As Trump’s authoritarian rule rumbles across the US and internationally Paul Garver examines its impact and the resistance
Nearly a full year since Trump’s re-election, his drive to consolidate absolute executive power continues. The leaders of the armed forces have been given notice that they will be deployed in American cities. Roving paramilitary gangs of armed and masked federal ICE and border patrol agents are sowing fear and chaos in immigrant communities. Trump and his minions are issuing ukases against organisations of “domestic terrorists” (namely, anyone who resists the imposition of authoritarian tyranny).
Trump and his enablers now proudly acknowledge the ambitious Project 2025 blueprints for seizing power that prior to his election, Trump claimed not to have even read. The checks and balances intended to limit usurpation of power in constitutional governments appear ineffective against the daily onslaught of executive orders and presidential social media posts.
Rulings by lower court judges have temporarily blocked the implementation of some of the most outrageous miscarriages of justice. However, the Supreme Court has a majority that often overrules any limitations on presidential powers. The Republican majorities in the House and Senate generally go along with whatever Trump asks them to do. The leaders of the Democratic minority in Congress meekly protest but seem content to wait for future elections to return them to majority status.
Many major media outlets, law firms and universities have bowed their heads and bent their knees to the new order, allowing Trump to extort major financial and policy concessions by withholding federal funds or threats of prosecution.
A bleak picture indeed, but not one without hope. While elite institutions capitulate, resistance to Trump’s neo-fascist agenda is building among large segments of the population.
On “No Kings Day”, October 18, close to seven million people rallied in more than a thousand towns and cities. It was promoted by a host of progressive organizations, some organized into local hubs capable of following up. For example, Indivisible has conducted mass conference calls with thousands of participants to teach methods of non-compliance.
While people participated for many reasons, my own personal experience suggests that a major organizing theme was resistance to the assaults on our immigrant neighbors. Throughout the USA, in large cities and small towns, tens of thousands have mobilized against ICE raids into immigrant support networks.
The ongoing successes of the Fighting Oligarchy tours, led by Bernie Sanders and various younger Left members of Congress, in mobilizing large rallies in contested purple and Republican red states indicate the widespread potential of anti-authoritarian politics.
Under the pretext of “fighting crime”, Trump is using National Guard units and threatens to use even the professional military itself in suppressing popular resistance in cities with Democratic mayors. Though unlikely to result in armed confrontations, his dangerous strategy risks further escalation into warring camps while trying to provoke sufficient civil disorders to justify further militarized interventions. Organizational resistance is emerging mostly from big cities in blue states as Democratic mayors and governors denounce the unpopular shows of force by federal stormtroopers in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland. While unable to prevent such encroachments, they can help legitimate community resistance to them. To date, civil opponents have maintained enough self-discipline to thwart Trump’s reckless schemes.
Zohran Mamdani is likely to be elected as mayor of New York City on 4th November. Campaigning for rent control, availability and affordability of food and housing for working-class New Yorkers, Mamdani’s candidacy has crystallized the hopes of many and aroused fears in others. The billionaire donor class and the pro-Netanyahu diehards of AIPAC are spending millions of dollars to derail Mamdani’s candidacy. Trump is blowing a lot of smoke about how he will not permit a “Communist Hamas supporter” from taking office. Trump is tacitly in an unholy alliance with Democratic Congressional leaders Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries to block Mamdani, who decisively defeated both corrupt former New York governor Andrew Cuomo and discredited current NYC mayor Eric Adams in the Democratic primary.
By rejecting the choice of the New York City Democratic electorate, Schumer and Jeffries are widening the rift within the Democratic Party between those dependent on corporate donors who fear the possible negative blowback elsewhere in the country from a victorious democratic socialist in a prominent elected office and those who advocate a more populist, pro-working-class politics for the Democratic Party. Some DSA members outside New York have expressed serious angst over Mamdani’s campaign. Unwilling to attack Mamdani directly, ultra-left caucuses are trotting out stale platitudes about the inevitable evils of Mamdani running in a Democratic primary, and the undeniable fact that no election will bring about a “Revolution”. At the DSA Convention, they focused their sectarian fire on an increasingly pragmatic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a safer target.
The prospect of a skilled and charismatic politician with impeccable DSA credentials becoming mayor of New York City poses challenges across the American political spectrum. By the time you read this report, you may know better what comes next.
The problem is the democrat party, the republican party no longer exists as a party, it is a Trump Rump. And they and the independents and the handful of old style republicans cannot grasp what they have to do, Revise the constitution.
Not a word on this. To break the maga hold on the country, sack the supreme court. while the rules allow tyranny, they must be removed,
the movement for reforming the constitution is the absent factor which is the fault of the democrats who think the status quo is salvable. It is not
trevor fisher