4 February, 2026
Author: Bas Hardy
When Donald Trump talked about retribution on his enemies, he didn’t just mean individual political opponents or members of the legal establishment seeking to hold him accountable. A large amount of his spite was directed at American cities, particularly those with black mayors, which had the temerity to reject him at election time.
They would be met with collective punishment in the form of invasion by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents, who’d intimidate their communities and place them under siege.
Despite pathetic efforts by the Trump regime to besmirch Renée Good and Alex Pritti as “domestic terrorists”, both were known to many as decent human beings. In Alex Pritti’s case he looked after the care of military veterans. Efforts by Trump lackeys to spin things otherwise ran up against overwhelming video evidence in both cases of cold blooded murder.
In addition to the strike, communities have organised themselves to monitor the activities of ICE and help those who fear getting swept off the streets should they venture out of their homes. Volunteers are taking children to school, delivering groceries, and offering rides to medical appointments. That citizens are expected to show proof of identity to masked men who don’t show any is beyond ironic and reminiscent of those old war movies where the Gestapo demand “your papers”.
Adding to the oppressive air of fascism has been Greg Bovino, the thug in charge of ICE, strutting around in an SS style greatcoat.
Right-wing fans of the US constitution’s Second Amendment have imagined a conspiratorial government (aka “deep state”) encroaching on their individual freedoms to justify the right to carry guns everywhere. Now the National Rifle Association has taken particular exception to Trump and co. criticising Pretti for carrying a gun. It might start to dawn on them that the very people they’ve been supporting politically all these years are the true enemies of freedom.
Two murders and 3,000 arrests so far, and some Republican politicians are getting cold feet. A particular low in despicable ICE behaviour was the use of five-year old Liam Ramos as “bait” to lure his father out of their house.
Public outrage at ICE antics has led a Republican candidate for Minnesota state Governor, Chris Madel, to drop out, declaring “Driving while Hispanic is not a crime. Neither is driving while Asian.”
Racial profiling has accounted for a massive drop in Hispanic support for Trump, while even Cubans are being deported in record numbers.
The government is currently engaged in a damage-limitation exercise given the bad optics. It has scaled down ICE numbers in Minneapolis. The two federal agents who murdered Alex Pretti have been placed on leave, although we still don’t know their identities. A federal judge has blocked attempts by the administration to alter or destroy evidence in the killings.
Yet the situation in Minneapolis stays tense, and the ICE presence in the city remains.
Calls from Attorney General Pam Bondi for Minnesota to hand over its electoral rolls to her have been met with outrage. And not just because that’s nothing to do with immigration. It also shows the extent to which Trump is pursuing voter suppression as an option to subvert the mid-term elections. The continuing presence of ICE on the streets may serve to prevent people of colour from going to the polls.
The FBI, now operating de facto as another personal police force for Trump, and has raided offices in Fulton County, Georgia to seize ballots and records related to the 2020 election in a fresh attempt to undermine trust in the electoral process. It is a further example of “payback”, this time against Fani Willis, the Fulton County DA who sought to prosecute Trump for his efforts to fraudulently overturn election results in Georgia in that year.
Trump? “No problem”? Or fascist?
4 February, 2026
Author: Jim Denham
From the moment Donald Trump emerged from his gilded escalator on 15 June 2015 to announce his run for US presidency, debate has raged about whether he can be called a fascist.
There was soon plenty of fuel for the “fascist” claim: his white nationalism, his rhetorical anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism, his vilification of racialised internal and external enemies, his dehumanising language and open encouragement of violence, were all suggestive of fascism.
The main objection to the idea of Trump being a fascist was that “classic” fascism was inseparable from the revolutionary conditions of its emergence in Europe between the two world wars (meaning Trump — and indeed, anyone else — simply cannot be called a “fascist” in this day and age).
Initially, the Morning Star didn’t have much to say one way or the other on this, generally taking the view that though boorish, Trump was nothing particularly out of the ordinary in terms of US politics (though the paper, like the US Communist Party, did quietly support a Democrat vote).
Before the 2020 presidential election, Andrew Murray used his Eyes Left column to opine that Brits shouldn’t concern ourselves with the outcome. In particular, we should stop worrying about Trump. Murray assured us that Trump’s threats and possible “civil conflict” were “nothing to fear”. After all: “there is no progress without conflict, and in the USA most likely no socialism without an awful lot of it.” And a further Trump presidency would bring one great benefit: “A weakened US is a gain for the rest of the world.”
As for “a fascist US presidency” not to worry, it will “surely give cause for protest here before long” and “the most aggressive powers on record have been impeccably liberal British and US imperialisms, with not a day of fascist rule between them… There is the main enemy, not the orange demagogue.”
Promises
After the 2020 election, regular contributor (and, like Murray, a leading Communist Party of Britain member) Nick Wright argued that the Trump administration had been “delivering on its promises” to workers and that Biden’s victory represented a “restoration of the violent neoliberal order.”
When Trump incited his supporters to storm the Capitol, the paper (editorial, 8 January 2021) seemed to sympathise with the mob: “the most significant event … [was] the decision of Vice-President Mike Pence to throw his bloated boss overboard and line up with the Republican leadership … It was this, as much as anything else, which so enraged the mob and sharpened their sense of betrayal. In this, they have more finely tuned political instincts than the host of liberal commentators on both sides of the Atlantic who saw an existential threat to US ‘democracy’”.
How things have changed: these days they habitually refer to Trump as “fascist”, the change initially brought about by his kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro (whom the paper refers to –against all the evidence — as “democratically elected”) but now also by the murderous impunity of Trump’s masked ICE thugs in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
On 27 January (appropriately, Holocaust Memorial Day) the editorial referred to “Trump’s fascist revival”; the next day it described (accurately) the ICE commander Bovino as “strut[ting] around… for all the world like a nazi gauleiter on the eastern front in the second world war.”
Perhaps most significantly, on 23 January the paper quoted retiring CPB general secretary Robert Griffiths’ political report to the party’s executive committee: “Inside the US today, Trump’s regime ignores national and international law, rules without accountability to the elected US Congress, persecutes political opponents and deploys its own ICE paramilitary forces against racial minorities and democratic local government.
He continued: “The US has embarked on the road to fascism …”
Griffiths conveniently forgot about the time, just a few years ago, when leading CPB members strongly hinted that Trump was preferable to Biden (Nick Wright) and that although he may or may not be a fascist, he is not the “main enemy” (Andrew Murray).
In fact, Murray’s 2020 claim that “civil conflict” brought about by Trump would be “nothing to fear” should go down in the annals of Stalinist stupidity.
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