Donald Trump is the symbolic figurehead of the MAGA cult who has achieved a towering stature in the popular imagination because of his defiant behaviour after an assassin’s bullet came within an inch of its mark, leaving blood streaming across Trump’s face. Not only should Democrats be gearing up for overcoming a much more confident, bombastic Trump, buoyed by massive contributions from billionaires such as Elon Musk, but also for drawing attention to the techno-feudalism that has already marked the formation of the capitalist leviathan, placing the social relations of production in the hands of the transnational capitalist class, with neo-feudal corporations controlling their own domains much like a feudal overlord, transforming the citizenry into digital serfs.
In a world sculpted by the hands of techno-feudalism, we find ourselves bound not by traditional chains but by the unseen forces of corporate dominion that have overspread attempts by progressives to meet the needs of their citizens. Giants like Amazon and Apple transcend the realm of mere monopolies, morphing into neo-feudal lords of the digital era, reigning over their algorithmic fiefs through debt enslavement, reminiscent of ancient overlords who collected tithes of wheat and barley under the threat of the sword. We, the inhabitants of this digital landscape, have become modern-day serfs. Yet, this new order poses an even greater threat to representative government than the old capitalism ever did. It is a silent subversion, eroding the very foundations of democracy.
Yanis Varoufakis writes:
Yes, the transition from Smithian to oligopoly capitalism boosted profits inordinately and allowed conglomerates to use their massive market power (that is, their newfound freedom from competition) to extract large rents from consumers. Yes, Wall Street extracted rents from society by market-based forms of daylight robbery. Nevertheless, both oligopoly and financialised capitalism were driven by private profits boosted by rents extracted through some market – one cornered by, say, General Electric or Coca-Cola, or conjured up by Goldman Sachs.
Then, after 2008, everything changed. Ever since the G7’s central banks coalesced in April 2009 to use their money printing capacity to re-float global finance, a deep discontinuity emerged. Today, the global economy is powered by the constant generation of central bank money, not by private profit. Meanwhile, value extraction has increasingly shifted away from markets and onto digital platforms, like Facebook and Amazon, which no longer operate like oligopolistic firms but rather like private fiefdoms or estates.
The only force capable of countering this techno-feudalism is creating a society where citizens are in control of the algorithms that govern their lives and subject them to democratic oversight. Only then can the digital serfs reclaim their autonomy and dismantle the invisible chains that bind them. The contemporary political thought and developments underlying Trumpism are retrogressive, resurrecting some of the most pernicious features of the Middle Ages. Its reversion to feudalism, a spectre long thought banished to the annals of history, has conferred power upon these neo-feudalistic entities and serves predominantly to politicise every facet of life. The likely legacy of this endeavour is an omnipotent authority and a residual state of serfdom. Techno-feudalism tends inexorably to consolidate political power rather than dispersing and checking it.
Donald Trump, in his fervent quest to propagate his ideology, frequently graced the media with proclamations on his Truth Social platform, mostly panegyrics of himself, imbued with a solemn gravitas. In these orations, Trump, ever the self-styled saviour, incessantly weaponised his gaslighting, drawing a parallel between himself and Christ, a figure of sacrifice who bore the tribulations of America upon his own shoulders. He adopted a tone that evoked the omniscience of a divine narrator, one who possessed arcane truths hidden from the common American populace.
His messages were a relentless invective against woke culture, painting it in the bleakest hues of decadence – a time purportedly marred by moral decay and the corrosion of the American spirit. Trump attributed the malaise of American decadence to the pernicious influences of political and economic liberalism. These ‘woke’ values, which he characterised as fomenting divisiveness, individualism and hedonism, were, in the view of Trump, Steve Bannon and his many media sycophants, locked in a sterile combat with their ideological offspring, Socialism and Communism.
Trump’s remedy for this perceived degradation appears to be in Project 2025, blueprints for the imposition of an authoritarian regime, designed to resurrect national unity and the forgotten virtues of traditional morality. Yet, despite his scatological critique of today’s America, Trump proclaimed that the deep, intrinsic qualities of American culture remained intact. He exhorted the American people to reclaim this true identity buried beneath the detritus of modernity.
Thus, within this theatre of political manoeuvring, Trump’s machinations unfurl with the gravity and drama befitting the annals of history, a testament to the enduring struggle for dominion over the very soul of public discourse. The American culture wars align well with Vladimir Putin’s eschatological notion of serving as the protector of Christian civilisation against the godless West (that he would like to destabilise politically, economically, culturally, militarily, ecologically) as he aspires to destroy Ukraine as a country – to the lip-smacking delight of JD Vance, Trump’s presidential running mate and new stage manager for Vlad the Mad.
Project 2025, a 900-page conservative policy agenda that proposes eliminating the US Department of Education, has become a dominating force in the 2024 election campaign as President Joe Biden and Democrats use it to make their case against Trump. Libby Stanford reports that Biden’s team has referred to Project 2025 as a ‘manifesto infused with MAGA ideology’ that ‘should scare every single American’ and has mentioned it in dozens of recent news releases. Its creators frame it as an effort to bring ‘self-government to the American people,’ according to the Washington Post. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign recently has tried to distance itself from the initiative.
The central tenet of the plan’s educational vision, according to Stanford, is to diminish the federal government’s dominion over education policy, reducing it to the humble role of a mere collector and distributor of statistics, bestowing information upon the states like a scribe distributing sacred texts. The Heritage Foundation, that venerable bastion of conservative thought, has fashioned this grand design as part of its Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project initiative. This ambitious endeavour has summoned a conclave of former Trump administration officials and stalwart allies, along with a cohort of conservative advocacy organisations. It is funded by the likes of Moms for Liberty, Hillsdale College and the Eagle Forum and is a lurid rewrite of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. That’s enough to make you hold your nose.
