Shortly before Trump’s inauguration, the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian said,
Trump 2025 is not just another administration coming into office. This is fascism: the undisguised dictatorship of this system of capitalism-imperialism in the world’s most powerful capitalist-imperialist country—openly and aggressively oppressive and repressive—a fascism fueled by anti-scientific and Christian fundamentalist lunacy, moving to forcibly impose its racist, immigrant-persecuting, woman- and LGBT-hating MAGA madness, determined to unleash unbridled capitalist plunder and naked imperialist expansionism, prepared to violently crush any opposition or resistance. (from 2025: A New Year—Profound New Challenges—And a Profoundly Positive Way Forward in the Face of Very Real Horror)
In the short time since he assumed office, Donald Trump has rapidly brought that definition to life. He has issued a drumbeat of “executive orders”—many of which immediately have the force of law and none of which have to be approved by Congress. These include:
- Unleashing fascist thugs to act outside the law: Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of virtually every single one of the over 1,500 people who were charged with violently attacking Congress on January 6, 2021. These fascists aimed to overturn the 2020 election and to illegally install Trump in office. With these pardons, armed fascist thugs now have grounds to believe that whatever they do in service to Trump, he will have their back. At the same time, Trump ended security protection for some of his high-profile opponents who have come under threat, often from Trump’s own followers. This includes Anthony Fauci, who led the responses to COVID, and Mark Milley, former U.S. Army general and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had opposed Trump’s attempts to use troops against protesters in the 2020 uprising against police murder and white supremacy. These, and other opponents of Trump, required these details because they have been subjected to threats, including by Trump minions as well as other forces.
- Setting in motion massive persecution of millions of immigrants: Trump has given a free hand to immigration police to raid churches, schools and hospitals to hunt down immigrants who might be undocumented, or so-called “illegal.” Trump has ordered over 500,000 refugees whose status in the U.S. was legal to be expelled immediately, in some cases to be sent back to almost certain death. And Trump has threatened to prosecute any officials who he says interfere with this crackdown, even if this “interference” is based on the law. Trump has even attempted to single-handedly defy the clear constitutional amendment stating that everyone born within the U.S. possess U.S. citizenship (though suits were immediately filed against this and Trump’s order was stayed by the courts).
- Rapidly moving to take the U.S. back to the days of open, undisguised and violent suppression of people based on “race,” nationality and gender. Trump has issued orders denying trans people the right to any kind of recognition as who they are, which has had the immediate and extremely cruel effect of ordering an estimated 1,500 trans women into all-male prisons. He has issued orders making it effectively illegal for any federal agency to take measures against or even discuss discrimination in hiring or the workplace against Black and other oppressed minority peoples, women, or LGBT people. His minions have issued their own orders following up on that which command all employees to snitch on anyone who doesn’t seem to be “getting with the program,” on pain of their own dismissal if they don’t. All this will put legal force behind the Christian-fascist effort to hammer people back to the days before the massive social upheaval of the 1960s against this oppression, which led to limited but significant concessions. And the fact that the January 6 criminals who were released (and hailed as “heroes” by Trump) participated in an action that was festooned with Confederate flags and featured people hauling around a lynching pole gives you a sense of how this will be backed up.
The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show
Episode 232: Trump's "Shock & Awe"... Revcoms Bold Protest... And "A Profoundly Positive Way Forward..."
These orders trample on the rule of law. Even the ones that may be more likely to be overturned in court still set the terms of debate. Take “birthright” citizenship. This case could easily end up in the Supreme Court and if it does: a) even though the amendment is clearly written and the decisions upholding birthright citizenship are also clear, that might not mean much to a thoroughly fascist Supreme Court; and b) even if it is turned down, Trump will have seized the initiative in the debate.
Looking at just these three factors, you have to say the “progress” toward the definition given at the beginning of this article by Bob Avakian is rapid… and extremely dangerous. And that doesn’t even touch on the open threats to take over territory of other countries, beginning but not ending in his inaugural address. Nor does it speak to the orders to “drill, baby, drill”—also featured in his thuggish inaugural speech—that will immeasurably speed up the suicidal destruction of the environment which this capitalist-imperialist system is already plunging us toward.
This Fascism Must Be Stopped and Prevented from Consolidating
To echo the revcom slogan, faced with this people must—in the name of humanity—refuse to accept a fascist America! To again draw on the 2025 New Year statement from Bob Avakian (BA),
[T]his is “not a time for accepting this Trump/MAGA fascism as ‘legitimate,’ and staying within the confines of ‘how things work’ under this system, as Democratic Party heads and other ‘mainstream’ ruling class representatives are urging people to do. It is not a time for turning inward and attempting to ‘take care of self’ as the juggernaut of Trump/MAGA fascism gains momentum and crushes masses of people. This is a time for reaching out to all the others who feel the same outrage at Trump/MAGA fascism—a time for collective action and self-sacrificing struggle for the greater good: the greater good of defeating this fascism.”
While it is important that there have been some notable examples of courage and resistance to this fascist juggernaut and while it is an objective fact that tens of millions deeply hate all that Trump/MAGA fascism represents, the stark truth is this: there has not been anything close to the level of mass opposition and repudiation of this fascism that is urgently necessary! Every person with a conscience must act to model and call forward mass opposition that draws forward thousands of others and soon millions with the aim of defeating this fascism. THE REVCOM CORPS For The Emancipation Of Humanity has called for a leap in that this week. That has to happen, and it has to be a stepping stone. We want to work with everyone who agrees that this fascism must be stopped.
It Is Time, and Past Time, to Break Out of the Confines of the System That Got Us Here
Essential and urgent as it is, we cannot just fight this fascism without asking how we got here and what must be done about it.
Fascism is a truly terrible leap into further horror, but it’s important to face this fact: fascism is one way that this capitalist-imperialist system deals with the contradictions that it itself produces. The everyday functioning of this system is a horror not just for the hundreds of millions in this country… it is an even greater horror for the billions in the continents of Asia, Africa and Latin America that are dominated by this system. BA in his 2025 New Year statement makes the point that Trump/MAGA fascism “having arisen out of the soil of this whole system (and the whole history of this country), will unleash all this horror more fully and in more blatant ways, while at the same time the basic nature and dynamics of this system as a whole are subjecting the masses of humanity to terrible suffering, destroying the environment at an accelerating rate and heightening the danger of all-out war between the U.S. and its rivals in Russia and China—all nuclear armed imperialist powers.”
That statement—which goes further into the need for revolution, what that revolution could and would do, how that revolution could be made, and where you could not just fit into it but take an active and conscious role in it—is urgently required listening and reading.
Your life and the lives of hundreds of millions of others are about to change radically—either in a reactionary and murderous direction, or a revolutionary or emancipating one.
Now is the time to give everything you have to fight for the latter.