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fascism
Cheap Living, Costly Politics
When Mamdani meets Trump on affordability, capitalism gets cheaper without becoming less exploitative.
Nov 25, 2025
In the press conference following their meeting, President Donald Trump and New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani presented what has widely been read as an unexpected moment of political harmony. The men appeared relaxed, even complimentary toward one another. Trump congratulated Mamdani on his victory and repeated, "The better you do, the happier I am,” all while shielding Mandani from the press’s often hostile questioning. At one point, when a reporter asked Mamdani whether he still believed Trump was a fascist, Trump humorously cut in to deflect the question, telling him he could simply say, “Yes”and move on. Coverage highlighted the ease of their interaction and the shared focus on lowering costs for New Yorkers, including joint criticism of high energy costs.
Many interpreted the friendliness as a shocking departure from expectations. A democratic socialist known for championing tenant power, free transit, and critiques of the United States’ complicity in genocide appeared congenial beside a reactionary politician who has spent years fueling racist, authoritarian movements. Yet what appeared surprising to many was in fact a predictable meeting of compatible political logics. Both appeal to popular material demands while leaving intact the deeper structures of power that require inequality, extraction, and coercion to function.
Popularity and the Politics of Cheap Relief
Trump has always treated popularity as the foundation of legitimacy. He mobilizes mass admiration, celebrity status, and populist rhetoric not to democratize power but to justify domination by a figure with immense wealth and personal legal vulnerability. The admiration he extends to Mamdani serves as validation by association. Aligning himself with a youthful, newly elected figure who commands broad public support strengthens his claim to represent the people, even as his agenda remains focused on legal survival, personal enrichment, and elite power.
Mamdani’s strategy rests on a different calculus that converges with Trump at the surface. The politics of affordability resonates because it speaks directly to lived capitalist crisis. Housing, groceries, utilities, and transportation devour household budgets while wages stagnate. The cost of simply existing in a city like New York has grown unbearable. Mamdani’s platform identifies that pain as the entry point to socialist reform. He connects his administration’s mandate to policies like rent freezes, fare free buses, and municipal ownership of basic goods. The focus on lowering costs mainstreams socialist policy by shaping it as pragmatic relief rather than ideological transformation.
This strategy carries value. It can anchor left politics in material need and build popular support for public services. But affordability also carries risk. If reducing prices becomes the central horizon rather than a bridge to systemic change, the political project risks evolving into a more humane version of the same order. Or even worse, it creates the conditions for an even more repressive and inhuman form of fascism in our time. Life becomes cheaper without becoming freer.
Cozying up to Trump, may seem like a good political tactic, but it ultimately plays into an attempt to make authoritarianism seem not only acceptable but even progressive.
This reflects a deeper contradiction in contemporary capitalism. Liberal democracy and market institutions are no longer accepted as inherently legitimate. Their worth is increasingly measured by whether they can deliver immediate material improvement. That shift creates openings for radical change because it breaks the old belief that the system deserves loyalty simply for existing. Yet it also gives the system new ways to protect itself. Popular leaders can step in to offer short-term relief that restores confidence in existing institutions while leaving the forces that create crisis untouched. Affordability becomes a pressure valve rather than a pathway to transformation. And it also limits the demands of the left to a universalized middle-class desire for a less expensive capitalist existence, regardless of its exploitative impact on the rest of society.
The cordial meeting did not signal an ideological unity between democratic socialism and right-wing populism. It showed how both now operate in a political landscape where legitimacy rests on delivering short-term economic gains to supposedly all New Yorkers rather than on the principles they claim to represent. The question is what must be surrendered to secure those gains.
How Affordability Buys Consent
Cozying up to Trump, may seem like a good political tactic, but it ultimately plays into an attempt to make authoritarianism seem not only acceptable but even progressive. In wealthy capitalist states, a long-standing, but too often conveniently ignored, political bargain is being updated. People can receive short-term economic improvements, subsidized public services, and relief from acute cost pressures in exchange for accepting the continued existence of imperial violence abroad and racialized coercion at home. In the present era, this “old” bargain carries the heightened risk of helping to usher in fascism.
The working populations of imperial centers are granted better access to goods while wealth continues to be extracted from workers in colonized, sanctioned, or militarized regions. Domestically the same bargain allows inequality to deepen as long as its effects are managed through policing, welfare targeting, and selective investment.
