Have We Reached Peak Insanity? Some Recent Developments in Trump Fascism
Have We Reached Peak Insanity? Some Recent Developments in Trump Fascism
The scariest thing to me this Halloween season isn’t actually the deranged fascist leader Mein Trumpf or the Trump fascist regime. The most frightening thing is that millions of US-Americans aren’t out in the streets every day in a mass uprising demanding the immediate removal of Trump and his regime.
“The President is Going to Have to Do What He’s Going to Do”
On Tuesday, the Daily Beast reported a chilling boast/warning from the former Trump administration attorney and leading far-right election denier Ed Martin. Reflecting on Trump’s two-hour Monday meeting with Tina Peters, the notorious country clerk who went to prison for meddling with the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf, Martin said this: “If the Congress won’t pass the [racist vote-suppressing] Save America Act and they won’t, then the President’s going to have to do what he’s going to do. And it is not a local issue when it’s national security, and it’s clearly national security.”
Martin helped lead Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement to try to overturn the 2020 election and has helped raised money to support January 6 defendants. His comment is consistent with the liberal historian Timothy Snyder’s warming that Trump’s criminal war on Iran is at least partly intended to provide a “national security” context for federal interference in (if not cancellation of) the 2026 mid-term elections.
“Let ‘em Take Out Los Angeles and San Diego…Small Price to Pay”
In a campaign event in Nebraska Monday, Trump suggested that “letting Iran take out Los Angeles and San Diego” would be a “small price to pay for keeping our country safe. They can take out a city, let’ em take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay.”
The Republifascist crowd cheered this insane comment, which wrote off two major US cities as expendable collateral damage in his failed and criminal war on Iran. The fact that Iran has no capacity to “take out” a major US city is besides the fascist point.
San Diego is a major US imperial military hub
“Midterm Surprise”
In a Tuesday Truth Social post bragging about the size of his rally crowds, Mein Trumpf told his followers to “Watch for the ‘Midterm Surprise.’” During a Maryland campaign event hours later, he said, “We have some big surprises coming up in a few weeks, right Russ?” Trump was referring to White House Office of Budget and Management (OMB) director Russell Vought, a leading architect of the Project 2025 plan for the fascist takeover of US government. Trump said that Vought is “going to be one of the most important people in the history of our country. He’s got some great things happening.”
DHS and Heather Honey Going After Nonprofits and Voter Data
On Wednesday, the New York Times reported on the basis of internal government documents that the fascist Department of Homeland Security (DHS) (a) has investigated 150 nonprofits on the (preposterous) suspicion of registering noncitizens to vote and (b) is considering sending undercover ICE agents into them to catch them in the act. The DHS investigations are naturally focused on states where the Democrats are bidding to add new Congressional seats. The Times elaborates:
“The documents also reveal that Heather Honey, a prominent 2020 election denier who now serves as the department’s point person on ‘election integrity,’ provided 48.4 million records of unknown provenance to federal investigators who are trying to find noncitizens on the voter rolls. The revelation raises new questions about the quality of records that the Trump administration is relying on as it seeks to scrub noncitizens from the voter rolls before the midterm elections. Ms. Honey is known to come up with and promote false information about American elections, including claims that there were more votes cast in Pennsylvania than there were voters on the state rolls in 2020 [- a claim that Trump repeated before sending his J6 mob off to attack the US Capitol].”
Detaining US Citizens
On Tuesday, ProPublica reported that the Trump47 fascist regime has detained more than 500 U.S. Regime spokespersons insist that U.S. citizens are not in danger from the president’s remigration campaign. It’s a lie. ProPublica has rigorously tracked every instance of an “immigration agent” holding a U.S. citizen during the second Trump administration:
“We have tallied and cataloged every case we can find of an immigration agent holding a citizen during the current administration. More than 500 cases. That includes:
+ More than a hundred Americans held after agents questioned their citizenship. Nearly all were people of color.
+ At least 70 American children and teens detained, some of whom were handcuffed.
+ Of the more than 300 Americans we tracked as detained for allegedly assaulting or obstructing agents, we found fewer than half were actually charged in federal court, and many of those cases were dropped or dismissed.
+ At least 63 Americans detained while recording.
+ 36 Americans held for at least a day without being able to contact a lawyer or their family.
+ Roughly a dozen citizens deported, mostly children.
Collectively, these cases show that as the administration has relentlessly pursued immigrants, federal agents have run roughshod over the constitutional rights of citizens too.”
“I Can Do Whatever I Want, if I Want”
On Wednesday, Trump actually said this to reporters in the Oval Office: “I could have done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could have done very, very bad things to Joe Biden. I could have done very bad things to Barrack Hussein Obama…I can do whatever I want, if I want. They have done some very bad things.”
