Donald Trump

Trump’s Cruelty Puts the Community Where Our Children Find Healing Under Threat

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Original article by Sarah Zogby republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

A protester holds a placard outside of the Pennsylvania Capitol during a #50501 protest on Wednesday, February 5, 2025.
 (Photo by Paul Weaver/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

If anyone celebrating this attack against transgender people were to spend time with the parents, children, and doctors affected, their feelings might change.

President Donald Trump’s executive order prohibiting any hospital that receives federal funds from practicing gender-affirming care callously disregards the needs of children who are both gender and neurodiverse, putting them and their families at risk. If anyone celebrating this order were to spend time with the parents, children, and doctors affected, their feelings might change. They should meet Pearl who before receiving treatment was failing out of high school, contemplating suicide, and rarely left the house, and is now attending community college, teaching herself another language, and has developed deep friendships. Or the mathematically-gifted Ellen who after two deep depressive episodes in the last three years, finds safety, companionship, and stability in her gender support group. Or Jacob, a role model to all that meet him, who is attending college out of state and just performed in a concert on campus.

For three years my husband and I have been part of a support group with the parents of these children, who range in age from 14 to 25. Many are now scrambling for information to determine how far the order extends; where one can continue to receive care; what care, if any, the doctors they’ve trusted, relied on, and put faith in for years can still provide. Parents are counting prescription refills, checking if pharmacies will still honor them, searching for providers not impacted by the order, and compiling a list of states they could afford to travel to if other options don’t materialize. Some fear the order will destroy their children’s delicate mental health. Others fear it is a death sentence.

Our “community” includes some of the most thoughtful and loving caregivers I have ever known. Our children, who all have autism spectrum disorder (ASD), see and experience the world through a different yet remarkable lens. While some focus on their deficits, we see their creativity, honesty, strong sense of justice, loyalty, and enhanced focus as superpowers. But none of us deny that what makes them unique also presents challenges, including struggling with social interactions, poor executive functioning skills, or developmental delays. One challenge they all share is dealing with their gender diversity.

These are parents not boogeymen. These children are lovingly cared for and listened to, not abused.

Those with ASD are three to six times more likely than the general population to be gender diverse1—the umbrella term that includes non-binary and transgender. On top of their social, developmental, or communication issues, the added stress of feeling uncomfortable in their own bodies deeply impacts their well-being. We often talk about their “dark periods” when they’ve experienced debilitating depression, suicidal ideation, and elevated anxiety. Like any good parent, we sought advice from trusted medical professionals who provide the standard of care supported by leading medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Our children see a multidisciplinary team of fully licensed, board-certified, highly trained pediatric specialists at a world-renowned hospital. These neuropsychologists, psychiatrists, gynecologists, and social workers coordinate care plans tailored to each child, considering their unique developmental, mental, and emotional health needs. Every child is evaluated regularly over extended periods of time. The medical care they receive may include mental health treatment, executive functioning courses, and in-person or online groups where they play games like D&D and socialize with like-minded youth. Some children who are past puberty receive hormone therapy after an extensive evaluation process. No child under the age of 18 is provided with gender-affirming surgery.

Parents in our group run the gamut. Some struggled to accept their child’s gender diversity or ASD diagnosis. Some oppose using hormone therapy, despite their child’s repeated demands, because they believe their child couldn’t handle the responsibility. Some have once needed to hospitalize their suicidal children, but have watched them flourish since starting them on hormone therapy. All struggling and questioning. But no care decisions are made without extensive consultation with their doctors, whose paramount concern is that our children are happy, healthy, productive, and thriving.

My child does not receive hormone therapy or other treatments outlined in the order. I do not, cannot, fully understand the magnitude of their pain. All I can do is stand witness to this action’s cruelty. These are parents not boogeymen. These children are lovingly cared for and listened to, not abused. These doctors have dedicated their lives to improving the mental and physical health of some of the most vulnerable among us. They are saving them, not experimenting on them. We are all good, intelligent, informed, and, now, scared people, whose greatest concern is the welfare of our children.

Editor’s Note: To protect privacy all names and identifying details of those mentioned in this piece have been changed.

