Last March, the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian defined a key aspect of what we’re facing with Trump fascism this way:

Fascism is a qualitatively different way that this system enforces its rule over people.

Trump fascism is a regime that openly and aggressively strips away basic rights and blatantly declares that there is no rule of law and due process of law other than what it dictates, and that raw destructive power is what must rule in the international arena, without even the pretense of adherence to international law or concern about the sovereignty, or even the right to exist, of less powerful peoples and countries.
—from REVOLUTION #114: “Defeating Trump/MAGA fascism: Looking to some future elections... or working now to mobilize millions around this powerful unifying demand: The Trump fascist regime must go!” 

This describes what is being violently hammered into place with the regime's attacks on fishing boats in Venezuela. The Trump fascist regime, with the Christian fascist crusader Pete Hegseth at the helm of the Department of “War”, is moving to set extremely dangerous fascist precedents. This is being met with significant opposition within the dominant ruling institutions of this system—but millions need to act now in sustained nonviolent protest in Washington, DC, to create “a political earthquake from below” to force the removal of this regime. Anything less will mean we are one major leap closer to the all-out consolidation of a fascist America.

Setting Fascist Precedents

Over the last three months, the U.S. military has carried out at least 22 violent attacks on fishing boats, murdering at least 88 people in cold blood. These were not war crimes because—while the regime is lying about this—the U.S. is not at war. This is murder, carried out under the leadership of Donald Trump, under the direct orders of Secretary of “War” Hegseth, and implemented by an unknown number of lower ranking people, all of whom have a legal and moral responsibility to refuse illegal orders. 

But the worst thing about this is not even the terrible loss of life, the heartbroken families, or the turning of an important seaway and fishing ground into a deadly shooting gallery. Nor was the worst thing how Trump joked about how fishermen would be scared to fish—as if depriving people of their means to survival, or kidding about killing innocent people, is a big laugh!

No, the worst thing is the fascist precedents—the “norms” of what the regime can get away with—that are being established right before our eyes, and which we will see metastasize like cancer if the regime remains in power.

New Norm Number One: It's legal because we say so

First, “It’s legal because we say it is.” 

Look at the “legal rationales” for the massacres so far. 

The regime says that Tren de Aragua are “narco-terrorists,” meaning that they are using drug sales, not primarily to make money, but as part of a “mission” to “poison” America, and therefore they are “at war” with the U.S., and anyone involved with them is a “combatant” in that war, subject to being murdered. Evidence? They have none. 

The regime says that Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, heads up the “foreign terrorist organization” Cartel de los Soles. Maduro and his government have been put in the same category as groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda. But the truth is: Cartel de los Soles doesn’t exist! It is a figure of speech that’s been used by Venezuelan journalists for decades to refer to military officials corrupted by drug money. “Cartel of the Suns” in English is a phrase that mocks corrupt officers by referring to the “suns” that Venezuelan generals wear to show their rank, like the stars worn by U.S. officers.

But still the murder of fishermen is legal “because we say so.” The Office of Legal Counsel in Trump’s fascist Justice Department signed a memo that said it accepted Trump’s determination that this is an armed conflict against these alleged drug cartels and so sinking these boats is lawful. The memo has not been made public and in any case, everything about their fascist logic is based on lies. But the memo is supposed to give the participants in these illegal bombings legal cover: in other words, because the regime has said it is legal, it is legal.

Just think of the implications. If there is no “need” for evidence, for trials, for due process of any kind, anyone who the regime considers an enemy can be labeled a “terrorist” and killed. The regime is already labeling anti-fascist resistance as “terrorism,” and even millions of peaceful protesters demanding "No Kings" as “domestic terrorists!” And Trump is sending the U.S. military into cities across the country to enforce their fascist rule.

This is Alice in Wonderland “off with their heads” style “justice”: verdict first, trial after—with the full backing of the world’s most powerful military.

