EDITORIAL: AMERICAN “EXCEPTIONALISM” AND TRUMP’S FASCISM
Vinod Mubayi
Many US Presidents, including President Obama, have celebrated America as an “exceptional” country and voiced many paeans to its exceptionalism. They meant this in a wholly positive sense of course, although it is difficult not to regard the United States at its founding as exceptional in a very different sense: its hypocrisy. The US founding fathers managed to integrate the soaring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence and the Rights of Man with its complete negation in the practice of a formal system of slavery in many of the colonies along with the ongoing execution of a brutal genocide of the native American population. Now that we have Donald Trump as president, who promised to be a dictator on Day 1 of his second term, an exceptional American form of fascist government appears to be emerging.
Trump is the front man of his MAGA (Make America Great Again) regime whose guiding principle all his life has been What’s In It For Me? His personal political style is that of a bully who seeks domination and demands submission. But, unlike past fascisms like Nazi Germany that were led by a Fuhrer operating through a party with a single ideology based on race or ethnicity, Trump’s fascist movement seems to consist of two distinct sets of followers; one could be considered the ‘America First’ white supremacist type of group of isolationists led by people like Steve Bannon, the other may be called the tech-bro group whose current leader is indisputably Elon Musk, the world richest man. While these two groups may share some common objectives, such as destroying the “deep state”, they have significant differences on other issues and some conflicts between them have already emerged openly, like the one on skilled immigrants and the grant of H1-B visas to foreign tech workers.
Trump gave full freedom to his own fascist impulses as soon as he was inaugurated by pardoning the 1600 criminals who he had incited to assault the US Capitol on Jan 6, 2021 to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the November 2020 election. Many of these people had pled guilty to and been convicted of violent assaults on law enforcement personnel and sentenced to long prison terms. This completely arbitrary action showed the whole world clearly the fragility of the legal order in a so-called nation of laws. Trump is a convicted felon himself and he would very likely have been in jail now had he not been rescued by a bizarre judgement of the US Supreme Court last June that essentially made the US president into a monarch instead of a citizen subject to the same laws as any other citizen. Compounding this fragility is the fact that almost no elected member of Congress belonging to the Republican party that currently controls both the Senate and the House of Representatives expressed any disapproval of Trump’s pardons despite the fact that several of them were in acute danger of being assaulted on Jan 6, 2021 themselves when the violent mob instigated by Trump forced its way into the Capitol building. Their subservience to Trump evokes shades of the fealty pledged by Nazi Party political leaders to Adolf Hitler.
Trying to justify his grotesque pardons, Trump was quoted by the New York Times (NYT) as saying that in his clemency order he tried to recast Jan 6, 2021 as a “day of love” and said the order would “end a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years” and begin “a process of national reconciliation.” However, NYT also quoted a federal judge who repudiated Trump’s twisted logic. In a written court order Judge Beryl A. Howell stated: “No ‘national injustice’ occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election, no ‘process of national reconciliation’ can begin when poor losers, whose preferred candidate loses an election, are glorified for disrupting a constitutionally mandated proceeding in Congress and doing so with impunity.” “This court,” Judge Howell concluded, “cannot let stand the revisionist myth relayed in this presidential pronouncement.”
Not content with overturning established legal judgments, Trump went on to issue a slew of new presidential orders touching almost all aspects of life in the US where the federal government plays a role, ranging from science policy to environmental policy, immigration, health issues, energy policy, gender concerns, regulatory concerns, climate change, and foreign aid.
As expected, Trump ordered US withdrawal from the Paris climate change agreement. Trump and his cohorts do not believe in the established science of climate change caused largely by greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, oil, gas and coal. Trump also declared a national energy emergency in the US that allows his government to promote fossil fuel energy projects, such as coal and natural gas-based power plants, liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals, drilling on protected Federal lands and so on. Trump’s actions in the energy sector hew closely to the agenda of Project 2025, an extreme right-wing manifesto directing federal government actions in a Trump second term. The US is by far the largest historical cumulative carbon emitter; it is currently the No 2 annual emitter behind China which is No 1 (India is No 3 currently). The US is also the world’s largest oil and gas producer. Encouraging and promoting more fossil fuel production as Trump is doing with his “Drill, baby drill” rhetoric, should be regarded as nothing short of insane and a crime against humanity when global warming is emerging worldwide as a harbinger of devastating climate change and 2024 was the hottest year in recorded world history.
Trump also signed an order to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO), a United Nations agency responsible for global health. This is expected to show Trump and his cohorts’ contempt for international agencies and pander to “America First” sentiments.
Trump’s two-and-a-half-week orgy of orders and action can be categorized into two parts: one, his domestic fascism exemplified by his attempts and those of his cronies like Musk to dismantle and seize parts of US government agencies and, two, his revival of the 19th century rhetoric of US imperialism reminiscent of Teddy Roosevelt and William McKinley to seize territory abroad. While initially he wanted to grab Greenland, the Panama Canal, northern Mexico, and make Canada the 51st state, he has since progressed to more outrageous and insane demands like making Gaza into a US territory, expelling the Palestinian population, and erecting an oceanfront French Riviera that will doubtless be so developed as to also make him a lot of money.