Original article by Sarah Zogby republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Donald Trump decrees forbidden terms denying sexual diversity
Donald Trump decrees forbidden terms denying sexual diversity
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Continue ReadingTrump’s Cruelty Puts the Community Where Our Children Find Healing Under Threat

Media Afraid to Call Ethnic Cleansing by Its Name

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Original article by Gregory Shupak republished from FAIR under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

News outlets often preferred euphemisms like “displacing” or “resettling” to the more accurate “ethnic cleansing, as in this CBC headline (2/4/25).

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump said that the US will “take over the Gaza Strip” and “own” it for the “long-term” (AP, 2/5/25), and that its Palestinian inhabitants will be “permanently” exiled (AP, 2/4/25). Subsequently, when reporters asked Trump whether Palestinians would have the right to return to Gaza under his plan, he said “no” (BBC, 2/10/25).

After Trump’s remarks, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (Reuters, 2/5/25) said “it is essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing.”

Navi Pillay (Politico, 2/9/25), chair of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, said that

Trump is woefully ignorant of international law and the law of occupation. Forcible displacement of an occupied group is an international crime, and amounts to ethnic cleansing.

Human Rights Watch (2/5/25) said that, if Trump’s plan were implemented, it would “amount to an alarming escalation of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.”

Clarity in the minority

Amnesty International (2/5/25) called Trump’s proposal to forcibly transfer the population of Gaza a flagrant violation of international law”—but the phrase “international law” was usually missing from news reports on the plan.

I used the news media aggregator Factiva to survey coverage of Trump’s remarks from the day that he first made them, February 4 through February 12. In that period, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post combined to run 145 pieces with the words “Gaza” and “Trump.” Of these, 19 contained the term “ethnic cleansing” or a variation on the phrase. In other words, 87% of the articles these outlets published on Trump’s plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza chose not to call it ethnic cleansing.

A handful of other pieces used language that captures the wanton criminality of Trump’s scheme reasonably well. Three articles used “forced displacement,” or slight deviations from the word, while five others used “expel” and another nine used “expulsion.” Two of the articles said “forced transfer,” or a minor variation of that. In total, therefore, 38 of the 145 articles (26 percent) employ “ethnic cleansing” or the above-mentioned terms to communicate to readers that Trump wants to make Palestinians leave their homes so that the US can take Gaza from them.

Furthermore, the term “international law” appears in only 27 of the 145 articles, which means that 81% failed to point out to readers that what Trump is proposing is a “flagrant violation of international law” (Amnesty International, 2/5/25).

A ‘plan to free Palestinians’

A Wall Street Journal op-ed (2/5/25) hailed “Trump’s Plan to Free Palestinians From Gaza”—in the same sense that the Trail of Tears “freed” the Cherokee from Georgia.

Several commentators in the corporate media endorsed Trump’s racist fever dream, in some cases through circumlocutions and others quite bluntly. Elliot Kaufman (Wall Street Journal, 2/5/25) called Trump’s imperial hallucination a “plan to free Palestinians from Gaza.”

While the Journal’s editorial board (2/5/25) called what Trump wants to do “preposterous,” the authors nonetheless put “ethnic cleansing” in scare quotes, as if that’s not an apt description. The paper asked, “Is his idea so much worse than the status quo that the rest of the world is offering?”

Sadanand Dhume (Wall Street Journal, 2/12/25) wondered why “If Indians and Pakistanis Can Relocate, Why Can’t Gazans?” To bolster his case, Dhume noted that 2 million people died as a result of the India-Pakistan partition, and cited other shining moments in 20th century history, such as Uganda’s expulsion of Indians in the 1970s. That these authors implicitly or explicitly advocate Trump’s plan for mass, racist violence demonstrates that they see Palestinians as subhuman impediments to US/Israeli designs on Palestine and the region.

Bret Stephens (New York Times, 2/11/25) wrote that

Trump also warned Jordan and Egypt that he would cut off American aid if they refused to accept Gazan refugees, adding that those refugees may not have the right to return to Gaza. The president’s threats are long overdue.

Ethnically cleansing the West Bank

Al Jazeera (2/26/24): “Settler violence is a central part of the Israeli state’s policy and plan to ethnically cleanse the occupied Palestinian territory.”