Together, Trump’s sycophants have forged a comprehensive playbook, ready to be unfurled with the dawn of a new far-right oligarchy. This opus, a veritable atlas for authoritarian governance, charts a meticulous course for every corner of the federal apparatus and is accompanied by a registry of potential staffers poised to step into their roles and breathe life into this vision from the very first day of ascendancy. Beyond the sweeping act of abolishing the Department of Education, the grand weave of the project unfurls a series of intricate and ambitious proposals. Stanford makes known that in a grand flourish of legislative intent, the proposal enacts a federal parents’ bill of rights (it should read a feral parents’ bill of rights), resplendent in its echoes of decrees proclaimed in various states under Republican dominion. This decree would endow parents with formidable legal armament, empowering them to challenge the administrative state in the courts whenever it imposes policies that encroach upon their sovereign right and sacred duty to nurture, educate and care for their progeny while bending the arc of justice backwards to the 1950s.
Behold, the transmutation of Title I funds into ‘no-strings-attached’ block grants to be dispensed by state education departments! These grants, akin to ideological tributaries, would flow directly into the hands of parents, manifesting as education savings accounts. As Stanford points out, such accounts would be at their disposal to finance private schooling and other scholarly pursuits, gradually diminishing over the course of a decade. Likewise, special education funds, once bound by the strictures of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, would be redirected as untethered block grants to local school districts or directly into parents’ education savings accounts, thereby enabling a broader array of educational choices for their children. In other words, let the public schools rot for lack of funding while parents send their children to private schools.
The proposal also seeks to diminish the federal state’s authority to enforce civil rights statutes, such as Title IX and Title VI, which serve as bulwarks against discrimination based on sex and race. This diminution would transfer the burden of enforcement to the Justice Department, requiring the federal government to litigate alleged violations in the courts rather than negotiating settlements with school districts.
Stanford specifies a further stroke of deviance, in that the proposal aims to obliterate the Biden administration’s revisions to Title IX, which sought to enshrine protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Moreover, it would permit states to extricate themselves from federal education programs, redirecting their portion of federal funds ‘toward any lawful education purpose under state law.’ The agenda argues that the regulatory burdens imposed by federal education programs far outweigh the meagre financial contribution – less than 10% – of the federal government to K-12 education. Thus, in this grand design, the Heritage Foundation seeks to return the helm of education to the states and the parents, reducing the federal government apparatus to a mere spectre of its former self, a distant echo reverberating faintly through the halls of governance.
Among the manifold propositions set forth, some, such as the elimination of the Education Department, the enactment of a federal parents’ bill of rights and the creation of a universal federal school choice program, would necessitate the approbation of Congress – a formidable endeavour, particularly if the Democrats maintain control over either the US Senate or the House of Representatives. Nevertheless, Stanford reminds us that a substantial portion of this agenda could be effectuated through executive action.
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has recently sought to distance himself from the comprehensive Project 2025 proposal. In a missive on his Truth Social platform, Trump proclaimed his ignorance of the masterminds behind the project. ‘I have no idea who is behind it,’ he declared. ‘I disagree with some of the things they’re saying, and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,’ he added. However, in matters of education, Trump’s actual policy proposals bear a striking resemblance to the precepts delineated in Project 2025. On his website, Trump has extolled the virtues of a potential federal parents’ bill of rights, lambasted the Biden administration for its revisions to Title IX and advocated for universal school choice programs. Thus, despite his public disavowals, the alignment between his educational aspirations and those enshrined in Project 2025 is undeniably evident.
In her incisive 2023 treatise on Critical Race Theory published by the Journal of Thought, the work of LuAnne Kuelzer deftly chronicles the insidious whitewashing of United States history – a sinister mandate allegedly imposed by the proponents of racist, ‘anti-woke’ ideology concerning the sacrosanct topics permissible within the hallowed halls of public K-12 schools and institutions of higher learning. Her profound observations merit a generous and unabridged exposition: Though the liberties of speech and the inviolable separation of church and state are enshrined within the Constitution’s First Amendment, it is with mounting dismay that one observes parents, politicians and high-strung religious activists usurping the rightful prerogative of curriculum determination from the hands of professional educators. These zealots, Keulzer warns, have singled out two expansive domains of instruction as particularly reprehensible: the critical examination of race, known as Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the discourse on human sexuality.
Thus, Kuelzer’s discourse delineates and illuminates the grievous encroachments upon academic freedom as the purveyors of reactionary doctrine strive to expunge from educational discourse any exploration of racial and sexual identities that might challenge their myopic worldview. One way they achieve this is by their attacks on Critical Race Theory. Ladson-Billings notes that Critical Race Theory (CRT) arose as a formidable counterforce to the prevailing positivist and liberal legal discourses on civil rights. This scholarly tradition, a strategic beacon of dissent, contends with the glacial pace of racial reform in the United States. CRT begins with a stark proclamation: racism is an omnipresent and entrenched aspect of American society. Diverging from conventional legal scholarship, it sometimes employs the art of storytelling to convey its truths.
This theory critiques the liberal orthodoxy and posits that White individuals have predominantly reaped the benefits of civil rights legislation. As the educational system in the USA ostensibly aims to form a democratic citizenry, CRT scrutinises the interplay between citizenship and race. The utility of CRT in elucidating educational inequities is still in its nascent stages. It necessitates a critical re-examination of some of the most venerated legal triumphs and educational reforms of the civil rights era, including multiculturalism.
According to Kuelzer, in the most elementary terms, Critical Race Theory (CRT) posits that race is a social construct and that racism is deeply embedded within the laws and institutions of the United States. This theory transcends the simplistic Black/white dichotomy and acknowledges the impact of racism on the lived experiences of diverse communities of colour, including Latinx, Native American and Asian American populations. It endeavours to scrutinise particular experiences of oppression and marginalisation through an understanding of the intersectionality of various contingent cultural, geopolitical, racial, gender and ideological dynamics, including the situatedness of the researcher.
