On January 6 Three Years Later:

The Trump Republi-Fascist Menace is Alive and Well

A Wannabe Fascist Strongman in Search of a Reichstag Fire, 2017-21

Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021 putsch attempt was unsurprising to those of us who understood from the start that the deranged Trump presidency and base were fascist and therefore ready to trash previously normative bourgeois electoral democracy and rule of law. 

Before the 2016 election, Herr Trump had refused to promise to accept the result if Hillary Clinton was named the winner.  From his earliest days in power, Trump made it clear that he wasn’t trying to gain a second term in the “normal” presidential way, by respectfully advancing policies he hoped might garner enough votes to prevail in 2020.  He was clearly a wannabe president for life looking for his version of the Reichstag Fire, the incident that Adolph Hitler used to declare dictatorial powers in Germany in 1933.

Trump’s fascist essence was clearly discernible in his 2016 campaign – see this and this for two among many examples of observers who understood this in early 2016.  Any lingering doubts should have disappeared after Trump’s response (“good people on both sides”) to the August 2017 white nationalist Unite the Right march and protest in Charlottesville and his response to the summer 2020 George Floyd-Breonna Taylor-Jacob Blake Rebellion, which Trump wanted to squash by deploying the US military in the nation’s streets.  

George Floyd was Trump’s first attempted Reichstag Fire. Soon after came the Trump team’s  attempted long rolling coup against the 2020 presidential election, basic facts of which were exhaustively investigated and made public in 2022 by the US House Select Committee (hereafter the “HSC”) investigating January 6. .

Trump’s Hitlerian and multiply mis-proven claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him was his second big try for a Reichstag moment.  The HSC’s final report noted numerous key aspects of Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Cuz the Guys with the AR-15s Don’t Want to Hurt Me” Trump’s efforts to remain in power over and against not just the popular presidential vote but also the nation’s archaic, right-tilted Electoral College:

·       Trump, the HSC revealed, led “a multi-part conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election." 

·       On the night of the 2020 election and in the weeks after, the HSC found, Trump "purposely disseminated false allegations of fraud related to the 2020 presidential election in order to aid his effort to overturn the election and for purposes of soliciting contributions." The HSC noted that those false claims "provoked his supporters to violence on January 6th."

·       Despite knowing very well that he and his backers had lost dozens of election-related lawsuits and in defiance of counsel from his own advisers to concede, Trump refused to accept the election’s outcome. "Rather than honor his constitutional obligation to 'take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” the HSC reported, “President Trump instead plotted to overturn the election outcome.” 

·       Trump "pressured Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes during Congress' joint session on January 6th," despite "knowing that such an action would be illegal." 

·       Trump "sought to corrupt the U.S. Department of Justice" by trying to recruit DOJ officials to "make purposely false statements and thereby aid his effort to overturn the election effort." Trump “offered the position of Acting Attorney General to Jeff Clark knowing Clark intended to disseminate false information."

·       Trump "unlawfully pressured state officials and legislators to change the results of the election in their states,” the HSC noted.

·       Trump "oversaw an effort to obtain and transmit false electoral certificates to Congress and the National Archives” and "pressured members of Congress to object to valid slates of electors from several states.” He "purposely verified false information filed in federal court." 

·       And then, in the name of the noxious Leviathan Lie of a Stolen Election, the mother of all Trump’s tens of thousands of fabrications, the tangerine- tinted tyrant called his supporters to Washington for Jan. 6, directing them to “fight” to "take back" their country despite his knowledge that some of his fascist supporters were armed. "Knowing that a violent attack on the Capitol was underway and knowing that his words would incite further violence,” the HSC reported, “Donald Trump purposely sent a social media message publicly condemning Vice President Pence at 2:24 p.m. on January 6th.”

·       Trump knew that has supporters were engaged in mass violence meant to block Congressional certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory at the US Capitol but "refused repeated requests over a multiple hour period that he instruct his violent supporters to disperse and leave the Capitol, and instead watched the violent attack unfold on television.”

·       Trump ignored intelligence community and law enforcement warnings of
“planning for potential violence on January 6th.”