A similar pattern exists in coverage of the West Bank, where evidence of ethnic cleansing is hard to miss, but corporate media appears to be finding ways to do just that.

Legal scholars Alice Panepinto and Triestino Mariniello wrote an article for Al Jazeera (2/26/24) headlined “Settler Violence: Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing Plan for the West Bank”:

Supported by the Israeli security forces and aided and abetted by the government, settler violence is a central part of the Israeli state’s policy and plan to ethnically cleanse the occupied Palestinian territory in order to establish full sovereignty over it and enable settlement expansion.

The authors noted that, at the time they wrote their article, 16 Palesti nian communities in the West Bank had been forcibly transferred since October 7, 2023.

In October 2024, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese found that throughout the Gaza genocide, “Israeli forces and violent settlers” have “escalated patterns of ethnic cleansing and apartheid in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.” In the first 12 months after October 7,  Albanese reported, “at least 18 communities were depopulated under the threat of lethal force, effectively enabling the colonization of large tracts” of the West Bank.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (2/10/25) said that Israel’s “latest ethnic cleansing efforts” entail “forcibly uproot[ing] thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank,” accompanied by

the bombing and burning of residential buildings and infrastructure, the cutting off of water, electricity and communications supplies, and a killing policy that has resulted in the deaths of 30 Palestinians…over the course of 19 days.

According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) (2/10/25), Israeli military operations in Jenin camp, which expanded to Tulkarm, Nur Shams and El Far’a, displaced 40,000 Palestinian refugees between January 21 and February 10.

Unnoteworthy violations

I used Factiva to search New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post coverage and found that, since Panepinto and Mariniello’s analysis was published just under a year ago, the three newspapers have combined to run 693 articles that mention the West Bank. Thirteen of these include some form of the term “ethnic cleansing,” a mere 2%. Nine more articles use “forced displacement,” or a variation on the phrase, 31 use “expel,” 11 use “expulsion” and five use some variety of “forced transfer.”

Thus, 69 of the 693 Times, Journal and Post articles that mention the West Bank use these terms to clearly describe people being violently driven from their homes—just 10%. Many of the articles that address the West Bank are also about Gaza, so the 69 articles using this language don’t necessarily apply it to the West Bank.

Of the 693 Times, Journal and Post pieces that refer to the West Bank, 106 include the term “international law.” Evidently, the authors and editors who worked on 85% of the papers’ articles that discuss the West Bank did not consider it noteworthy that Israel is engaged in egregious violations of international law in the territory.

‘Battling local militants’

The Washington Post (2/2/25) captioned this image of IDF bombing with Israel’s claim that it was “destroying buildings used by Palestinian militants.”

Rather than equip readers to understand the larger picture in which events in the West Bank unfold, much of the coverage treats incidents in the territory discretely. For instance, the Wall Street Journal (1/22/25) published a report on Israel’s late January attacks on the West Bank. In the piece’s 18th paragraph, it cited the Palestinian Authority saying the Israeli operations “displaced families and destroyed civilian properties.” In the 24th paragraph, the article also quoted UNRWA director Roland Friedrich, saying that Jenin had become “nearly uninhabitable,” and that “some 2,000 families have been displaced from the area since mid-December.” Palestinians being driven from their homes are an afterthought for the article’s authors, who do nothing to put this forced displacement in the longer-term context of Israel’s US-backed ethnic cleansing.

A Washington Post  report (2/2/25) on Jenin says in its first paragraph that the fighting is occurring “where [Israeli] troops have been battling local militants.” The article then describes Palestinian “homes turned to ash and rubble, cars destroyed and small fires still burning amid the debris.” It cited the Palestinian Health Ministry noting that “at least five people were killed in Israeli strikes in the Jenin area, including a 16-year-old.”

Establishing a “troops vs. militants” frame at the outset of the article suggested that that is the lens through which the death and destruction in Jenin should be understood, rather than one in which a racist colonial enterprise is seeking to ethnically cleanse the Indigenous population resisting the initiative.

The rights of ‘neighbors’

This New York Times piece (2/4/25) acknowledges that Israeli settlements have “steadily eroded the land accessible to Palestinians”—but doesn’t call this process ethnic cleansing.

