Trumpist fascism: The worm turns
First published at MR Online.
For those who lived through Richard Nixon’s lurch toward authoritarian rule, the period after his reelection in a landslide in November 1972 was frightening. (And it was a real landslide, with 60 percent of the vote.) Nixon soon launched a brutal “Christmas” bombing of Vietnam and prepared further revenge against his “enemies list” at home. Though weakened by then, antiwar youth still constituted the largest presence among the 100,000 people who demonstrated against his inauguration in January 1973. But even though Nixon seemed to be riding high, the worm had begun to turn. A few weeks later, the American Indian Movement began its epochal Wounded Knee Occupation. By May, the Democratic Party had recovered some of its backbone and the Senate Watergate hearings were underway. The rest of the story is well known.
Today, the worm is turning for the Trumpist fascists, despite their control (unlike Nixon) of all three branches of government and their massive attempts to transform the US state and society. In November, Zohran Mamdani’s electoral victory in New York, as well as other victories for progressives in Seattle and elsewhere, showed not only a widening opposition to Trumpism, but also its radicalization. The No Kings demonstrations in October drew over five million into the streets. The immigration raids in the Los Angeles and Chicago regions met with fierce citizen opposition on the streets, slowing and even derailing efforts at mass roundups, in actions reminiscent of the legendary struggles against the Fugitive Slave Law in the 1850s. By December 2025, amid more electoral defeats, most notably for a Cuban right-winger in Miami, Trump’s poll numbers plummeted amid severely worsening jobs data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
What went wrong for the Trumpist fascists?
According to the famous statement by Martin Niemöller,
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I kept quiet; I wasn’t a communist.
When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a trade unionist.
When they locked up the social democrats, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a social democrat.
When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left to protest.
Niemöller was describing what are sometimes called “salami tactics”: divide one’s opponents by picking them off one at a time, starting with the most reviled.
But this has not been the case with Trumpism in 2025. The Trumpist fascists have instead gone after everyone, everywhere, all at once.
They went after transgender people from day one, but also attacked large LGBTQ constituencies and even prominent centrist liberal feminists. They denied transgender military veterans their pensions. This kind of repression took place in purportedly liberal institutions as well, as when the University of Pennsylvania acceded to Trumpist pressure by severely restricting trans people from its athletic programs. But the Pride demonstrations in June saw very large turnouts, including in lots of smaller cities and towns.
Under mad hatter multibillionaire Elon Musk, DOGE attacked federal agencies with a sledgehammer, not just the social programs or diplomatic jobs, but also the police/security apparatus. The administration also decreed in peremptory fashion that it was ending union representation for one million federal workers. Other Trumpists even attempted to prosecute the likes of the former director of the FBI. The working class recoiled in the face of Musk, anyone’s worst nightmare of a boss. The racist and sexist nature of these attacks was also seen in the fact that huge numbers of federal workers are women, among them many women of color. As Erica Green observed at the end of the summer: “The most recent labor statistics show that nationwide, Black women lost 319,000 jobs in the public and private sector between February and July of this year, the only major female demographic group to experience significant job losses during this five-month period” (“Black Women Most Affected by Trump Cuts,” New York Times, September 1, 2025). A furious backlash has ensued, as seen not least in the election returns in the DC area and elsewhere.
Trumpist fascists tried to seal the border with Mexico, claiming they were targeting violent “criminal aliens,” while rounding up random brown people across the country, seizing everyone from high school students to pregnant women to grandmothers. Many were in fact citizens, while countless other citizens and residents showed solidarity on the streets.