In September 2020, former President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13950, since rescinded, which sought to proscribe the teaching of CRT. Kuelzer highlights how Trump condemned CRT as a vehicle for ‘brainwashing’ and ‘psychological abuse,’ alleging it inculcated youth with an antipathy towards their own country. Similarly, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders equated CRT with indoctrination, proclaiming: ‘We cannot perpetuate a lie to our students and push this propaganda leftist agenda, teaching our kids to hate America and hate one another. It is one of the reasons that we put into law banning things like indoctrination and CRT.’
Notwithstanding the consensus among many educators and CRT scholars that CRT is not actually part of the K-12 curriculum, as it lacks the definitive course content of subjects like mathematics or science, lawmakers in numerous states have enacted legislation to prohibit its instruction. Eleven states have outright banned the teaching of racial issues, while twenty-five states either have local school policies or pending legislative bills that explicitly forbid the teaching of CRT. The restrictions extend into higher education, where institutions face similar prohibitions. For instance, North Dakota House Bill 1012 prohibits colleges and universities from teaching ‘divisive concepts.’ Similarly, Iowa and Oklahoma’s anti-CRT legislation impacts both K-12 and higher education, while Tennessee’s ban proscribes instruction on topics related to racism, sexism and social class in higher education.
Kuelzer cautions that determining the precise objections lawmakers have to CRT is a vexing task, as the language within these bills is often broad and deliberately vague. Rather than explicitly forbidding CRT, these bills typically aim to limit instruction on ‘divisive subjects’ such as racism and sexuality, or the notion that ‘one race, colour, religion, sex, ethnicity, or national origin is inherently superior to another.’ Oklahoma House Bill 1775 (2021), for example, mandates that classroom instruction should not cause ‘any individual discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.’ Thus, under the guise of preserving educational purity, these legislative measures seek to silence discourse on racial and social justice, cloaking their intent in the rhetoric of protecting students from discomfort, yet, in reality, perpetuating a narrative that eschews the critical examination of historical and systemic inequities.
Kuelzer discloses that even prior to the enactment of CRT gag orders, the landscape of education was marred by omissions, blatant errors and specious interpretations, particularly on matters of race. Many textbook publishers, in their pursuit of historical revisionism, began to distort the information imparted to students. For instance, in the state of Texas, textbooks promulgated the egregious falsehood that ‘the Atlantic slave trade brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations,’ conspicuously omitting any mention of Africans being forcibly transported as slaves. Kuelzer reveals that Publisher Studies Weekly, in their first-grade social studies textbooks for Florida, expunged any reference to Rosa Parks’ race. In their fourth-grade Florida textbooks, they likewise excised language indicating that Black people faced discrimination during the Reconstruction era, opting instead for the vague and misleading term ‘certain groups.’
Further compounding these distortions, the Florida Board of Education’s new standards for African American history will instruct middle school students that slavery purportedly provided Black people with ‘personal benefits’ because they ‘developed job skills.’ High school students in Florida will encounter an equally deceitful account of the 1920 massacre in Ocoee, where a White mob unleashed deadly violence against Black residents, but the lesson will misleadingly describe the incident as involving ‘acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.’ Elsewhere, other textbook publishers have employed imperialistic expressions such as ‘Empire of Liberty,’ ‘Manifest Destiny,’ ‘The American Frontier’ and ‘wards of the state’ to sanitise and obscure the brutal reality of White settler colonialism. These terms effectively erase the grievous histories of Indigenous peoples, who were assimilated, confined to reservations and boarding schools, or murdered. Kuelzer concludes that through these pernicious alterations and erasures, the narrative of history presented to students is one that obfuscates the grim truths of oppression and systemic injustice, perpetuating a sanitised version of the past that serves the interests of those who seek to maintain their ruling class ideological dominion over the present.
Though Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida proclaims a zealous crusade against what he deems the left-wing ‘indoctrination’ of our youth, the architect of PragerU, the staunchly right-wing and cringeworthy Dennis Prager, unabashedly avows that indoctrination is indeed the raison d’être of his organisation. Within the digital realms of PragerU, one can encounter an animated rendition wherein the intrepid explorer Christopher Columbus, speaking in a caricatured pseudo-Italian accent, audaciously justifies the enslavement of individuals by proclaiming that ‘being taken as a slave is better than being killed.’
Of late, notes Kuelzer, the state of Oklahoma has aligned itself with Florida, adopting the PragerU curriculum under the banner of ‘pro-American’ education, despite vehement criticism branding it as ‘right-wing indoctrination.’ Such insidious examples of sanitised rhetoric serve to obscure the harrowing atrocities of history, simultaneously enabling White individuals to internalise a version of American nationalism that reinforces the legitimacy of their historical abusive exercise of power. These subtle lessons perpetuate a persistent racial hierarchy, privileging those deemed ‘White’ above all others.
Governor DeSantis, the pseudo-educationalists at PragerU and various politicians from other conservative states exhibit a deliberate disregard for historical veracity and a calculated amnesia concerning historical truths. This prompts us to ponder: how should we navigate the intersecting fields of knowledge that comprise history? How do we discern the truth of the past through the lens of contemporary understanding? To engage with history is, Kuelzer reminds us, to embark upon a journey through the labyrinth of time, deciphering the myriad narratives that have shaped our present. It requires a steadfast commitment to uncovering the unvarnished truths and acknowledging the complexities and contradictions of our shared human experience. Only through such rigorous inquiry can we hope to transcend the distortions of the past and forge a future grounded in justice and equity.
