Fascism in Trump Land

Vinod Mubayi

The victory of Donald Trump, a man convicted in a New York State court by a jury of his peers on 34 criminal counts, in the US Presidential election signifies a new low for the system of electoral democracy in the country that likes to bill itself as the world’s oldest democracy. Trump who has already served one term as President (2016-2020) has made no secret of his contempt for the usual norms of democracy. He tried to overturn the result of the November 2020 election, when he lost to Biden, via the storming of the US Capitol by his followers on January 6, 2021 to prevent the certification of Biden’s victory by the US Congress. In addition to his conviction, Trump was accused of and under indictment for other serious crimes such as openly trying to buy votes in the state of Georgia, inciting his followers to forcibly prevent the US Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 from certifying the election of Biden, and mishandling highly classified documents. These alleged crimes were so serious and committed so openly that there is hardly any doubt what the outcome of a fair trial would be. His escape from jail was made possible by a ruling of the right-wing majority of the US Supreme Court that granted the US President, and even a former President, immunity from prosecution for virtually all actions that could be deemed “official.” Since there was no clarity in the court’s judgement on where the boundary between official and non-official actions lay, the ruling was a blank cheque to a President to commit any act howsoever illegal it may be under the law. As journalist James Risen pointed out the ruling served to protect Trump “from his ongoing criminal cases and to grant him virtually unlimited power if he gets back into the White House. With its ruling, the Supreme Court’s right-wing bloc has made it clear: They are tired of democracy. The justices want a dictator.” Three of the justices who voted with the majority were appointed by Trump himself when he was President. So, the ruling reeked of corruption of a high order, truly worthy of a judgement passed by a court in a banana republic.

Trump’s election victory was made possible by a number of factors, such as the mistake made by the Democratic Party in maintaining the aging Biden’s candidacy for too long and the failure of the administration to end the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian population in Gaza, coupled with perceived high inflation and Biden’s low approval ratings. But the background to his victory is the rampant economic inequality and the hemorrhaging of stable industrial jobs caused by neoliberal capitalism over the last few decades. The fact that a majority of the working-class population, especially the white workers, voted for Trump reflects not just racism but also the fact that free-market capitalism is not working for them and they are willing to blindly follow an inveterate liar concerned only with his self-interest and a huckster selling a bizarre mix of fascist rhetoric, white supremacy, anti-immigrant racism, and Christian nationalism.

Bernie Sanders, the independent Senator from Vermont, has repeatedly said that the American people understand that their economic and political systems are rigged. They know that the very rich get much richer while almost everyone else becomes poorer. They know that they are moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society. According to Sanders, while the Democrats campaigned on protecting the status quo, including the corporate interests that fund their party, the Republicans, who are supported by other corporate interests like Elon Musk, sang the siren song of “change” and overturning the existing order. Sanders is not surprised that the Republicans won but the change they promise to bring will “make a bad situation worse, and a society of gross inequality even more unequal, more unjust and more bigoted.”

Now that he is due to assume power in less than two months, Trump’s actions, guided by his fascist and authoritarian instincts that were recognised by many in his previous term of office, including the retired Army general who was his chief of staff in the White House, are coming into focus. He has announced plans to instantly arrest and deport millions of what he has termed “illegal aliens”, he would allow the US military to put down opponents such as protesters and demonstrators, something that it is legally barred from doing inside the country, and generally to recreate a McCarthyite era to intimidate and repress political opposition.

Trump’s selection of cabinet members shows that the only criterion for their choice is their personal loyalty to him and what he perceives as their ability to cause institutional disruption. It has nothing to do with their suitability for the position in the governmental institution as it is currently configured. Thus, Robert Kennedy Jr, an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy addicted crank with no connection to medicine has been chosen to head the Dept of Health and Human Services, Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host who has faced sex assault allegations and has a propensity for Christian extremism and defending US soldiers accused of committing atrocities in wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere, has been chosen to head the Department of Defence, celebrity TV host Dr Mehmet Oz who promoted the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine on his show as a cure for the corona virus has been nominated to administer Medicare and Medicaid programmes, and the wildly inappropriate Matt Gaetz with serious charges of paying for sex with underage girls against him was selected initially as Attorney General until he withdrew when his appointment generated too much opposition even among Republican senators.

In the domestic arena, Trump’s stated policies are to make America more misogynist, racist, and unequal on one hand and, on the other, to dismantle the regulatory powers of the government and allow corporate polluters, for example, free rein. The most retrograde aspect of the latter is Trump’s and the Republican Party’s complete lack of belief in long-settled climate science. They wish to greatly increase extraction and use of fossil fuels, especially oil and gas, in the US in utter denial of global warming that is threatening to make large parts of the world uninhabitable.”We will frack, frack, frack and drill, baby, drill,” Trump said at an October 2024 rally in Detroit. If there was a functional international court with real powers, Trump and the Republican Party would be indicted for what is, in effect, a crime against humanity that expanded fossil fuel exploration and production would pose.

Meanwhile, Trump’s loose cannon approach of saying outrageous things that are frequently disavowed in the media, masks the more sinister, right-wing forces under him that are laying the grounds for fascism. Project 2025, a blueprint for Trump administration policies prepared under the conservative Heritage Foundation aims at nothing less than creating a framework for a fascist Christian nationalist state in the US. For example, the plan would allow the President to fire most of the non-partisan Federal bureaucracy and replace them with Trump loyalists. It would likely end the separation of church and state, diminish civil liberties, and eliminate or greatly restrict what conservatives consider to be the ‘nanny’ state, i.e., government regulation of private corporate behaviour. A beginning on the path of reducing civil liberties has already begun in the Republican majority House of Representatives with the passage of a bill that would empower the Secretary of the Treasury to unilaterally designate any non-profit group as a “terrorist supporting organisation” and revoke its tax-exempt status, effectively killing the group. Critics say the proposal would give presidential administrations especially the incoming Trump administration a tool to crack down on and eliminate political opponents. Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat from Texas, said “This bill is not about terrorism — it’s about giving Donald Trump unlimited authority to label his opponents as terrorists.”

On international issues, Trump’s history of supporting the Israeli right wing, the appointment of Mike Huckabee as the ambassador to Israel, Steven Witkoff as Mideast envoy and Michael Waltz as National Security Advisor, suggests that his policy would be to give Israel even more of a blank cheque than the Biden Administration to let Israel continue with its genocidal policy towards the Palestinians, implement a more aggressive approach to Iran and potentially annex the West Bank and Gaza with US support. Each of Trump’s appointees has a history of close relations with Netanyahu and Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, is an open proponent of a Greater Israel who has suggested in the past that Egypt or Saudi Arabia could offer some of their own territory for resettlement of Palestinians who could be expelled from the West Bank and Gaza.

While Trump made Modi his BFF in the past, whether he would continue to do in future remains to be seen. A test will come in future of whether his administration’s Justice Department will choose to continue the prosecution of Gautam Adani and associates on financial fraud charges that has already begun under the current dispensation.

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 24, Dec 8 - 14, 2024