Fascism is not a looming threat. It is upon us now. 

Humanity's only hope is for the decent people of this country to rise in our millions. We cannot wait for future and rigged elections. We must drive the Trump Fascist Regime from power. 
– from the call initiated by Refuse Fascism, and open to all, for sustained nonviolent determined protests flooding DC starting November 5

In a recent interview, Ezra Levin, a co-founder of Indivisible, argued that what's needed is "building up the kind of massive wave necessary to overcome the voter suppression and any other shenanigans they [the fascists] pull next year." 

This is a profound and extremely dangerous underestimation of what we are facing. Not only does this not confront the rapid consolidation of all-out fascism, the mass deportations and terror being inflicted on millions throughout society, the evisceration of the rule of law, and destruction of public health. But this ignores all the ways that Trump and the MAGA fascist regime are already working overtime, and from many different angles, to rig and steal the next election. They are on an existential mission to remake society on a fascist foundation and they think only they have a right to rule. This regime will not be defeated through the same "normal channels" that brought this fascism into power. The only thing that will stop this is the decent people rising in our millions in sustained, nonviolent and determined protest in Washington, DC beginning November 5 and not stopping until the regime is driven from power.

The Fascists Are Telling You to Your Face They Will Steal the Next Election

Trump and the fascists are already telling you they will not respect elections they lose. Trump said recently, “We can never let what happened in the 2020 election happen again,” and that “everybody is working on it,” including FBI Director Kash Patel and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. In other words, he is making sure that this time when he moves to overturn an election he lost, he will win!  Leading MAGA fascist Steve Bannon said in a recent interview, “Trump is going to be president in ’28, and people just ought to get accommodated with that…. At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is.” 

Trump has repeatedly threatened to jail Democratic politicians, accusing them of being “insurrectionists.” His regime has launched “investigations” into Democratic fundraising platforms and major donors. And what kind of “free and fair election” can go on when large sections of the traditionally Democratic base are afraid to go out into public spaces because they are terrorized by the ICE gestapo, backed by the National Guard, in an increasing number of cities?

We will get into several key ways Trump and the fascists are already moving to steal and rig the next election. But as we write this, the Trump “Justice” Department announced it is sending election “monitors” to polling sites in two Democratic states, California and New Jersey, for the upcoming November 4 elections. This move, one year before the 2026 mid-term elections, is meant to intimidate and suppress voters, normalize MAGA election interference and do a dry run for greater interference in the next year’s midterms.

Extreme—and Racist—Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering means redrawing electoral maps to favor one party. In the hands of the Republicans—a fully fascist party openly advocating white-supremacy—gerrymandering is aimed at suppressing the vote of Black and other oppressed people. That’s what happened when Trump commanded Texas’s Christian-fascist governor and Republi-fascist majority in the state legislature to redraw the electoral map in order to gain five more Republican congressional seats. The Texas Republi-fascists threatened criminal investigations and the use of the FBI to steamroll over Democratic Party opposition and do Trump’s bidding.

The leader of the NAACP, which filed a suit against the Texas gerrymandering, said, “The state of Texas is only 40 percent white, but white voters control over 73 percent of the state's congressional seats. It's quite obvious that Texas's effort to redistrict mid-decade, before next year's midterm elections, is racially motivated.”

Trump is pressuring Republicans in other states to follow in Texas’s steps. This has already happened in Missouri and North Carolina, resulting in an additional Republican congressional seat in each state. North Carolina, considered one of the “swing states,” already had an electoral map heavily skewed toward Republicans. After the latest gerrymander, Democrats will have only three of the state’s 14 congressional seats (21 percent), despite having 32 percent of statewide registered vote while Republicans have 30 percent (38 percent are unaffiliated). 

The fascist-dominated U.S. Supreme Court could super-charge Republi-fascist gerrymandering through a case involving the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). The VRA forbade many of the practices through which white people maintained a lock on voting during the nine decades of racist Jim Crow rule after the Civil War. If the Court rules by the end of this year or early next year to do away with what remains of the Act—which already has been severely limited by earlier rulings of this Court—that will very likely enable the Republi-fascists to go even more all-out with racist gerrymandering before the midterms. After the recent session where oral arguments were presented and justices asked questions which revealed their “tilt,” commentators widely predicted the further evisceration of the Voting Rights Act. 