At universities, the Trumpists went after pro-Palestine speech and organizing even more than during the Biden administration, further weaponizing charges of antisemitism. But instead of waiting to consolidate this form of repression before moving against more powerful constituencies, they also targeted from the start the more established Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion structures, and they even jeopardized the funding of scientific researchers holding massive Defense Department contracts. Research funding for science dropped to its lowest level in decades, while that for humanities and social sciences plunged even lower. Almost immediately, some university administrations surrendered without a fight, like at Columbia, which, among other outrages, removed self-governance from its Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies Department. By December, Northwestern University president Henry Bienen, who actually began his academic career as an Africa scholar with expertise on Tanzania, did Columbia one better. In his deal with the Trumpist fascists, Bienen ignominiously revoked an agreement with pro-Palestine protesters from 2024 that had mandated scholarships for Palestinian students and the establishment of an advisory committee that would have included discussion of divestment from apartheid Israel. He did so in the face of a 595–8 Faculty Assembly vote rejecting this kind of capitulation.
Most universities in relatively liberal areas of the country have attempted rotten compromises — curtailing Palestine protests, eliminating or renaming DEI — that fell short of complete capitulation. Harvard struck a slightly stronger pose than most, but its degree of willingness to compromise is unclear. Meanwhile, students have shown few signs of accepting the Trumpist agenda. Nor have faculty, as seen by the lawsuit at the University of California launched by the faculty association rather than by craven administrators. At UCLA, the contrived nature of Trumpist antisemitism charges has even led to the resignation of a significant number of Justice Department prosecutors, normally hardly in the progressive camp. At many universities, the defense of academic freedom continues to include Palestine and transgender rights, the two issues centrist liberals want us to downplay or even drop.
Meanwhile, in the South and in some of the more conservative states elsewhere, academic repression has been even more pervasive. Faculty have been fired for discussing transgender rights, Palestine, or socialism; or even over chance remarks about assassinated rightwing leader Charlie Kirk. Some universities are policing syllabi and eliminating courses they accuse of DEI or “wokeism.” At the University of Texas, once a flagship research university, the pro-Trumpist administration is attempting to strip faculty of the forms of self-governance that have marked universities since their inception nearly a millennium ago. The outright firing of even faculty with tenure is not limited to Southern and conservative states, however. This can be seen in the dismissal over faculty objections of Professor Sang Hea Kil of San José State University for her participation in a Palestine demonstration. To make this point, Kil is working with Tom Alter, a historian dismissed for socialist speech from Texas State University, in a joint campaign for their reinstatement and for academic freedom more generally.
Most big corporations and law firms readily agreed to drop or curtail DEI programs, which were never all that strong in the first place. Trumpists attempted to appeal to majoritarian sentiment here (“anti-white” discrimination, etc.), but at the same time enraged many people of color and youth who will not easily forget.
Inside the military, the Trumpists have summarily fired long-serving Black and women officers, removed references to General Colin Powell from websites and restored Confederate monuments and symbols. They also pulled Black studies books from military academy libraries in response to the Trumpist attack on DEI. In national parks and monuments, depictions of slavery were also removed. These moves have outraged many veterans, who are speaking out openly when many still serving cannot.
The Trumpists have intimidated several of the major broadcast networks and attacked popular comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Rob Reiner, the latter right after he was brutally murdered. The backlash was immense, and some networks had to backtrack. Meanwhile, billionaire Trumpists like the Ellison family are buying up large media properties, including most notably the storied CBS News, celebrated for having in the past stood up to both McCarthy and Nixon. The new CBS news editor, self-described “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss, has already blocked a 60 Minutes segment that featured migrants recounting their deportation and torture at the notorious Cecot Prison in El Salvador.
Trumpist fascists have rolled back or seriously undermined over a century of health and environmental protections. Most damaging here in the short term are the policies of anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy, Jr., which will result in the deaths of more people than anything else the Trumpists are doing. In terms of the environment, Trumpists are slashing anything they can, even trying to abolish wind farms. They have also broken up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which includes the agency that monitors and predicts hurricanes.