The New York Times (2/4/25) published an article on Republican bills that would require US government documents to refer to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” the name that expansionist Zionists prefer. The report discusses how Trump’s return to office “has emboldened supporters of Israeli annexation of the occupied territory.”

The piece notes that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have “settled” the West Bank since Israel occupied it in 1967, and that Palestinians living there have fewer rights than their Israeli “neighbors.” The author points out that “the growing number and size of the settlements have steadily eroded the land accessible to Palestinians.”

Yet the article somehow fails to mention a crucial part of this dynamic, namely Israel violently displacing Palestinians from their West Bank homes. Leaving out that vital information fails means that readers are not a comprehensive account of the ethnic cleansing backdrop against which the Republican bills are playing out.

Recent coverage of Gaza and the West Bank illustrates that, while corporate media occasionally outright call for expelling Palestinians from their land, more often the way these outlets support ethnic cleansing is by declining to call it ethnic cleansing.

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Original article by Gregory Shupak republished from FAIR under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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Continue ReadingMedia Afraid to Call Ethnic Cleansing by Its Name

‘Vulnerable Children’ at Risk as Trump Halts Legal Aid for Unaccompanied Migrant Youth

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Original article by Jessica Corbett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Unaccompanied minors are grouped apart from families waiting to be processed by U.S. Border Patrol agents near the Mexican border on April 10, 2021 in La Joya, Texas. (Photo: John Moore/Getty Images)

The move was denounced by one immigrant rights advocate as “an affront to American values.”

Migrant rights advocates are forcefully denouncing the Trump administration’s move this week to cut off legal services for unaccompanied immigrant children.

Multiple organizations said Tuesday that they had received a “stop-work order” emailed from the U.S. Department of the Interior. Among them was Acacia Center for Justice. CBS News‘ Camilo Montoya-Galvez shared a partly redacted copy on social media.

“Acacia’s Unaccompanied Children Program provides legal representation to over 26,000 children in and released from Office of Refugee Resettlement custody, protecting children from trafficking, abuse, and exploitation, helping immigration courts run smoother, and ensuring a modicum of due process, so that children navigating the immigration system alone understand their rights and legal obligations,” the group’s executive director, Shaina Aber, said in a Tuesday statement.

“This decision flies in the face of ensuring children who have been trafficked or are at risk of trafficking have child-friendly legal representatives protecting their legal rights and interests,” Aber continued. “The administration’s decision to suspend this program undermines due process, disproportionately impacts vulnerable children, and puts children who have already experienced severe trauma at risk for further harm or exploitation.”

Immigrant Defenders Law Center president and CEO Lindsay Toczylowski similarly said Tuesday that “the safety and welfare of children in government custody should be the primary concern of our elected leaders. Today’s decision by the Trump administration to eliminate access to counsel for 26,000 children is an affront to American values. The Trump administration is abandoning children for the sake of politics and leaving kids to fend for themselves against our complex immigration system.”

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According to Mother Jones, in addition to causing about 26,000 children to lose their legal representation—absent outside funding—the new order will lead to about 100,000 kids “missing out on programs designed to educate them about their rights.”

President Donald Trump is known globally for forcibly separating migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border during his first term and last year campaigned on various harsh immigration policies, including mass deportations and ending birthright citizenship. Since returning to office last month, the Republican has taken steps to enact his anti-immigrant agenda.

“Trump’s decision to slash a 20-year-old program meant to safeguard the rights of the most vulnerable among us will only cause more chaos in our immigration courts and violates our commitment to children’s safety,” said Toczylowski. “We will continue to fight for their right to legal representation and to uphold our ethical and professional obligations. We urge the government to restore services immediately to protect children’s rights. Our government will be judged by how it treats children in its care. By all standards, this administration is failing them and self-inflicting a black eye as the rest of the world watches.”

National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) executive director Mary Meg McCarthy said Tuesday that “the Trump administration continues to choose politics over the rule of law and cruelty over humane treatment of children.” She also said that “this denial of congressionally appropriated funding violates federal law,” and mirrors Trump’s “mass firings and funding cuts of essential programs and agencies across the U.S. government.”