·       Trump failed to use his “authority and responsibility to direct deployment of the National Guard in the District of Columbia, but never gave any order to deploy the National Guard on January 6th or on any other day."

The HSC (whose leader Jamie Raskin [D-MD] called January 6 rioters “fascist traitors”) recommended that the Justice Department investigate and prosecute Trump for numerous federal crimes including insurrection.

The Menace is Alive and Well

This was the Trump and Trumpism that Refuse Fascism (formed immediately after Trump’s election in 2016) had been warning Americans and the world about for four years, arguing that the “normal” bourgeois-electoral and constitutional constraints were insufficient to defeat Trumpism-fascism. Refuse Fascism (RF) spent four years calling for mass resistance in the streets and public squares not only to dispatch the man Noam Chomsky rightly (in January of 2020) called “the most dangerous criminal in human history” (Chomsky was strangely unable to call Trump a fascist) from power but to set radical new terms for US politics by demonstrating the power of a mobilized people determined to take on both the fascisized Republican Party and its cringing Weimar-like enabler and conciliator the Democratic Party. 

But all’s well that ends well, right?

Surely Biden’s election and Trump’s ultimate flight from the White House exactly two weeks after the  Capitol Riot prove that RF was engaged in “boy who cried wolf” warnings far beyond the actual Amerikaner fascist menace, no?  

We have seen that the normal bourgeois democratic constitutional, legal, and electoral constraints have in fact held along with the common democratic decency of “we the people,” yes?  

Know any other good jokes?

January 6 wasn’t the end of the game at all for the Republi-fascists, it turns out.  They were just getting started!

Here we are three years to the day after January 6, the attempted Trump-led physical overthrow of previously normative US rule of law and peacefully accepted election outcomes. And guess what? The Malignant One who led the putsch attempt is by far and away the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. Herr Trump has used the threat of  political and violent retribution from his deranged base to eliminate opposition to neo-fascism within his own party. All ten of the US House Republicans who voted for his impeachment after January 6 have been run out of power by the Trump  movement. The current House speaker is a Christian Fascist election denier who doesn’t go for the separation of church and state.  

Trump is polling considerably ahead of the bumbling, listless, and unpopular warmonger and eco-cidal corporatist “Genocide Joe” Biden in the seven “swing states” that absurdly determine US presidential election outcomes under the archaic, democracy-flunking right-tilted Electoral College. It is well understood that the Democratic Party presidential candidate must beat his Republican opponent by 4 to 5 points in the overall popular vote to retain or gain the White House. And guess what? Joe “I Mean It!” Biden leads the fascist menace in just three of the most recent twelve reputable national match-up polls.

Bearing in mind that the listless incumbent would likely have lost the 2020 election fair and square but for the emergence of Covid-19 that year, Biden is looking like a dead duck ala 1980 Jimmy Carter this election cycle. According to USA Today:     

“With the 2024 presidential election 11 months away, Democrats are rattled by polls showing Biden trailing former President Donald Trump in a hypothetical rematch and worried Biden's legislative accomplishments − including historic funding for infrastructure and climate and helping haven't resonated with key voters…Meanwhile, Biden, who turned 81 in November, hasn't silenced concerns about his age. In an especially troubling sign for Biden,…voters of color − Democrats' most important and reliable voting bloc − are unenthused, and in some cases unconvinced, about the president. A poll from HarrisX/The Messenger last week found only 59% of Black voters and 45% of Hispanic voters said they would vote for Biden in a race against Trump. Biden won support from 92% of Black voters and 69% of Latino voters in 2020…For Biden to win next November, he will have to motivate a Democratic base that doesn't appear excited by his candidacy. A CNN poll in September found two-thirds of Democrats don't want Biden to run again, and 70% cite his age or concerns about his mental sharpness, health and ability to handle the job.”