Such callous disruption, destructiveness, and brutality, not limited to just a few sectors, but taking place in numerous directions at the same time, has amounts to an overreach that has made even some Trumpist constituencies uneasy. While none of this portends something like what Nixon experienced, forced to resign eighteen months after beginning his second term, it is clear that the public has turned against Trump, as seen both in elections and in numerous opinion polls showing his support at below 40 percent.
Three historical episodes of violent state repression, US style
There is much fear of a third Red Scare or a second “Redemption,” the name given by its perpetrators to the violent resurgence of white supremacy in the South in the 1870s. But are we really on the verge of something so momentous? What are the chances that the Trumpist fascists can get their increasingly unpopular agenda through, either by force or by changing public opinion radically in their favor? Since they don’t seem to be succeeding in the latter, can they create truly violent and massive repression at a societal level? Another look in the historical mirror may help illuminate this.
Here, a glance at the three most serious bouts of political repression the United States has experienced to date may be instructive. It should be noted that each of them took place in the aftermath of a truly serious crisis involving war and revolution. I would argue that as serious as is the situation facing us in 2026, the chance of such levels of repression is not as great as is often being assumed.
- Starting in the 1870s, white vigilantes and politicians across the South visited tremendous violence upon Blacks and their supporters and murdered thousands, rolling back Reconstruction. In the process, they created a violent wall of racial segregation and disfranchisement that held for nearly a century across the region. But this was the counterrevolution that followed the only real social revolution the United States has ever undergone, the Civil War and Reconstruction, when four million enslaved people gained physical and, for a time, political freedom. Because that revolution did not cross the horizon of distributing land to formerly enslaved people, something that Northern capital and some liberals also hesitated to support, the new democratic freedoms of the era came to lack any solid economic foundation. In a few years, the reactionaries pounced, abetted by the acquiescence of northern capital and the Republican Party in the infamous compromise of 1877.
- In 1919–20, a truly massive Red Scare targeted Socialists and Wobblies, as well as the nascent Communist Party, all the while blaming immigration as the source of radicalism. The Red Scare began during World War I amid a pervasive patriotic fervor that marginalized antiwar and leftwing voices. But it also occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, seen as a global threat by capital and its states across the world, including the United States.
- The second Red Scare, McCarthyism, was meeting stiff resistance until two large geopolitical events, the Chinese Revolution of October 1949 and the start of the Korean War in June 1950, put dissenters and the left severely on the defensive. Without full-scale war and the “loss” of China, McCarthyism would likely have had milder effects.
What of the United States today? While nothing like a social revolution has occurred over the past decade and a half, we have seen threats to the global social order that began with the Great Recession of 2008 and the Arab revolutions and Occupy in 2011, and then continued into the Sanders campaigns, the #MeToo movement, and the Movement for Black Lives of 2020. While not fully cataclysmic, these events were radical and widely situated enough to scare both of the major wings of Trump’s base: (a) primarily lower-middle class, disaffected, mainly white people, many of them deeply racist and some of them working-class, who feel threatened by immigration and the rising prominence of people of color, all this amid declining or stagnating living standards; and (b) a new plutocracy disdainful and fearful of even the mildest taxation or regulation.
The former group is by no means incorrigibly Trumpist, though the persistence of its support for an entire decade has been truly remarkable, never going below 35 percent in national polls even after the January 6, 2021 coup attempt and the huge revulsion against Trump that followed. Nor is Trumpism a one-person show; rather, it is a deep movement of opinion and practice, as David Norman Smith has recently argued. At the same time, as Bill Fletcher noted last spring with regard to our response going forward, “rank-and-file members of our unions should be won over to fully appreciate the nature of the danger facing us.” In this way, we need to dialogue with at least some elements of that Trumpist base, while also trying to break up the deep pessimism into which many of the more progressive sectors of the working people have fallen.