As McCarthy explained:

Decades ago, Congress passed the bipartisan Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) that recognized the unique vulnerability of children who travel alone to seek protection in the United States. The TVPRA codified the federal government’s obligation to ensure these children have legal representation so they do not face the risk of deportation without due process. Most unaccompanied children are eligible for permanent status in the United States under current laws. Attorneys help them safeguard their rights under U.S. law, connect them to essential services, and shield them from exploitation and trafficking

[…]

Last month, NIJC and other legal service providers successfully sued the Trump administration following the unlawful stoppage of another congressionally funded legal service program. The administration’s failure yet again to uphold its legal and ethical duties does not eliminate NIJC attorneys’ ethical obligations to the hundreds of children we’ve committed to represent. We call on members of Congress to vocally oppose this egregious abuse of power by the executive branch.

The Michigan Immigrant Rights Center wrote in a lengthy email about the order that “MIRC condemns this cruel action from the Trump administration, designed to inflict further suffering on vulnerable children and families,” including victims of labor trafficking and child abuse.

MIRC also noted that “abruptly terminating statutorily mandated services violates the TVPRA, as well as the government’s clear obligations to children that it has otherwise agreed to during litigation, including the Flores Settlement Agreement (FSA) and the relatively recent Ms. L v. ICE settlement designed to prevent family separation, among other critical protections.”

Original article by Jessica Corbett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

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Power-mad orange gasbag Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
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The UK could be at the forefront of the climate revolution. Here’s how

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Keir Starmer’s Labour Party once seemed focused on the climate. Not any more | Leon Neal/Pool/AFP

Original article by Paul Rogers republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. 

There are plenty of ways we could enter a new global crisis. One might stem from a pandemic, a cyber attack, or any one of the current wars escalating out of control. Already underway, though, is the crisis of accelerating climate change.

That unfolding global catastrophe has long existed but is becoming more urgent week by week, as climate scientists issue increasingly strident warnings over what is happening and we see hard evidence in the form of extreme weather around the world.

The crisis is not remotely being met by the changes required to turn things around, and certainly not by the essential rapid economic decarbonisation.

The one saving grace is that there may still be time to make the changes, which raises the question of whether individual countries can push them forward. In a previous openDemocracy column, I briefly explored this question in relation to the UK, which was thought to be in a strong position to push change last July, when the apparently climate-focussed Labour Party had just won the general election.

Yet within a few months, there was bitter disappointment among climate activists and many others as Labour’s plans were scaled down and replaced by the dominant theme of ‘growth at almost any price’.

But, still, it is worth taking a more thorough look at what could be done by a country such as the UK – which is wealthy and has huge national potential for developing renewable energy resources – if it had a government determined to respond to climate breakdown in time.

We start with the need to implement an immediate and sustained acceleration of wind and solar power at a considerable scale, effectively trebling the rate of development within at most a couple of years. It will be supported by heavy investment in the power grid and by expanding the national skills base.

In parallel to this, the UK should immediately begin national investment in home and workplace insulation, as well as increasing the use of solar panels and solar thermal systems.

The experience of the late Noughties and early 2010s is relevant here, showing how modest fiscal measures can act as effective catalysts for wider progress. Before leaving office in 2010, Labour had set out to encourage home-based solar panels with a generous feed-in tariff system. That scheme survived and indeed thrived during the 2010-15 coalition government, mainly because of the Liberal Democrats’ insistence, but collapsed when the Conservatives came to power in 2015 and cut it back.

The UK could also speed up the transition from petrol and diesel transport to electric power, coupled with much-increased investment in public transport. There are many other steps to take relating to issues such as methane emissions and food production, but these are also areas where investment will pay off handsomely.

Of course, even if we succeed in curbing carbon dioxide emissions, it will take at least another 30 years to reverse the effects they’ve had, so we will need to invest heavily in the many resources needed to minimise the impact of storms, floods and wildfires to come. Coping with these will require increases in emergency services, which can be aided by a substantial change in the role of the military.

One eye should be kept on Donald Trump and the likely damage he and his people will do in the next four years. As well as head-hunting sacked US climate researchers (which will do much to restore optimism across the whole climate science community), the UK and other rich nations can do much to plug the research gaps that will inevitably emerge as the US president uses his wrecking ball.