In the incandescent discourses of history, the attitudes and beliefs leading to prohibitions against certain topics and individuals did not commence with the spectre of CRT but are deeply rooted in the oppressive machinations of bygone eras. These prohibitions are the shadowy tendrils of systems designed to suppress and control. By refusing to educate students about those who differ from them, about those who are similar yet have committed transgressions, or about the profound awareness of one’s own and others’ inner landscapes, these topics are consigned to the silent abyss of what Kuelzer aptly describes as ‘the null curriculum.’ This deliberate omission does not liberate students from the potential distress these subjects might evoke; rather, they are ensnared in the ‘negative freedom’ of censorship and obstruction, a dark mirror to true liberation.
Such measures, Kuelzer recounts, stand in stark opposition to the enlightened philosophies of John Dewey, who championed the virtues of social-emotional learning and the creation of a vibrant community of learners. Dewey’s vision was one where a nurturing social-emotional environment fosters a sense of belonging and significance among students, a milieu where equity is paramount and the needs of all learners, regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation, are met with compassion and inclusivity.
Kuelzer reminds us that it was Antonio Gramsci who eloquently argued that these outcomes are likely not the unintended byproducts of well-meaning actions but the conscious aims of hegemonic forces. Gramsci posited that the role of hegemonic activity is to marshal the consent of the masses in favour of the dominant class. This ‘cultural hegemony’ embeds power dynamics within the very fabric of language and discourse, reinforcing the constructs of dominance and allowing the preservation of power by White individuals. Historically, Kuelzer writes, Whiteness has relied upon a racial hierarchy, its central tenet being an identity defined not by intrinsic unifying characteristics but by the exclusion of those deemed ‘not White.’ This power relation, steeped in the belief of White supremacy, assigns a racial identity equated with inferior status to those considered subordinate, thereby perpetuating the structures of dominance and exclusion.
In this grand narrative, the interplay of censorship, social-emotional learning and cultural hegemony reveals a complex matrix of power, oppression and the struggle for equity. The challenge remains to dismantle these entrenched systems and cultivate an educational landscape – what is sometimes described as a counterpublic sphere where every student can flourish, unburdened by the shadows of historical and contemporary inequities.
I find myself in concordance with Paula Allman, who posits a stratified conception of truth: meta-transhistorical truths, which ostensibly endure across the epochs of humanity yet must perpetually be subjected to critique; transhistorical truths, vulnerable to the vicissitudes of future revisions; truths intrinsic to particular social formations; and, in tandem, specific truths, ephemeral but valid within the contextual confines of their developmental processes.
While I concur that epistemological perspectives on the world are imbued with values and theories, unlike the postmodernists, I do not subscribe to the notion that the world can be transformed merely by altering our beliefs about it. Nor would I conflate epistemological objectivity with ontological objectivity, suggesting that the absence of an epistemologically objective view precludes the existence of an objective world. Adopting varied worldviews or cosmologies does not equate to dwelling in objectively disparate worlds.
The specific social formation that captivates the revolutionary intellectual is capitalism, and the quintessential act of such an intellectual is to aid in the creation of a counter-public sphere, advocating for a socialist alternative to capitalism. Richard Wolff’s definition of socialism is worth quoting in full:
So long as employers, private or state, hire labourers to produce commodities and generate profits that the employers exclusively receive, the economy has a capitalist structure. So long as it is exclusively the employers (whether private, state or hybrid; whether more or less regulated) who decide how to use those profits, it is a capitalist structure.
An enterprise only qualifies as ‘socialist’ once the distinction between employers and employees within it has been abolished. When workers collectively and democratically produce, receive and distribute the profits their labour generates, the enterprise becomes socialist. Such enterprises can then become the base of a socialist economy – its micro-level foundation – supporting whatever ownership system (public and/or private) and distribution system (planning and/or market) constitute that economy’s macro level.
Actual large-scale socialism would thus predominantly entail worker cooperative enterprises such as these. Like the capitalist enterprises that once emerged from European feudalism, these new cooperative enterprises would seek to solve problems such as how to organise their interdependencies with one another and with the public, how to relate to private and public property and how to manage transitions from smaller- to larger-scale enterprises. Different forms of societal socialisms will emerge: some with markets, private property and large corporations and others with centralised and/or decentralised planning systems, socialised property, constraints on enterprise size, etc. Debates, experiments and choices among them will likely characterise the multiple forms that socialism will take.
Previous economic systems likewise often displayed coexistences among more or less regulated private enterprises and state enterprises. In slave societies, for example, alongside the private masters of slaves working on plantations, states often owned and operated slave plantations. In feudal societies, private feudal manors interacted with the feudal manors operated by kings, to take a European example. In short, slavery and feudalism, like capitalism, display varying combinations of private and state enterprises.
Wolff cautions that, should the grand edifice of socialism find a renewed lease on life, it must sever the lingering bonds to both the state-regulated private capitalism and the state capitalism that have hitherto constrained its ascent. In the fullness of the 21st century, it must complete the great cycle, returning to and revitalising the distinctive separation from capitalism envisioned in the 19th century – a separation that delineates a mode of organising the production and distribution of goods and services fundamentally divergent from the capitalist ethos.
In the spirit of introspection, affirms Wolff, the socialist must confront the stark decline of socialist parties within the Western European sphere and the ignominious collapse of the so-called ‘actually existing socialisms’ or state capitalisms. Such a confrontation demands the articulation of novel definitions of socialism for the contemporary epoch, definitions that pivot increasingly towards the democratisation of the workplace at the granular, microcosmic level. This, indeed, is the pivotal alteration absent from prior iterations of socialism – an element imperative to the new doctrine, complementing yet transcending the erstwhile preoccupation with supplanting private ownership with socialised assets and substituting market mechanisms with planning.