Packing the Government with Election Deniers

The Trump regime has been moving systematically to place in important government positions lunatic MAGA fascists who enthusiastically echo Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” and support the January 6 coup plotters. One of those is Heather Honey—recently named as the chief of “election integrity”(!) at the Department of Homeland Security. Honey is a prominent figure in the movement of pro-Trump election-deniers. The New York Times reported that in a call earlier this year with other MAGA activists, she “suggested that the new administration could declare a ‘national emergency’ and justify dictating new rules [on voting] to state and local governments…. She said this could be based on an ‘actual investigation’ of the 2020 election if it showed there had been a ‘manipulation’ of the vote.” She added, according to the Times, “And therefore, we can take these other steps without Congress and we can mandate that states do things and so on.”

Think about what this means: the federal official supposedly overseeing the nation’s electoral “integrity” thinks Trump could take the utterly unconstitutional step of dictating how state and local elections should be run! 

Other prominent election deniers placed throughout the government include Kurt Olsen—former Trump lawyer during his attempts to overturn the 2020 elections—now a “special government employee” looking into “fraud” in elections; Ed Martin—an attorney for some of the January 6 rioters—now leading the “weaponization working group” at the “Justice” Department (DOJ) to carry out attacks against Trump’s enemies; and Marci McCarthy—who spread false rumors about voting machines in Georgia—now the director of public affairs at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which supposedly deals with cyber threats against U.S. elections.

Executive Order to Promote Voter Suppression

Trump signed an executive order (preposterously called “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections”) in March that included a range of measures aimed at suppressing the votes of those who oppose him. As Mother Jones described the order: “The laundry list of suppressive policies included requiring proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote in federal elections; specifying that mail-in ballots must be received by Election Day or else states will lose federal funding or face lawsuits from the Justice Department; and giving DOGE and the Department of Homeland Security the power to sift through federal immigration databases and subpoena state voting records to search for alleged voter fraud.”

The "proof of citizenship” requirement would prevent millions of eligible voters in the U.S. who don’t have such documents from casting ballots—and would disproportionately affect Black and other people of color. 

Another part of the order calls on states to switch their current voting machines to ones using technology currently not widely available. Mother Jones notes that this puts states “in a seeming catch-22—required to use voting machines that they can’t get. If those machines are not certified, Trump might try to resurrect his 2020 plan to seize them, experts warn.”

The executive order is facing challenges in the courts. But even if some aspects of the order are stopped, that could be used by Trump to claim that Democrats and “radical left judges” are conspiring to prevent “fair elections” (and the only elections they think are "fair" are ones MAGA fascists win). New York University Law School professor Bob Bauer points out, “[T]he executive order lays fresh groundwork for an attack on the outcome of elections that involves claims of compromised or errant voting machinery.”

State-Level Vote Rigging

Earlier this year, Republi-fascists in North Carolina engineered a takeover of the state’s board of elections. The state board is the overall administrator of elections and issues guidance to county officials. Elections have to be certified by both the state and county boards—raising the possibility that Republicans will rig elections procedures to favor their candidates, and even refuse to certify Democratic winners in close races. 

Such moves to rig votes are happening in many other states. According to the voting rights group States United Action, 24 election deniers in 18 states hold statewide offices that involve oversight of elections. Moreover, in many states Republicans have been pushing laws that restrict voter access and fair administration of elections. In the first 10 months of this year, 36 such laws were passed in 19 states. 

Once Again: We Cannot Wait for Future and Rigged Elections

Trump and the MAGA fascists are telling you—in a million different ways—that they will move to steal any elections they lose. Believing otherwise is dangerous delusion and total self-deception that humanity cannot afford. 

What's needed, urgently, is for millions to flood DC, beginning with thousands on November 5. As the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian has said about this call, and why it could have a real possibility of driving out this fascist regime:

In keeping with the unprecedented nature of what is happening with the terrible tyranny of this fascist regime, what is being called for is an unprecedented, historic mobilization and convergence of millions in D.C.—determined to create a massive “political earthquake from below,” bringing about a profound political crisis such that the completely illegitimate nature of the Trump fascist regime stands out all the more sharply, provoking and motivating major shifts and realignments throughout society, including within the dominant institutions, such that this regime can no longer function and cannot remain in power. (From social media message Revolution #132: The whole point of principle…)

Every person of conscience needs to throw all in on this, like the future of humanity depends on it… because it does.