This arrangement relies on economic relief as a tool for preserving the broader system. Rather than confronting the structures that create poverty, states manage discontent by making survival marginally less difficult. Political institutions become custodians of a society where inequality is expected and stability is achieved through regulated compromise rather than emancipation.
This bargain is increasingly reinforced by what can be understood as an authoritarian financial complex. Contemporary capitalism is stabilized through a fusion of financial power, corporate control, and coercive institutions that contain unrest when inequality becomes volatile. Policing, surveillance, carcerality, and militarized foreign policy do not simply uphold order; they function as profitable sectors that expand precisely because inequality persists. In this context affordability works to preserve the system by easing everyday pressures while leaving intact the industries that rely on repression at home and abroad for growth.
Within this context affordability becomes a pacifying tool—especially for working class New Yorkers who are demanding real systemic change. Cheaper transit and lower utility bills offer real improvements, but they can also function as incentives to accept a political order responsible for global extraction and domestic repression. The issue is not whether material relief has value; it is that such relief can substitute for structural transformation rather than build toward it.
This framework clarifies what is at stake in New York. Mamdani’s focus on affordability could lead to transformative public ownership and a challenge to capital. It could also become a mechanism through which New Yorkers receive lower prices while the underlying machinery of exploitation remains in place. The reported decision to retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner, outlined in coverage of Mamdani’s choice to keep Tisch in place, highlights this tension because it signals continuity with a policing regime that has historically prioritized property protection, broken-windows enforcement, and surveillance over structural justice. If these institutions remain in place, affordability risks functioning as cover for a system that deepens inequality while appearing to relieve it. Or more precisely, it creates new acceptable forms of repression, inequity, and exploitation—expanding more widely the unethical desires of an aspiring middle class who ignore the oppression of others so that they can live comfortably.
This pattern already exists internationally. European welfare systems were largely built on colonial resource extraction. United States prosperity relied on global dominance, military power, dollar hegemony, and dispossession. Cheap goods do not emerge from nowhere. They are subsidized by unseen human costs. A left project that seeks to lower the price of living without confronting those global and racialized foundations risks reproducing a moral economy where the comfort of the metropole is purchased through others’ subjugation.
Beyond Cheaper Survival
The shift in public consciousness that enabled Mamdani’s victory should not be underestimated. People are no longer persuaded by justifications that capitalism or liberal democracy are inherently legitimate. Legitimacy is now measured by whether institutions deliver tangible improvement. That shift makes sense in an era of crisis. It erodes ideological loyalty and opens space for radical alternatives grounded in meeting basic needs. Crucially, just as Mamdani uses the discourse of “affordability” to make his brand of liberal socialism seem more politically acceptable, so too is Trump using these desires for his own project of fascism.
This transformation creates an opening for socialist politics. If people demand material improvement then the left can demonstrate that market-based systems cannot provide it reliably. Success requires more than lowering prices. It demands democratizing control over production, land, energy, transit, and finance. It demands replacing private ownership with social ownership and treating housing, transport, food, and utilities as public rights rather than profit sources.
Affordability can accelerate this transition if it is framed as a step toward decommodification. Free buses point toward collective transit. Rent freezes point toward social housing and community land trusts. Lower energy bills point toward democratically owned utilities. However, it can also distract attention from more radical demands such as for a living wage and the socialization of the economy.
The meeting showed how easily a left project that prioritizes cost of living can be absorbed into the political logic of the system it aims to confront.
But without such grounding affordability can consolidate the system instead. A state that lowers prices without challenging ownership leaves profit structures intact and relies on subsidies, taxation, or temporary regulatory pressure rather than structural change. When that occurs the governing project becomes managing capitalism responsibly rather than ending it. Even more concerning, it creates the condition for the far-right to claim the demand for “affordability” as their own.
This risk is amplified by electoral politics. Winning office creates pressure to compromise with existing institutions. Mayors must navigate financial markets, credit ratings, property tax structures, policing unions, federal funding constraints, and real estate interests. Under those pressures affordability becomes a technocratic tool to pacify the public without challenging the interests that make the city unaffordable. It provide the very legitimacy for both “progressive” and far-right authoritarian elites to justify their own power and rule.
A socialist movement must therefore build power outside electoral institutions. Tenant unions, worker cooperatives, public banking campaigns, fare strikes, climate blockades, and mass organizations can exert pressure that elected officials alone cannot.