The rapid shift rightward of the new plutocracy, in response to slights and mild threats to its hegemony, is a more recent phenomenon, as can be seen in the evolution of Elon Musk from moderate liberal during Obama’s time to Trumpist fascist, or more recently, in Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s tilt toward Trump in late 2024. As Naomi Klein exclaimed last spring, the tech billionaires, once hailed as heroes even by many progressive, are so arrogant that “they truly believe they are gods.” The way in which both the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times refused to publish their usual liberal editorials supporting Kamala Harris in 2024 — at the last-minute direct order of their billionaire owners, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong — was also a remarkable turn. But as Klein also noted, their alliance with Trump’s more plebeian base is deeply unstable. Nor do these moves have much support among the technical workers or journalists at these big institutions.
What we accomplished in 2025
The Trumpist fascist overreach has led to increased support for a wide array of forms of resistance. Three of these stand out at the end of the year 2025.
First and foremost, the defense of immigrants has been a shining moment of community mobilization and solidarity across ethnic lines. If the mainly Latinx communities being targeted were initially startled and intimidated by massive raids by ICE and the Border Patrol, the dispatch of US Marines and federalized National Guard troops to Los Angeles over the summer constituted a turning point.1 Since Los Angeles is a global media capital, the whole world witnessed the sight of armed troops guarding federal installations, of Latino US Senator Alex Padilla being violently arrested for asking a question of “Cruelty Barbie” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem inside the Westwood Federal Building, of ICE agents on horseback and in armored vehicles going through a city park full of children taking part in a summer camp, of President David Huerta of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in California being throttled and arrested while protesting ICE roundups of working people in Downtown LA, and of the death of a man fleeing onto a highway to avoid ICE—all this turned fear into rage.2 Groups like Union del Barrio, which has been doing this work for decades, organized regional neighbors to come out to protest ICE everywhere, so effectively that they could have protestors at most sites in a matter of minutes. In these networks, unions like SEIU were also crucial actors. After some weeks, amid reports of dissension within the national guard, themselves California residents called up involuntarily, the troop and ICE presence was scaled back, a clear victory for the resistance. At the same time, many arrests of protestors and draconian charges against them resulted in grand juries failing to indict or acquittals by juries of their fellow citizens, most recently in December in the trial of a tow truck driver who had removed an ICE vehicle from blocking a driveway during a raid.
By fall, when ICE and the National Guard hit Chicago, the population was even more fully prepared, with their long trains of civilian cars and their ubiquitous whistles “escorting” ICE agents everywhere, often slowing arrests to a trickle. In Chicago’s more compact urban neighborhoods, government thugs were more easily surrounded and blocked. As LA Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, a champion of immigrant rights, noted during trip to Chicago’s predominantly Mexican American Little Village neighborhood:
We don’t have the whistles. They’ve become the fall soundtrack of the Windy City to the point organizers are holding “Whistlemania” events to hand them out by the thousands. Chicago has a radical legacy that predates LA… People poured out of businesses and their residences. Others looked out from rooftops. The intensity of their pushback was more concentrated, raw and widespread than almost anything I’ve seen back home. It wasn’t just the activists on call — block after block was ready.
As with Chicago, a number of other struggles have not gained the kind of media spotlight that has been shone on LA, but two examples are illustrative: In November, high school youth went on strike in Charlotte, NC to protest ICE raids on their communities. By December, Minneapolis community members also brought their whistles. On a freezing cold afternoon, the community, clearly better adapted to local conditions, outlasted shivering ICE agents, who gave up and left, allowing the people to secure an immigrant from their clutches.
The No Kings Day rallies, in June and in October, demonstrated the breadth of the opposition far and wide to Trumpist fascism, including in small towns in conservative areas of the country. Gigantic marches took place in many major cities, larger in October than in July. While controlled mainly by the liberal Invisible coalition, these events did not exclude either Palestine supporters or leftists, far from it, and they also featured a large trade union presence.
