by Alan Morrison

We can’t expect politicians to save American democracy, we’re going to have to do it.
—Eddie Glaude, Jr., historian and author, speaking with Latino USA

 

Immediately upon resuming the presidency, Donald Trump initiated a counterrevolutionary assault, taking advantage of all the powers he could grab, whether bestowed by the U.S. Constitution or prohibited by it. Despite gaining one of the narrowest popular vote margins ever, not even achieving a majority of those who did vote, he naturally lied that he had a mandate. He combined attempts to concentrate his own personal power and wealth with attacks on his real and perceived enemies—all within an overarching offensive to revive the supremacy of straight white men, especially the lords of capital, and salvage their faltering hierarchy and waning U.S. empire. Billionaire Elon Musk’s double Nazi salute was only the most blatant sign of the counterrevolution’s willingness to embrace fascism in new and old forms.

With Musk’s help, the new regime began a largely illegal purge of federal government personnel to replace them with loyalists. The purge extended to thought as well, closing websites with information ranging from climate change to women’s health to the famine early warning systems network. Schools were ordered to teach propaganda labeled “patriotic education” and to purge from education and government the real history of slavery, racism, sexism, labor exploitation—and especially the freedom struggles against them. Everything that those struggles won is in the bullseye.

HATE TARGETS MANY, BEGINNING WITH IMMIGRANTS

Deadly hate toward women, Blacks, people of color, LGBTQ people—especially Transgender people—is encouraged to run rampant. No one who is not rich, white, male, and certified heterosexual will be safe in the nation that Trump is trying to create. Likewise, no country rich in assets—from Greenland’s minerals to the Panama Canal—will be safe from the greed of capitalist expansionism.

As promised, the offensive began with attacks on immigrants. The spectacle of a military plane stuffed with shackled adults as well as some children is not only intended to deport people but to terrorize whole communities and scare undocumented workers out of exercising any labor or human rights.

As of Jan. 28, there have been workplace raids all over the country, starting with a seafood distribution plant in Newark, N.J., and farms in California’s Central Valley; then moving on to Chicago and Miami, and other parts of the southeastern U.S. An average of 400-1,000 people have been arrested each day. The government claims that each raid targets at least one criminal, but the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency’s (ICE) high-level official Tom Homan has gushed that he doesn’t mind making collateral arrests: “When we find him, he’s going to be with others … [and] if they’re in the country illegally, they’re coming too.” During the raids, ICE agents wear uniforms with highly visible text in order to attract media attention. But they use plainclothes officers when advantageous.

SCHOOLTEACHERS AND ADMINISTRATORS FIGHT BACK

In the midst of threats that immigration raids will come to schools, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) issued their New Presidential Administration Guidance: “CPS will continue to actively protect students, staff, and their families. In accordance with the Illinois Trust Act and Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance, CPS…WILL NOT allow ICE agents access to CPS facilities unless they produce a criminal judicial warrant signed by a federal judge.” Expressly excluded are administrative warrants, issued by immigration agencies, which do not carry the same legal weight under the U.S. Constitution. On Jan. 19, one CPS music teacher told this author she would stand in the doorway to block officers from entering her school. Five days later, teachers at Hamline Elementary School did just that. The officers who showed up never got into the school as they presented identification implying they were from the Department of Homeland Security. They were, in fact, Secret Service agents.

Asylum seekers—those who fled their homes because they feared persecution or murder—who are not yet in the U.S. have been blocked from presenting their cases since noon on inauguration day, when the Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) cellphone application went dark.

That app, called “CBP One,” is a requirement for people fleeing violent situations who are now forced to “remain in Mexico.” They had to obtain a cellphone with internet service, GPS, and facial recognition capability, then book an appointment if they can manage to find one in the next six months to more than a year. Amnesty International called it “a lottery system based on chance.”

When Trump canceled the app, the media let him get away with looking like he only canceled the easy avenue to an asylum hearing. A CNN anchor opined that people can probably just present themselves at the border the old way. That has been impossible for years! All asylum seekers have no choice but to use the cumbersome and buggy CBP One. The phone has to physically place them in Mexico while they wait, making them vulnerable to extortion and kidnapping.

Cumbersome and buggy might as well have been the goal of Biden’s asylum system. As president, he failed to revoke Title 42 (rapid expulsion) until the federal courts forced him to; then he simultaneously instituted a Trump wish-list item: requiring non-Mexican asylum seekers to first apply for asylum status in Mexico. Regarding executive orders on immigration, there was not much there for Trump to reverse, but no doubt he will find it.

DICTATORSHIP CONTINUES: RACISM, TRANSPHOBIA, SEXISM AND GRAFT

Some of the most consequential executive orders of Jan. 20 were focused on exorbitant gifts to fossil fuel companies and canceling any discussion of Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI), which was code for a very specific attack on Black people, other minorities, women, LGBQ and Trans people.

The inaugural speech was chock-full of gaslighting about ending the weaponization of justice while, at the same time, Trump plans to impose such weaponization. When he pardoned or commuted sentences for most of the insurrectionists, then called Jan. 6 a day of “love,” he was channeling the tactics of religious cult leaders (see “Review: ‘The Cult of Trump’”).