A Crossroads for the Left
The Trump-Mamdani meeting symbolized a potential broader turning point. The crisis of capitalism has eroded ideological certainty. People demand results. Political actors from different factions will compete to supply them. Some will promise affordability without freedom. Others will promise belonging and national cohesion without justice. The real radical left must offer something different.
The stakes are not small reforms or ideological purity. Instead, they are whether a politics rooted in affordability may become a transitional stage toward democratic control of society or, more likely, a permanent settlement that normalizes exploitation in exchange for a comfortable life. One path leads to public ownership, internationalist solidarity, abolition of punitive institutions, and dismantling of capitalist extraction. The other path stabilizes oppression by making it less painful.
The meeting showed how easily a left project that prioritizes cost of living can be absorbed into the political logic of the system it aims to confront. Trump gained legitimacy through proximity to a socialist victor. Mamdani gained access and cooperation through cordial tone. Both walked away stronger, and the system stayed exactly where it was.
The moment demands strategic clarity. Affordability must not replace emancipation. The goal cannot be cheaper survival; it must be a society where survival is no longer determined by market forces or secured through imperial violence.
There is a chance to move beyond comfort into collective power. The task is to seize it and build socialism from below.
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How Trump Cynically Uses Fighting Antisemitism to Justify Fascism
Trump’s urge to suppress free speech may be about Israel today, but count on one thing: It will be about something else tomorrow.
Nov 21, 2025
Rooting out terrorism and antisemitism was the supposed reason that plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, after she coauthored an op-ed calling on Tufts University to divest from companies with ties to Israel due to the killing and starvation of Palestinian civilians. There is an international movement to boycott, sanction, and divest from Israel, but in the United States, President Donald Trump is imperiling the freedom even to publicly discuss such ideas, which should, in effect, be considered a test case for his larger attack on free speech. So far, the test is going well for Trump.
In what seems a long time ago, in 2024, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, released a blueprint for what it called “a national strategy to combat antisemitism” by addressing what it described as “America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American ‘pro-Palestinian movement.’” In essence, and in what’s amounted to an extraordinarily effective work of political theater that has been sold to my own state, Massachusetts, among other places, that foundation dubbed its political opponents “supporters of terrorism.” It also labeled organizations working in opposition to its agenda a “terrorist support network,” and claimed for itself the noble mantle of “combating antisemitism”—even as it deftly redefined antisemitism from hatred of Jewish people to criticism of the US-Israel alliance. President Trump has put the Heritage Foundation strategy into action and gone even further.
It may be his most original idea. As political scientist Barnett Rubin put it in September, “President Trump always says he’s very creative and accomplishes things no one has ever done before. And now he is building a fascist regime which is legitimized by the fight against antisemitism. Nobody ever thought of doing that before.”
How the Defense Department (Oops, Sorry, the War Department) Promotes World Peace
I attended Hebrew school as a child, and today, when I try to recall what I learned there about Israel and Palestine, I find in my memory an image of a desert, replete with flowers, and the pleasant recollection that the State of Israel was founded in that empty landscape. In 1998, I visited Israel with my family. My brother had his bar mitzvah at the mountaintop fortress of Masada overlooking the Dead Sea. Though I enjoyed an enviable private school education, I didn’t hear the word Nakba until adulthood. That Arabic word for catastrophe refers to the displacement of 700,000 Palestinian people for Israel’s founding in 1948. A majority of the population of the modern-day Gaza Strip descended from refugees of the Nakba.
According to Amnesty International and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Israel has imposed a system of oppression on Palestinians across Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories through an enforced system of segregation that constitutes apartheid. For decades, Israel has controlled who could enter or exit the Gaza Strip and, from 2007 on, that 25-mile strip of land functioned as what Human Rights Watch called an “open-air prison.” As of 2022, the unemployment rate in Gaza had hit 45%, and 65% of the people there were living in poverty. On October 7 of the following year, an armed group broke out of Gaza and waged attacks on Israel that killed 1,195 people, 815 of whom were civilians.
The real question is whether Americans will accept his violations of the First Amendment or fight to protect free speech even when they dislike things other people have to say.
