By Mark Buckley
Trump has launched an all-round authoritarian offensive in the United States. His purpose is to consolidate his power and sideline dissent even from within the billionaire class he represents, as he prepares to launch a much wider attack on the US working class and oppressed ethnic communities. There is a strategic purpose to his brutal tactics and his power-grabs.
The catalogue of attacks is wide-ranging and growing almost daily. Within the US elite he has indicted critics like ex-FBI director James Comey, had extremely mild satirists like Jimmy Kimmel taken off air, tried to remove a governor of the Federal Reserve Bank and clashed with the owners of Democrat-leaning media giants like CNN.
At the same time, Trump’s oligarch allies are busy buying up social media with the express aim of preventing dissent. The latest social media to fall into their grasp is TikTok.
But it is ordinary people, workers plus global majority communities, and women who are bearing the brunt of his most brutal attacks. ICE is waging a reign of terror in migrant communities and others. An estimated 60,000 people are currently in ICE detention and held without charge. A further 200,000 are reported to have been deported in the first seven months of this year. Inevitably, this terrifies whole swathes of the population, with many reported to be too frightened to leave their homes.
Trump’s simultaneous attack on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) is an attempt to effectively roll-back the gains of the civil rights movement, an avowed aim of the MAGA crowd, with disastrous consequences for the workplace rights and opportunities for Black, Asian and Latino workers and for women. Major corporations have eagerly complied with Trump’s urgings; no legislation has been necessary, and discrimination is now openly encouraged.
In addition to the ICE’s assaults, the National Guard has now been unleashed on a number of US cities, which are concentrations of workers, global majority communities and anti-Trump resistance. The alleged crime waves prompting the invasions are a pure fiction, Trump’s own version of the Big Lie technique.
Other tactics are also being borrowed from fascists. The killing of Charlie Kirk has been turned into a political opportunity by Trump and his supporters to target his opponents, an echo of the Nazi’s lionising of Horst Wessel. Goebbels was plagiarised by a key Trump supporter Steve Miller at the Kirk memorial/political rally. Antifa has been made a proscribed organisation even though it had nothing to do with the murder and is not an organisation. It is, however, an antifascist movement and therefore provokes Trump’s hostility.
Thousands of Federal workers have also been fired. Some were targeted by Musk, in his reactionary and ill-fated ‘efficiency drive’. Some have been removed for failing to go along with Trump’s politically motivated use of Dept. of Justice prosecutions. Many more have been fired for expressing their views on social media. The New York Times estimated back in May that then almost 300,000 Federal workers had been fired.
Authoritarianism with a purpose
Some commentators are inclined to explain all this with reference to Trump’s bombast, his thin skin, his personal authoritarian tendencies. All of these are no doubt present.
But they miss the wider motivation of this administration. In effect, a key part of restoring the US economy’s faltering competitiveness (Making America Great Again) is a series of very severe attacks on the pay, conditions and rights of American workers. From Trump’s perspective, if profits are going to be boosted sufficiently to take on China, then greater exploitation of the working class must take place, and so its scope for resistance must be crushed, or at the very least severely curbed.
The media is being subordinated to this project to curb dissent, as are previously untouchable figures in the US Establishment. This applies to judges, central bankers and even to talk-show hosts.
But the target is the working class and the poor. ICE is being used to batter working class and poor districts across the country, to terrorise the population, and the National Guard is being used to occupy particular areas of resistance, such as Washington D.C., Memphis and Portland.
Firing Federal workers specifically for their non-MAGA views is a crucial part of this project. Trump has enacted the first explicitly austerity fiscal measures in the US since the Great Financial Crisis in 2007. His budget bill enacts huge tax cuts for multi-millionaires as well as deep cuts to social programmes, including Medicaid. Like austerity elsewhere, this is effectively a transfer of incomes from poor to rich, and from labour to capital. If he can, it will be Trump’s intention for this to be a continuing series of attacks, again as it has been elsewhere.
Naturally, left activists and groupings will be targeted as organised voices of resistance. In addition to Antifa, the US state and media are targeting peace activists like Code Pink, as well as other critics of US foreign policy, along with Chinese Americans.
Some have likened this to a new McCarthyism, and there are similarities. But McCarthy’s red-baiting witch hunting took place against the backdrop of a booming US economy. Despite what Trump says the US economy is not strong and living standards of rich and poor are already diverging enough that commentators have dubbed it a ‘K-shaped’ economy.
Trump’s assault on liberties and living standards will be the main domestic battle in the US in the next period.
Image: President of the United States Donald Trump speaking at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland; Photo by Gage Skidmore; licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.