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. In this and in coming regular columns here at Refuse Fascism I am going to dig into what strikes me as the most significant and outrageous fascist things done and said by Trump, the Trump executive branch, and/or the Trump MAGA party.
“We’re Not Going to Lose an Election for 100 Years”
Generally, this will relate to the last week leading up to the morning of the column’s date, but for this opening intervention I want to stretch back to a chilling speech Trump gave two weeks ago at Mount Rushmore, one night before the 250th anniversary of the United States’ Declaration of Independence. The following passage deserves special mention:
“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land…You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both…We’re [going to] send them into exile. We will send them quickly away,.. We can only lose the midterms if we …are foolish…But if we terminate the filibuster …and immediately vote for the Save America Act, then we will not lose an election for 100 years. We do that, we’re not going to lose an election for 100 years…The Communist Party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals, and everybody that doesn’t want to work.”
Trump here essentially called the openly capitalist and imperialist Democrats “The Communist Party” and equated the prospects of the Democrats winning the midterm elections this fall with the supposed menace of the US “becom[ing] a communist country.” He wants one party – his MAGA fascist Amerikaner party – to rule the country without serious contestation “for 100 years.”
The “SAVE America Act” is a draconian voter identification and suppression bill premised on the fascist Big Lie of massive fraudulent noncitizen voting.
An Evidence-Free Rant to the Nation on the “Deep State” Conspiracy to Rig Elections Against MAGA
Trump made another pitch for the SAVE Act in a wild address to the nation last night. In a clear bid to sow doubt about the outcomes of the 2026 midterm elections or perhaps to justify cancelling those elections, Trump went on television to make thoroughly unconvincing and unsubstantiated claims about noncitizen voting, Chinese interference in the 2020 election, and a “deep state” conspiracy to hide evidence of that alleged interference. None of the heavily redacted and “declassified” information he cited provides any serious basis for his charges. He threatened three television networks with the cancellation of their broadcast licenses because they refused to grant him prime time broadcast space.
Rubio’s Paranoid Global Conference About the Mythical Epidemic of Left-Wing Terrorism
Virulent and paranoid anti-communism, hallmark components of fascist ideology, were prominently featured in an unhinged lecture that Stephen “We Are the Storm” Miller gave yesterday to representatives from 67 nations called to Washington by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to discuss the supposed global menace of “leftist political terrorism.” In a series of deranged speeches, Miller, Rubio, Commerce Secretary Scott Bennett and other top Trump administration officials called the political left a “terrorist” threat and pledged to use all the tools at their disposal to obliterate left-wing groups. Miller claimed without evidence that the nation and world are plagued by epidemic “left-wing violence” and labelled leftists and left-wing organizations as “enemies of civilization” and a “cancer” that will “destroy society” if not taken down. Miller even took aim at “anyone who supports” left causes, accusing US institutions of being “soft” when it comes to cracking down on “left-wing beliefs.” Adopting a “future crime” perspective, Miller called on true Americans to work with the Trump regime to target left people to “prevent a threat from occurring.”
The purpose of Rubio’s conference, deeply consistent with the legacies of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and Joe McCarthy: spark a global war of repression on people with “left-wing beliefs.”
As Reich-Wing Watch noted: “This playbook isn’t new. After the 1933 Reichstag fire, Hitler blamed Communists and declared: ‘we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.’ Cancer. Pest. Terrorists. Root them out. We’ve read this script before, and we know how it ends.”
As predicted, the Trump regime’s presenters made no mention of the well-established fact that the lion’s share of political violence in the United States is committed by the far-right.
Trump Countermands the Suspension of Extrajudicial Traffic Stop Executions
Then there is Trump’s rapid overturning of the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to suspend ICE traffic stops after ICE killed two legally resident Latino men – Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on July 7 and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine on July 13. Both men were murdered in cold blood while driving their vehicles by ICE thugs. Both were unarmed. Neither of them was the intended target of the operation that killed them. In both cases the masked killers wore no body cameras to record the incidents and ICE tried to justify the murders by claiming without evidence that the victims had tried to run down federal agents. Civil rights groups have properly described both shootings as “extrajudicial executions.”
The killings sparked angry protests that received national media attention, leading the DHS to send out a memo directing agents to temporarily stop pulling people over. Trump countermanded this order in less than 24 hours. In a statement demanding that ICE keep making the lethal stops, Trump failed to mention either of the deaths.
A Trump Truth Social post proclaimed “we must be strong…we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” Trump insisted that efforts to hold ICE accountable are the nefarious work of “Radical Left Dumocrats…I.C.E., go back and do your very important job,” he posted. “Keep those Crime Stat Records coming!”
(Neither Lorenzo Salgado Araujo nor Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero had any criminal record. Both were hard-working fathers with legal US residence. Mr. Araujo worked 32 years in construction, putting three sons through college. Mr. Guerrero was handcuffed after being shot in the head in front of his three-year-old daughter.)
Hauling in Journalists.
Also worth mention: last Friday, Trump ordered his Justice Department (currently headed by his own confessed personal lawyer) to undertake the nakedly repressive step of delivering subpoenas to the personal homes of New York Times journalists who reported on security problems with the new Air Force One plane that Trump corruptly accepted from the nation of Qatar. The Trump regime is trying to compel the reporters to divulge their sources before a grand jury. The message to news personnel is clear: reporting findings the Dear Leader doesn’t like can put you at risk of arrest and incarceration. “The appearance of Federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” David McCraw, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for the Times, said in a statement.
This is fascism.