Trump's first presidency was a hall of terrors, getting very far in the direction of all-out fascism: separating immigrant children from their parents, banning Muslims from entering the country, filling the judiciary with Christian fascists all the way up to the Supreme Court which then overturned the federal right to abortion, waging an insurrection at the Capitol and nearly stealing an election… and unleashing a violent, fascist movement of millions that is determined to steal the next one.

But in the last few months the Trump movement has made clear: “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”

The fascist movement behind Trump is preparing and planning to take the fascist agenda that was attempted in Trump’s first term in office onto a whole other level. This is very dangerous and poses an existential threat… but it also contains within it the potential for revolutionary change, depending on what people do. This depends on you, and thousands like you, taking this up now. 

The Trump campaign, along with organized forces that share Trump's aims, have released major documents that spell out their full fascist vision: Agenda 47, from the official Trump campaign; and Project 2025, from a coalition of fascist think-tanks, led by the Heritage Foundation.

These outline forced massive deportations; establishing laws outlawing LGBTQ rights by recognizing only “two genders”; ramping up oil drilling to a level far beyond current levels; terminating the Department of Education and allowing elections of school principals by parents, while promoting prayer in schools; deploying the National Guard to cities like Chicago, reinstating “Stop and Frisk” policies for the police and even for suspected “criminals”—even like shoplifters—to be killed on the street. All this is not the half of what their plan is. Check the accompanying article titled “Some Ways Trump Would Be Given an Unprecedented Level of Power and What He Aims to Do” for more on this.

Society Is Being Ripped Apart. That Means Extreme Danger… but It Can Mean Unprecedented Opportunity

This country is split into two. Things have not been this sharply divided since the Civil War in the 1860s. On the surface, things seem really bad and left unto itself, this will head toward something truly terrible, even worse than before. Humanity and the planet face an existential danger—but the danger is posed by both sections of the rulers even as they are fighting, knives out, with each other. 

On the one side are the fascists that the Republican Party has been cohered around. This side of the divide is determined to bring the full force of the state (meaning the institutions, the government, and the military) to lock down power and remake all of the ways this system has worked and how it rules over society. This would mean the rounding up of immigrants and building up of concentration camps at the border, criminalizing abortions and fully stripping the basic right for women and girls to any means of getting an abortion, filling every position inside of government with Trump loyalists, further drilling and plundering the planet, eliminating any perceived opposition to their agenda, crushing dissent and demonstrations, delegitimizing and banning LGBTQ people, instituting “Patriot” and Christian education while suppressing public education, and disenfranchising (stripping the right to vote from) and even more blatantly and violently oppressing “minority” groups under the banner of a full-on white supremacy. This would be a further hellish nightmare on top of what are already the daily horrors for billions of people around the world. 

Then there are the Democrats, the section that YOU are supposed to vote for. You, the decent people who care about what is going on and want to do away with all the ways that people are oppressed and suffering needlessly. Yet with the escalating wars for empire, such as the U.S. backing up and supporting a proxy war behind Ukraine against Russia that could ramp up into an all-out world war, and the U.S.-backed slaughter and genocide of the Palestinian people by the Israeli military… these Democrats don’t seem so “decent.” In fact, they seem downright criminal. And, they have no answer on immigration, white supremacy and police terror, or on the environment other than being “Trump Light”—if that.

No one who claims to be part of the “decent people” should have anything to do with racing toward the support of the Democrats or waiting for the 2024 presidential elections to cast their ballot in the hopes that voting will finally defeat these fascists. 

On the contrary, for you “decent people,” the progressives and liberals and all those oppressed at the base of society… for the government officials and interns now questioning what their government is doing in Palestine… for the ones who believe in “equality for all” and desire a world free of oppression and exploitation... for the people who are sick of the crimes done by this system in your name, who cannot stand another day that the fascists are moving to restructure all of society, who oppose any of the futures that both sides of the rulers tell you are the only possibilities, you need to get with this revolution right now. A revolution for a whole new way to live, a fundamentally different system.

