Paul Street -- More Crap from the Trump Regime and Party
More Crap from the Trump Regime and Party
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
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, below, are some important recent developments from the Trump47 campaign to makeover US government and society on fascist lines.
Threatening Epic War Crimes Against Humanity
In an interview with Fatherland (FOX) News earlier this week, the fascist US president threatened to bomb all of Iran’s bridges and power plants, explicitly adding that the nation’s entire population of 91 million might soon be without electricity. This Hitlerian threat of collective punishment – illegal under the Geneva Conventions – raises the specter of sheer humanitarian catastrophe on a monumental scale. The fact that Trump could make such a sociopathic threat is symptomatic of his and his regime’s eliminationist/genocidal mindset.
Fake Threat: Rubio’s Claim that Cuba is Directing a Wave of Radical Left Terrorism in the US
Last week the fascist US Secretary of State Marco Rubio released a bizarre 100-page report entitled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism. This paranoid-style neo-McCarthyite document names more than 40 liberal and leftish politicians, influencers and groups as tools of Cuba’s alleged “sustained campaign of subversion” against the US. Presenting no serious evidence for its truly wild claims that Cuba has conducted “a campaign that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the US government [!], recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of leftwing terrorism on American soil [!], and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history [!]” (emphasis and exclamations added), Rubio’s report contains a not-so fearsome roster of US “radical leftists” including New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, streamer Hasan Piker, Ben and Jerry’s founder Ben Cohen, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, the Amazon Labor Union leader Chris Small, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, US Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA), and US Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN).
Rubio’s deranged document absurdly claims that the mildly social democratish Democratic Socialists of America “serve as a particularly potent illustration of the ideological victory of Cuba’s effort to position itself as the spiritual capital of Third-Worldist radicalism.” The unhinged report shamelessly invokes the supposed positive legacy of “the blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions” as instruments of the post-WWII Red Scare’s “effectiveness at dismembering the Communist Party USA.”
“The Very Survival of Humanity”
Mein Trumpf’s top political and policy adviser, the open fascist Stephen “We are the Storm” Miller took RepubliNazi redbaiting to new levels this week. He said this about the 2026 midterms elections:
“The very survival of freedom, liberty, humanity, your family, your children and your future depends on ensuring that we do not allow communism to take hold. AOC, Bernie, Omar—these are people who, even 10-15 years ago, would have been relegated to the outermost fringes. They are now the heart of the party. The Democrats have become the party of freaks, weirdos, losers, and crazies.”
The notion that “communism” has taken hold of the Democratic Party is of course pure fascist fiction. This wild claim is being rolled out again nearly eight decades after the Cold War Red Scare as part of the Trump regime’s determination to cancel the midterms or refuse to honor their outcomes this coming fall and winter. (The “progressive” Dems AOC, Bernie, and Mamdani are mild social democrats at leftmost, hardly sympathetic to the communist revolution[s] that humanity requires if it not going to experience societal collapse [at best] and extinction [at worst] thanks to the accelerating depredations of the world capitalist-imperial system.)
“No Choice But to Seize Voting Machines”
The liberal voting rights expert Ari Berman recently and rightly said this to The New Republic’s Greg Sargent about Trump’s continuing mad effort to make the US Senate pass the vote-suppressing “SAVE America Act” and about Trump’s recent wild speech falsely claiming that American elections are insecure from foreign (principally Chinese) interference:
“He’s using the SAVE America Act as a pretext to challenge the legitimacy of the midterms. So if it does not pass, which it won’t pass, he’s going to say, we don’t have the SAVE America Act, therefore the elections were rigged, therefore I have no choice but to challenge the legitimacy of the midterms. And he’s going to point to that crazy speech he gave and say, I laid out all the evidence—even though he laid out no evidence, but he’s going to say, I laid out all the evidence, the elections were rigged, the Congress didn’t act on this, therefore I have no choice but to issue a national emergency executive order, or seize voting machines, or take some kind of dramatic intervention to mess with the midterms” (emphasis added).
Warning Against History
One week ago, Mein Trumpf ordered that “warning” signs be placed in front of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to inform visitors of the “inaccurate information presented in the Museum.” The fascist Dear Leader (well, Stephen Miller) wrote that the museum “does not present American history as a shared national inheritance to be taught and celebrated, but instead views American history as a ‘prime tool’ to advance ideas of social justice and the radical transformation of our society.”
