On February 24, Trump gave his annual State of the Union address. 

Many anti-Trump commentators (gleefully) deemed the speech a “failure” because “it won’t improve Trump’s falling poll numbers” in advance of the midterm elections this November. And they argued that he advanced few “policy proposals” that would provide legislative reforms for the deep problems gripping the U.S. (and the world).

These commentators are—at least for now—stuck in a vision of “democratic governance” that does not exist anymore and for which, in any case, Trump has zero respect or allegiance. They are in denial about the fundamental split that has riven the ruling class exactly over how to solve these problems. They are aching for traditional reformist solutions to a bone-deep crisis that the system has given birth to! 

Those trapped in this dreamworld are actually sleepwalking through a rapidly consolidating existential crisis. They would do well to reflect on what Bob Avakian (BA) brings out in Revolution #118. He starts by asking and answering one of the biggest and most urgent questions that people are confronting… or refusing to confront:

Why are we facing this fascism? The answer is that the fundamental cause of this fascism is the fact that this system of capitalism-imperialism is running up against its limits.

After sketching the profound changes in society, the economy, and the political structures in the last 80 years—including concessions made to Black people, women, and others whose oppression and exploitation have been and remain necessary pillars of this system and its social order, BA says:

All this has driven those threatened by these changes to embrace lunatic conspiracy theories and other blatant distortions of reality, in supporting Trump’s fascism, with his vicious insistence that if vulnerable people are not blamed and persecuted, his followers “won’t have a country anymore.” All this is aimed at a return to “how things are supposed to be,” where whole groups of people—women, LGBT people, Black people and other people of color, non-European immigrants, and others—are openly regarded and treated as inferior, not deserving the same rights as “regular people,” or even not having a right to exist at all.

Trump is the leader of a fascist regime and of a fascist movement. He is not aiming to “win over the majority”; he is aiming to shatter or rig any structure or institution that would restrain his power (including elections and Congress) and to crush any opponent. 

This fascism does not have, and may not get majority support… at least at first. But it does represent a significant section of the ruling capitalist class, and it is supported by more than a third of the population, tens of millions of hard core MAGA fascists. And this speech was aimed mainly at that hard core base (including forces within the fascist section of the ruling class and military). Trump seemed to be aiming to consolidate their loyalty and prepare them to act as the cutting edge—as lawlessly and violently as necessary—of this fascist transformation of the U.S. and the world in the days, weeks and months ahead. 

Here are three key elements:

Whipping Up Christian Fascist Fanaticism and American Chauvinist Bloodlust

Especially now, in the light of the criminal war launched by the U.S. against Iran, this stands out. Trump painted a picture of the U.S. that was the opposite of its true history and current role in the world. 

Right at the start Trump claimed that America is “the most incredible and exceptional nation ever to exist on the face of the Earth.” Later he went even further, declaring that America has “lifted humanity into the skies on the wings of aluminum and steel, and then we launched mankind into the stars on rockets powered by sheer American will and unyielding American pride.” 

As if the whole of humanity was mindless savages completely dependent on the U.S., incapable of creating, inventing or building on their own. And he actually spelled out that the U.S. is on a mission from “god”: “When God needs a nation to work his miracles, he knows exactly who to ask.”

As part of this, Trump glossed over and covered up the actual foundations of the U.S. He erased the genocide and massive land theft of the native population, describing the American West that European settlers encountered as “empty marshes and wide open plains,” thus “disappearing” the millions of native people who had lived there for centuries. He outright embraced the enslavement of 10 generations of Black people, celebrating the renaming of U.S. military bases after slave-owning Confederate generals, which turned those who fought for slavery into heroes and role models. 

But this speech didn’t stop at rewriting history—Trump was intent on whipping up a Christian fascist “warrior” spirit.¹ He singled out—and used—a series of soldiers or veterans, and reveled in detailed and graphic telling of the story of all they had suffered in the service of the U.S. empire.

All this was drenched in religious references. Trump designated as martyrs all those who die in the reactionary fight for U.S. domination of the world—as well as the assassinated “civilian activist” Charlie Kirk, who was a leader in the fight for a Christian fascist America. He talked about “warriors' wives” lovingly blessing their husbands’ dog tags with “Holy Water” to prepare them for battle. He bragged about the “tremendous renewal in religion, faith, Christianity and belief in God” during his time in power.

Trump’s message to his base: America is on a mission from god to make the world right; killing others in this mission is to the glory of god; and those who die fighting for it are Christian martyrs.

