To make revolution, you need three conditions. In the words of Bob Avakian (BA), the first one is this:

A crisis in society and government so deep and so disruptive of the “usual way of things,” that those who have ruled over us, for so long, can no longer do so in the “normal” way that people have been conditioned to accept.

Every week, the Trump fascist regime drives this first condition further. And this past week the regime and Trump himself took further big leaps in moving to subvert what is considered one of the main ways that "people have been conditioned to accept" the oppressive and exploitative rule of American capitalism-imperialism: the U.S. elections. 

These fascists deeply and fanatically believe that only they are the legitimate rulers of this system and they are actively working to rig and steal the next election—without violence if they can, but through violence if they must. What is urgently required are millions of people determined to wrench a livable future for humanity out of this extremely volatile and dangerous situation.

Election Rigging, Violent Threats and Practice Runs

Since Trump was prevented from stealing the 2020 election—despite an all-sided campaign which did actually come very close to succeeding—he and those around him have been actively working to steal the next election. On Trump's first day in office, Trump pardoned about 1,500 insurrectionists who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to overturn the 2020 election. In August 2025, Trump asked fascist governors to redraw election maps to openly favor the fascists. He has worked to remake how American elections are run and has repeatedly threatened to run for a third term.

This has intensified over the last two weeks:

This week, Trump has repeatedly threatened a federal takeover of elections. This would be a major violation and break with the U.S. Constitution itself, which says that the states oversee the elections. 

Twice he has said that "The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” And he even went so far as to spell out what kind of places needed to be “taken over,” naming Philadelphia, Detroit and Atlanta as incapable of conducting fair elections because they are all “unbelievably corrupt.” These are all majority Black and Latino, and majority Democratic cities. 

On February 3, the fascist architect and ideologue Steve Bannon said, “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November.” And addressing Democrats, he said, “We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

A leap in this offensive took place on January 28 when the FBI raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, and seized 700 boxes of ballots from the 2020 elections.¹ In the midst of this raid, Trump himself got on speakerphone with the FBI agents to ask questions and praise them for being part of this outrageous raid. This kind of direct intervention from the fascist commander-in-chief is unprecedented.

Analyzing what was really going on with this, Marc Elias—an elections lawyer for the Democrats—said: 

This is not only the election denialism of 2020... this is about proof of concept for the future. People talk about seizing ballots and surrounding polling places and stealing elections as if somehow these things are easily done. These are conceptual frameworks that people in the administration have to get comfortable with, moral frameworks they have to get comfortable with. They have to contend with the Constitution and the law and judges and all that, but they also have to contend with just the sheer logistics of it all. Like, how do we actually do this thing where there are ballots in the possession of a county official? How are we going to get them and how are we going to then count them in a way that is going to cast doubt on the outcome or cast doubt on the outcome through other propaganda and disinformation campaigns? And I think that this Georgia thing is just as much about that as it is about 2020. And in that respect, we have to be honest: Donald Trump and his administration are pulling something off. They actually did seize ballots. They actually got their hands on them... at the end of the day, Tulsi Gabbard is on a truck full of documents that have been seized from an [election] office. And those are now in the possession of Trump's FBI...

One of Trump's regrets from 2020 is that he didn't seize the voting machines, and in a recent interview, he openly pondered whether National Guard troops were “sophisticated enough” to impound ballots in the upcoming election. 

As a vicious climax to the week, Trump posted an ugly racist attack of Barack and Michelle Obama—depicting them as apes—in the midst of a video lying about the "stolen 2020 election." And in all these attacks, there is a vicious and openly white supremacist assault against voting rights for Black people and Latinos. 

All this is happening in a context in which court rulings that go against the Trump regime are routinely ignored, and in the great majority of cases that get to the fascist dominated Supreme Court, the Court rules in favor of Trump. 

Elections: Why They Mean Nothing… 

What we've cited here just scratches the surface of an onslaught of lawsuits, proposed legislation, blackmail and other maneuvers by the fascists to make sure that Republicans either “win” the election (by preventing people who oppose them from voting, or from having their votes counted), and/or are in a good position to overturn the election results if the fascists lose. 

This whole situation is politically explosive. Millions are actively opposing this regime in every corner of society. Trump's armed gestapo is murdering protesters without remorse. Meanwhile, Trump is itching to send the U.S. military into city streets and continues to threaten to execute his political rivals. 

In a country that has relied on the "peaceful transfer of power" as one of the central things that provides this system with legitimacy, openly ripping that away is not a minor matter. We'll speak to this point more below, but first, let's get clear on what elections are, and are not.

Despite the cover of "freedom and democracy," elections have never been the process through which decisions in this system of capitalism-imperialism get made. But they have been at the foundation of why people go along with this system. You're constantly told that if you passionately oppose the white supremacy and patriarchal oppression of women and LGBT people, if you can’t stomach the mass deportations and wars, if you dread the ongoing destruction of the environment… then you should vote for someone to change all this. But because all this oppression is woven into this system of capitalism and cannot be ended under this system, there can be no real meaningful change brought about through elections.

The elections do, however, give this system a so-called "popular mandate." They tell you that the elections express “the will of the people.” But the reality is that who you vote for and the questions you hear debated are pre-selected to serve the interests of that same system. You don't change or "control" this system through the elections, but the elections is how you get controlled, confined and channeled—in your thinking, and actions. 

Just think about the election of 2024 where you could not meaningfully vote against the genocide in Gaza. Because as profound as the differences are between the Democrats and the Republi-fascists, they do have a fundamental unity about the need for their empire (again, even as they have sharp irreconcilable differences over how this empire should be ruled). And whatever else is going on, the American empire needs Israel to play a role as attack dog and military outpost in the strategic region of the Middle East.