Wolff draws our attention to the burgeoning enthusiasm for workers’ self-directed enterprises amongst anti-capitalist social movements and critics. These shifts herald a transformative vision, one that aspires to an enlightened socialism, refined and refocused for the demands and ideals of our present century. It is imperative for students to comprehend that, despite our inability to grasp the full truth of human history, the world remains knowable. Our understanding, however, will forever be partial and relational – never merely relative. We navigate through fields of knowledge, our engagement perpetually anchored in historical contexts. Thus, as we chart our course against the grain, let us remain steadfast in the pursuit of a nuanced understanding, recognising the complexities of our historical situatedness and the perennial quest for a more profound, albeit incomplete, comprehension of the world.
In the tempestuous aftermath of the thwarted assassination attempt on Donald Trump on July 13, a rare and fleeting moment of unity emerged. Voices from across the political spectrum rose in unison, pleading, ‘Political violence has no place in these United States.’ Yet, as Arun Gupta eloquently elucidates, ‘This noble entreaty harbours a grievous irony. For over a decade, the chief architect, the exuberant cheerleader and the indefatigable apologist of political violence has been none other than Donald J. Trump himself.’
Gupta reveals how Trump revels in the theatre of political violence. It was he alone who ignited the deadly insurrection on January 6, the sole attempted coup in the annals of American history. In 2017, he infamously proclaimed there were ‘very fine people’ among the white nationalists mere days after one of their number committed the heinous murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia. In 2020, he brazenly instructed the Proud Boys, a violent fascist gang, to ‘Stand back and stand by.’ During the 2016 campaign, he darkly hinted that his followers could stop his opponent, Hillary Clinton, from appointing Supreme Court justices, suggesting that ‘Second Amendment people’ might take matters into their own hands.
Gupta chronicles some of Trump’s worst offences as the litany of Trump’s incitements has continued unabated. In 2023, Trump declared to his supporters, ‘I am your retribution.’ In March of 2024, he ominously warned, ‘Now if I don’t get elected…, [i]t’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.’ By June, Trump was vowing ‘revenge’ against his enemies. Political violence has been his defining trait since that fateful day in June 2015 when he descended the golden escalator, ranting about Mexican immigrants, ‘They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.’
Since the beginning of Trump’s 2016 campaign, he embraced and celebrated political violence as his hallmark. His frequent encouragement of violence at rallies led The New York Times to compile a video of his greatest hits: ‘Maybe he should have been roughed up.’ ‘Knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously… I will pay for the legal fees.’ ‘You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.’ ‘I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you.’ ‘They used to treat them very, very rough. And when they protested once, you know they would not do it again so easily.’
Gupta is worth quoting at length:
Trump has transformed America into a seething cauldron of political violence of every form imaginable. Trump was entirely responsible for Jan. 6. He was the chief organiser, telling his followers, ‘Be there, will be wild!’ Before his armed supporters stormed the US Capitol, he exhorted, ‘And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.’ His heavily armed mob wielded tasers, pepper spray, baseball bats and other blunt instruments in a ‘medieval battle’ that injured at least 140 police officers and killed five people. Even as aides, congressional leaders and his family begged Trump to call off his Brownshirts, he poured ‘gasoline on the fire,’ a White House aide said later, by attacking Mike Pence on Twitter as he was fleeing for his life. After his goons committed thousands of acts of political violence on Jan. 6, Trump tweeted a video in which he said, ‘So go home, we love you, you’re very special.’
Political violence follows Trump like black flies follow water buffalo. In 2016, hate crimes surged 226 per cent in counties that hosted a Trump rally in contrast to similar counties that did not host one, according to a Washington Post analysis. Trump is an accelerant for individual hate crimes. In May 2020, ABC News ‘identified at least 54 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault.’ What’s remarkable is these are just the statements that were admissible as evidence. In one instance, a white man suddenly punched a Latino gas station attendant in Florida and was caught on a surveillance camera saying, ‘This is for Trump.’ In another case, a suspect in Washington state who threatened to kill a Syrian-born man told police that he wanted the victim ‘to get out of my country’ and added, ‘That’s why I like Trump.’
Trump is linked to dozens of white nationalist terrorists who killed at least 25 people in 2017, his first year in office. Many mass shooters have been Trump fans or cited his words and ideas. This includes massacres that killed ten people or more at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Parkland High School in Florida, a Walmart in El Paso and a Buffalo supermarket. The mass shooter who killed 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand in 2019 hailed Trump as ‘a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.’
Trump’s enthusiasm for violence has bred the worst outburst of organised far-right terrorism since the days of Jim Crow. Dozens of militias and gangs cropped up after Trump began his campaign in 2015, such as the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, Atomwaffen Division, Identity Evropa, Rise Above Movement, American Guard and Patriot Front, which together are responsible for more than a dozen deaths.
Trump’s attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci weeks into the coronavirus pandemic led to near-constant federal protection for him and his family. As the 2020 election loomed, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wrote, ‘Every time the president ramps up this violent rhetoric, every time he fires up Twitter to launch another broadside against me, my family and I see a surge of vicious attacks sent our way. This is no coincidence, and the president knows it. … he thinks it will help his re-election.’
So heated was Trump’s violent rhetoric in 2020, The Washington Post said, ‘seething hostility stoked by a sitting president’ was aimed at ‘nearly every category of government service: mayors, governors and members of Congress, as well as officials Trump has turned against within his own administration.’
Trump is a superspreader of violence, who has infected the entire right. It is now common for the MAGA world to threaten civil war. In 2022, after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for classified documents that Trump allegedly held, talk of civil war exploded 3,000 per cent on Twitter. After Trump was found guilty of 34 felony charges on May 31, far-right threats of civil war, insurrection and coups bounced around the internet. On Jul. 4, the head of the Heritage Foundation, which is orchestrating Trump’s 2025 Project to grab power, declared a ‘second American Revolution’ and all but promised bloodletting against the left.
