The regime’s depravity will continue to shock the world until it is removed.
It is a good time to reflect on how true this statement is as we approach the one-year anniversary of Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump’s second presidential election.
Mad “king” Trump is now blowing up random boats, slaughtering innocents in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, claiming without a hint of a wisp of a scent of evidence that the people he is massacring in cold violation of international and national law and basic decency are “enemy combatant” narco traffickers “at war with the United States.”
Trump is gathering major military forces off the coast
of Venezuela in
preparation for a likely regime-change war on that nation. He may also
attack Colombia,
whose president has angered him by criticizing his extrajudicial executions in
international waters.
Trump and the key people around him... are dedicated sociopathic
fascists eager to stamp out the last embers of American democracy, decency,
deliberation, and rule
of law by any and all means “necessary.”
He is sending $20 billion to Argentina to back
his fellow far-right president there as 42 million US Americans face hunger because he is
cutting off their Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
Former SNAP recipients will join masses of federal workers Trump
has thrown out of work on food lines
as Trump demands $230 million from his Department of
Justice as “compensation” for its (badly belated) indictment (under
former President Joe
Biden) of Trump for… you know, trying to overthrow electoral democracy and
the rule of law at the end of his first horrific administration (and for
absconding with classified documents and obstructing efforts to retrieve them).
Trump has just maniacally torn down the East Wing of
the White House,
planning to replace that former historic landmark with a gargantuan, gaudy
ballroom funded by some of his favorite capitulating corporations, including
the tech giants Google,
Meta, and Palantir and the leading “defense” firm Lockheed Martin.
Trump has slapped 50% tariffs on Brazil to punish it for
properly prosecuting and convicting his fascist comrade Jair Bolsonaro (the
onetime “Trump of the Tropics”) for sparking an attempted insurrectionist coup
(Brazil’s January 6)
in that nation’s capital on January 8, 2023.
Among the many ways in which Trump is mimicking his role
model Adolph Hitler is his attempt to rule through executive order and
memorandum.
A recent Trump memo–NPSM-7–absurdly attributes recent
domestic US political violence to a supposedly top-down movement of left-wing
terrorism and tells federal law enforcement to investigate and potentially
prosecute any group or individual who advances “anti-fascist” ideas, including
even criticism of “Christianity” and “traditional” family and gender relations.
Trump has unleashed his Department of Justice on a
transparently political campaign of prosecutorial retribution against his
enemies and critics. He has even directed his fascist attorney general to
investigate people Joe Biden pardoned.
********************************
The deranged, orange-sprayed POTUS responded to the
remarkable outpouring of 7 million Americans in the No Kings Day protests held in more
than 2,500 cities and towns two weeks ago by posting an AI video showing “King
Trump” wearing a crown while piloting an Air Force bomber that dumped liquid
shit on protesters in New
York, Chicago,
and other US cities.
There’s far more than online fantasy in the menace Trump
poses to the US cities. Herr Donald’s 21st-century Gestapo, Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE),
and its junior partner Border Patrol, are many months into a reign of racist,
xenophobic-nationalist, and militarized police state terror
across urban America. Among its many outrages, this assault has included the
disgraceful deployment of Black Hawk attack helicopters and hundreds of heavily
armed storm troopers against the residents of a large apartment complex in the
Black Chicago neighborhood of South Shore. Small children of color
were thrown on the street, zip-tied, and tossed into vans.
The Trump regime is recruiting ICE agents from the ranks of the Proud Boys and other paramilitary fascist groups. It is building mass detention camps from coast to coast with taxpayer funding that makes ICE more well-funded than the militaries of every nation except the US and China.
Trump’s sadistic puppy-killing Homeland Security head Kristi
Noem, aptly nicknamed “Gestapo Barbie,” coldly rejected Illinois Governor JB
Pritzker’s request that she suspend the terror in Chicago for Halloween weekend
so that Chicago-area children could go out trick-or-treating without fear of
being tear-gassed and zip-tied by Trump’s gendarmes.
Mein Trumpf47 has invaded Los Angeles, Washington DC, and
Memphis with the National Guard. He sent the US Marines into Los Angeles. He is
pressing to militarily invade Portland, Oregon on the basis of
the utterly absurd claim that “radical left terrorists” are “burning” that city
“to the ground.” In a nod to the Slaveowners’ Confederacy, whose virulent
racist legacy he and his openly Christian white nationalist (neofascist) “Secretary
of War” Pete Hegseth uphold, Trump has asked his Supreme Court to
summarily reverse lower court rulings that have so far blocked his bid to
put Texas National
Guard troops in Chicago.
Trump has said that Illinois Gov. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor
Brandon Johnson “should be in jail” since they have not ordered state and city
police to join ICE and Border Patrol’s racist kidnapping operations.
Three weeks ago, the depraved fascist-in-chief Trump and
Hegseth ordered 800-plus generals and admirals to Quantico, Virginia from across
the vast American global empire to hear them say that America’s real adversary
is “the enemy within,” meaning the residents of the nation’s majority nonwhite
and “radical left” cities. Trump told the stone-faced brass that American cities
need to become “training grounds” for the US military.
