Rule Through Fear

Six Takes on Intimidation and Violence as Underpinnings of the Trump47 Fascist Regime

“I am your retribution”

At some point this year I think I saw an interview in which the former Russian dissident and current New York Times columnist Masha Gessen said you know you are living under an authoritarian state when the retribution and punishment from those in state power makes people seriously afraid to speak, write, and otherwise act in accord with their beliefs. They were talking about the Trump regime.

Here it might be useful to distinguish different levels of retributory threat. Moving from lowest to highest, they include exclusion from participation in decision-making roles, private criticism, public criticism and shaming, cancelling, loss of employment (job or promotion) opportunities, demotion, firing, de-funding, surveillance, prosecution, incarceration, and actual and even murderous physical violence against oneself and/or one’s family members.

All of these and other threats are constantly in play to some degree in any society based like ours (a capitalist social order) on class, race, gender, national, and imperial oppression and exploitation. (I’ll never forget a fellow history professor sheepishly telling me in the fall of 2005 that he occasionally dared to tell his students that he personally opposed the mass murderous and monumentally criminal US invasion of Iraq.) In what Gessen calls an authoritarian state, the threats are dramatically elevated and often include very real threats of violence against people thought to present obstacles to the reigning regime’s authority. One among many examples of this is the significant number of journalists Trump’s “good friend” Vladimir Putin has liquidated with impunity on the path to making formerly/briefly independent Russian media into an authoritarianism-normalizing organ of Russian state power.

That such menace and fear is part of life under the deranged fascist lunatic and racist kidnapping champion Trump47 should be clear as day. I do not have time now or space here to list all the different examples of the menace and retribution the orange fugitive slave-catcher-in-chief is inflicting across US government and society, including our educational institutions, political parties, and media. But I do want to highlight six parts of the “authoritarian” Trump “story” that I think deserve special mention.

First, it’s not for nothing that Trump pardoned 1500-plus January 6 criminals and commuted the sentences of the nation’s top two paramilitary fascist leaders on his very first day in office. This was a clear message that he intends to prominently include the threat of violence from the “worst of the worst” parts of the MAGA Amerikaner base in his toolbox of rule.

No doubt many of his January 6 putschists are being accepted into the expanding terrorist wing of government known as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – Trump’s 21^st Century Gestapo along with its junior partner Border Patrol.

Second, Trump and his fellow top Republifascist allies’ reckless and incendiary rhetoric about next Saturday’s No Kings Day II protests, calling them “insurrectionist,” “terrorist,” “Marxist” (I wish), and about “hating America,” is an endorsement and provocation of violence – state and/or extra-state violence– against mainstream bourgeois constitutional rights of free speech and public assembly.

Third, it’s not just Democrats, liberals, progressives, and leftists (“radical” and not-so radical) that the Trump regime seeks to intimidate. The targets include elected Republicans and other right-wingers who might dare to voice any opposition to anything Dear Leader Trump does or says. It is by now routine to hear Washington insiders remark that Trump’s lockstep control over nearly every Republican in Congress and state government reflects those legislators’ fear not just of “getting primaried” (losing primary races to more fully Trumpified candidates) but also of literal physical violence against themselves and their families. It is not far-fetched to think that Republican members of the judiciary (including Supreme Court justices) have reason to fear the same. Fascists tolerate no dissent first and foremost in their own party (Google up “the Night of the Long Knives” for some historical context from the Third Reich).

Fourth, Trump may well be back in power a second time thanks to this fear. If Mitt Romney and others high in the Republican (now Republi-fascist) Party are to be believed (and I do), the US Senate would have convicted Trump after the US House impeached him for January 6, bringing the upper Congressional chamber’s vote to the two-thirds supermajority required for conviction but for Republican Senators’ fear of violence from Trump’s MAGA enforcers. Conviction would have prevented the deranged fascist sociopath Trump47 from running again in 2024.

Think about that: the debased tyrant and his vicious fascist coordinators (Stephen “the Storm” Miller and Herr Vought among other neo-Nazis) would not be back in the saddle inflicting a second and far worse Trumpocalypse except for right-wing Senators’ fear of MAGA bloodshed in January of 2021.

Fifth, the fear extends into the upper ranks of the US bourgeoisie, many of whose members’ grotesque capitulation to the “madness of King Don” reflects fear perhaps not so much of violence as of punishment through various executive branch agencies (the FTC, the FCC, the IRS, Treasury, the Commerce Department, defense/war contracts, etc.) and presidential shaming.

Sixth, something strangely underestimated and too poorly remembered (despite its recency and great significance) contributes to Trump’s freedom to use intimidation, including physical intimidation, to keep people in line under his widely hated regime. I am referring to the Christian fascist Supreme Court’s July 1, 2024 decision in the aptly named Trump v. The Unted States ruling. This epic dark judgement gave Trump blanket forever immunity from prosecution for any crime he has committed or commits past, present, and future for as long as that crime bears the imprimatur of “official presidential duties.” This was and is a blank check for authoritarian impunity, basically “a Reichstag Fire ruling.” And while it is true that the decision did not immunize federal agents who carry out criminal orders at Mein Trumpf’s command, the orange-sprayed wannabe strongman for life possesses the constitutional pardon power he used on day one of his second presidency to release more than 1500 January 6 thugs from jail and prison.

Fear as part of our political lives today? Look at the following reflection from the freelance writer Howard Lisnoff on the left Website CounterPunch:

“Nothing will change on or after October 18th, but the ‘Refuse Fascism’ nonviolent protest planned for November 5, 2025 in Washington, DC, which strategists hope will begin the fall of Trump’s fascism offers some hope for change….Refuse Fascism[‘s] noble words and plans …deserve wide support, but a host of issues and dangers may be involved in the just cause of fighting fascism, that Refuse Fascism rightly holds is ‘upon us.’ The question for November 5, 2025, is to what extremes the US government will go to quell protest? The military presence in DC and elsewhere may be a harbinger of what’s to come…Will the Trump administration seek to make martyrs out of those going to DC to protest fascism?…Trump seems ready to cross the tripwire and create all-out chaos with police and military repression on the streets of the Capitol city. And what’s to restrain him with a compliant Supreme Court, Congress, and the US military? During the height of the anti-war movement, Richard Nixon was not nearly as out-of-control as Trump is today.”

Jesus Fascist Christ. Okay, but Lisnoff might have noted the far greater risk involved in not protesting in giant numbers to bring about the rapid fall of the Trump regime: the consolidation of fascist rule in the world’s most dangerous and lethal country, leading to the potential cancellation of all prospects for a decent human future amidst a climate catastrophe in a world shock full of nuclear weapons.

I also have a bone to pick with Gessen: The Trump regime is more and worse than merely authoritarian. I am serious when I describe it as fascist, as has thankfully become common among sentient and politically and historically informed humans. The Trump regime and movement seek a new dictatorial form of governance beyond previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law not just for the sake of power in and of itself but in order to impose virulent white supremacism, toxic misogynist patriarchy, and xenophobic and palingenetic ultra-nationalism, all in the name of “traditional values.”