Photograph Source: SC Guard – Public Domain

The Trump administration’s race toward fascism is unfolding at breakneck speed and on multiple fronts. At the heart of this transformation lies the emergence of the United States as a warfare state, a captive state that merges the interests of the military-industrial-academic complex with the toxic ideologies of white nationalism and white supremacy. What makes this moment especially dangerous is that warfare no longer refers solely to foreign conquest; it has become a central organizing principle of governance at home. The state itself has been weaponized, turning inward against its own population, normalizing domestic terrorism as a tool of rule. The scourge of militarization as the driving force of American politics, which has its contemporary roots in the terror state created by Bush and Cheney after 9/11, is even more intensified as a domestic and foreign policy mode of governance. The long legacy of armed intervention abroad by the U.S. now appears on the streets of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. as well as in universities, courthouses, and even sports fields. As Melissa Gira Grant notes, “federal agents are the new proud boys.” Perpetual war is now waged against Americans, legitimated as a normal condition of politics.

This is domestic terrorism, the transformation of inflammatory, fear-mongering, and dehumanizing rhetoric into acts of state violence. It is a form of necropolitics wedded to the notion of death worlds and the ascendence of a corpse-like order. As Achille Mbembe argues, “death worlds” mark regimes in which “new and unique forms of social existence [emerge] in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions conferring on them the status of the living dead.” Trump’s regime of domestic terrorism, especially his war on immigrants and naturalized citizens is driven by a death drive that constitutes an orgy of annihilation wedded to the dictates of capital accumulation, the dynamics of class and racial hierarchies, and bold embrace and displays of racist histories and neo-Nazi symbols. Under Trump’s notion of gangster capitalism and politics of vengeance, there is no room in the U.S. except for white Christian nationalist and supine loyalists.

There is no pretense of democracy here, only the workings of gangster capitalism masquerading as the future. When a government deploys violence and coercion to intimidate its own population, driven by nativism, racism and political extremism, it meets the definition of domestic terrorism. Its policies and language are designed to cultivate fear, intimidate, and amass power in the hands of the rich. Dehumanizing speech does not simply wound; it punishes, it draws blood, and it prepares the ground for expulsions, detention centers, and a culture saturated with hate. Words like “invaders,” “vermin,” and “criminals” are weaponized against immigrants to mark them as disposable. Policies of family separation, mass deportation, and indefinite detention are constructed not only to punish but to terrorize. Confronted with this dehumanizing rhetoric and violence-soaked policies, Trump, chillingly and without irony, declares, “A lot of people are saying maybe we’d like a dictator.”

Trump’s authoritarian obsession with violence and punishment is........

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