In the two years since then, Israel has responded by killing more than 67,000 Palestinians in Gaza in a military campaign of such horror that, as the head of Doctors Without Borders reported to the United Nations Security Council, children as young as five said that they preferred to die rather than continue living in fear while witnessing the slaughter of their family members. A girl named Sham was born in Gaza in November 2023 and survived smoke poisoning as an infant. As a toddler, she was diagnosed with acute malnutrition, before being killed on May 6 of this year when Israel dropped explosives on the shelter where she was living with her family. The United Nations and prominent experts, including Israeli-American professor of Holocaust and genocide studies Omer Bartov, have concluded that Israel’s war on Gaza is a genocide. The current ceasefire has slowed, not stopped, the death toll.
By 2024, the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, had ruled that Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem was illegal; that Israel needed to halt all settlement construction, evacuate its settlers, pay restitution to Palestinians, and allow them the right of return. It also indicated that all states and international organizations have a legal obligation not to assist Israel’s further occupation of the area.
However, since October 2023, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry and the Council on Foreign Relations, using 800 transport planes and 140 ships, my own country has delivered 90,000 tons of arms and equipment to Israel, including tanks, artillery shells, bombs, and rockets. The US government gives Israel billions of dollars annually in military aid, which that country spends mostly on purchases made through the US “Foreign Military Sales” program. According to a Defense Department website, that program sells “articles and services [that] will strengthen the security of the United States and promote world peace.”
Despite how, as Israeli historian Lee Mordechai described it, Israel has limited the flow of information out of Gaza and campaigned to discredit critical voices, a July Gallup poll found that 60% of Americans disapprove of Israel’s military actions there. Even more strikingly, a September Washington Post poll found that nearly half (48%) of Jewish Americans disapprove (and only 46% approve).
But according to recommendations issued by the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism, a group created by state law in 2024, a teacher discussing such polling in a classroom could precipitate an anonymous complaint filed with the state police on the grounds that the educator has rendered the learning environment in my state hostile to Jewish students.
School Teachers Are the Problem!
Last February, Special Commission cochair and State Rep. Simon Cataldo (D-14) conducted an inquisition—yes, an inquisition—into the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (who is himself Jewish), including presenting a series of materials on Israel-Palestine that Cataldo had obtained from a database of educator resources. He displayed a graphic called “Born Unequal Abroad,” which lists the different rights afforded to an American Jewish child and the child of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The former can visit Israel and even become an Israeli citizen at any time, while the latter is barred from visiting and has no pathway to citizenship (even through marriage). Cataldo seemed to regard that graphic (and others like it) as self-evidently antisemitic and displayed it as a smoking gun that revealed the supposed antisemitism festering within the Massachusetts Teachers Association.
In other words, in my home state today, “combating antisemitism” means a governor- and legislature-appointed commission conducting an inquisition of a (Jewish) union leader for the offense of failing to suppress critical discussion of a foreign nation that the world’s leading human rights organizations have found to be upholding a system of apartheid and committing genocide. At the same time, actual antisemitism—that is, the hatred of Jewish people by xenophobic nationalists—has gone largely unexamined by the commission in the midst of its campaign to shut down criticism of Israel. (I imagine President Trump and the Heritage Foundation applauding in the background.)
Indeed, over the course of a year of hearings, the Special Commission has perhaps irreparably merged the concept of antisemitism with criticism of Israel, which seems to have been the point. State Sen. and Commission Cochair John Velis (D-2) actually uses the terms “anti-Israel” and “antisemitic” interchangeably, though they do have different meanings and anyone charged with the responsibility of leading a state panel on antisemitism should know that. Velis, who is not Jewish, has taken multiple trips to Israel paid for by the Israeli government as well as a charity affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the lobby group known as AIPAC.
The Special Commission has unveiled recommendations for Massachusetts schools that include utilizing a definition of antisemitism that, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, will have the effect of chilling free speech. It has also recommended launching a statewide reporting system in which anonymous allegations of antisemitism in schools would be collected by the state police.
Following the initial release of those recommendations, Gov. Maura Healey issued a statement applauding the commission’s work. Organizations like the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston have also sent out emails to their membership commending the commission.
Perhaps in response to the hours of dissenting public testimony that (mostly Jewish) people as well as scholars and education experts have offered, the commissioners wrote in their most recent report, “We should listen to and respect people who say that they have been harmed by antisemitism; we should not gaslight them or tell them that their experience is invalid.”
Who could argue?
