeing people being citizen journalists and taking photographs and videos of what’s going on and publicizing them. We’re seeing people come out from the community when these arrests are going down. We saw it in San Diego last month, when a local favorite restaurant was raided and suddenly people were pouring out of their surrounding houses to protest what ICE was doing. So people are bearing witness, and people are saying: Not in our name.
Sasha Abramsky 1:02:05
The same question is posed to all the decent people who aren’t in that, how long will we allow to be ruled this way, and will we accept this?
Sam Goldman 1:02:26
It’s incredibly important. In my opinion, we have to move from bearing witness, as important as that is, to, in nonviolent, but determined ways, really grinding the machinery of this fascist regime to a halt. Moving from learning to live with and accommodate to this new normal to defeating it, is a gap we have to close.
Sam Goldman 1:02:48
I want to thank you, Sasha, for coming back on, for taking the time to share your expertise of being on the ground and interviewing so many people about what’s happening and unfolding. Thank you for your writing and continuing to try to wake people up so that we can respond in collective action. We’re going to link to some of your most recent pieces for The Nation, your Santa Fe piece that I think just came out. Is there anything else that you want to direct people to, or anything like that?
Sasha Abramsky 1:03:18
I’m doing a column comes out tomorrow, Friday, on the immigrant rights protest in Los Angeles.
Sam Goldman 1:03:22
We’ll definitely include that as well. Thanks again, Sasha.
Sasha Abramsky 1:03:25
You’re welcome.
Sam Goldman 1:03:27
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