This is Trump’s way of seeking to render illegitimate the accurate portrayal of the disastrous genocidal racism, ethnic cleansing, slavery, imperialism, class exploitation, environmental ruin, and patriarchy that have marked the US American historical experience. The core fascist characteristic of “palingenetic ultra-nationalism” — the ideal of resurrecting a glorious but liberal- and left-betrayed national greatness — requires whitewashing the terrible history that Trump-fascism represents in contemporary form. Along with the deletion of past and ongoing crimes, MAGA history demands omission of the great people’s struggles that oppression has sparked past and present.
Real Threat: Agents of Chaos and Cruelty
Moving from fascist fantasies positing fake threats to actual, reality-based threats to freedom and security inside the US, a new ACLU report reveals the scale of civil rights violations committed by ICE and the police forces it has deputized. The report, titled “Agents of Chaos and Cruelty,” reviewed and documented more than 1,200 incidents in eight states in 2025. It found that ICE and agents working for ICE — what the ACLU calls the “national deportation policing force”(NDPF) – have undertaken methods and routine tactics that “lead to serious civil rights violations. [ICE is] committing these violations at a scale and severity without precedent in our nation’s recent history.” In a subsection of the report titled “Turning American Streets Into Deportation Zones,” the ACLU notes that ICE’s methods and tactics are:
“straight from the authoritarian playbook. The Trump administration deploys anti-immigrant scapegoating and nearly explicit white supremacist narratives, even featuring white supremacist slogans and images in its recruitment campaigns. Its deportation drive also involves suppressing dissent, evading checks and balances, and consolidating executive power” (emphasis added).
Further:
“In 2025, senior [Trump] officials [above all the open fascist Stephen “We are the Storm” Miller] created a national deportation policing force of officers who appeared masked and menacing in our communities. They treated it as the president’s personal force to be deployed against American cities perceived as hostile to his interests, during political standoffs with the opposing party, and in response to protests. Now, the national deportation policing force is — with little public notice — operating all over the country, with state and local police conducting traffic stops and setting up checkpoints for immigration enforcement. ..What we are experiencing mirrors aspects of countries under authoritarian rule, where the loss of basic freedoms grows so widespread that it seems less remarkable over time and simply becomes a fact of life. We must prevent the abuses we’ve seen across the country from becoming an accepted, new norma.”
(It’s too much to expect the ACLU to call the Trump regime fascist, and not merely authoritarian, I suppose)
Agents of Chaos and Cruelty reflects on how the regime’s assault on immigrant and other Americans has expanded in new form since ICE’s (actually Border Patrol’s) murder of citizen protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last winter:
“The Trump administration [regime] is ramping up immigration arrests and deportations to record-breaking levels. Instead of surging into one city at a time — as we saw in Minneapolis and Los Angeles, for instance — the administration is escalating its deportation efforts in communities across the country, at the same time. A larger-than-ever ICE, together with the thousands of state and local police they have deputized, is attempting to arrest scores of people on American streets in the coming weeks to meet a quota. These street arrests, which ICE has never previously conducted at this scale, will endanger everyone’s rights and safety.”
(New court filings this week show that ICE and Border Patrol agents who swept down on Los Angeles last year used racial slurs like “tonk” and “wet” “After a June raid at Home Depot in Hollywood,” the Los Angeles Times reports, “body camera footage captured an agent saying: ‘There was a guy, I’m pretty sure he’s wet he was just sitting in that minivan.’ A text chain revealed an agent referring to ‘tonks everywhere selling food’ — using a word reportedly derived from the sound an agent’s utility flashlight makes when hitting a migrant’s head. In a video, an agent said, ‘Yeah, just plug us in wherever you see some tonks and we’ll jump out.’…Mayra JoachÃn, an attorney at the ACLU of Southern California, said the language agents used underscores that ‘what’s driving the way that immigration operations are being conducted now is a racist sentiment.’”)
Subpoenaing Breakthrough News
In an openly neo-McCarthyite attack on free speech and a free press, the Republifascist-controlled US House Ways and Means Committee has subpoenaed Breakthrough News (BN), demanding that this liberal online outlet hand over its financial records and internal communications. The letter sent to BN by the committee specifically mentions BN’s coverage of ICE kidnappings and killings and Israel’s genocide in Gaza and absurdly accuses BN of “anti-American rhetoric.” BN is being investigated for committing the crime of journalism.