In his emergency request for a Supreme Court shadow docket
ruling that will green-light the military takeover of Chicago and other cities,
Trump has dispensed with his past invocations of federal statutes that
supposedly permit him to bypass the Posse Comitatus Act and the 10th Amendment
to the Constitution and argued instead that the judicial branch has no
constitutional right to opine on his power to deploy the military anywhere he
wants for whatever reason.
If he doesn’t get what he wants from the Christian fascist
court he molded during his first term he will likely invoke the ancient
slaveowners’ Insurrection Act to put troops in Democratic Party-run majority
nonwhite cities.
The Trump regime is moving in numerous ways to rig the 2026
midterms, which may well take place in the intimidating, vote-suppressing
presence of occupying troops in US cities.
Even without National Guard or regular duty troops deployed,
the direct federal gendarmes of ICE and its junior partner Border
Patrol–unencumbered by the 10th Amendment and Posse Comitatus law and filled in
its ranks with the most racist and reactionary thugs in the federal state–have
already this year undertaken a federal military attack on US cities, replete
with advanced weaponry and Black Hawk attack helicopters. The nation’s cities,
and most especially those cities’ Latino sections, are already under de facto
military occupation.
********************************
But what did we expect? Is any of this surprising? Trump45
led an insurrectionist coup attempt on January 6. 2021. He campaigned on
political “retribution” and a promise of racist mass deportations animated
by his Hitlerian claim that brown-skinned immigrants are “poisoning our blood.”
On his first day in office, he pardoned more than 1,500 January 6 putschists
and criminals, commuted the long prison sentences handed down to the nation’s
top two paramilitary fascist leaders for their roles in the Capitol Riot, and
signed an executive order purporting to end the explicit constitutional right
of birthright citizenship.
On July 1, 2024, Trump’s Christian fascist Supreme Court
granted him forever immunity from prosecution for any crime he committed past
or future under the rubric of “official presidential duties.”
Trump and the key people around him, including above all
Stephen “We Are the Storm!” Miller, are dedicated sociopathic
fascists eager to stamp out the last embers of American democracy, decency,
deliberation, and rule of law by any and all means “necessary.” The Trump
regime and the Trump party’s wild denunciation of the second No Kings Day
protests as “radical left,” “Marxist” (I’m one), and “terrorist” rallies
dedicated to “hating America” is symptomatic of their fascist ideology, which
requires socialist, Marxist, and communist enemies even when such enemies do
not exist to any significant degree, as in the US today (unlike in Germany in the early
1930s).
The Trump regime’s obsessive hatred of “the left” more than
merely echoes Hitler and Goebbels’ fanatical calls and pledges to “restore
German greatness” by saving it in from dreaded Marxists and “Judeo Bolsheviks”
who had supposedly “stabbed the nation in the back” during and after World War
I.
The former Fatherland News co-host and current “Secretary of
War” Pete “I’ll Stop Drinking if You put Me Atop the Pentagon” Hegseth (member
of a far-right church whose pastor says that the best period in American race
relations was the era of Black chattel slavery) is a “Christian” white
nationalist zealot who salivates over the prospect of unleashing the US
military on US cities. He holds his position despite his monumental
incompetence in great part because Trump47 is counting on him to do what Trump45’s
military chiefs wouldn’t do: Use bloody force against US citizens and residents
on US soil. A recently leaked Signal chat shows that Hegseth has been thinking
about sending the elite US Army 82nd Airborne to crush anti-ICE protests in
Portland.
*************************************
In a sign of how insane and depraved things have gotten atop
the US government (and how lame and Weimar-like some top Dems are), I recently
put up this Onion-style spoof online:
Unnamed sources report that Donald Trump has ordered the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to present a plan next week for the nuclear annihilation of every US city with a population of 500,000 or more. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) says that “any such plans would be contrary to the national interest and inconsistent with the Democrats signing on to a budget agreement to end the government shutdown.” Asked for comment, former President Barack Obama said that “the nuking of our major cities by our own military would be a major setback for our great nation.” Obama cautioned that “Democrats should seek bipartisan support for a congressional resolution questioning the legality of a US nuclear attack on major US cities.I know it can sometimes be difficult to win votes on the other side of the aisle,” Obama added, “but the genius of America is that at the end of the day we’re all on the same team. It would be terrible to lose Chicago or St. Louis, of course, but we’re still all Americans at the end of life on Earth.”
Crazy, right? And yet serious, intelligent people
understandably felt the need to make sure it wasn’t for real. As one of my
brilliant readers commented: “My first thought was to laugh, my second thought
was ‘Let me Google this and make sure it’s a joke.’ I was relieved to discover
it was not a real story but disturbed that I felt the need to check because it
sounded like something he might consider.”
That’s because there really are no limits to the depravity
of this fascist regime. There is no rock bottom.
After understanding this, the next and obvious question is what to do about it?
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Paul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University. He is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago Urban League. Street is also the author of numerous books, including "Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump and the Politics of Appeasement" (2020), "The Empire's New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power" (2010), and "They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy" (2014), and a regular contributor to Counterpunch, Z Magazine/ZNet, Black Agenda Report and teleSUR English. He has taught American history at several Chicago-area colleges and universities and currently lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