Don’t Say It Can’t Happen—It Can, but It Will Take YOU

Remember the protests that happened across the country around abortion rights when the Supreme Court struck down and overturned Roe v. Wade? Remember the thousands and thousands of people who poured out into the streets following the video that went viral all across the world of the cop who kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for several minutes, killing him? Remember how so many of the white people who stayed so silent during “normal times” came out with signs that said “WHITE SILENCE IS VIOLENCE” along with Black and Brown people, Asian people, and LGBTQ folks determined to stay in the streets for months and months? Remember how it changed some of the ways people thought all this was permanent and the only way things could be? Remember the Confederate statues being taken down by those masses, the school walkouts, and the shutting down of “business as usual”? Remember just from the last few weeks the outrage over the U.S.-backed Israeli slaughter of the Palestinian people?  

The lesson here is this: People can and often will rise up. The question is: What will they fight for and how, and through what organized force will they be led?

Today, the belief that this is all a part of “God’s plan” or “This is just the way things are and all that it could be” is coming up hard against reality, and could fall apart. What does it mean when you no longer have the “peaceful transfer of power” from one section of the rulers to the other according to who wins the election? What does it mean when you have a section of the rulers, the fascists led by Trump, who claim that any loss in the elections is a “steal” by the Democrats? What does it mean when they are organizing armed thugs to back that assertion up? What does it mean when you have Trump declaring that the Democrats, the liberals, and anyone opposed to him are “vermin” and “enemies of the people”? What does it mean when everything you have been led to believe in—especially, that this is the “greatest country in the world” with “freedom and democracy”—is heading toward outright fascism and theocratic rule? 

It means... IT’S TIME TO GIVE IT UP! GIVE UP those illusions that this is a “democracy” that is ruled “by the people and for the people.” GIVE UP your self-DELUSIONS that all this will work itself out through the “democratic” institutions and processes. The U.S. Constitution, that “sacred” document you’ve been taught to worship, was written by slave-masters and capitalists—it is an exploiters’ view of how to rule society. GIVE IT UP! 

We should not want to go back to the way things were, and neither should we believe that those ways will come back. Society is being ripped apart. There is a positive potential and possibility where the revolutionary forces, as small as they are today, can advance and build up to the thousands now in a very concentrated period, where what would have taken decades and years can happen in a matter of months and weeks. During these next months, many people will be shaken up and forced to ask questions and look for answers. 

This is where the revolutionary forces can come in with a basic understanding of what is going on, why we need a revolution, and why the fight at the top of society holds the potential for the splitting apart of the two sides of the rulers that have dominated over society. And this is where YOU, in your masses, can come in to represent as a powerful revolutionary force, contending with other trends and “dead ends,” projecting as a bold and righteous force. This may not result in the millions now, but this force of thousands can impact and influence millions around the world right away, almost overnight—and as things develop and sharpen, this could be decisive.

YOU need to be part of the force that is not only unafraid of what this system will bring down upon those who get with this but will have the courage to go out amongst the masses to struggle like hell with them to GIVE IT UP, all of the ways that are counter to the revolution and all of the bullshit the masses are caught up in.

There really is a different way this world could be. As the Declaration from the Revcoms, We Need And We Demand: A Whole New Way To Live, A Fundamentally Different System, says:

A whole different way of living is possible: a whole different way to organize society, with a radically different economic foundation and political system, emancipating relations among people, and an uplifting culture—all of this oriented to meeting the basic needs and fulfilling the highest interests of the masses of people.

Finally, we have the biggest plus of the revolution: Bob Avakian, who’s developed the strategy for this revolution and a framework for human emancipation in the new communism, and written the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America. “Having a leader like this is a rare and precious thing for the masses of people who are so terribly oppressed under this system. It’s a powerful positive factor for the revolution that is urgently needed, for the goal of ending all oppression and finally bringing about the emancipation of humanity as a whole.” (From Building Up the Basis to Go for the Whole Thing, with a Real Chance to Win: Strategic Orientation and Practical Approach)

We should take the threat posed right now very seriously. But even more we should recognize and seize on the opening for revolution that could be wrenched out of this madness.