...And Why (Sometimes) They Mean a Lot

But now that con game is in a crisis.

The Republi-fascists existentially feel that they cannot preserve the American empire without a sharp break with the "normal" way that U.S. capitalism has functioned for the last 150 years and are determined to smash that whole way of operating. These dangerous maniacs fervently believe that only they, and only their program of open and unconstrained white supremacy, male supremacy, erasure of LGBT people, hatred of immigrants, anti-science lunacy, belligerent war mongering, the crushing of protest and dissent, and decimation of the rule of law—only that recasting of U.S. society is legitimate and can “Make America Great Again.” And the path to achieving this demands defeating, crushing and subordinating—as violently as necessary—their opponents, both in the ruling class and among the people. Elections also have to be “retooled” (assuming they are continued) into an automatic affirmation of fascist rule. (See sidebar for more from Bob Avakian on the roots of this.) 

In the election of 2020, Bob Avakian called Trump's attempts to steal that election a "rolling coup." The culmination of this all-sided effort was on January 6, 2021 when thousands of crazed fascists violently stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of the vote. When it was over, BA labeled it a dress rehearsal.

This time, the fascists are determined to succeed.

This Situation Demands That YOU—That Every Decent Human Being—Step Up Their Commitment to Stop This and Search for a Way Forward Out of This Truly Existential Crisis

No one can predict exactly how this situation will unfold in these next weeks and months—the situation in the U.S., and around the world is extremely volatile. But Trump/MAGA fascism is accelerating, and working overtime to lock down their grip on society and consolidate their fascist program.

What we can predict is that those who are ignoring or downplaying this danger are marching you to disaster. The Democratic Party and their leading representatives are desperately clinging to the very elections that the fascists are moving to rig and steal. As a ruling class institution, they are working to maintain the stability of capitalism-imperialism and will not risk the upheaval that might be required to defeat Trump fascism. Elias himself, while sounding the alarm that Trump's moves are "terrifying," ended up just arguing that what people should do is protest, keep filing lawsuits, "make a plan to vote, pay attention, and make sure that everyone in your social circles understands what's going on."

In the face of this fascist warp-speed juggernaut, this is extremely inadequate and profoundly irresponsible. If this regime is allowed to consolidate, it will not just mean absolute horror for masses of people here and all over the world, it could crush any real possibility of resistance, or the struggle for a better future. With the increased danger of climate catastrophe and nuclear war, it's not an overstatement to say that it could even mean the extinction of our species.

There need to be growing millions recognizing the full fascist program, in sustained nonviolent protest, determined to drive this whole fascist regime from power NOW! People's rights—including their basic right to vote—need to be defended as part of going up against and defeating this juggernaut as a whole. And people broadly need to have each other's backs in the face of the severe repression being brought down by the fascist regime. 

At the same time, there is great urgency in looking deeper into the very system that has given rise to this fascism, and so many other atrocities, and in looking for answers outside of and beyond this system. For while the situation is full of extreme and very negative danger, there is also the possibility that a revolution to bring a whole new system into being could be wrenched out of all this craziness if through this, the second two conditions for revolution are developed. Again, from Bob Avakian:

A revolutionary people in the millions and millions, with their “allegiance” to this system broken, and their determination to fight for a more just society greater than their fear of the violent repression of this system....

An organized revolutionary force—made up of continually growing numbers of people, from among the most oppressed but also from many other parts of society—a force which is grounded in, and is working systematically to apply, the most scientific approach to building for and then carrying out revolution, and which is increasingly looked to by masses of people to lead them to bring about the radical change that is urgently needed.

That radical change is spelled out in an inspiring way in the Declaration from the revcoms, We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way to Live, a Fundamentally Different System:

So long as we are still living under the rule of this system of capitalism-imperialism, we will defend people against attacks on their lives and on the rights that are supposed to be guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution. But we need a whole different system, with a whole different Constitution—the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America—which will provide much greater rights for the people, including the basic right to have the fundamentally determining role in a new society and government whose purpose and goal is to eliminate all exploitation and oppression, everywhere.

The fact is that, despite its claims to speak in the name of “we, the people” the U.S. Constitution is a document that was written by and has served the interests of slave-owning and capitalist exploiters, from the beginning of this country down to today. It is a document that restricts the notion of “freedom” to what is possible within the killing confines of this system of capitalism-imperialism, a system of brutal exploitation and murderous oppression. It is a document that sets the terms for enforcing this system which treats the masses of people, here and all over the world, as objects to be used and abused to generate profits and increase capital for a small number of big-time exploiters...a system that casts off as useless, and treats as dangerous, huge numbers of human beings who cannot be profitably exploited...a system that causes endless wars that kill off millions and cause massive destruction...a system that treats the environment as something to be plundered in the pursuit of profit and rivalry to dominate the world.

The Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America is completely, fundamentally different than the U.S. Constitution. This Constitution for a new socialist republic provides a sweeping vision, a firm foundation and concrete blueprint for bringing into being a society, and ultimately a world, free from all forms of slavery, all exploitation and oppression based on class, race, sex and gender, all relations in which one part of humanity is subordinated to and dominated by others.

The new socialist system based on the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America will do what can never be done under this system of capitalism-imperialism: Through its institutions, through elections and in an all-round way, this new socialist system will provide the means to politically empower the masses of people, in order to carry out the revolutionary transformation of society, and to contribute to this process in the world as a whole.

While uniting all who can be united to defeat this fascism, this is what people need to raise their sights to—and be part of fighting for.