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.
“It’s That Simple”: The Racist Ethnic Cleansing of Haitian Immigrants Begins
Seven weeks after the Trump fascist Supreme Court approved the administration’s cold termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for more than 350,000 Haitian immigrants and days after a federal district judge made this revocation official, horrific stories of racist ethnic cleansing are being reported:
“A nurse who’s no longer allowed to work at one of the city’s top hospitals hunkered down in her Boston home, afraid ICE could be in the neighborhood…A man in Ohio collapsed to the ground in tears after leaving an ICE check-in wearing an ankle monitor….residents in eastern Maryland came upon a jarring sight: cars left behind at gas stations with their engines still running. ‘They’ve been arresting people left and right — some people in the middle of the streets. … We have people who went to the grocery store to cook for their kids and didn’t return home,’ said Dr. Marie D. Fouché, founder and executive director of Safe Harbor Circles…Fear and confusion are widespread among former holders of TPS, who had been allowed to work legally in the United States for years as part of the program and suddenly find themselves vulnerable to detention and deportation.” (CNN, 8.10.2026)
It’s exactly what the Trump fascist regime wants. Homeland Security Secretary last week: “We’re going after them now. These individuals can either self-deport or we will arrest you and send you back. It’s that simple.”
A key part of the fascist assault is the humiliating dehumanization. Haitians are being swept up out of their cars and fitted at court appearances with electronic ankle bracelets that evoke the memory of the shackles worn by generation of Black US slaves.
Return to Haiti is not a decent human option. Long abused and targeted for intervention by the United States ever since it undertook a heroic anti-colonial and anti-slavery revolution in the 1790s, Haiti is mired in mass poverty, joblessness, gang violence, medical collapse and state failure thanks in no small part to the US imperialism.
The escalating fascist round-up is a blow to the labor needs of numerous US industries, including health care, elder care, hospitality, construction, and manufacturing.
Tellingly enough, the democratic socialist Mayor of New York City has cooperated with the ethnic cleansing program by having his “sanctuary city” send pink slips to Haitian city workers. In New York and across the nation, Haitians are going into hiding like Anne Frank during the Nazi Third Reich’s occupation of the Netherlands.
“Stranger Things Have Happened”
Last Tuesday, the wannabe be fascist strongman for life Mein Trumpf “left the door open to declaring a national security emergency and federalizing control over the November midterms.” As The Hill explains:
“Conservative commentator Wayne Root suggested during an interview with Trump that the president could declare a national emergency if the Senate does not pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act. The legislation, which Trump and hard-line House GOP lawmakers have pushed Senate Republicans to pass for months, proposes requiring Americans to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and show photo ID at the polls. ‘If you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship and a limit to mail-in ballots, and you don’t even need the Senate’s help,.’ Root said to the president, regarding him declaring a national emergency. Trump cut Root off, saying, ‘Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK? I’ll leave it at that.’”
Spoken like a mafia Don.
A Standing Army Among the Populace
As numerous informed commentators have suggested, Trump has continued to press for his “voter ID”/voter suppression bill despite the lack of Senate votes required to pass the measure because he hopes to use Congress’s “failure to protect voter integrity” as a pretext for subverting and perhaps cancelling or refusing to honor the outcomes of the midterm elections. Setting the stage for such interference with previously normative US electoral democracy was the whole point of the creepy national televised address of the nation’s supposedly “compromised election integrity” last July 16th.
This week marked the one-year anniversary of Trump’s chilling deployment of armed troops to the streets of Washington DC on the basis of the false claim that nation’s capital was in a “Crime Emergency.” Armed and uniformed soldiers are now a ubiquitous presence across the city. They are “part of the city’s scenery, appearing on busy streets, in farmers’ markets, metro stations, and around the national monuments…Life in DC,” NPR reports, “has largely settled around their presence.”
This is dangerous normalization utterly contrary to the nation’s better civil liberty traditions. Thanks to the Trump fascist regime, the “modern democratic norm” separating the national military from civilian policing is being violated in full public view. The nation’s capital is home to standing armies amidst the populace, a provocation that the nation’s Founders condemned in their bill of grievance against King George III.
Mass Spying Campaign Against “Left-wing” Groups
Newly released Department of Homeland Security records reveal an ominously named “Operation Puppet Master,” which sent federal agents to infiltrate organizing meetings in New York City and Minneapolis, surveil private Signal chats, record demonstrations, track license plates, and obtain financial records in order to identify a “network of conspirators” – targeting activists, protesters, and mainstream progressive groups such as AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union; the local unions Minneapolis Federation of Educators and the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees; the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ).
This mass surveillance followed the directive of Trump’s executive order designating “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization, and NSPM-7, directing the machinery of the federal government to carry out the criminalization of people and groups organizing against the actions of the Trump regime or even holding certain progressive beliefs. These directives, to turn anti-fascist beliefs into thought crimes and non-violent protest into “terrorism,” were quickly operationalized into campaigns of surveillance and political prosecutions of activists.
A Final Thought
The deranged, depraved, and debased leader’s approval rate is 29 points underwater. This ought to be understood as a ripe moment for millions upon millions who don’t want to live in a fascist America to take to the streets and public squares to demand the immediate removal of a fascist regime that poses a grave existential menace to humanity. But among far too many decent (non-fascist) Americans, it is taken to mean things are looking good for the Democrats in the midterm Congressional and state elections that the reigning Republi-fascists are openly scheming to poison, subvert, rig, and perhaps cancel or refuse to honor. This is deadly quicksand. As we (RF) said in our Call to Conscience seventeen months ago: “Waiting for the next elections will be too late. We cannot rely on the Democratic Party’s leadership who complacently rely on the very norms and processes that the Trump regime shreds by the hour.”
This is fascism. The Trump fascist regime must go now!