And yet Republican operatives are blaming Democrats for the political violence that led to Trump’s assassination:
After the failed assassination, the GOP blamed political violence on Biden and the Democrats. But it was the right that cried ‘War now,’ ‘They should all be hung in the streets,’ ‘eradicate and eliminate all democrats.’ Wired reported the right is not just talking about war, it’s planning for it. ‘Militia and anti-government groups across the United States are using the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump as an opportunity to organise, recruit and train.’ As dangerous as Trump and his forces are out of power, they have a far greater capacity for political violence in power, such as by ethnic cleansing millions of immigrants, encouraging and overlooking police brutality, and deploying military forces against protesters.
Gupta warns that if there is any hope of averting such a cataclysmic scenario, it must commence with the media elucidating, in no uncertain terms, that, for the past decade, Trump has been an unparalleled purveyor of political violence in modern American history. This truth must be proclaimed loudly and clearly, a clarion call to awaken the populace to the looming danger.
As Thom Hartmann elucidates, once the Republican faction seizes the reins of both the overt political sphere and the clandestine labyrinth of the ‘deep state,’ those shadowy corridors of administrative governance, the ardent champions of the MAGA cause shall unfurl their long-cherished stratagems. These resolute conservatives, undeterred and unyielding, shall embark upon a grand campaign to implement the transformations they have fervently advocated for years, laying bare their vision with unbridled zeal and meticulous precision:
- End gay marriage and criminalise being trans.
- Outlaw abortion and most forms of birth control.
- End the teaching of Black history.
- Outlaw DEI and affirmative action of any sort.
- Shut down most functions of the EPA so the fossil fuel and chemical industries can do whatever they want to our air and water.
- End enforcement of our anti-monopoly laws.
- Fire thousands of IRS investigators to make America safe for morbidly rich tax cheats.
- Shut down all ‘green’ initiatives and instead ‘drill, baby drill.’
- Sell off public lands and parks to the highest bidders.
- Privatise Social Security and end traditional Medicare.
- End federal funding for public schools and colleges.
- Outlaw unions.
In the tumultuous epoch of Trump, the essence of truth has become entwined with the threads of tribal allegiance. Truth now resides within the identity of the speaker, the originator of the historical assertion or factual claim.
As I mentioned in my article on the Pentecostalisation of Donald Trump, Trump’s devotees regard the deceit of their demigod to be of a higher order of the truths of ordinary mortals. Trump is revered as one capable of reshaping reality itself for his followers. In this realm, the words of their idol carry the power to transcend temporal truths, crafting a new reality tailored to their collective faith.
If the indefatigable Trump can persuade his ardent disciples that his fabrications transcend the terrestrial truths captured in countless videos, then it illuminates the perilous dominion he wields in reshaping the very fabric of their reality. His devotees, eager to transmute their objective existence into a shadowy unreality, do so with fervent zeal, for it serves the glorification of their idol, Trump. This phenomenon echoes a modern-day transubstantiation wherein Trump’s brazen falsehoods, while damning to his adversaries, are perceived as divine revelations by his supporters. They believe themselves uniquely anointed to decipher these deceptions as harbingers of divine wrath, messages imbued with the same sacred authority as those conveyed by the patriarchs and prophets like Elijah and Isaiah.
Trump’s followers, ensconced in their esoteric convictions, act as if privy to a celestial secret – that Trump is endowed with a singular authority by Holy Scripture, the Holy Spirit articulating through him, words comprehensible only to his faithful base. In this twisted alchemy, Trump has been elevated to a quasi-deity, a co-equal with Christ Himself. We, the progressives and radicals, derisively labelled as suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, are perceived as lacking the requisite faith to receive such divine revelations. The near assassination of Trump has only solidified this divine hierarchy for his followers. How could anyone escape certain death with the mere motion of his head unless they held God-like powers and were at the top of the divine food chain? Yet, in their fervour, Trump’s followers remain blind to the tenets of their own Christian doctrine, which condemns them for the sin of idolatry. In exalting Trump to such divine stature, they unwittingly wage an unholy war against the democracy that proclaims, ‘In God We Trust.’ Thus, the faithful are led astray, ensnared in a perilous dance with blasphemy and treason.
The violent, venomous rhetoric of Trump supporters, replete with its testosterone-fuelled bravado, harmonises seamlessly with Trump’s message. As figures from all walks of life pledge their ideological fealty to Trump, his intimate affiliation with racists, homophobes, Islamophobes and white supremacists serves him brilliantly. He can claim plausible deniability, deftly retracting statements he himself has made. The surfeit of verbal adulation that Trump receives daily, rife with sycophantic fervour, serves as a pungent counterpoint to Stormy Daniels’ lurid comments about his anatomy, accusations about his chickenhawk bone spurs and remarks on his sartorial excesses – his billowing britches and strategically extended ties designed to distract from his girth while suggesting an exaggerated virility. Such imagery lays bare the absurdity, yet terrifyingly effective spectacle, of his persona: a grotesque parody of power, masked by the trappings of virility, laying waste to any semblance of reason or dignity. Yet smashing through any derogatory imagery regarding Trump is his heroic gesture seconds after narrowly escaping an assassin’s bullet, his face bloodied, his fist raised in defiance against the deep state and liberal democracy. Such was America’s baptismal moment as a born-again oligarchy.
Assassination attempts aside, Thom Hartmann opines that modern American oligarchs have preserved their dominion through a triad of pernicious stratagems:
- overt and unambiguous racism,
- colossal disinformation campaigns, and
- the systematic suppression of voters.
Hartmann clearly acknowledges what has been lost. Placed on democracy’s funeral pyre are the lofty ideals and aspirations for the improvement of our schools, hospitals, airports, roads and bridges, the clarion call for the reformation of our health, energy, or financial systems, the promises of more and better jobs. These essential tenets of erstwhile presidential campaigns are now conspicuously incinerated, vanished from Republican proclamations for the foreseeable future. Trump’s baptism of the country that offers citizens a divine rejection of democracy and a new life under oligarchy will be complete when all the heretics are run out of the Republican Party, and every single Democrat is viewed as fair game. Instead, Hartmann underscores the dark alchemy of Republican discourse: it is suffused with matters of race, or more precisely, the subset of race intertwined with religion – wherein ‘Muslim’ is but a cipher for ‘brown Arab’ in the parlance of the GOP – and immigration is the influx of brown peoples from the southern border. The spectre of socialism is also invoked with the fervour of religious damnation.