After also pardoning 23 anti-abortion activists who forcibly denied healthcare to women by occupying and blockading a clinic, Supreme Misogynist Trump reinstated the global gag rule, denying funding to any organization that even mentions abortion. This rule has led to thousands of deaths of women in poor countries. His shutoff of supplying the AIDS medication, if maintained, would kill hundreds if not thousands of women and girls. Most people with AIDS are now women and girls.

In campaigning, Trump promised to leave abortion to the states—leaving 40% of U.S. women subject to forced childbirth, including young girls and those who’ve been raped; and making women carry dangerous, and or non-viable fetuses to term, only to watch the babies they were forced to have die in agony after birth.

The route to banning all abortions may well take the form of declaring that life begins at conception and those two joined cells will have the same rights as the women whose body they inhabit. Thus, women who self-manage their abortion could be tried for murder along with  anyone who helps them. Already introduced in Congress is a bill to do this: “To implement equal protection under the 14th article of amendment to the Constitution for the right to life of each born and preborn human person.”

TRUMP USHERS IN HIS PLUTOCRACY

While reveling in announcing fascistic ideas at his inauguration, Trump was flanked by four of the five richest people in the world: Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk, all of whom control media or social media; and Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, a computer technology corporation that has expanded into Artificial Intelligence. This at a time when Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter had resulted in a 50% increase in hate speech on the platform. Multitudes, from TV talking heads to red state school officials, are offering absurd and performative policy arguments in the hopes of attracting the president’s attention. The worst inclinations of anonymous commentary have been set loose, and some of Trump’s fixations also seem to indicate he is being steered by social media as much as steering it.

For example, take his pledge to seize the Panama Canal. The canal being in U.S. hands or Panama’s would not significantly affect global capital, and it may not happen. But it shows how dreams of restored empire heat up global conflict and militarism. During Trump’s aggressive 45-minute phone call with the prime minister of Denmark, he may have threatened a U.S. invasion of Greenland as well as tariffs. Further to the right than even the Israeli government, Trump hoped to eject the thousands of Palestinians now returning on foot to Northern Gaza to Jordan instead—that is, ethnic cleansing.

As some parts of the government reel, behind the smokescreen Trump’s allies are horrendously efficient at launching long-planned legal challenges on dozens of issues. One of the most egregious is misrepresenting the 14th Amendment and going back to the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford position that birthright citizenship never existed. The same decision notoriously declared that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Then on Jan. 28, up to $3 trillion allocated by Congress was frozen by the White House, interrupting programs such as Head Start which encapsulate “government for the people.”

Meanwhile, trade unions and Left legal organizations like the ACLU and Democracy Forward had their briefs ready so that injunctions blocking government actions would be swift. The courts alone cannot save us, however, especially because too many have been stacked with judges beholden to Trump or just agreeing with his fascist ideology. Activists and the religious who disagree with Trump’s avalanche of hate have opened up churches as sanctuaries, and have started mutual aid networks for people missing paychecks or encountering other forms of hardship. Helping the already injured could be a step toward preventing the injuries and stopping the attacks.

FASCISM MAKING INROADS

There is no question that many ordinary people were angry at their objective living situation, which helps explain how so many voted for a fascist-wannabe-dictator.

While Trump played to the country’s racism, sexism and homophobia, he was helped by the economic aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Wages never kept pace with runaway inflation, felt especially in the prices of food, fuel, healthcare, and rent. For example, a healthcare premium increase of $40 out of each week’s paycheck would amount to an effective pay cut of $2,000 per year. Politicians in charge failed to raise the spending power of the people suffering the most.

In its first two years, Joe Biden’s administration failed to push the Democratic Congress for a rise in the federal minimum wage, which hasn’t moved since 2009 (see: “Battle for living wage”). An amendment to raise the minimum wage in 2021 failed when all Republicans and a scandalous eight Democratic senators voted it down. Another minimum wage bill was never attempted, and the wages of the lowest wage-earners did not increase.

The business elite, including Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell (a Trump appointee re-appointed by Biden), constantly gave interviews blaming an inflationary economy on workers’ leverage to demand higher wages. In reality, wage growth lagged far behind prices, which slowed down inflation. What did exceed the inflation rate was the extreme growth in the net worth of corporations and the rich.

Workers did not gain from the immense corporate profits spurred by increased worker productivity. Automation, including new uses of artificial intelligence, is being rolled out at an exponential clip. This is precisely why living workers (human beings) in some industries are producing exponentially more product in each hour of the workday. Even if they get a raise in real numbers of dollars, their pay generally goes down in terms of a percentage of the value they produce with their labor.

Instead of paying the increased profits back to workers who made it possible, many a corporate board voted to divert this cashflow to buying back the company’s own stock. For example, Uber made a $7 billion share repurchase in February 2024. That’s how they steered more of the accrued capital into management’s pockets, and those of the large shareholders, including the political class. This is a form of stock manipulation, but while Senate progressives held fruitless hearings over the issue, the rest of Congress wasn’t about to require Biden officials to simply block stock buyback schemes via the Security and Exchange Commission, and he declined to do so on his own prerogative.