We should at least treble our funding for key research into the whole global ecosystem, including atmospheric, oceanographic and polar studies and those in relatively under-researched regions of the world. Funding for carbon capture and storage, meanwhile, should be scaled back, as this will take far too long to have an impact.

A further task will be to boost the transition to renewables across the more marginalised parts of the Global South, especially if that enables states to make the transition to low-carbon economies by leap-frogging their current mix of energy uses.

All of this will be hugely beneficial in straight political terms, with the impact increasingly obvious within two or three years. Energy prices will fall, fuel poverty will ease, and effective political leadership will act as an effective catalyst. The UK would get a reputation for a truly relevant response to a manifest global security challenge.

The costs will not be exorbitant, either. Money could be redirected from the military, which is expected to cost UK taxpayers £59.8bn over the next financial year, up from £56.9, despite climate breakdown exceeding just about every other security challenge facing us.

There are plenty of other sources of funding, too. One symbolic if small option would be to remove all subsidies for fossil fuel production and transfer them to renewables. A more substantial one would be to increase efforts to prevent tax avoidance, and beyond that will be to greatly increase the control of illegal tax evasion, including the myriad forms of tax havens in which the UK is a world leader.

Beyond that there is plenty of scope to increase tax on those best able to bear it, undoing the cuts made under Thatcher in the 1980s, when the top rate of tax was slashed from 83% to 40% and even now is only 45%. Given the obscene levels of wealth that we have in 21st century Britain, largely down to the changes of those Thatcher years, just a thousand people now possess close to a trillion pounds of wealth. That surely calls for the introduction of substantial wealth taxes.

Devil’s advocates might say that the changes required are too big and too expensive, but that misses one key point. A decade or two ago, one might have reasonably argued that we needed proof that something was going wrong before we took such ‘extreme’ action. But we can now see with our own eyes that climate breakdown is happening.

This point will only be reinforced every time a catastrophic weather event hits any part of the world. The UK could be at the forefront of the necessary transformation that has to come globally. It could finally have found a worthwhile post-imperial role.

Original article by Paul Rogers republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. 

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Continue ReadingThe UK could be at the forefront of the climate revolution. Here’s how

An Actual Neofascist Coup Is Now Underway in the United States

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Original article by C.J. Polychroniou republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

A protester holds a ‘This Is A Coup’ sign at a rally against the Trump administration during a “Not My President’s Day” protest on February 17, 2025 in North Hollywood, California. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Trump’s attempt to incite a coup in 2021 and his subsequent victory in the 2024 presidential election speak volumes of the democratic decline in the United States. We must admit exactly where we are at this point in time.

Over the past few years, there has been an alarming surge of coups d’état across the world, particularly in Africa. The most common definition of a coup is an illegal attempt to seize control of the government. The seizure of power by coup leaders is often justified by pointing to poor governance and/or deteriorating security situations.

Coups are typically irregular transfers of power that occur in countries with weak democratic institutions and may be carried out by military or civilian elites. Consolidated democracies have long prided themselves of being immune to the conditions that generate coups d’etat, but the Trump phenomenon in U.S. politics seems to suggest that there are no absolutes, and that liberal democracy can be brought down.

The storming of the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, was a coup attempt incited by outgoing president Donald Trump, and can be best described as an “attempted auto-coup.” Yet, shockingly enough, not only wasn’t Trump held accountable in the end for being criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 election but was allowed to run again for the presidency in 2024. And what is even more shocking is that he prevailed in his third presidential bid by winning both the electoral college and the popular vote.

Trump and his Nazi buddy Elon Musk are trying to destroy civil society by dismantling the State.

Both Trump’s attempt to incite a coup in 2021 and his subsequent victory in the 2024 presidential election speak volumes of the democratic decline in the United States. Citizens’ support not just for a democracy-eroding leader but for one who repeatedly promised during his campaign to be a dictator, even if only for one day, is ample evidence to make the case that the end of democracy in the U.S. (or whatever is left of it as the country was never designed to be democratic) is upon us.

Indeed, an actual neo-fascist coup is now underway. Trump and his Nazi buddy Elon Musk are trying to destroy civil society by dismantling the State. Trump had promised on numerous occasions during his campaign to “demolish the deep state,” and even offered specific details for how he planned to do so. And this is exactly what is happening right now.