Spewing Anti-Immigrant Racism and Doubling Down on Ethnic Cleansing

In the last few months, Trump’s signature policy of “mass deportations” aroused mounting disgust, anger and resistance throughout the U.S., reaching a peak with the ICE murders of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, Minnesota, who were peacefully opposing ICE’s brutal abductions of “suspected illegal immigrants.” And demonstrations have erupted in dozens of towns and small cities against the network of concentration camps ICE is building to hold them.

Trump never mentioned any of this. But he did talk about rising “corruption” in the U.S., which he absurdly blamed on “members of the Somali community” in Minneapolis and third world immigrants generally! He claimed that “The Somali pirates who ransacked Minnesota remind us that there are large parts of the world where bribery, corruption and lawlessness are the norm, not the exception. Importing these cultures through unrestricted immigration and open borders brings those problems right here to the U.S.A.”²

The involvement of a small number of Somali-Americans in a fraud scheme was the bogus excuse for the massive ICE invasion of Minneapolis to begin with. So bringing it up this way now and even intensifying the attack was Trump’s way of saying “I did the right thing… and I’m gonna do more of it.” 

Trump repeated his standard racist attack on immigrants as a whole: “before I came along… [immigrants] poured in by the millions and millions from prisons, from mental institutions. There were murderers.” These are the same lies he has been using all along, which at this point have been refuted 10 times over. In fact, according to the federal government’s own figures, only a small percentage of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. committed crimes of violence, and crime rates among immigrants are significantly lower than those of U.S.-born people.

Trump dealt with this by trying to bypass actual logic with appeals to racism. He brought out a series of victims of crimes that Trump claimed (sometimes falsely) had been committed by undocumented immigrants. One woman’s daughter was slashed on a train—by a native-born U.S. citizen. A man’s daughter was badly injured in a terrible car accident. 

Notably, all of these crime victims were women. And as with the descriptions of military wounded, Trump again reveled in blood and gore. All this is in part aimed at tapping into the grotesquely upside-down racist/patriarchal trope of “protecting ‘our beautiful women’ from these dark-skinned savages,” which was historically used to justify thousands of lynchings of Black people.

Of course, the presence of people who had either been severely injured, or had lost loved ones to crime were heart-wrenching. But to state the obvious, there are millions of examples of American citizens committing serious crimes too—so what does that prove. Under Trump’s logic the entire U.S. population should be deported. But the point is not logic. Or rather, it is training people in a racist logic and using that to justify far greater crimes. 

Demonizing Democrats

Trump’s speech repeatedly portrayed Democrats as acting out of hatred for “the people” rather than honest disagreements, and depicted them as dangerous and needing to be punished. Trump said:

• Democrats voted against his massive tax-cut for relatively wealthy people because “They wanted…to hurt the people instead.”
• “These people [Democrats] are crazy, I’m telling you. They’re crazy. Amazing. Terrible. Boy, oh boy.…With people like this—Democrats are destroying our country, but we’ve stopped it just in the nick of time, didn’t we, huh?”
• He wants to “enact serious penalties for public officials” who enforce laws restricting ICE in sanctuary cities—i.e., for carrying out their legal responsibilities.

Historically (since the Civil War ended), different sections of the capitalist-imperialist ruling class—mainly the Democrats and Republicans—have shared power, foregrounding their common interest in controlling the population, maintaining stability and expanding the empire. But Trump’s vicious and threatening attitude towards the Democrats reflects the fact that now the ruling class is sharply divided, and that in the eyes of the fascists, only their rule is “legitimate.” 

As BA puts it, “What is happening now is that Trump is moving to make this a dictatorship, not of the ruling class as a whole, but of a certain—fascist—section of the ruling class, to the exclusion, and with a determined vendetta against, the other ('bourgeois-democratic') section of the ruling class.” (see “Trump is moving to make this a dictatorship, not of the ruling class as a whole, but of a certain—fascist—section of the ruling class...”) Trump’s comments are aimed at demonizing these ruling class opponents, and laying the ground work for their violent suppression.

Conclusion

If you try to understand Trump’s speech by looking through the lens of “an unpopular president facing an important midterm election who needs to win over the ‘middle,’ the ‘independents,’ etc.,” then his speech makes no sense. But in reality, Trump’s speech was first and foremost about hardening, consolidating and motivating a base that is large, but still a minority, as well as demonizing and marginalizing the section of society that is hostile to or being targeted by MAGA. This is about preparing the fascist base to help “regulate” the tens of millions that MAGA deems “the enemy,” including a significant portion of the ruling class itself, and intimidate everyone else into going along. 

And from that standpoint, the speech was “on target,” and should serve as a warning as to where society is actually heading and the extreme urgency of preventing that.