THE PUSILLANIMOUS BIDEN AND THE GENOCIDE IN GAZA

Biden’s reluctance to actually use presidential power in broad, sweeping ways would become a recurring feature of his term. Through his inaction, both perceived and real, he demoralized and deactivated Left humanists and liberals at the same time Trump promised to ram through hundreds of regressive policies while plowing over any obstacle in his way.

By the time Israel’s war in the Gaza strip had killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and had driven 80% of the Gazan population from their demolished homes, Biden had rolled over for Israeli prime minister Netanyahu numerous times, offering empty admonitions but never stopping U.S. military aid in a way that would slow the genocide. More than a dozen government officials resigned over the continued U.S. arms transfers to Israel, stating: “America’s diplomatic cover for, and continuous flow of arms to Israel has ensured our undeniable complicity in the killings and forced starvation of a besieged Palestinian population in Gaza.”

The genocide became the final straw that sank the Democratic party in the 2024 election. Low turnout among the Democratic base allowed Donald Trump to garner 49.7% of the popular vote, which put him in first place and translated to a majority in the electoral college. Vice President Kamala Harris came in second with 48.2%. Republicans captured the U.S. Senate by shifting four seats; lost a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives but retained narrow control of that chamber.

GRASSROOTS FIGHTING BACK

Chispa, a small group of community organizers from the undocumented movement and the ACLU, worked for many years on local issues such as police reform and rent control in their home of Santa Ana, Calif., only to see the police union raise money in the next election and repeal their changes. In 2024, for the first time, they decided to raise money for a grassroots politics. Their door-knocking campaign was probably decisive in helping Democrat Derek Tran win an Orange County Republican-held seat in the U.S. House of Representatives by a margin of 650 votes. Joesé Hernández directed the project in some heavily Latinx parts of the district, ensuring that these voters knew about the incumbent Republican’s anti-immigrant activism. Speaking to the L.A. Times, he said, “We’re not new to the issues but new to this game. But those voters we reached out to see themselves in us, and we see ourselves in them.”

Though Democrats did not win enough seats to win party control of the U.S. House, the laborious and persistent work of Chispa and similar groups reduced the House Republican caucus by just enough to have a domino effect in Washington, D.C.—they prevented the vocally anti-immigrant Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio from becoming a U.S. Senator. The seat formerly held by Vice President J.D. Vance had to be filled instead by the Ohio lieutenant governor, because he would not leave yet one more crucial House seat vacant.

There are already more than enough politicians spewing anti-immigrant rhetoric in the Senate. Recently, the busing of migrants to northern cities has highlighted the inadequacy of local public services (especially public housing, see: “Immigration deadlock reveals inhumanity”) to deal with a sudden influx, which is a problem for long-term residents on fixed budgets who get hit hardest by inflation, and who then end up needing those services. The legitimate anger over this condition highlights the failure of capitalism and the officials who profit from it and argues for an economy that puts human beings first.

Refugees, asylum-seekers, and their families contributed $37.5 billion to the federal government between 2005 and 2019, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Most of that is in the form of payroll contributions to the Social Security and unemployment insurance programs, which undocumented immigrants are not eligible to collect. This population consumed about $21.4 billion over the same period from state and local governments, mostly in the form of sending children to public schools, a right enshrined in the Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe. So far that’s a surplus of $16.1 billion, if only Washington, D.C., would share it with cities and states.

Trump’s meritless gang, now the government, reportedly wants to act on its pseudo-mandate by executing roundups and detention on a mass scale, including children. According to Professor Cindy Buys of Southern Illinois University, the cost of administrative detention is about $100 per immigrant per day. The focus on arresting more undocumented people to get at the criminals is misplaced and a lie, because there are so few of them since immigrants are unlikely to commit crimes. This is well documented even in studies done by right-wing organizations, such as CATO; but these studies don’t matter to people who cheerlead their racism into the echo bubbles of TikTok and X.

Yet, spooked by media manipulation, a handful of Democratic U.S. Senators handed Trump an inauguration gift by voting for a bill that requires ICE to detain and deport undocumented people who are arrested for petty theft, such as shoplifting a candy bar. There is no way to release such individuals if they are later cleared of the offense. This outrage might well spur a restart of the rapid response brigades from the late 2010s made up of people who can congregate quickly when and where a raid is discovered and physically surround ICE vehicles when a person is being detained. Already groups like Protect Rogers Park in Chicago have been doing this, and 700 students at Arizona State University protested when College Republicans set up a snitch table “asking fellow students to report their criminal classmates to ICE for deportation.”

It will be responses like these that can block Trump’s power grab, along with the projects of mutual aid, escalated to a larger scale. More forms of revolt and struggle are sure to break out in the face of the downward spiral of this capitalist world in crisis. It is significant that non-hierarchical styles of communication and organization are already made a principle in many of these efforts. It will be crucial to maintain independence from Democratic politicians, who to an extent have joined the great capitulation to the new regime alongside corporate leaders and mass media and social media—and just as crucial to challenge institutions and ideas that stand in the way of the total uprooting of this degenerating society and the building of a new, free, human one.