The most blatantly fascist Trump order is the one to deport all undocumented immigrants possibly with the help of the US military, all 11 million of them. Trump’s policies of mass detention, exemplified by the plan to build a concentration camp for 30,000 deportees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and mass deportation have become the most concrete expressions of fascism embedded in the “America First” ideology. The deportation flights are propagandistic elements of the machinery of terror that Trump wishes to unleash against families and communities who hail from what Trump calls “shithole countries”. Images of chained and shackled detainees being led like cattle on to military cargo aircraft for transport to their home country have now been flashed all over the world. In the case of India, in particular, which accounts for the third largest number of illegal migrants in the US, behind Mexico and El Salvador according to a Pew survey, the image of the104 shackled migrants who were sent on a 40 hour flight on a C-17 military cargo plane that landed in Amritsar a few days ago, evoked strong reactions all over India with the shameful exception of Indian government spokesmen. External Affairs Minister Jaishankar claimed that ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, i.e., the jailer) had “assured” him that everything was done according to standard operating procedures of the agency. This servile behavior on the part of the leaders of a country that aspires to be a Vishwaguru (world’s guru) was in stark contrast to President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, a country with barely 3% of India’s population and one more subject to bullying by the US, who refused to let US military planes with shackled Colombian illegal migrants land in his country and ensured them instead a dignified arrival on civilian Colombian aircraft.
Many observers have pointed out that despite Trump’s bluster the deportation of millions of illegal immigrants is a logistical impossibility over any foreseeable future time period certainly the four remaining years of Trump’s term. But, as the economist and commentator Paul Krugman writes in his blog “As the official immigrant crackdown ramps up, we’re also going to see a lot of vigilantism… All of this will be ugly and scary. America may very quickly become a nation in which everyone — or at least every nonwhite — feels the need to carry proof of legal residence with them wherever they go, and even having the right papers may not protect you from detention or vigilante violence.” Krugman predicts that this crackdown is going to have very negative economic impacts. Almost half of the workforce in the US farm sector consists of undocumented aliens and their absence, either due to deportation or their fear of coming to work, will lead to an acute farm labor shortage and cause food prices to skyrocket. Also, undocumented aliens account for 25-30% of labor in the construction industry and their removal will also cause major problems.
Trump’s order cancelling birthright citizenship as granted in the Fourteenth Amendment to the US constitution was temporarily blocked by a federal judge who termed it “blatantly unconstitutional.” This issue is certain to be appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court.
In another executive order Trump revoked the federal contractor nondiscrimination executive order, EO 11246, signed by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 that protected employees of businesses seeking federal contracts from discrimination. Trump and his father were charged under this order with discrimination against blacks and Hispanics in their federal housing projects in the 1970s and it is very likely that Trump has felt a grievance against it ever since. Further malice is demonstrated by Trump’s order to fire the Inspector Generals at multiple US agencies and departments whose mission is to uncover and prosecute fraud, waste, and abuse in their respective domains.
It is difficult to overstate the sheer illegality of Donald Trump’s order allowing Elon Musk to arbitrarily fire US government employees, shutter long standing agencies like USAID, and most sinister of all, permit Musk and his tech-bro team access to key government functions, including direct control over the Treasury’s payment system. This system, the federal government’s financial lifeline, determines which agencies, contractors, and programs receive funding. It is, in essence, the federal government’s checkbook. Musk claims he has frozen payments to organizations he disapproves of, canceled allocations based on personal grievances, and redirected funds—all without congressional approval or legal oversight. As one commentator remarked: “Elon Musk holds no official position in the United States government. He has not been elected to serve in any capacity. Nor has he been appointed, let alone confirmed, by Congress to any role that grants him legal authority over public policy or federal operations. Yet he has now seized core government powers, with the apparent approval of President Donald Trump… The extent of Musk’s informal control is staggering. His companies—Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter)—have long been intertwined with government contracts and subsidies. But Musk has moved from being a corporate beneficiary to an unelected autocrat… What Musk is doing bears all the hallmarks of a coup d’état, even above and beyond Trump’s broader assault on the Constitution. A coup occurs when some person or group of persons seize extra-legal control over the state. Musk’s actions, though unconventional, fit within this framework. Without holding office or formal authority, he has effectively taken control of critical government functions, sidelining constitutional processes in favor of personal edicts.” This represents, no doubt, a collapse of the bourgeois democratic constitutional order of checks and balances among the different branches of government: the executive, legislative and judicial. Whether it is temporary or not remains to be seen.
The excuse trotted out by Trump cohorts for these orders and actions is to abolish “woke ideology” in government, i.e., the so-called diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) principles, that offend patriarchy, white supremacy and hierarchy. This has now extended in almost comical fashion to the government’s scientific and technical agencies. The CDC (Centre for Disease Control) has instructed its scientists to retract or pause the publication of any research manuscript being considered by any medical or scientific journal, to ensure that no “forbidden terms” appear in the work. What are these forbidden terms? According to an email sent to CDC employees, researchers were ordered to refrain from mentioning or remove any references to the following: “Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female.” Further comment would be superfluous.
The feasibility of a fascist vision in the US and what may hinder or slow it down is difficult to predict at present. The only legislative agenda the Republican Party in Congress seems to have is another massive tax cut for the wealthy that will necessitate deep cuts to social programs like Medicare and, perhaps, Social Security. While this will please Elon Musk and his tech-bros it will deliver a blow to those sections of the working class who were swayed by Trump’s promises to drain the Washington swamp and voted for him in the last election. This is a basic contradiction in the pro-Trump movement as he hands power to unelected billionaires to shred the meager social safety net that exists in America. Whether opposition forces can creatively deepen this contradiction remains to be seen.
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