New Norm Number Two: a green light to slaughter civilians, “legality” be damned

Second, giving the U.S. military open license to commit war crimes without even any pretense towards legal oversight or “laws of war.” Or in Hegseth's words, a military based on “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”

Over the last two weeks, there has been a major open controversy within the dominant ruling institutions focused on the first of the U.S. military strikes on fishing boats off the coast of Venezuela. In that September 2 strike, the first missile blew up the boat and killed nine of the 11 people on board. But two others survived and clung desperately to the boat’s wreckage. After watching them struggling in the water for 41 minutes, the commander of the operation, Admiral Bradley, gave the order to strike again, murdering those two survivors.

The Washington Post said that according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation, Bradley was following Hegseth’s spoken order to “Kill them all.” Hegseth claims this is “fake news,” that Bradley gave the second order, but that (in Hegseth's view) Bradley was justified in carrying out this second strike.

As we wrote last week:

Ordering the execution of unarmed people who were desperately clinging for dear life to a burning boat is not just a war crime by international law, but given that the U.S. is not even at war, it is state-sanctioned murder prosecutable by U.S. criminal courts.

On Saturday, a group of former judge advocate generals (JAGs)—military lawyers responsible for, among other things, prosecuting war crimes—issued a statement declaring that the group unanimously “considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both,” and called for “anyone who issues or follows such orders [to] be prosecuted for war crimes, murder, or both.”

At the same time, the main committees in the Senate and House overseeing the military—made up of Republicans and Democrats—issued statements promising “vigorous oversight.”

Only a tiny snippet of the full video has been released publicly, but last week, the full video was privately shown to some people in Congress. Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the video was “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service. You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion with a destroyed vessel who were killed by the United States.” 

In response to criticism, Hegseth went on the attack. In a cabinet meeting, Hegseth defended this criminal act, saying, “This is what you and the press don't understand. You sit in your air conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill and you nitpick... And then you want to throw up really irresponsible terms about American heroes about the judgement they made... I wrote a whole book on this topic because of what politicians and the press does to war fighters.”

The book Hegseth refers to is from 2024, titled: The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. Taking on the sick logic of Hegseth’s full argument here is beyond the scope of this article, but it is bound up with the lie that the U.S. got “bogged down” in Iraq and Afghanistan because the U.S. wasn't able to just openly slaughter people. (Setting aside the fact that the at least 185,000 Iraqi civilians were violently killed, either directly by the U.S. or in the storm of violence unleashed by the U.S. invasion.) In contrast, he upholds the U.S.’s nuclear bombing of Japan.

In the book, Hegseth argues: “If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?! Who cares what other countries think.” 

In September Hegseth told an unprecedented meeting of almost all the generals and admirals in the U.S. military, “We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”

The U.S. military has always been a machine of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Just look through the American Crime series on this website for mountains of evidence. (See for instance, American Crime Case #96: Vietnam, March 16, 1968 and American Crime Case #93, U.S. Invasion of Korea—1950.) But Hegseth is moving to rip away any pretense of legality. This is a fascist military doctrine aiming to reforge the existing U.S. military into a fascist fighting force: a force ready and willing to carry out illegal orders and kill civilians because the fascist tyrant said so.

This brings us to the third dangerous precedent being set: Bound up with this is a bloodthirsty celebration of slaughter. In the face of all this controversy, Hegseth posted a graphic of Franklin the Turtle (an animated character for preschoolers) gleefully firing on men in boats. MAGA mouthpiece Megyn Kelly said on her SiriusXM show that “I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water… I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so that they lose a limb and bleed out a little.” 

This is how you turn people into heartless genocidal Nazis. This is how you mold a generation willing to “exterminate” and torture those they have been taught to view as lower beings. And this is how you forge a people who find meaning in the pain and degradation of others.

Will you allow this to get hammered into place? Or will you rise to defeat this? And will you ask the deeper questions about where this fascist nightmare came from, and what it will take to get to a world without war?