A Federal Judge Weighs In
After Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk was abducted from the street by ICE agents for the offense of cowriting an op-ed in the school paper asking the school to divest from companies with ties to Israel, a federal judge found that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had violated the First Amendment through a policy of targeting for deportation noncitizens who criticized Israel or voiced support for Palestinians. The judge also found that executive orders issued by President Trump had relied on a definition of antisemitism that encompassed First Amendment-protected speech (the same definition recommended by the Massachusetts Commission!).
But will that federal court ruling even matter? According to the same judge, “The effect of these targeted deportation proceedings continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Benjamin Moser has noted that, after October 7, some American Jewish institutions not only supported Israel’s reign of terror over Palestinian civilians but also applauded the clampdown on free speech in order to sustain the killing. “The younger generations, people who have seen with their own eyes the crimes of the so-called Jewish state, and who feel the sacrilege, the impious desecration, of the values they thought were Jewish,” he wrote, “will never return to these institutions.”
But will it matter? Surely, it won’t stop Donald Trump from using his version of Jewish identity as a moral shield for his attack on free speech.
In Massachusetts, a coalition of organizations has publicly opposed the Special Commission’s recommendations and, in the western part of the state where I live, a group of residents has resorted to putting out yard signs with QR codes on them to call attention to this travesty. I’m part of that effort, but does it matter?
In California, a new law, ostensibly intended to protect Jewish students from discrimination, goes into effect on January 1. It has, however, put educators on alert that they may be accused of antisemitism if they share information deemed critical of Israel.
Meanwhile, the leaders of civil society organizations appear ill-suited to resist such suppression of free speech and, in some cases, seem to embrace it. In January, members of the American Historical Association voted 428 to 88 in favor of declaring their opposition to “scholasticide” (the deliberate destruction of an education system) in Gaza. But the association’s leadership council vetoed that vote. A similar episode occurred at the Modern Language Association.
Amy Hagopian, a professor emeritus of global health at the University of Washington, who for years taught a class on war and health, recently wrote about how she was expelled from the American Public Health Association after publicly protesting a decision by its executive board to halt consideration of a resolution on Palestinian health justice. (An anonymous complaint had alleged that the protest was antisemitic.)
An Alternative Could Look Like This
The usual line-toeing of politicians in both major parties has involved reciting statements of support for Israel, whatever it does. By contrast, Zohran Mamdani was clear during his victorious campaign to become mayor of New York City that he supports an end to apartheid for Palestinians and opposes the crimes against humanity committed by Israel. In American politics, that represented a fresh playbook. He focused successfully on his city’s absurdly high cost of living and did so as part of a coalition that included people of the Jewish faith and other faiths, even as powerful moneyed interests lined up against him. And he won.
Keep in mind that a clear majority of Americans do indeed disapprove of Israel’s actions in Gaza, so it makes sense that there was an electorate for a candidate who would tell the truth about the oppression of Palestinians, while rejecting claims that it’s antisemitic to do so. Mamdani won a third of voters who specified Judaism as their religion (just as he won a third of Catholics). He also overwhelmingly won among those with no religious affiliation (a quarter of the electorate) and those whose religious affiliation was described as “Other,” which is where exit pollsters put people who are Muslim.
Trump’s urge to suppress free speech may be about Israel today, but count on one thing: It will be about something else tomorrow. The real question is whether Americans will accept his violations of the First Amendment or fight to protect free speech even when they dislike things other people have to say.
There are those who believe that Mamdani’s victory cannot be replicated outside New York City. But given that free speech itself may hang in the balance, it’s at least worth a try.
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For Trump, There Is No Rock Bottom
The regime’s depravity will continue to shock the world until it is removed.
Nov 04, 2025
“For anyone holding their breath,” someone said online a couple weeks ago, “waiting for this fascist Trump regime to hit rock bottom: There is no rock bottom. Their depravity will continue to shock the world, week after week, for as long as they hold power.”
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.
The Congress has been essentially dissolved by Trump through his command over the Speaker of the US House, the obsequious Mike Johnson (R-La.). This makes legislative branch oversight of Trump’s war moves and plans impossible. It also prevents the release of the Epstein Files, which contain information on his close relationship with a disgraced pedophile, and congressional action to restore SNAP benefits (food stamps). (Johnson is meanwhile refusing to seat a duly elected congresswoman from Arizona since, according to media reports, she would tilt the US House majority to the side of the files’ release.)
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.
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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.
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.”
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.
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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.
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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?
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