EDITORIAL: FASCISM AT HOME, IMPERIALISM ABROAD; THE FIRST YEAR OF TRUMP’S SECOND TERM
Vinod Mubayi
Trump’s second term as president began a year ago with a domestic policy based on detaining and deporting supposed illegal immigrants. This policy has been carried out in a brutal and fascistic manner by masked agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency who wear no identification badges and act in the manner of the Nazi Gestapo. Their assault on immigrants have also ensnared several immigrants who are in the country legally and whose only “crime” was that they exercised their constitutionally protected right of writing an article or participating in an activity that criticized Israel for the genocide in Gaza or US support of Israel. From the initial stated focus on undocumented aliens who had committed alleged criminal acts, goon squads of ICE agents then began attacking and arresting anyone who they believe looked “foreign” or demonstrated opposition to the Trump regime or to the ICE presence in their city or community.
The death of two white middle-class Americans in Minneapolis at the hands of ICE seems to have slowed down the wheels of Trump’s fascist chariot for now. Renee Good, a mother of three children, was driving away from an ICE agent who shot her multiple times and called her a “fucking bitch” as she was dying. Alex Pretti, a nurse at the VA hospital, was trying to assist a woman who had been assaulted by ICE goons when he was assaulted himself, thrown to the ground, and shot ten times in the back by the same goons as he lay spreadeagled on the sidewalk.
The Trump administration attempts to gaslight the murder of US citizens Good and Pretti in broad daylight on the streets of Minneapolis by ICE agents did not succeed. Not when many hundreds of concerned citizens angered at this invasion of their neighborhoods and communities by masked fascist thugs posing as “law enforcement” agents have taken to recording every gratuitous assault on their mobile devices. Thus, it took only a few hours before the spin being given by Trump and his minions to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti was thoroughly exposed for what it was: a blatant falsehood.
The treatment Good and Pretti received at the hands of ICE seem to have touched a nerve in mainstream America that even has Republican politicians trying to hide from the fallout. It needs to be acknowledged, however, that the killing of innocent civilians or bystanders by the guns of those supposedly enforcing the law is an all-too-common experience for the marginalized sections of American society; people of color, Hispanics, and other immigrants, documented or not. The depredations of ICE in cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago that focused mostly on immigrants who looked foreign or “spoke foreign” drew condemnation from rights activists but the mainstream public and politicians remained relatively unconcerned until the Minneapolis killings happened.
The columnist Ta-Nehisi Coates writing in Vanity Fair of January 26 has pointed out the deeply racist, white supremacist nature of the alien/immigrant removal project in the eyes of Trump and his minions such as Stephen Miller. Trump and his followers treat America as The Homeland, taking their cue from the federal Department of Homeland Security created in the aftermath of 9/11. Just as the Nazis wanted Germany to be restricted to the Aryan race, The Homeland in Trump’s view should only be open to people like those from Northern Europe or white Afrikaners from post-apartheid South Africa not people from places like Somalia that are, in Trump’s words, “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime” and whose people Trump regards as “garbage” or asylum seekers from Gaza fleeing the Israeli genocide. In this regime’s view, The Homeland is reserved for white, Christian, heterosexual folk who do not harbor the highly suspect “woke” values of diversity, equity, and inclusivity and those whites like Good and Pretti who do not adhere to these norms are traitors worthy of elimination. Coates makes an insightful comparison of the ICE killing of Good and Pretti with the Ku Klux Klan’s killing of white people who went to the southern states in the 1960s to promote racial equality. He cites the example of Viola Liuzzo, a middle-aged white housewife from Detroit with 5 children and a husband who was a union organizer. She
“headed south to join the march to Montgomery, AL and in the process left the privileges of white ladyhood behind. For transgressing against The Homeland of that era—the neo-Confederate South—Liuzzo was murdered by white supremacists. Just as Good was slandered by The Homeland’s authorities as a domestic terrorist and a “fucking bitch,” Liuzzo was slandered by The Homeland’s rulers as a heroin addict and nymphomaniac who’d gone south to make a cuckold of her husband.” While understanding the economic exploitation of her family, she also understood that whiteness had enrolled her in the exploitation of others. When Liuzzo acquired this knowledge, when she got woke, she was transfigured into a traitor to her race and a menace to The Homeland. For being a menace, for being woke, she was killed—as was Renee Good.”
A further demonstration of Trump’s domestic fascism are the explicit or implicit fascist postings by the White House, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Labor, that were recently noted by news correspondent Evan Gorelick in an article in the New York Times January 27. He writes:
“This month, the White House and the Department of Homeland Security jointly posted a recruitment ad for Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Instagram, Facebook and X, overlaid with the words “WE’LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN.” That’s also the name of a song, written by members of a self-described “pro-White fraternal order,” that has been embraced by the Proud Boys and other white-nationalist groups. Hundreds of explicitly neo-Nazi and white-supremacist accounts have shared the song on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, since 2020. The white supremacist who killed three Black people at a Jacksonville, Fla., dollar store in 2023 included lyrics from the song in his writing. Also this month, the Labor Department posted a video captioned “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.” That phrase resembled a German slogan used by Nazis during World War II, “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer,” or “One People, One Realm, One Leader.”