Biden’s big January 6 Valley Forge speech (moved to the afternoon of Friday January 5th thanks to imminent extreme weather on the Mid Atlantic coast) calling out Trump as a threat to democracy will fall on largely deaf ears as Americans try to keep up with inflation. Biden’s record of serving the wealthy Few in defiance of the popular majority while investing vast US resources in bloody wars including a brazen racist genocide in Gaza renders his egalitarian rhetoric transparently inauthentic.  As one correspondent wrote me, mocking Biden’s coming address: “ ‘Ok, I’m covered in the blood of innocent Palestinians, but Trump is a threat to this the greatest democracy in the history of the world.’ Accepting the choice of Trump or Biden is moral bankruptcy and signing off on a death certificate for the planet and the hope for humanity.”

It gets worse. Herr Trump is running this time not just with Steve Bannon and a few revanchist plutocrats whispering in his ear as in 2016 but now with a vast army of Republican/Republi-fascist policy institutions who have worked up “Project 25,” a giant and detailed agenda for the  Christian white nationalist makeover of the federal government.  The plan was developed by the “mainstream conservative” think tank the Heritage Foundation in collaboration with “eighty partners including Turning Point USA led by the sick Christian fascist Charlie Kirk; the not-so Conservative Partnership Institute including former Trump chief of staff and coup plotter Mark Meadows as senior partner; the Center for Renewing America led by former Trump-appointee Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought; and America First Legal led by former top fascist Trump  advisor Stephen Miller.”

Trump will make loyalty to Him as Dear Leader the top criteria for holding positions in the vast US executive branch from cabinet positions and agency heads down through regular office personnel.

And Trump is now making little effort to hide his fascist sentiments. He is openly channeling Hitler in public, neo-Nazi sentiments that get (what ought to be) a shocking pass from his own party, including all his top if distant contenders for the Republican presidential nomination.  Trump’s 2024 campaign rallies open with singing by incarcerated January 6 rioters, who he calls “patriots” and promises to pardon once he returns to power.  

The Trump 2024 campaign includes a vowsto crush political enemies, who he calls “vermin,” to suppress independent media and to deploy the military to quash protest. He tells his fascist hate rallies that he will be their “retribution,” their vengeance, and that he wants to deport all socialists, Marxists, and communists (Trump’s “vermin”) from the country.  He absurdly calls the capitalist-imperialist Democrats “radical left” and ludicrously claims that the Marxist “radical left” has taken over the American educational system.

Trump has called for the extra-judicial execution of suspected shoplifters.  His campaign pledges to build giant concentration camps for “illegal” migrants and asylum-seekers.

Trump says his former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair should have been executed for reassuring China that the US would not start a nuclear war after January 6.

Trump promises to invade Mexico and says he wants to be a “dictator for one day” (whatever the F that means) because “I want to build the wall and drill, drill, drill.”

And now we have the Hitler fan Trump openly channeling Mein Kampf by claiming that non-white immigrants are spoiling white American pedigree and stock – “poisoning our blood.”  Also straight out of the Nazi  playbook is Trump’s palingenetic nationalist “stabbed in the back” rhetoric claiming that the biggest threat to the “greatness of America” is “internal” – the supposedly “radical Left Democrats”/ “vermin.”  After calling socialists and communists “vermin” in New Hampshire last month, Trump channeled Hitler and Mussolini say saying that “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

What do you do with “vermin”?  You exterminate them. It’s an eliminationist word choice with full-on genocidal implications particularly in light of Hitler and the Nazis’ use of the term to justify the Holocaust.

Here is a useful translation for the meaning of Trump and Trumpism’s oft-used phrase “America First,” the name of a US fascist movement in the late 1930s: crush all internal opposition and then invade the American nation of Mexico first, before gathering forces to wage war farther away and wherever our Chosen One says.  (Trumpenlefties who fantasize that Trump is an anti-imperial isolationist are engaging in childish buffonery).

Speaking of crushing your internal enemies, this is what Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung had to say about those who observed the classically fascist nature of Trump’s “vermin” talk: “Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion… are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, and their sad, miserable existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

Meanwhile, the federal judiciary from the Supreme Court down is stocked with Christian fascist Trump appointees, the 2024 Senate election line up favors Republi-fascist takeover of the nation’s upper legislative chamber, and 20-plus “red”/Trumpist states make revanchist policy in abject defiance of majority national opinion on numerous key policy matters including abortion rights, gun safety, voting rights, and the right of children and young adults to receive proper schooling about racism and sexism in American history and society past and presen.  The Republi-fascist majority in the US House has just collaborated with bipartisan Zionists to force the resignation to two presidents of elite ruling class Ivy League universities (Penn and Harvard) on false charges of anti-Semitism.

