“The Trump Fascist Regime is shredding the rule of law. Making a mockery of due process. Illegitimately deploying the military on U.S. soil. Disappearing immigrants and other brown-skinned people into brutal concentration camps. Aggressively resurrecting genocidal white supremacy. Reversing the gains not only of the 1960s, but even of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Enslaving women through the brutality and suffocation of forced motherhood. Erasing LGBT people. Trampling democratic rights. Violating international law. Assaulting and threatening politicians and judges. Paving the way for boundless terror against the people. Accelerating climate collapse. Cutting science and medicine, costing millions of lives. Depleting humanity’s store of knowledge. Destroying truth. Drowning out reason. Subjugating the arts to fascist cruelty and conformity. Targeting everything that is decent, moral and good. All at the whim of a debased lunatic tyrant.” —From the RefuseFascism.org call for millions to gather in DC beginning November 5 to drive the Trump fascist regime from power

The truth of this crucial statement was forcefully demonstrated over this past week. Four sharp examples, in different dimensions:

One: For the first time, Trump succeeded in engineering the legal indictment of a political opponent. These charges against former FBI head James Comey were so “trumped up” that Trump had to force his original appointee for U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, to resign because he refused to proceed with the case. Trump instead installed Lindsay Halligan, who had previously defended Trump in a case connected to his taking top secret documents with him from the White House when he lost the 2020 election. Halligan quickly got the grand jury to indict Comey on invented charges of making false statements to Congress. 

At the same time, Trump threatened to go after other prominent government officials—including Senator Adam Schiff, who led the prosecution of the case against Trump during his first impeachment trial, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who won a court case against Trump for financial fraud. Trump has also been urging a federal prosecutor in Pennsylvania to go after former CIA director John O. Brennan. 

A sitting president openly demanding that the Justice Department indict someone who has “crossed” him politically means that he can personally wield and bring to bear the full power of the state against anyone he pleases, with no regard for legal procedures meant to protect individuals from arbitrary and illegal prosecution. 

This is unprecedented.

Two: Trump threatened to go after the funding base of the Democratic Party and many progressive organizations or projects. He didn’t do this openly—instead he called them “funders of domestic terrorism.” In justifying this baseless slander, Trump said: “You know, when you see the signs and they’re all beautiful signs made professionally, these aren’t your protesters that make signs in their basement late in the evening because they really believe it. These are agitators and anarchists.”

Please note, making signs—even paying for them to be professionally produced (gasp!)—as well as agitating, and/or believing in anarchism are not only fully legal and protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution, such activities are by no conceivable stretch of the imagination “terrorism.” 

Trump went so far as to openly accuse George Soros, head of the Open Society Foundations, and Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, of being behind this (non-existent) “wave of terrorism.” In fact, both are prominent donors to the Democratic Party, and they each fund a range of projects having to do with investigative journalism and various projects for reform. Hoffman funds Change.org, for instance, and Soros gives to Planned Parenthood. In regard to Trump’s invention of some kind of wave of “left-wing terrorism,” as we have shown before, the overwhelming majority of violent political attacks come from right-wing fascists, with only a very small percentage coming from those who could conceivably be called left-wing. 

Three: These repressive moves took a giant leap last Thursday with the issuing of NATIONAL SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM/NSPM-7. This memorandum targets activities of what it called the “self-described ‘anti-fascism’” movement, and then proceeded to criminalize “anonymous chat forums, in-person meetings, social media, and even educational institutions” where people promote anti-fascist ideas. This puts a target on the back of everyone who acts, organizes, speaks and even listens to anything in opposition to the regime.

What makes this even more threatening is the memorandum’s provision for using Joint Terrorism Task Forces to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals engaged in acts of political violence and intimidation designed to suppress lawful political activity or obstruct the rule of law.” Not only did Trump himself conflate nonviolent political activity with “terrorism” (as we have shown in this article), but there is a whole history of such political police “creating” plots in order to justify long trials and imprisonments based on entrapping people in these plots or on bogus charges altogether. (To get a fuller sense of the danger posed by this memorandum, we refer readers to this useful article by Ken Klippenstein.)

Here, a word cries out to be said about Trump’s recent focus on the alleged violence he and his administration claims has been carried out against ICE. Last week there was an instance in which someone, whom the Department of Homeland Security alleged was aiming at agents, shot three immigrants—killing one of them—before taking his own life. If the allegation that he was targeting ICE proves to be true, we will again state that such actions are very wrong and do real harm. But the much more important dimension of reality is that protest against ICE has been overwhelmingly undertaken nonviolently. Yet despite that, ICE has almost invariably reacted with extreme and utterly illegitimate violence or vindictive legal repression in its arrests of immigrants and of those documenting or protesting those arrests (see the arrest of Brad Lander, New York City comptroller, when he was escorting an immigrant from the courthouse, and ICE agents throwing a protester to the ground outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois). This vengefulness even extends to retaliation against those who later protest their arrest or treatment (see, for instance, “A U.S. veteran spoke out against his wrongful arrest by ICE. Now he’s being accused of assault,” Melissa Gomez, LA Times, September 26, 2025). Yes, people detest ICE—and rightly so! But to take one “out of the blue” incident to distort the thrust and tactics of an entire movement is gross distortion and dangerous slander.

Four: Trump once again threatened to use the military to suppress protest in a city—even as every political authority in the state made clear the military was neither needed nor welcome. He ordered “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth "to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa,¹ and other domestic terrorists." Trump went on to say that these troops should use “FULL FORCE, if necessary.” Federal troops already occupy Washington, DC, are due in Memphis, Tennessee, this week, and earlier this year occupied LA for several months. The normalization of this kind of threat and the actual use of the troops on the ground is extremely ominous and intimidating.

This all took place, again, within the space of one week. These instances signaled and set the wheels in motion for very heavy and wide-ranging repression. These events and threats take us a whole lot further down the road to full-out fascism.

The answer to this is not to give in to fear or silence, the answer is to come forward—in our millions. Giving each other strength and courage, standing with any and all under attack, with the clear-eyed determination to drive the Trump fascist regime from power.

In that light, this point from Bob Avakian rings out all the more sharply:

If this fascist regime is allowed to remain in power, everything that decent people have felt they could rely on to seek justice will be brutally shut down...every uplifting moral value will be reviled and repressed...every sphere of society will be remade, in terrible ways, in line with the male supremacist, anti-LGBT, white supremacist and anti-immigrant cruelty and the anti-scientific, health and climate destroying madness of the Trump fascist regime and the bloodthirsty ravings and depraved violence of fanatics heading “the department of war,” with the deranged maniac Trump having his finger on the nuclear button.

Every vision, and every active striving, for a better, more just world, for a future worth living in, will be violently suppressed and effectively foreclosed, at least for the foreseeable future.

This is not hyperbole—it is the bitter reality that is being rapidly enforced.

But here is another profound reality: The massive mobilization called for by Refuse Fascism, and open to all, represents the real possibility—the ONLY real possibility—of actually driving out this fascist regime, and putting an end to the endless horrors it is determined to perpetrate. (From social media message @BobAvakianOfficial REVOLUTION #133: Yes, this Trump/MAGA fascism really is that bad. And, if it is not driven from power soon, it will get far worse.)