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 a few of the important recent developments in the accelerating Trump fascist assault on humanity.
“We’ll Bomb the Shit Out of Them”
Last Monday morning, the fascist leader Donald John Trump said this to FOX (Fatherland) News about what he sees as the Middle Eastern nation of Oman’s failure to properly align with his arch-criminal and mass murderous war on Iran: “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.”
It takes brazen chutzpah to make such a criminal threat, consistent with Trump’s earlier threat to “bomb Iran back to the Stone Ages where it belongs,” with recent reports that Trump is considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran, and with Trump’s Monday posting of a map showing the Strait of Hormuz as “a new US territory.”
Trump’s domestic political fascism is intimately bound up with his lawless conduct and rhetoric on the global stage.
Hegseth Trashes Transgender People in Iowa
The open Christian white nationalist head of the US Pentagon, Trump’s “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth made a vulgar statement about transgender people during a campaign stop in Iowa last Monday. While breaking with the longstanding norm that maintains a barrier between the Defense Department and partisan politics, Hegseth said this to a crowd of Amerikaner Republifascists at the Iowa State Fair: “At the Department of War, we do training, not trannies…Training,” Hegseth said, “is the only focus of our department. Colorblind, gender-neutral, merit-based.”
Far from “gender-neutral,” Hegseth’s ongoing war on women, gay, and trans military personnel is hyper-masculinist, consistent with the aggressive patriarchy that is a key lynchpin of fascist ideology.
Penalizing Colorado For Imprisoning an Election Meddler
One year after Mein Trumpf threatened the state of Colorado with “harsh measures” unless its governor commuted the prison sentence handed to Tina Peters, a former county clerk convicted of tampering with voting machines on Trump’s behalf after the 2020 election, The New York Times this week reported about an impeachment-worthy Trump extortion plot. Following Trump’s criticism of Peters’ imprisonment last year, the White House conducted a “brainstorm call” with five federal agencies to discuss slashing federal funding to Colorado. The next day, Trump’s Departments of Energy and Transportation announced they were removing grants worth hundreds of millions of dollars for Colorado projects. Trump subsequently targeted Colorado by vetoing clean water funding, relocating Space Command, and moving to dismantle a federal climate research office.
An email documenting the “brainstorming” session was disclosed during a court hearing last Tuesday. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson. “The very idea that the president…would target a state because they don’t feel that the state and its administrators are in line with the current administration’s priorities is phenomenal.”
Let’s be clear about just exactly what “the current administration’s priorities” are: making over US government and society on white supremacist, patriarchal, xenophobic nationalist, and arch-authoritarian – that is, fascist – lines. Legitimizing the attempted Trump coup against the 2020 presidential election is a key part of the MAGA fascist project.
(Colorado’s governor complied with Trump’s demand earlier this year.)
Mass Election “Monitoring” Announced
Trump’s Department of [in]Justice, headed by a 2020 election denier and Trump’s personal January 6 attorney, Todd Blanche, announced last Wednesday that it will send 1000 federal “election monitors” to polling places across the country during the midterm elections this fall. This chilling declaration came one day after Blanche indicated that the DOJ may take its case for the federal takeover of state voter rolls to the Trumpist Supreme Court.
Military Guns Drawn on Reporters in California
Last Monday night, The Guardian reports, five news reporters and two members of the military who were invited to a groundbreaking event at the Vandenberg Space Force base in California were stopped at gunpoint and detained by security officers. The journalists missed the event they were supposed to cover and the military has offered no apologies. The incident is symptomatic of the Trump-Hegseth Pentagon’s fascist hostility to independent media.
Fired for “Insubordinate” Journalism
The Pentagon this week fired the publisher, Max Lederer, and the editor, Erik Slavin, of Stars and Stripes, the US military’s taxpayer-funded news outlet. The terminations came after Stars and Stripes reported on the terrible conditions experienced by the crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln, an American aircraft carrier mired in 272 consecutive days at sea without a port call during Trump’s criminal operations in the Middle East.
Threatening the Center for American Progress
Trump this week threatening the prominent centrist think tank the Center for American Progress with a $5 billion defamation lawsuit as retribution for a publication showing that his invasion of US cities with National Guard troops has done little to reduce violent crime. “The threats against the think tank,” The New York Times reports, “were Mr. Trump’s latest effort to use the legal system to punish critics for voicing unflattering facts and opinions generally protected by the First Amendment.”
“Be Quiet, You’re Very Disrespectful!”
Last Monday, Trump engaged yet again in the sustained verbal abuse of a female journalist. As CNN reporter Kristen Holmes tried to ask Trump why he had pulled back the US from military drills with South Korea and if he had spoken to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, Trump responded as follows:
“Quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet! You’re very disrespectful in front of this young man [said while looking at a right-wing male reporter]. Don’t you find her disrespectful? He understands. Quiet. You’re fake news. You are a loud and your boisterous person, you’re fake news. Be quiet. Be quiet! You’re a fake reporter and you report fake news.”
As usual, nobody in the press gaggle directly witnessing Trump viciously attack a female reporter said a word in the reporter’s defense.
Hours later, the White House ramped up the gender abuse by saying this to Ms. Holmes on X: “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive.”
U.S. Air Force Major Re-Detained
Days after Jason Watson criticized Trump on CNN, he was “ordered into pre-trial confinement” and held without being charged with a crime. Watson was first arrested in July for standing on the Capitol steps and calling for Trump’s impeachment. Watson’s dissent is significant, and points to some of the difficulties the regime could have in forging a military loyal only to Trump. Watson said, “What is happening with President Trump is not normal. He has failed us,” Watson said. “And not only is he a failure as president, he is flagrantly violating the Constitution, breaking the law, engaged in rampant corruption and is killing Americans. And that is unacceptable to me and it should be unacceptable to all of us.”
Local Probation Officers’ Enlistment in Trump’s Nativist Round-Up
It was reported yesterday that local probation officials in Idaho’s Canyon County have been regularly sending ICE a list of foreign-born people on probation. The information is sent without indicating which probationers are in the country “illegally.” People born outside the US include naturalized citizens and people with green cards and pending asylum applications. This ugly enlistment in the Trump regime’s fascist ethnic cleansing program is common on the part of local law enforcement, especially in red states.
Mexicans Deported to Guatemala and Honduras
Reuters reported this week that the Trump administration has so far deported 2300 Mexican nationals to Guatemala. “Under international accords,” Reuters notes, “deportees are usually sent directly to their country of citizenship.” Since May of this year, Reuters learned, the Trump regime has been systematically terrorizing Mexican deportees by dropping them in Honduras and Guatemala.
Mass Removal Back to Hell in Haiti
The Washington Post reported yesterday that:
“the first deportation flight to Haiti since the Trump administration ended humanitarian protections for 350,000 [Haitians] living in the United States landed Thursday in the Caribbean nation, and activists say immigration arrests are beginning to ramp up. The flight carrying 170 people, ranging in age from 19 to 71, landed in Cap-Haitien, on the northern coast of Haiti. Commercial flights from the U.S. have been blocked from landing in the Caribbean nation’s primary airport in the capital of Port-au-Prince due to gang activity and reports of aircraft being struck by gunfire.”
Haitian human beings ripped out of lives, jobs, and families they built in the US are being sadistically plummeted back into the Western Hemisphere’s poorest, most unsafe, and most violence-plagued nation, itself a victim of repeated US invasion and systematic US exploitation. ICE agents are sweeping up Haitian workers at traffic stops, court hearings, workplace, and shopping centers across the US.
This is fascism. The Trump Fascist regime must go now!