The Rule of Law to Save the Day?

Oh but surely all the great criminal prosecutions will undo Adolf Trump’s bid for a second presidency, yes?! Yay rule of law!!

Not so fast. The Senate could and should have kept the orange fascist maniac (who is hated by most of the former staff in his first presidency) off the 2024 ballot by voting to convict him after the US House impeached him for inciting the January 6 Capitol Riot. But the upper legislative body devised by the Founders to check potential democracy failed to do the obviously right bourgeois-democratic thing thanks to its right-wing slant, its Republican members’ fear (both electoral and physical) of the fascist Trump base, and the US Constitution’s requirement of a 2/3 majority to convict.

None of the charges that Trump is facing from state prosecutors and federal special prosecutor Jack Smith would invalidate his 2024 presidential bid. Smith failed to indict the insurrectionist Trump for insurrection, a charge that would in theory cancel his candidacy under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment if it brough a conviction before the election.

The charges against Trump so far in New York (campaign finance violations), Georgia (a racketeering trial on the Trump campaign’s attempted 2020-21 election manipulation in that state), federal court in Florida (criminal theft and retention of classified documents and obstruction of justice), federal court in Washington DC (election subversion, election interference and more) have (along with fraud and rape lawsuits against him in New York City) if anything been a boon to Herr Donald’s campaign. They are fundraising gold for him and help feed his core narrative claiming that he is being selectively prosecuted and persecuted by a “radical Left” “deep state” trying to de-rail “democracy” – this even as he promises to install an authoritarian regime that cancels the American republic.

The federal classified documents verdict and perhaps trial is being effectively delayed until after the 2024 election by a demented, Trump-appointed federal judge (Aileen Cannon). The big Georgia case will not yield a verdict until after the election and the same likely goes for the New York campaign finance case. The Trump-created Christian fascist US Supreme Court may well soon seriously cripple Jack Smith’s Washington DC-based election interference (“January 6”) prosecution of Trump. If and when Trump regains, the federal cases against him will vanish. He will have no problem nullifying any and all state cases against him.

History could well record that the war criminal and fossil capitalist Biden’s gutless Attorney General Merrick Garland flunked Rule of Law School by waiting far too long to appoint a prosecutor to punish Trump for trying to overthrow what was left of US bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy in 2020-21. The basic facts of Trump’s attempted fascist coup, which culminated in an actual mass physical assault on the US Congress (an assault that Trump wanted to be led by fascists permitted to carry military assault weapons) were well known at the time. They were impressively exposed and detailed in the US House of Representative hearings in the summer of 2022 and in a sweeping US House report issued at the end of that year (see above).  

I am partial to current liberal efforts to keep Trump off state election ballots on 14^th Amendment grounds. These ballot bans could be useful when it comes to organizing mass resistance to a second Trump White House. Still, the bans require US Supreme Court approval to be enforced and such approval seems highly unlikely.

Doubling Down on Societal and Institutional Failure

It is now fairly common to hear Trump accurately if belatedly decried as a fascist in certain wings of US mainstream media.  It’s kind of hard to avoid the association of Trump with the “radical” “F-word” when he’s calling his enemies “vermin” and channeling Hitler’s blood and soil and “stabbed in the back” rhetoric. But all Joy Reid, “Morning Joe,” Rachel Maddow, Michelle Goldberg, The Atlantic, Laurence Tribe, Jamie Raskin, and Joe Biden et al have to offer in terms of what is to be done about fascism is doubling down on the same old failing, played-out bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy and the underlying capitalist-imperialist order that that pretend form of popular sovereignty reflects and protects.

We will not vote, prosecute, publish, boycott, Op-Ed, or Instagram- (or Substack-) post our way past the fascist Amerikaner menace.  It will take a remarkable new people’s movement beneath and beyond all of that not only to beat back fascism but to confront the underlying oppression and exploitation system(s) that gives rise to fascism in the first place