Buddhist Studies Professor Absurdly Charged with Terrorism
The Trump regime is prosecuting a Buddhist studies professor Erik Davis on “antifa”-affiliated terrorism charges because he encouraged and helped organize protests against the federal terrorist ICE and Border Patrol surge into Minneapolis and St. Paul last winter. “Davis, the government says, has attended and facilitated meetings about protests and discussed his ‘anti-authoritarian’ ideology with other activists. He is not accused of violent acts, taking any specific actions at protests nor having any encounters with ICE agents. He is facing six years in prison.”
Suing the Times for Reporting on Trump.
A Republifascsit federal judge in Florida has just permitted Dear Leader Trump to go forward with a retaliatory $15 billion defamation lawsuit against The New York Times. Mein Trumpf’s complaint boils down to his pique over the Times’ failure to function as a Trump propaganda organ. The wannabe dictator-for-life is particularly angry over the Times’ finding that his rise to prominence drew heavily on his background in reality television.
Mission Creep in Memphis
When they announced a joint federal, state, and local “anti-crime task force” including the deployment of National Guard troops in the majority Black city of Memphis last fall, neither Trump nor Tennessee’s Republifascist governor Bill Lee mentioned the Trump fascist regime’s mass deportation (ethnic cleansing) drive. But a recent analysis by the Institute for Public Service Reporting (IPSR) finds that “the influx of federal agents into the city has led to widespread immigration arrests — a majority without criminal convictions.” IPSR researchers “found paralyzed immigrant neighborhoods, where scenes played out reminiscent of Chicago and Minneapolis at the height of targeted federal immigration enforcement actions. Aid networks ramped up their work to help immigrants too fearful to leave their homes. Hotlines rang out with calls from panicked immigrants. And routine traffic stops led to immigration arrests.”
Trump says he has “plans for similar task forces elsewhere, particularly in Republican-led states where he has more political buy-in.”
(Earlier this month, Herr Trump and Herr Miller’s “Memphis Safe Task Force” killed a man at a Memphis motel, the fourth officer-involved death since the “anticrime” initiative began.)
The Tech Reich “Social Media” is Platforming Virulently Racist And Fascist Responses to the Murder of Corey Ruiz and Subsequent Protests in Madison, Wisconsin
It has been bracing to read the plethora of horrific racist and fascist comments online beneath reports on the brazen racist police state extrajudicial execution of the 38-year-old Black man Corey Ruiz in Madison, Wisconsin last week. One virulent Americana white supremacist bootlicker after another has taken to the platforms run by the obscenely wealthy “tech Reich” Trump backers Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to applaud the killing and call for violent attacks on the protesters who have risen up against the crime. Encouraged by the Afrikaner Nazi Musk and Zuckerberg’s opening of X/Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to vile content, some of these commenters have put up horrific racist images depicting Black people in the most savagely distorted ways imaginable. It’s all darkly consistent with Musk and other fascists’ belief that the United States is plagued by “suicidal empathy.” This telling phrase (“suicidal empathy”) refers to liberal and leftists’ supposed excessive care for people of the bottom of the world’s savage hierarchies: humanitarian aid recipients abroad, asylum-seekers at the border, the inner-city poor, and the homeless, all part of what fascists consider to be disposable people, “useless eaters” in Nazi language.
In other sickening news:
+ Musk recently told CNN that everyone who opposes “remigration” – a neofascist term for the removal of nonwhite people from the US and Europe – is a “traitor to the West.”
+ It was reported last week that the Trump regime last October dictatorially nixed $8 billion in federal energy grants to US states “based solely” on whether those states were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris in 2024.
+ Thanks to the anti-science Trump regime’s insane pandemo-fascsist war on vaccines, the US has now registered more cases of measles in the last two years than in all the other previous years since 2000, when the virus was officially declared eliminated!
+ Trump has been putting up social media posts depicting himself as a naval commander seizing Iranian oil ships and violating the US Constitution by running for a third term in 2028.
+ The fascist Department of Homeland Security has sent out more than 100,000 letters threatening immigrants with draconian fines of $998 for each day they have allegedly lived in the US without legal status. The people targeted by these letters are told the fines will be waived if they self-deport. In some cases the fines levied have risen to $1.8 million. This is pure financial terrorism harnessed to the Trump regime’s ethnic cleansing campaign.
+ There’s more, lots more…there always is.
Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/08/03/more-fascist-shit-from-the-trump-regime-and-party/
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