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 evident in his relentless drive to criminalize dissent and weaponize the state against what he calls “enemies of the people.” He has demanded draconian penalties, including prison time, for those who burn the American flag, an act of protest protected under the Constitution. Stephen Prager argues in Common Dreams that Trump has issued an executive order that puts in place portals and legal mechanisms that may permit “‘random fascist vigilantes’ to help him crack down on protests across the country, according to one prominent civil rights lawyer.” In addition, he has called for the reinstatement of the death penalty for murder cases in the nation’s capital, deploying the ultimate form of state violence as both spectacle and warning. These are not isolated authoritarian postures but militarized acts of domestic terrorism, designed to fuse punishment, repression, and vengeance into the very core of political life.

What we are witnessing in the United States is not simply the corrosion of democratic norms but the rise of an aggressive fascist politics, one that weaponizes the threat of punishment to enforce Trump’s whims and vanities. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat rightly observes, Trump seeks to transform the Department of Defense into the Department of War, a blunt instrument of his personal authority. He boasts of sending armed troops into Democratic-run cities he despises, embracing the military as his private army. Journalist and historian Garrett Graff underscores the gravity of this descent, arguing that “America has finally tipped over into fascism.” While he does not explicitly invoke the term domestic terrorism, his depiction leaves little doubt that the necropolitics of state terror have taken root under Trump’s regime. Graff writes:

America has become a country where armed officers of the state shout “Papers please!” on the street at men and women heading home from work, a vision we associate with the Gestapo in Nazi Germany or the KGB in Soviet Russia, and where masked men wrestle to the ground and abduct people without due process into unmarked vehicles, disappearing them into an opaque system where their family members beg for information.

Anti-Communism Fanaticism and the Ghost of Roy Cohn

It is precisely out of this obsession with punishment and terror that Trump revives another of fascism’s oldest weapons: the anti-communist smear. At the core of this politics of fear, dissenters are not engaged but denounced, not debated but branded as traitors. In the McCarthy era it was used to silence dissent, dismantle unions, and destroy lives—think especially of “the Hollywood Ten.”

Under Trump, anti-communist smears are wielded once again, not as an argument but as a weapon, meant to mark whole movements, cities, and communities as enemies of the state. A chilling illustration of this came in a rant by white nationalist Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff. Speaking at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station on August 20, 2025, during a stop at Shake Shack with Vice President J.D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, while visiting National Guard troops. Referring to protesters shouting at Miller in Union Station, he stated:

They’re the ones who have been advocating for the one percent. They’re criminals, killers, rapists, and drug dealers. And I’m glad they’re here today because me, Pete, and the vice president [are] going to leave here and, inspired by them, we’re going to add thousands more resources to this city to get the criminals and the gang members out. We’re going to disable those networks, and we’re going to prove that the city can serve law-abiding citizens. We are not going to let the Communists destroy a great American city, let alone the nation’s capital… So we’re going to ignore these stupid white hippies, who all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old, and get back to protecting the American people and the citizens of Washington, D.C.

Here the slur “Communists” does not name an ideology, it operates as an epithet, a scarlet letter of treason designed to criminalize protest and erase dissent itself. As Thom Hartmann reminds us, fascism rarely marches into being with tanks rolling down the avenues; it seeps into everyday life through language that glorifies violence, legitimizes cruelty, and sanctifies authoritarian power. By branding critics as “Communists” and ridiculing protesters as “criminals” and “stupid hippies,” Miller’s rant exposes how hate-saturated speech fuses with state repression to cultivate a culture where fear and violence appear natural, even necessary. He surely knows the lineage he is invoking. Anti-communist rhetoric, in the hands of George Wallace and Richard Nixon, functioned in the 1960s as a weapon to justify brutality against “domestic enemies”: liberals, civil rights activists, student radicals, leftists of every stripe. The irony is unmistakable: Miller resurrects the anti-communist hysteria of Roy Cohn, Trump’s mentor and enabler during the darkest days of McCarthyism, channeling a script of fear and denunciation that once destroyed lives and now returns as a blueprint for authoritarian rule. History leaves little doubt: the anti-communist vocabulary revived today by Trump, MAGA, and their sycophants is far from rhetorical excess, it is a deliberate strategy, a time-tested script, to sanctify authoritarian rule, legitimate state-sanctioned violence and silence democratic resistance.

Infamous for his rabid attacks on immigrants, Miller has long been the ideological architect of Trump’s fascism. His racism and nativism fuel three central pillars of this project. First, Miller insists that all immigrants are criminals, fit only to be expelled or incarcerated. Second, he casts the assault on immigration as the cornerstone for erecting a police state, eroding justice, truth, morality, and freedom itself. Third, he has become a leading force in the war on public and higher education, branding them as “cancerous, communist, woke culture” that is “destroying the country.” Such language, echoing Trump’s lexicon, is code for dismantling the critical, inclusive, and democratic possibilities of education: the chance for diverse students to learn, to question, and to act as informed agents of a democratic society.

For Miller, schools must not cultivate critical consciousness but instead drill children in patriotism, uncritical reverence for America, and hostility toward “communist ideology.” The details of this pedagogical assault are chillingly familiar: banning books, whitewashing history into a racist mythology, abolishing critical pedagogy, and hollowing out the capacity for........

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