Every day brings new proof: this fascist regime is not “stumbling into chaos”—it is charging forward with deliberate viciousness and calculated consolidation of power. From intensifying cruelty against LGBTQ people, to weaponizing the government shutdown to starve millions and cripple travel before the holidays, to openly scheming with foreign fascists to dismantle every check on their rule, to getting dangerously close to criminalizing dissenting political thought—the Trump/MAGA machine is accelerating its drive to lock in fascism for generations.

These are not separate outrages. They are parts of one coherent program—to impose a white supremacist, Christian fascist, patriarchal order backed by police-state repression and fueled by lies of “national renewal.” The regime is using the shutdown, the courts, and the machinery of the state as weapons against the people.

What we face now is not just “corruption” or “incompetence.” It is a fascist seizure of power in motion. And the hour is late. The question is not “What more will they do?”—but how far will we let them go? We say: NOT A STEP FURTHER! THE TRUMP FASCIST REGIME MUST GO NOW!

As sharply posed by Bob Avakian in social media message REVOLUTION #141, The Time Is Urgently Upon Us Now—To Drive Out The Trump Fascist Regime!:

The profound question with which all decent people are now confronted is: Will we rise together, in the millions, to do what urgently needs to be done, to drive out this Trump fascist regime that is a truly terrible scourge on humanity and a very serious threat to humanity’s future?

Trump Tells Republi-Fascist Senators: Kill the Filibuster, and “We’ll never lose a general election”

In early October, Congress was supposed to authorize payments from Trump’s monstrously fascist budget that was passed earlier this year (see here and here). The Republi-fascists demanded that the Democrats simply agree to a “continuing resolution” to go forward with the budget as is. In an attempt to at least partially beat back Trump’s onslaught, the Democrats used a Senate parliamentary rule called the filibuster to block the resolution. Under the filibuster, even a single senator can hold up most legislation unless at least 60 senators vote to cut off debate. And the Democrats, while a minority in the Senate, have had enough votes to block the passage of the continuing resolution through the filibuster. The Democrats are demanding negotiations with the Republicans on some parts of the budget before giving their approval. But the Republi-fascists, at Trump’s urging, have refused to even negotiate. And so the government shutdown began, and is now in its sixth week.

While blaming the Democrats for the shutdown and the chaos and suffering it is causing, Trump has pushed Senate Republicans to get rid of the filibuster so that they can just steamroll over the Democrats. To do this, they would need almost all the Republican Senators to be on board. But some Republicans have been reluctant to abolish the filibuster—worried that it would backfire on them if Republicans end up being the minority in the Senate again. (During the Biden years, the Republican minority in the Senate repeatedly used the filibuster to block Democratic legislation.)

Trump had a blunt answer to such worries among Republi-fascist senators. During an appearance with the visiting Hungarian fascist leader Viktor Orbán, Trump said the Democrats would get rid of the filibuster if they won in elections in order to push their agenda: “So if the Democrats are going to do it, I’m saying Republicans should do it before they get a chance. It’s very simple. And if we do it, we will never lose the mid-terms, and we will never lose a general election.” And, “Here’s some of the things we’d pass if we terminated the filibuster. Voter ID. No mail-in voting. No cash bail. No men in women’s sports. No welfare for illegals. You can go on and on.”

In other words: we have to end the filibuster so we can lock in our fascist program on hyper-speed and give the FULL green light to rigging the next election!

Illegitimate Supreme Court Joins MAGA Onslaught Against LGBT People

On November 7, the Court’s fascist majority, through the Court’s unsigned “shadow docket,” reimposed a federal rule that passports of transgender people must define them by the gender that was assigned to them at birth, even though they now live as, look like, and present themselves as a different gender. Think about the hell this will cause a trans person in an airport when their gender expression contradicts the sex on their passport! 

The Supreme Court ruling claimed that allowing trans people to identify themselves as their current gender would (somehow) do “irreparable harm” to the federal government. It overruled an injunction from a federal district court blocking this rule. That district court had based itself on the fact that transgender people commonly face abuse for their gender. The district court said that under this rule, trans people “are likely to experience worsened gender dysphoria, anxiety, and psychological distress, and they will face a greater risk of experiencing harassment and violence.”