But it was Mamdani’s stunning double electoral victory in New York City that created the largest mobilization in a single city against Trump, with some 1.1 million voting for the democratic socialist, despite tens of millions being spent by billionaires, including centrist Democrats and Republicans, many of them rightwing Zionists who couldn’t believe how much “their” city had changed. To be sure, Mamdani hewed to the doctrines of reform socialism, which included some important economic measures like a wealth tax and free daycare and buses, while backing away from saying anything concrete about police brutality and murder. However, on one point he stood consistently to the left, refusing to back down in his clear support for Palestine, including the charge of genocide against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In a metropolis whose City Council never managed to pass a Gaza ceasefire resolution, this was a stunning outcome indeed. Moreover, Mamdani’s campaign won via true grassroots organizing, over 100,000 volunteers to knocking on 3 million doors, thus bypassing the corporate media. In many cases recruited by the Democratic Socialists of America, these canvassers echoed Socialist Party efforts in cities like Milwaukee a century ago. Two weeks later, Seattle elected Katie Wilson as mayor, defeating a centrist incumbent who’d opposed a wealth tax.
The danger that Trumpism could still triumph
It is very sobering to recall, as mentioned above, that the radicalization of Trumpist actions and policies in his second term, and the growing opposition, has resulted in only a slight diminution of his support base. As also noted above, his core support, as measured by opinion polls, has never gone below about 35 percent, even in the months right after his 2020 electoral defeat and his January 2021 fascist coup attempt. Equally dangerous is the fact that support levels for Trumpism are surely higher inside the military and police apparatus, plus the fact that many of his civilian supporters are armed to the teeth.
As also mentioned above, the last year has also seen a sharp turn toward Trumpism on the part of many big capitalist individuals and firms, ranging from Silicon Valley billionaires to giants of Wall Street. Thus, the most flamboyant among them, Musk, is by no means alone. Other plutocrats have not expressed open support but acquiesced more quietly. Still others have tacked in a parallel direction, as seen in Bill Gates’s recent abandonment of environmental initiatives. All this gives Trumpism, at least for now, much more solid support among the dominant classes and their representatives than during his first term.
A look at Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s is instructive here too, since it shows how the resistance Trump is experiencing now could conceivably fade. Elected with just over 50 percent of the vote in 1980, Reagan met with fierce and massive opposition during his first few years. But an easy military victory in the 1983 Grenada invasion, amid footage of “rescued” white US students and of captured Black Grenadian soldiers, put the opposition — both electoral and grassroots — on the back foot for several years. This allowed Reagan to win a 59 percent popular vote landslide in 1984 and to consolidate neoliberalism for decades to come. Trump’s present military maneuvers against Venezuela, if successful in toppling the Maduro government without a fight, could offer him a “Grenada” boost. But Venezuela is a much larger country — with a population of 30 million versus Grenada’s 100,000 in 1983 — that would not be easy pickings.
While these examples are indeed worrisome, it needs also to be recalled that Trump has never received the kind of popular support that Reagan or Nixon achieved, let alone Woodrow Wilson during the First World War–era Red Scare. As of now, the opposition to Trumpist fascism is deep and wide, with no sign of abating. And while he is using the state apparatus in vicious, extremely destructive ways, he has not succeeded in intimidating his foes on the streets or at the ballot box—quite the contrary. While a semi-coup is of course possible, in forms like militarized voter suppression during the 2026 midterm elections, this seems unlikely for a presidency whose popularity is hovering around 40 percent. Of course, more severe repression, carried out by the elements of the state in league with vigilantes like the Proud Boys, could possibly silence the opposition. But that would take far greater force than anything seen up to now, including mass arrests and the violent intimidation of large sectors of the population. There are of course precedents for this, like the KKK and allied forces in the South from the 1870s to the 1960s. One sign to watch in this regard would be if Trumpist forces could create no go zones in states where they exercise a great degree of political domination. But so far, they have not been able to do so.
If the worm has indeed turned, what now?