Racist and Sexist Slurs from the Fascist-in-Chief
On Monday, Trump, a multiply accused rapist, told reporters that he “feels bad” for the Cornell 7 – the seven former and current members of the Chi Phi fraternity at Cornell University who were accused of a multi-hour gang rape of an incapacitated female student in October 2024. Trump claimed without evidence that the accused rapists “won’t get a fair trial” and then referred to Letetia James, the Black female special prosecutor appointed to investigate the Cornell 7 and current New York Attorney General, with a racist nickname: “Peekaboo.”
Need more evidence that the President of the United States is a deranged fascist sexist psychopath? In a campaign event in South Carolina Monday, Mein Trumpf referred to Dr. Annie Andrews, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in that state, as “Annnie Trannie.” Dr. Andrews is not transgender, but has a history of supporting transgender rights. Trump continued with his sexist slur on his Truth Social platform, where he wrote this:
“Darline [Graham, the Republifascsit candidate] is a High Quality person, maybe the Highest, and Annie Trannie is not, in particular, as it pertains to representing the Values of the Great People of South Carolina—She is in favor of Transgender for Everyone, Open Borders, Defunding the Police, High Taxes, a Weak Military, and will absolutely fight to take your guns away…”
The “Final Battle”
The controversy over the Trump regime’s expenditure of $20 million through the Department of Homeland Security to pay for Trump television commercials continued this week. A notable feature of this controversy is its exclusive focus on the blatantly illegal corruption involved in the use of taxpayer dollars to promote Trump. Far less if any attention has been given to the fascist content of the commercials, which have included claims that “God made Trump” and “America will never be communist” and images of the expanded Trump border wall. One of these fascist commercials, aired during an NFL game, spoke of a “Final Battle” in which Americans will defeat at “the deep state,” “Marxists,” and other “villains.”
Lining up Unfounded Court Challenges to Midterm Outcomes
It was reported last Friday afternoon that the party of Trump (the ex-republican Republican Party) already has 129 “active election integrity cases” filed in courthouses on the basis of completely unfounded claims that noncitizen voting is a pervasive problem. Despite “a generation of research showing that voting by noncitizens is extremely rare,” the New York Times reported last month, hundreds of DHS federal agents “have been assigned to an intensive, weekslong hunt for noncitizens among the nation’s registered voters despite an absence of evidence of widespread fraud. Agents are scouring voter rolls managed by the states, and are using personally identifiable information about individual voters, such as their dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers, to look them up on those rolls, according to the documents”
Increasing Nuclear Options
It was reported last Friday that Elbridge Colby, the US Under-Secretary of Defense, has acknowledged that the fascist-run Pentagon is increasing the “nuclear options” available to Trump in the criminal US war on Iran. In recent closed-door testimony to the US Senate’s Committee on Armed Services, Colby said the Pentagon was carrying out a “classified review of U.S. nuclear employment guidance, with the goal of increasing options available to the president …in light of the changing global nuclear landscape.”
Rubio Seeks to Ban Leftists from Travel to the US
The fascist Secretary of State Marco Rubio has sent a cable to US embassies around the world implementing the fascist National Security Presidential Memo 7 to ban “leftists” from entry to the US.
Fascist Media Control
With the closing of its deal to acquire Warner Bros Discovery on Monday, the company Skydance, headed by the Trumpist tech scion David Ellison, son of the mega-billionaire Trump donor and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, is the new parent of CNN. Skydance already owned CBS News along with dozens of other major media brands as part. Earlier this year, Ellison put the right-wing operative Bari Weiss in charge of CBS News and feted Trump and senior Trump administration officials at an event titled, “honoring the Trump White House.” As The New York Times reported last April, the gathering
“included top executives and journalists from CBS News….Bari Weiss, the network’s editor in chief, joined Mr. Ellison at Mr. Trump’s table, and Norah O’Donnell, the former ‘Evening News’ anchorwoman, also attended…Among the guests was Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general. Mr. Blanche oversees the Justice Department, whose antitrust division is set to review the Warner Bros. acquisition. The deal would place CNN and HBO, among other outlets, under Mr. Ellison’s control.”
As insidious as fascist state repression of the media is private fascist ownership of the media.
Questioning the Watergate Prosecution
It was reported last Friday that the fascist Trump Department of Justice is now looking to see if special prosecutors committed misconduct in investigating the proto-fascistic US president Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal.
Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/10/09/have-we-reached-peak-insanity-some-recent-developments-in-trump-fascism/
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