The Court’s majority didn’t even attempt to refute these facts; it just reinstated the rule. 

The day after this outrageous ruling, the Supreme Court had a private conference to consider whether to take a case that challenges the 2015 Obergefell decision that recognized the legal right of gay people to marry. 

We don’t know yet if the Court will take this case. But the very fact that it is considering it is fucked up! Stripping away the right to marriage for same-sex couples will rip apart the lives of millions of people, taking away a fundamental right.

All this is part of the larger agenda of Christian fascists who pack the illegitimate Supreme Court—with a program of female enslavement and the purging of LGBT people from public life.

SNAP Benefits Paused: More Cruelty from Trump/MAGA Fascism

Tens of millions of people—one in five children, and one in eight adults—face acute hunger because of the Trump regime’s deliberate refusal to fund SNAP (food stamps) during the government shutdown. On Thursday last week, a federal district court judge ordered the government to tap into an emergency reserve to fully fund food stamps for November, saying this must happen by the next day, Friday. Judge John McConnell accused the Trump administration of withholding SNAP funds for “political reasons” and said the loss of food aid means "16 million children are immediately at risk of going hungry."

Instead of complying with the order and resuming the desperately needed food aid, Trump’s “Justice” Department immediately challenged McConnell’s order to the First Circuit appeals court. When the appeals court did not intervene by the Friday deadline, the Trump regime filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court to allow them to let millions go hungry!

On Saturday, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the justice on the Supreme Court responsible for dealing with emergency appeals from the First Circuit, issued a freeze of McConnell’s order. The order is temporary, until the appeals court rules on Trump’s appeal of McConnell’s order. Her order said the First Circuit should make its decision "with dispatch [quickly]." Some have speculated that Jackson did this because a) she thought the lower court would give a more favorable ruling than the fascist-packed Supreme Court and b) having a good reason on the record might make it harder to overturn.

After McConnell’s order on Thursday for the Trump regime to fully fund SNAP for November, several states began issuing food stamps overnight. But while some people received their full benefit amount for the month, the horrific reality is that others received zero or only partial benefits—like a woman in New Orleans who had been trying to live on only black coffee until receiving partial benefits. And then on Saturday, Trump officials told states that had issued food stamp benefits after McConnell’s ruling to “immediately undo” their actions, or face financial penalties.

Part of the inhumanity imposed on desperate people by Trump’s cutoff of SNAP is not knowing whether or not they would actually receive their food aid. While food banks and other private groups are scrambling to feed the hungry, there is no way they will be able to meet people's basic needs.

As we wrote last week, “This is not by accident—but exactly part of the point, and the larger fascist strategy.” Project 2025, the fascist blueprint for the Trump regime, outlined a plan for shredding the “social safety net,” including slashing SNAP, Medicaid, Head Start, and other programs. “This is a major part of the radical remaking of society on an openly white supremacist, patriarchal and theocratic foundation envisioned by the Christian fascist forces at the heart of Trump/MAGA fascism.”

There is NO living with this fascism!

Political Extortion in the Skies: The Trump Shutdown’s Impact on Upcoming Holiday Travel

Among many other ways the government shutdown caused by the Republi-fascists affects millions of people, U.S. air travel is already fraying as the shutdown drags into its sixth week. Regulators have begun imposing across-the-board cuts to flights to keep a strained system safe. The Federal Aviation Administration has ordered staged reductions in air traffic at dozens of high-volume airports—4 percent initially, rising to 10 percent in many hubs by mid-November—after unpaid air-traffic controllers and other safety personnel were skipping work, or were extremely tired due to overwork. This made the normal pace of operations unsustainable. The results are tangible: thousands of delays and more than a thousand cancellations in recent days, with tracking services and airport boards showing growing backlogs as airlines scramble to rebook customers and redeploy crews.