During his first month back in office, Trump signed a plethora of executive orders which ranged from a militarized crackdown on immigration and pardoning those who had taken part in the January 6, 2021, coup attempt to shutting down scores of federal agencies and starting mass layoffs across governments. By declaring himself above the law, Trump’s intent is to use executive power not for the purpose of dismantling the “deep state” in order to make federal government more efficient and therefore more responsive to citizen needs, but rather in order to take over government and have it run by loyalists, by people who would faithfully obey the commands of the “Great Leader.”

The aims behind this neofascist coup are threefold: Oligarchic state capture; white Christian nationalism as the hegemonic project; and the rise of a new U.S. empire.

Oligarchic state capture is a key goal of the Trump-Musk strategy behind the demolition of the so-called “deep state.” Dismantling the government bureaucracy is seen by the aspiring dictator and the world’s richest person as an essential course of action if “powerful individuals or corporations” are to have absolute freedom in creating rules and policies that serve their own benefit, at the expense of society. Trump and Musk are both fervent believers in the “natural right” of the rich and powerful to shape society as they please and make government function as they see fit.

Oligarchic state capture is a key goal of the Trump-Musk strategy behind the demolition of the so-called “deep state.”

The assault on regulations and on workers’ rights and vital workers’ institutions by the “two brothers” as prerequisites for economic prosperity forces us to go back to the 1880s when laissez-faire capitalism and social Darwinism ruled the day in order to find comparable situations. Trump has always been anti-labor, but Trump 2.0, influenced as heavily as it is by the anti-labor agenda of Project 2025, that wants to roll back all labor reforms under the Biden administration, outlaw public sector unions and indeedrewrite a hundred years of labor law, could be the most damaging administration the U.S. labor movement has ever faced. Trump’s agenda for the economy revolves around laissez-faire product market regulation and laissez-faire labor market regulations. Thus, the fact that the white working-class, which has been increasingly voting Republican instead of Democrat since 2000, helped Trump to return to power is indeed one of the most disconcerting trends in U.S. society.

Trump’s vision for America’s future is also rooted in white Christian nationalism and, as such, its realization virtually mandates anti-equality and so-called “gender ideology” attacks, along with a host of other “enlightened” undertakings such as book bans and seeking to revoke birthright citizenship. Trump’s white Christian nationalism agenda is born out of the preconceived notion that the rightful owners of this country are losing their political and cultural power. It is thus an exclusionist and nostalgic ideology which transcends social class and thus may explain why a significant segment of white working-class Americans support Trump.

Dark times are ahead—dark times, indeed.

Lastly, Trump envisions a new U.S. empire which includes gaining control of the Panama Canal, the purchase of Greenland, the possibility of turning Canada into the 51st U.S. state, owning Gaza, and even extending America’s manifest destiny into the stars.The acquisition of new wealth, greater security and strategic advantage in power politics are the drivers behind this new U.S. imperialism envisioned by Donald Trump. His imposition of tariffs on imports, which is baffling to economists, is intended to force countries to play according to the rules of the free market, so it is a profound mistake to think that Trump has somehow turned his back on neoliberalism. His deadly anti-regulatory blitz combined with tax-cutting for the rich and corporations and the use of economic rules into politics should be alone sufficient enough to dispel the notion that Trump is somehow waging a war on neoliberalism simply because he is using tariffs as part of his “America First” policy.

This, of course, is not to indicate that the neoliberal world order that the United States created after the end of the Cold War is not in crisis. Economic inequalities, political fragmentation, and social discontent threaten to bring down western liberal democracies and be replaced instead by authoritarian yet staunchly pro-capitalist regimes. The contradictions of neoliberal capitalism have become so extreme that only neofascism may be able to prevent the system’s ultimate collapse. This is precisely why Trump’s billionaire top lieutenant has so enthusiastically embraced far-right parties not only in Europe but across the globe. Neofascism is also needed to defend Christian values from the “radical left” and halt the alleged threat of the Islamization of the western world.

Dark times are ahead—dark times, indeed. And the only question is how to fight back before everything good and decent is lost once again in the return to fascism.

Original article by C.J. Polychroniou republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Continue ReadingAn Actual Neofascist Coup Is Now Underway in the United States