What we need is a counterpublic sphere strong enough to build a united front against Republican oligarchy. Jake Johnson alerts us to the wisdom of Bernie Sanders, who lays bare the oligarchy that currently engulfs the nation: ‘In the wake of reports indicating that Musk plans to inject $45 million per month into a new super PAC supporting former President Donald Trump’s bid for another four years in the White House, Sanders (I-Vt.) thanked Musk for doing ‘an exceptional job of demonstrating a point that we have made for years – and that is the fact we live in an oligarchic society in which billionaires dominate not only our economic life and the information we consume, but our politics as well.’ During the tenure of President Trump, spanning the quadrennium from 2017 to 2021, the coffers of Musk and his fellow billionaires burgeoned by an astounding $1 trillion. This prodigious enrichment was propelled by the sweeping tax cuts enshrined into law by Trump in the year 2017.
In a recent epistle, Bernie Sanders articulated a portentous observation: Musk’s sway over the forthcoming 2024 election could be exceptionally profound, owing to his dominion over the social media colossus formerly known as Twitter, now rechristened X. Johnson is worth quoting at length:
‘And let me be clear. While the size of Musk’s financial contribution is particularly egregious, he is not alone in attempting to buy this election to further his own needs,’ Sanders continued. ‘Other billionaires are also playing a significant role – in both political parties. Oh, I know… here goes Bernie Sanders again about Citizens United and the role of money in politics. I have no shortage of critics who accuse me of being boring and of hammering away at the same themes year after year after year.’
‘They’re probably right. I am repetitious, but that’s because the problems we care about are only getting worse,’ he added. ‘Let’s be clear. It has never made sense to me, then or now, that a tiny clique of people should have incredible wealth and power while most people have none.’
‘While people like Elon Musk try to buy elections for Donald Trump, people who work for low wages, have no health insurance, can’t afford prescription drugs and can’t find affordable housing are giving up on politics.’
Musk, Sanders wrote, has used the platform ‘to amplify the voices of conspiracy theorists who deny the results of the last election and spread the dangerous idea that Democrats want to allow mass, undocumented migration to the country to replace, electorally, the votes of white people.’
‘The reality is that while people like Elon Musk try to buy elections for Donald Trump, people who work for low wages, have no health insurance, can’t afford prescription drugs and can’t find affordable housing are giving up on politics,’ the senator continued. ‘They see the rich getting richer as they use their wealth to buy influence and wonder whether anyone in Washington even knows what is going on in their lives.’
Sanders argued that to end the pernicious political influence of Musk and other billionaires, it is essential to elect candidates who support overturning Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that spawned the super PACs now playing a massive role in the nation’s elections.
‘It is an issue that should concern all Americans – regardless of their political point of view – who wish to live under a government that represents all of the people and not just a handful of powerful special interests,’ Sanders wrote. ‘Taking action is not just good politics, it is also good policy. Because the truth is, campaign finance reform is the most important issue facing us today because it impacts all the others.’
We must not only contend with billionaires like Musk but also leaders of already-established fascist regimes. In the dark theatre of geopolitical machinations, Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán recently conferred with Russian President Vladimir Putin before he found himself under the gilded chandeliers of Mar-a-Lago, rendezvousing with his ‘good friend’ Donald Trump. Orbán serves as a shadowy intermediary between Putin and Trump, united in their clandestine ambition to metamorphose America and every bastion of democracy into oligarchic autocracies reminiscent of Hungary and Russia. This meeting stands as a testament to the peril Trump embodies and underscores the ominous extent of Russian entanglement in the forthcoming election, mirroring their nefarious triumph in 2016. The stage is set, the actors are in place, and the world watches as the drama unfolds.
Campaign finance reform seems perilously out of reach now. Instead, we have the reality of Trumpism with which to contend. Piers Morgan made the specious claim on his YouTube show called ‘Uncensored’ that those who dared to label Trump an enemy of democracy and/or the ‘new Hitler’ could have been responsible for the recent assassination attempt on Trump. No, Trump is not the ‘new Hitler,’ but his rhetoric of political violence is gut-churningly reminiscent of Hitler’s speeches. Trump has, in fact, quoted Hitler. It would be irresponsible for journalists to ignore the incendiary language of Trumpian political violence. This is evident in Trump’s closing speech at the Republican National Convention.
Patrick Martin writes:
Before the speech, there were suggestions from Republican Party leaders that, in the wake of Saturday’s attempted assassination, Trump would change his tone and adopt a more unifying message. As he began, the ex-president spent 15 minutes rehashing the events of Jul. 13 in a meandering and subdued tone, in the course of which he claimed that he had been calm throughout the attack because he knew he was protected by God.
Trump referenced a couple of times the necessity for ‘unity,’ but what he meant was that everyone must unite behind the fascistic agenda he laid out. He piled filthy lie upon filthy lie, denouncing the supposed ‘invasion’ along the US-Mexico border, blaming immigrants for crime, poverty and every other social evil in America, and celebrating the mass deportations, detentions and other cruelties of his first term, which included the separation of parents and children.
The crowd of 18,000, including nearly every prominent Republican elected official, gave ovation after ovation, particularly to every reference to God, which Trump frequently injected into his verbal overflow.
As for the promised more ‘positive’ approach, Trump simply asserted that once he had returned to the White House, he would end all wars and other conflicts, seal the US-Mexico border by finishing the border wall and create the greatest economy in the history of the world. As to how this miracle was to be accomplished, he did not say a word in an increasingly deranged presentation that dragged on for 90 minutes.
