Nether the Fascist Trump Nor Imperialist Biden

Only a Revolutionary Mass Movement Can “Keep Hope Alive” for a Decent Future

Just two weeks ago, the fascist leader and wannabe president for life Donald Trump made a campaign stop at the Palmetto State Armory, “the same gun store that sold weapons to a racist mass shooter who murdered three Black people in Jacksonville, Florida, last August. At least one of the shooter’s weapons was painted with a swastika,” The New Republic reports.

Of all the 16,538 guns and ammunition stores in the US that Trump might have visited to demonstrate his loyalty to the right to bear arms, he chose that particular store.  

Trump has recently in California called for the extrajudicial execution of suspected shoplifters. “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” said in Anaheim, while selling his vision for the future at the state’s Republican convention.  “As the audience applauded, laughed and cheered,” reports The Washington Post, “Trump added for emphasis, ‘Shot!’”

A few days before that, the Post ads, Trump “suggested…that outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Mark A. Milley deserved ‘DEATH!’ for reassuring Chinese officials that the United States had no plans to attack in the waning days of the Trump administration.”

Trump has recently claimed that nonwhite immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” That’s one of the most flat-out fascist things I’ve heard him say – and that’s saying a lot.

Trump this year vowed to deploy US Special Operations and naval forces in and against Mexico when he returns to power – an action supported by most of the Republican Congressional delegation and all the Republican presidential candidates.

None but one or two of those candidates criticize Trump for much of anything even …like…um…for example, trying to overthrow previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law on January 6.

Earlier this year Trump responded to a federal judge’s warning not to threaten witnesses by going online to say, “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU.”

Trump quipped in Anaheim about the physical assault one of his deranged supporters inflicted on the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last fall. The only thing worse than his comment was the laughter of his California GOP crowd when Trump said, “how’s he [Paul Pelosi] doing anyway, anybody know?” Paul Pelosi was gravely injured in a hammer attack by an assailant who believed Trump’s big Hitlerian lies about a “stolen” 2020 election.

Earlier this year, Trump posted an image of himself menacing the Black New York prosecutor who indicted him in the Stormy Daniel case with a baseball bat.   Last April, Trump said that that indictment would result in “potential death and destruction.”

Last Monday, facing a civil suit alleging business fraud, Trump urged people to “go after” Letitia James, the New York state attorney general who filed the suit.

Trump absurdly calls state and federal prosecutors holding him accountable for his fascist and corrupt crimes “radical left” “racists,” “lunatics,” “maniacs,”  Marxists, socialists, and communists and other bad names — sometimes even “fascists.”

Speaking of Marxists (I’m one), Trump told the far-right evangelical Faith and Freedom Conference this summer that he thinks all the nation’s Marxists, socialists, and communists should be deported. from the United States.

Trump said, accurately, that federal law “prohibits the entry of communists” into the U.S. But that’s not enough for Trump. “My question,” Trump said “is, what are we going to do with the ones that are already here, that grew up here?” His Christian Fascist audience arose in a screaming chorus, chanting “Deport them! Deport them!”

(Please deport me to Paris, with enough money to live in properly globalist style, sipping coffee by day and wine by night on the Left Bank.)

Trump recently described NBC and MSNBC’s coverage of him as “treason" and promised to investigate its parent company, Comcast Corp., when he returns to office.

It’s all very consistent with a presidency that wound down to its malevolent conclusion with Trump making a last night campaign stop in Kenosha, Wisconsin to honor the teen fascist Kyle Rittenhouse for murdering Black Lives protesters in August of 2020. The nightmare administration ended with Trump furious because metal detectors blocked Proud Boys and Oath Keepers from bringing AR-15s to an assault on the US Capitol meant to block the peaceful transfer of power. To review that long national nightmare in detail, please read the fourth chapter of my book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (New York: Routledge, 2021), the chapter titled “A Fascist in the White House, 2017-21.” Among the chapter’s “highlights”: Trump as president calling for the electrification of the southern border; Trump telling one of his hate rallies how much he enjoyed the image of migrant asylum-seekers running in fear from big snarling German Shepherds; Trump praising Philippines strongman Rodrigo Duterte for killing thousands of drug addicts; Trump trying to deploy the US military to crush and George Floyd Rebellion and asking his Defense Secretary if US troops could “just shoot” Floyd protesters; Trump quoting a former racist Miami, Florida mayor on how “when the looting starts, the shooting starts;” Trump pardoning his “good friend” the fascist Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio, who ran outdoor concentration with high rates of unexplained Latino deaths in the heat of Arizona; Trump pardoning the sadistic war criminal Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL who butchered an Iraqi prisoner with a hunting knife and shot Afghan and Iraqi girls to death.

The threat, incitement, and use of political violence is a defining aspect of fascist movements. It’s the ugly thread behind Trump’s recurrent promise to his base the last two years: “I am your retribution,” he says.  Let that word sink in – retribution, whose cognates include vengeance, revenge, reprisal, and payback. This is Trump’s core campaign promise: fascistic vengeance.  It’s the word Trump used to justify a federal fugitive task force’s hit squad murder – extrajudicial execution – of Michael Reinhol, an antifascist who killed a white supremacist Patriot Prayer street thug in a Portland street battle.

The danger of Trumpist political violence is why the judge overseeing the civil trial determining the damages Trump will have to pay for his fraudulent business practices has to be protected by armed security coming to and from his Manhattan courthouse.  It’s why Mitt Romney spends $5000 per day on private security for himself and his family. It’s why the Black female New York Attorney General Latitia James and the Black female Fulton County prosecutor Fanni Willis both require expensive protection.  It’s why public officials, election workers, educators and librarians and others fear attack across vast swaths of the country.