Despite the above concerns, and they are undoubtedly serious ones, the tide seems indeed to have turned sharply against Trumpism as the year 2026 dawns. Republican congressional representatives are resigning either due to simple weariness or differences over the Epstein files or the prospect of skyrocketing healthcare costs. Even the right-wing Supreme Court blocked his use of the National Guard in Chicago as 2025 was coming to an end. The opposition, both grassroots and electoral, is gaining strength and confidence across the country. At the same time, tremendous damage has already been done and will continue to be done to the social and political fabric of an already wounded society as long as this regime is in power.
We need to continue and deepen the struggle, making it as broad as possible while still fighting for our principles within that struggle. As Marxists, we especially need to highlight the issues of class, race/gender/sexuality, environment, imperialism, and national liberation. Thus, we must insist that that class oppression and resistance remain at the center, whether in the defense of immigrant day laborers or more privileged US government workers. We also need to struggle within our unions and our communities for class unity versus racism, sexism, and xenophobia, cutting into the Trumpist base. The national liberation of the Palestinian people, who are struggling for their very existence in the face of genocidal Israeli colonialism, and Venezuela’s right to maintain its independence against Trumpist imperialism, cannot be sacrificed to any mythical “broader” unity. Nor can that of trans people, who are also fighting for their very existence, amid silence even among progressives. The protection of the environment cannot be put on the back burner, despite calls even from progressive to do so on a “temporary” basis, or to resort to nuclear power.
We need to build up organizations and coalitions that cut across all these issues and constituencies, but not in a way that erases their particularity, or that ignores capital and class. In order to do so, we will need build the struggle theoretically as well, against mainstream liberals who want to brush aside the most “controversial” issues, against some types of radicals who may wish to downplay the importance of capital and class, and against those among the Marxists and socialists who attack what they call “identity politics” in ways that cut us off from some of the most revolutionary forces in society today by downplaying race or the historical links of capitalist accumulation to colonialism and slavery.
At a time when some on the left are saying that we need to break completely with the tradition of the Russian revolution, of Lenin, I would argue the opposite. At a juncture like ours, when the world has changed in wrenching fashion, when established progressive forces are hesitating or even betraying, Lenin’s intransigence in opposing the imperialist First World War, an epochal event that created a civilizational crisis for the “West,” is still relevant. But it is not only that. In opposing war and imperialism, Lenin was joined by a number of other leaders and thinkers, from Eugene Debs and Leon Trotsky to Emma Goldman and Rosa Luxemburg. What Lenin did differently from these others was to dig deeply into revolutionary theory amid all the chaos of war and repression. First, he made a profound study of Hegel’s dialectic. Second, out of that he developed his epochal theory of imperialism and of anticolonial, national liberation movements as a key to future revolutions, from India and China to Ireland. Third, in the summer of 1917, even as he was fleeing what seemed to be a wave of reaction that could repress the revolution, he wrote his masterpiece The State and Revolution. He and his comrades also made serious errors, which we can also learn from, but on the above matters he can still inspire us, most of all on the need to unite theory and practice, to face and analyze what is new very deeply even as one continues the socialist struggle without betraying its longstanding principles.
Thus, we need to renew and deepen the struggle in the streets, the schools, and the workplaces, while at the same time renewing and deepening our theoretical groundings.
Kevin B. Anderson’s authored books include Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies and Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism. Among his edited books are The Power of Negativity by Raya Dunayevskaya (with Peter Hudis), Karl Marx (with Bertell Ollman), The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (with P. Hudis), and The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence (with Russell Rockwell).
- 1
Hereafter, I will use ICE, the largest and most active among them, as shorthand for the various federal forces that have been rounding up immigrants.
- 2
The appellation “Cruelty Barbie” was used to characterize Noem by Anita Chabria in her column, “ Homeland Security Says It Doesn’t Detain Citizens. These Brave Californians Prove It Has,” Los Angeles Times, December 12, 2025.
