Big Protests and Bad Polling?

Trump Doesn't Care: Fascism Accelerates

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/declare-independence-from-trump

Some reflections from Washington DC, where I am joining my friends and comrades in Refuse Fascism in a rally outside the White House later today.

You know that television drug commercial that tells people over fifty years old “Shingles Doesn’t Care” if you are watching your diet, getting exercise, and otherwise staying healthy?

Well, guess what: the Trumpist-Republifascist regime running the United States Doesn’t Care if most of the country is healthy and decent enough to hate what it is doing to us.

Five million or more people in the streets denouncing Trump on No Kings Day (NKD) three weeks ago?

One poll after another showing that big US majorities hate the big fascist oligarchy bill that the Trumpist Congress just passed and Mein Trumpf will sign later today?

Trump and his minions don’t care! The RepubliNazi juggernaut just keeps on transgressing, sticking its daggers into the back of what’s left of previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law, such as they are.

If anything, protests and opposition spark the Trumpists across and atop government to transgress more and harder to demonstrate their unflappable dominance as they “fight, fight, fight” to make American government and society over on fully white supremacist, patriarchal, xenophobic-nationalist and dictatorial lines.

Since the last impressive but seriously time-staggered national protest day staged by the Democratic Party-affiliated organization Indivisible, on June 14th (NKD):

· A Trumpist majority panel from the Ninth District US Court of Appeals has absurdly ruled that Trump can keep occupying Los Angeles with federalized National Guard troops and active-duty US Marines against the wishes of the city’s mayor and California’s governor because Trump has preposterously called protests against his racist mass deportation campaign there “a rebellion against the US government.” The panel signed off on de facto martial law, helping open the door for Trump to do the same thing in other Democratic-controlled cities and states. The panel’s authoritarian reasoning amounts to this: if the insurrectionist president decides a protest against his policies is an insurrection, then he is free to send in the troops, regardless of whether or not an actual insurrection is underway. Trump rules, facts are what he says they are. Trump is the law. (If California’s challenge to US troops on its streets makes its way to the Trump-crafted Christian fascist Supreme Court, a docket ruling could well extend this despotic reasoning to the whole country.)

· Racist immigrant kidnappings have continued to escalate from coast to coast, producing outrages including the brutal seizure of a Marine Corps veteran’s wife (while she breastfed her baby) as she waited to attend a green card hearing.

· The Trumpist Supreme Court, the illegitimate body that last year gave Trump forever criminal immunity, has finished its 2025 summer session by: ending federal district judges’ capacity to nationally block unconstitutional Trump actions including the brazen cancellation of the explicit constitutional right of birthright citizenship – a great green light to the escalation of Trump’s savage war on immigrants; approving the Trump regime’s cruel and unusual practice of rendering “illegal” immigrants without due process to torture prisons in “third countries” – nations from which they did not come and to which they have no connection; approving the denial of medical care to transgender youth; permitting fossil fuel corporations to challenge California’s special limits on carbon emissions; approving South Carolina’s denial of Planned Parenthood’s right to receive Medicaid payments even for non-abortion care.

· Trump has appeared alongside his fellow sadistic fascist Florida governor Ron DeSantis to celebrate the opening of “Alligator Alcatrez,” a joint state-federal immigrant detention camp in the Everglades, where Trump boasts that escapees will be “eaten by wildlife.”

· Trump has sent 200 US Marines to Florida to “assist” in immigrant round ups – another brazen deployment of active-duty troops on US soil.

· Trump has responded to the progressive social democrat Zhoran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City Democratic Party’s mayoral primary by calling Mamdani “a communist lunatic” who wants to “destroy New York” and threatening to strip Mamdani of his US citizenship and deport him.

· Trump’s fascist Attorney General Pam Bondi has told tech companies they are free to violate a Congressional statute barring American companies from platforming TikTok because Trump “has the constitutional power to set aside laws.”

· It has emerged that the legal US resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia was viciously tortured in the fascist El Salvadoran torture prison to which the Trump regime criminally sent him.

· CBS/Paramount bowed to “king” Trump by agreeing to a “settlement” of his baseless and absurd lawsuit against the media giant – a chilling surrender that will embolden Trump in his ongoing war against the media.

· Under the control of the cult party of Trump, Congress has just passed (and its Dear Leader will soon sign) a big fascist and oligarchic bill that cuts out more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and drastically slashes Food Stamps to pay for a giant tax cut for wealthy Americans and the establishment of “an anti-immigrant police state, replete with a standing army of ICE agents and a gulag of detention facilities with will transform ICE into the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the government” (Robert Reich) --- all this helping expand the giant federal deficit by more than $3 trillion.

· Herr Trump just told his fans in Iowa that his big fascist budget bill protects them from “shylocks” – a racist slur long used to demonize Jewish people.

· Trump recently posted this fascist statement absurdly directed at the capitalist Democratic Party: “We will never be a Socialist or Communist Country. IF YOU ARE NOT HAPPY HERE, YOU CAN LEAVE! It is your choice, and your choice alone. This is about love for America. Certain people HATE our country…”

Really big protest marches once every month or two? Claims that his policies will cost him public support that could cost his party votes in 2026 and 2028? Polls showing that US-Americans oppose this horrific budget bill by a 2-to-1 margin?

Trump and his big team of fascists DON’T CARE!

As Refuse Fascism (RF) says, we must build on the impressive protests that have taken place so far to construct “serious mass nonviolent struggle” and “forge a fierce, unrelenting, nonviolent struggle that makes it impossible for Trump to govern the country, impose his fascist program, and hold on to power. That,” RF rightly argues, “is how hated tyrants have been driven out all over the world and it is what we must do here – not allowing our power to be diverted into elections in 2026 or 2028 that will be too late to stop the consolidation of fascist rule.” As I wrote in RF’s Declaration of Independence from Trump’s Fascist America, which will be read aloud outside the White House today:

A harsh historical truth made evident at great human cost in the previous century is that it is devastatingly difficult to dislodge fascists from power once they consolidate rule over state and society, as in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and in Chile under Pinochet in the 1970s. If they are not separated from authority prior to the cementing of their reign, it can become too late.

No matter how they attain power, fascist rule is never legitimate. The responsibility to expel fascists from power is particularly urgent when fascism threatens to consolidate control atop history’s most powerful nation in a time of deepening global climate catastrophe and a world full of ever more lethal nuclear weapons.