Not that Trump is averse to parliamentary means of mass democracy destruction. His demented acolyte and fellow Steven Bannon friend Matt Gaetz just procedurally ousted former House speaker Kevin McCarthy as payback for not doing Trump’s bidding by shutting down the federal government. Reports are that Trump will visit the US Capitol next week to confer with some of his Republi-fascist underlings about the newly vacant Speaker position.

Meanwhile, Trump takes proud claim for appointing a Christian Fascist Supreme Court that has re-imposed forced motherhood across much of the country, leading to sexist medical violence that threatens the lives, health, and freedom of countless women and girls. A white Trumpist country crooner shot this summer to the top of the music charts with a lynch mob song that promised lethal “good ‘ol boy” violence to anyone who protests racist police violence “in a small town.” A number of Trumpist red states currently bashing transgender youth have made it a crime for teachers to tell the truth about racism, sexism, and homophobia in American history past and present. Christian fascist book banning is rife across the land. The war on books that speak of Black, gay, transgender, and female experience is not just a small- town red state thing. Dozens of Chicago public libraries have received bomb threats from fascists.

Could there be a second Trump presidency? Absolutely. On the current trajectory, don’t bet against it. Despite the 91 indictments against him, despite the federal and state-level criminal and civil trials he’s facing, Trump is running neck and neck with Biden in on match-up poll after another. Tens of millions of miltantly partisan Republi-fascists believe his Big Hitlerian Lie about the 2020 election being stolen - lie loaded with white supremacism since it is driven largely by the belief that Biden’s victory is illegitimate because it depended on nonwhite votes.

Close presidential popular votes mean victory for the Republican candidate under the archaic, right-tilted US Electoral College system. The Democrat has to win the popular vote by 5 points under that ridiculous regime. And this time, Dear Leader Trump is coming with an army of “conservative” policy wonks devising grand and detailed schemes for the radical expansion of his authority within and beyond the executive branch (check out “Agenda 47” on Trump’s campaign website and the Heritage Foundation’s recent 900-page “Project 25” playbook Mandate for Leadership).

It “is tempting” but wrong, the New Yorker’s erudite editor David Remnick wrote the other day, “to ignore” and “dismiss” Trump’s fascist outbursts “as inconsequential.” They are, Remnick says, “Trump’s bloody campaign promises” – promises the orange-hued malignancy has every intention of delivering on.

That’s a good point, I think, but I disagree with the liberal Democrat, Obama friend, and Joe Biden apologist Remnick on what it will take to make fascism go away in this country. While I bear no ill will for those who vote “lesser evil” in the nation’s quadrennial electoral extravaganzas (I’ve done it twice in my life), I hold no brief for Remnick and Biden’s bourgeois party. On one issue after another – climate, immigration, abortion rights, war, and more – the dismal dollar-drenched Dems under not-so “communist” (LOL!) Joe have continued to be precisely the same neoliberal era capitalist and imperialist neo-“Weimar party” that I held responsible for enabling, conciliating, and collaborating with Republican neofascism in my aforementioned book This Happened Here.  This is very much as a I predicted in a 2019 essay on Biden’s history and character.

I assume that many of my readers saw yesterday that Biden has brazenly broken another campaign promise by going ahead with the completion of a big section of Trump’s nativist border wall (When does Joe say, “and I’ll make Mexico pay for it?”)  

Biden has rejected asylum claims at a higher rate than Trump.  A big and rising share of the asylum seekers now are Venezuelans, refugees from a country that Biden has been, like his last three predecessors, crushing with economic sanctions. (Biden has just decided to reject Venezuelan asylum applications).

The Biden-trailblazed US-Russia proxy war in Ukraine, replete with the use of US-supplied depleted uranium and cluster bombs, is a lethal inter-imperialist conflict that has combined with the capitalist climate crisis that Biden is helping escalate to push the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock closer to Midnight than it’s ever been.

“The Democratic Party,” says the mission statement of Refuse Fascism (on whose editorial board I sit), “will not stop this nightmare. Trump, fascist Fox News, and the Republi-fascist Party have branded them as enemies and ‘traitors.’ Yet, the Democratic Party will consistently pull to try to work with, conciliate with and collaborate with them. There can be no reconciliation with fascism except on the terms of the fascists. Fascism must be resolutely opposed.”

The lasting defeat of Amerikaner fascism will require radical political and structural change beyond the underlying system that gives rise to fascism.  It’s the same socio-pathological and anarchic system that generates endless imperial war, ecocide, and pandemicide, to mention three other related and mutually reinforcing horsemen of the apocalypse that are stalking the world these days. 

That system is capitalism and mark my words: that system will cancel all prospects for a decent future regardless of how power is distributed between the nation’s two dominant capitalist-imperialist parities – the neoliberal, late bourgeois-democratic Democrats or the neofascist Amerikaner Republicans – going forward. The ecological, epidemiological, and nuclear clocks are ticking.  We can’t postpone a decisive revolutionary confrontation with that underlying system much longer. The chances of building the movement required to overthrow that exterminist oppression system are greater with bourgeois democracy still intact than they are with fascism in power, obviously, so Republi-fascism must of course be resisted and refused.  But it must be resisted and refused in ways far more militant and radical than anything the Democrats are remotely willing to undertake – ways indeed to which the Democrats are in fact militantly opposed. It must be resisted and refused in ways that set new terms for American politics by demonstrating the awesome power of an awakened and mobilized populace in the streets and public squares and in ways that that open masses to the liberating vision of a revolutionary socialist world and way of life beyond the despotism, imperialism, and anarchy of capital and all the oppression systems that go along with capital’s disastrous reign.