An additional fascist threat made by Trump is to invoke the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that empowers the president to deploy the US military domestically in the event of an armed rebellion against the federal government. He has also on occasion threatened to cancel the mid-term elections in November 2026 that some pollsters feel will result in Democratic party winning the House of Representatives. If Trump cancels elections fearing loss of legislative control by the MAGA Republicans, that will signal the end of electoral democracy.
It also needs to be noted that the fascist actions inside America replicate what the US has done outside for decades, most recently for example to the people of Iraq or Afghanistan. This is the indissoluble and inevitable link between fascism at home and imperialism abroad.
Veteran reporter Chris Hedges writes on his blog that “The murders of unarmed civilians on the streets of Minneapolis… would not come as a shock to Iraqis in Fallujah or Afghans in Helmand province. They were terrorized by heavily armed American execution squads for decades.” Hedges goes on to point out that:
“What the rest of us are facing now, is what Aimé Césaire called imperial boomerang. Empires, when they decay, employ the savage forms of control on those they subjugate abroad, or those demonized by the wider society in the name of law and order, on the homeland… But before we became the victims of state terror, we were accomplices. Before we expressed moral outrage at the indiscriminate taking of innocent lives, we tolerated, and often celebrated, the same Gestapo tactics, as long as they were directed at those who lived in the nations we occupied or poor people of color. We sowed the wind, now we will reap the whirlwind. The machinery of terror, perfected on those we abandoned and betrayed, including the Palestinians in Gaza, is ready for us.”
Another perspective suggests that what Trump has been doing abroad for the last year is to resurrect the late 19th century imperialist era of Presidents McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt when the US embarked on its imperial conquests by ousting the decaying Spanish empire from Latin America and the Philippines. Trump has updated the old Monroe doctrine, that was meant to keep Latin America within the US sphere of influence, to the Donroe doctrine that wishes to launch new conquests of territory to bring them under his rule. Thus, he has frequently threatened to buy or conquer Greenland, which is now a part of Denmark, and which, in turn, is a member of NATO. He ordered the US military to invade Venezuela and capture its incumbent President Maduro, who is now in a jail in New York, and openly stated his aim to grab the oil resources of Venezuela that has the world’s largest proven oil reserves for the benefit of American oil companies. He has also proclaimed his intention to make Canada the 51st US state and take over Panama and has threatened actions to overthrow the regimes in Cuba and Colombia. As this piece is being written (Feb 1), Trump has stationed a large armada off the coast of Iran and has threatened to overthrow the Islamic regime that has ruled since 1979.
In the post World War 2 world, when the US emerged as a global imperial power it was also instrumental in creating the United Nations and fostering, at a formal level, the rule of law, non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, democratic rights, and other measures of good governance. Whether these symbols of soft power were promoted to emphasize the superiority of the US “democratic” system that was then in competition with Soviet communism globally can be debated. However, it should be acknowledged that the velvet glove of soft power did not completely hide the iron fist inside as demonstrated by many episodes: the coup to overthrow the parliamentary regime of Mossadegh in Iran, the war in Vietnam, the overthrow of Allende in Chile, and other later episodes like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regardless of the true motives underlying them, the public justification of these actions was always framed in terms of restoring democracy and good governance. Trump’s rhetoric has no use for these niceties or obfuscations; it is openly couched in the language of conquest whether of resources, as in Venezuela, or land areas, as in Greenland.
This reversion to the language of 19th century imperial conquest may reflect to some extent Trump’s own bizarre, fascist personality but also reflects the state of the world where an aging, declining, hegemon, the United States, confronts the rise of an economic power, China, that poses a significant threat to US dominance. Neoliberal capitalism in the US has evolved to a point where the US has become an oligarchy; a handful of uber rich billionaires control more wealth than over half the country’s population. The disappearance of industrial manufacturing from its earlier home in the American Midwest and other areas has led to the elimination of well-paying, stable jobs that formed the basis for upward mobility and belief in the American Dream of prosperity in earlier decades. Those affected by the downside of this phenomenon, many of them white workers in the US hinterland, form the core of Trump’s MAGA coalition. They respond to Trump’s crude rhetoric blaming immigrants, woke liberals, academics, gay folks and other easy targets for their precarity and their plight along with his attempts to stoke patriotism by lauding how he is enhancing America’s greatness under his administration. Trump’s boasts about bringing manufacturing back to the US by his tariff policies are likely to just remain slogans in the opinion of many economists. Domestic fascist assaults by ICE agents while mostly directed at Democratic party ruled states and cities will inevitably negatively impact some of his MAGA followers too as recent popularity polls appear to suggest. But how this combination of fascism at home and imperialism abroad will play out over the next few years remains to be seen.
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