Those cuts come at the worst possible moment: Thanksgiving travel—the single busiest week for U.S. passenger flights—is only about two weeks away, and carriers warn that reserve pilots and crews already being tapped early will shrink the industry’s margin for handling peak demand. Unpaid controllers and overstretched TSA staff have pushed airlines to trim schedules and call up reserves, which risks creating cascading cancellations because of duty-time limits and the simple arithmetic of fewer planes and crews covering more delayed itineraries. This could strand millions of families trying to reconnect for the holiday.

If the shutdown continues to mid-November, for millions who count on those flights to reach loved ones, the result will be a very personal denial: cancelled plans, unexpected costs, and a holiday fractured by a fascist-fueled political fight playing out at 30,000 feet. Whether called brinkmanship or blackmail, the political calculus now in play has turned safe, routine travel into a fascist bargaining chip, threatening to convert what should be a season of family reunions into a national crisis of access and mobility.

Green Card Holder Charged for “Antifa Materials”: A New Front in Trump’s War on Dissent

A chilling new case reported by the National Lawyers Guild exposes how far the Trump regime is starting to go in criminalizing dissent. Federal prosecutors have targeted a lawful permanent resident (“green card” holder)—Dallas artist Daniel “Des” Sanchez—for allegedly possessing or distributing so-called “Antifa materials.” Des is a partner of one of the Prairieland Defendants in a separate federal “Antifa” case we covered last week. 

According to the government’s own criminal complaint, Des was not involved in any violence or even present at the protest in relation to which his wife, Maricela Rueda, was arrested. Two days later, he received a call from his incarcerated wife asking for help towing her car and tending to things at their home. Later that morning, FBI agents on surveillance claim they saw Des moving boxes from his family’s residence and leaving one outside an apartment in Denton. He was arrested that afternoon. When federal agents later searched the apartment, what they found was not weapons or contraband, but a box of political literature and organizing materials—zines and flyers that ICE and federal prosecutors have twisted into supposed “evidence” of criminal intent. Given that he is a green card holder and charged with a federal crime, it is possible (and arguably likely) that the government or ICE could place him into removal proceedings. 

The NLG warns that this case “should shock us all, as all that is alleged is the movement of a box of political ‘documents and propaganda’ from one place to another.”

This isn’t an isolated act, but part of a systematic assault on political opposition and free thought under Trump’s increasing fascist rule. The regime is telling us: “Oppose us, criticize us, associate with dissent—and you’ll be treated as a threat to the national security state.” The green-card holder, a legally protected immigrant, is now subject to criminalization and possibly deportation for engaging in political expression. This is fascism in action, quietly and systematically ramped up.

By labeling anti-fascist and immigrant-rights organizing as “terrorism,” the regime is constructing a framework to persecute anyone who refuses to fall in line. 

The Time to Act Is Now—Drive Out This Fascist Regime Before It’s Too Late

Every headline in this week’s fascist onslaught points to a single truth: Trump’s regime is cementing an openly fascist America—where hunger, repression, and fear are weapons of control.

Bob Avakian has sharply posed the reality before us: “The time is urgently upon us now—to drive this fascist regime from power…” because the future of humanity truly depends on what we do.

No matter whether you’ve felt the sting yet or believe “This isn’t happening to me,” make no mistake: life in this country has already changed drastically in less than a year of Trump’s rule. And Trump fascism poses an existential danger to the people of the world. It’s no longer about “if”—it’s “when.” We are now in a place and time where you can be arrested, jailed, and even deported for having a flyer that criticizes the government—one step away from being persecuted simply for a thought. Despite the intoxicating excitement over a few Democratic victories, if this is where we are less than a year in, no one in their right mind should choose to “wait and see” where we’ll be by the 2026 elections—the elections Trump’s regime will not respect unless he wins.

Now is the time to put all your moral convictions into action. The movement begun in the streets of Washington, D.C. on November 5—called by RefuseFascism.org—must now grow, spread, and gather force. We need millions joining and sustaining this mass, nonviolent but determined protest to drive this regime out.

History will not forgive silence. The eyes of the world—and the verdict of the future—are upon us. The question is not whether this fascist storm can be stopped, but whether we will stand up, together, and make it so.