Last week, Donald Trump was indicted in Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., on four counts in connection with his attempt to overturn the 2020 election—including for elements connected to the attempted coup on January 6, 2021. These new indictments of Trump come on top of two other criminal indictments and a fourth one rumored to be in the works in Georgia.

Nothing even remotely close to this has ever happened in U.S. history before. No losing candidate had ever attempted to overturn the results through fraud, intimidation and force. And no leading presidential candidate has ever been indicted in the run-up to an election, let alone four times, let alone on counts related to fomenting a coup to overturn a previous election!

The Fascists Are Moving

Yet the huge hard-core fascist base of the Republican Party is so tightly tied to Trump that no serious Republican “rival” to Trump has done anything but defend him. Kari Lake, who nearly won the governorship of Arizona last November, recently threatened, “If you want to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to go through me, and you’re going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA [National Rifle Association].”

The indictment—which carries potential prison time for Trump—raises the stakes enormously and underlines the fact that Lake’s threat must be taken seriously indeed. But it is not just a threat “for later”—the fascists are already on the offensive. They are:

• changing the election laws to further advantage the fascists;
• intimidating teachers, school board members and librarians, while they strip the educational system of anything that lets out even a little bit of the truth about America’s ugly history of the oppression of Black people;
• taking up arms to shut down LGBTQ events and using the power of the state, where they hold office, to stigmatize LGBTQ people and to deny trans youth medical care; and overall…
• responding to every step of the legal “persecution,” as they put it, of Trump to further tear up the norms and institutions that have held this system together in this country for 150 years while preparing their social base to fight for an outright fascist—white-supremacist theocratic—form of rule.

The fascists view these indictments as an attack against them from a section of the rulers that they deem entirely illegitimate. They are moving to fight this—not just later, but now.

As the Rulers Split Apart, Don’t Choose Between Them—Seize on This Time to MAKE REVOLUTION

But this must NOT be responded to by attempting to (or hoping that the Democrats or the Department of Justice can) hold this system together as it has been up to now. First, that is unrealistic—it is highly unlikely that any move to actually find Trump guilty and sentence him to prison would go down easy with the Kari Lakes of the world and the millions of lunatics she speaks for. Think about it. These people threw down heavy over an election that Trump clearly lost—you really think they’re gonna just shrug their shoulders if their “messiah” is convicted and/or sent to prison?

But that’s not the half of it. There’s the very distinct possibility that whatever the outcome of the trial, Trump could even gain office “legally” through some combination of manipulating the election machinery, intimidating masses of people in areas that are anti-Trump and depriving them of the right to vote, and outright force. Remember how Trump got in the first time—he actually lost the popular vote, but because the electoral college is weighted toward the fascists, he was able to “officially” win. Think about the way that state laws have been changed to favor the fascist voting base and disfavor those who tend to oppose them (see here and here). Think about the way that the fascists mobbed the vote-counting last time in “battleground states.”

And it’s certainly not just the 2024 elections. Even now, there will very likely be still greater conflicts between the fascists, on the one hand, and those who oppose them on the other—including politicians and officials grouped around the Democratic Party or the anti-Trump Republicans, as well as masses of people, including radical and revolutionary forces. These could erupt or intensify at key junctures like actually going to trial, the verdicts, and so on, and then at the election itself. At the same time, we are living on a political and ideological tinderbox, and anything could set it off.

But if we let this stay as a fight between the fascists and those among the rulers who are fighting for the way things have been for the past 150 years in this country, if we let this stay on the terms of this system, then that will be a terrible betrayal of the people of this planet and the oppressed within the U.S., as well as future generations whose very existence this system endangers. Humanity desperately needs to get this whole monstrous system off its back.

This capitalist-imperialist system itself, whoever has ruled it, has always been a horror for tens of millions of people in this country and literally billions around the world. It is this system itself that produced Trump and the rest of these fascists. We need a whole different way to live and a fundamentally different system. We need a revolution—and we need it soon. Look around you—the environment on fire, nuclear war more likely today than it’s been in 50 years, millions being driven from their countries desperately seeking a place to go—we need a whole new, emancipating world.

The fact that those who rule over us are split—the fact that the whole society is split, top to bottom—makes the chances to actually make revolution greater. It means that people are being forced to wonder if this is the only possible way that things can be. It means that there will be intensifying splits reaching into core institutions of the rulers of this country.

But it will end up meaning nothing—and it will likely not even be recognized—unless there is a revolutionary people, numbering in the millions, with the leadership, the strategy and scientific method to recognize and seize on potential openings, and the plan for building an emancipating society. We have that leadership, that strategy, and that method (as well as great humanity) in Bob Avakian (BA)—in the work he has done, in the ongoing analysis and leadership he gives in these pages and elsewhere (see for example, Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating: Profound Crisis, Deepening Divisions, The Looming Possibility Of Civil War—And The Revolution That Is Urgently Needed. A Necessary Foundation, A Basic Roadmap For This Revolution), and in the revcoms who follow that leadership. We have the Constitution he wrote for the new socialist society, which provides a sweeping vision, a firm foundation and a concrete blueprint for the new society. But if we want the people in their millions—we and you—must go to work on that with everything we have.

As we put it in our proclamation, WE ARE THE REVCOMS:

This is also a “rare time” when the capitalist-imperialists who rule over us, in this country, are deeply divided in a way they have not been since the Civil War in the 1860s, and the country is being ripped apart, with one section moving toward an outright fascist form of rule with the other fighting for the horrific way things have been. They cannot resolve these deep divisions, and “hold the country together,” on the basis of the “normal way” this system has operated—and, in any case, that “normal way” is full of oppression, destruction, and the real danger of wiping out humanity. For these reasons, this revolution we are working for is urgently necessary—and more possible.

BA also said:

This rare time must not be wasted, squandered, thrown away. Rather, revolution must be actively prepared for and vigorously, consistently worked for—now, and in an ongoing way—to build up the scientifically oriented and powerfully organized forces for, and to prepare the ground for, this revolution. (“Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating”)

The question is not whether this is possible; it is whether you will be part of doing the work now to realize that possibility.