At least one critic was triggered enough by Trump’s speech to recall Hitler, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North. North remarked on X:
Trump’s deranged monologue recalls Trotsky’s description of Hitler’s demagogy: ‘Sentimental formlessness, absence of disciplined thought, ignorance…. They supplied him with the possibility of uniting all types of dissatisfaction in the beggar’s bowl of National Socialism.’
Marty Schladen recounts that just two hours after a 20-year-old took shots at Trump, vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance took to X to blame Biden. However, Vance failed to recall that his own comments on Trump in 2016 were exactly those which he is now condemning:
‘Today is not just some isolated incident,’ he wrote. ‘The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.’ In February 2016, Vance sent a text message to a former Yale Law School classmate in which he made an even starker comparison about Trump. Vance said he’d been going ‘back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.’
Trump is under federal indictment on charges that he tried to steal an election that he lost, he’s called to ‘terminate’ the Constitution over his loss, he’s embraced political violence and police brutality – and he’s called his political opponents ‘vermin.’ In saying – repeatedly – that immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’ the former president clearly rhymed with Hitler, who several times used the same metaphor to attack Jews and any other ‘race’ that he considered inferior to ‘Aryans.’ Of Jewish men who ‘allow’ Jewish women to marry Christians, Hitler said, ‘He poisons the blood of others but preserves his own blood unadulterated.’ It might seem that some of the rhetoric stems from Trump’s own words and actions. It might also seem that the rush to blame others for the shooting was really an attempt to bully people from speaking publicly about Trump’s anti-democratic conduct.
Republican US Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, the GOP challenger to Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, is another who claims that blame for the assassination attempt on Trump lies with the media and Democrats:
‘They’ve been calling (Trump) Hitler for eight years,’ Moreno said in a recording that his campaign posted on X. ‘The shooter is 20 years old. From the time he was 12 years old, they’ve been telling him (Trump) is the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler. If you could take a shot at Adolph Hitler in 1935, would you be a good person or a bad person? That’s how (the shooter) viewed it. That’s on them. It’s on them, meaning the Democrats, and also on the mainstream media.’
But on Moreno’s Twitter account in 2016, the future Senate candidate retweeted a poll featuring Trump and Hitler, and he appended a comment.
‘He attacked immigrants, tries to silence the press, & appeals to the darkest part of human nature,’ it said. Moreno didn’t say to which man he was referring. But his use of the present tense is telling, given the fact that Hitler was 70 years dead at that point.
Trump and Vance are isolationists poised to sacrifice Europe to protect their own interests should Russia invade European countries. David A. Andelman describes this strain of American isolationism, akin to a pernicious weed, that has entangled itself with the most catastrophic epochs in the nation’s history. Historically, the United States has stumbled when it retreated from the world stage, erecting impregnable tariff walls and shunning the crucible of armed conflicts abroad.
Andelman recounts that, in the early 20th century, Senate Republicans, vehemently opposed to the Versailles Treaty – a magnum opus crafted by President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat – succeeded in rejecting the pact, thereby keeping the US out of the League of Nations that the treaty would have birthed. This act of isolationism sowed the seeds of darkness, nurturing the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany and heralding the inferno of World War II. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, a bastion of protectionism, ignited immediate retaliation from the nations it targeted, exacerbating the Great Depression by stifling the demand for American goods and inflating the prices of all imports. This economic fortress, instead of safeguarding the nation, accelerated Hitler’s ascent to power.
The America First movement, launched at Yale Law School in 1940 (decades before Vance graced its halls), advocated the cessation of military aid to Britain and the maintenance of American isolation from World War II. This movement, notes Adelman, was a colossus of 800,000 adherents, including luminaries such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. It posited that the vast oceans would shield America if it remained isolated. However, this illusion of safety shattered as the group disbanded two days after the cataclysmic attack on Pearl Harbour by Japan.
Despite the ominous historical records, the America First doctrine, resuscitated by Vance and Trump, stands as the cornerstone of their foreign policy, draped in the robes of economic populism. ‘No more free rides for nations that betray the generosity of the American taxpayer,’ Vance proclaimed with fervour. Andelman describes Trump’s first administration as a relentless endeavour to dismantle NATO, demanding that allies shoulder more of their defence costs, while he severed ties with a myriad of international treaties.
For years, the left has been tolling the sombre bell, forewarning of a perilous drift towards fascism within the Republican Party. Even though more and more university professors are assuming the role of public intellectuals, their proclamations are being dismissed as overwrought hyperbole, unbecoming of scholars who should keep their political opinions to themselves, both in the lecture hall and the wider public sphere. Critics have accused us of inflating the concept of fascism into a nebulous catchall for anything authoritarian, thereby draining it of its true, sinister essence. The term ‘illiberal’ emerged as the more palatable moniker, exuding an air of temperance and erudition. Occasionally, the adjective ‘fascist’ would punctuate the opinion columns of major newspapers, usually in fiery denunciations of Trumpism by intrepid journalists, but these instances are rare, aberrations in a broader landscape of cautious rhetoric. Now, the Republicans are holding those who call Trump a fascist responsible for the assassination attempt on his life, clearly an attempt to bully Democrats into silence. They would prefer Democrats to restrict their criticism to adjectives such as ‘illiberal.’
However, with the recent Supreme Court ruling on Trump’s immunity, the euphemism ‘illiberal’ seems woefully inadequate, a feeble whisper against the thunder of Orwellian Newspeak. The re-election of Donald Trump seems on a steady course towards a far-right, racist, authoritarian and ultranationalist regime, characterised by a centralised autocracy bent on muzzling the press, voter suppression and quelling dissent. In simpler terms: fascism. Although the United States is not yet a one-party state, the Republican Party’s relentless assault on voting legislation edges it ever closer to functioning as such, potentially for years, even decades, to come.
