CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

More Crap from the Trump Regime and Party

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

It’s hard to keep up with the fascism that is unfolding as the Trump MAGA regime and party bid to consolidate a new form of governance atop the United States. Here, below, are some important recent developments from the Trump47 campaign to makeover US government and society on fascist lines.

Threatening Epic War Crimes Against Humanity

In an interview with Fatherland (FOX) News earlier this week, the fascist US president threatened to bomb all of Iran’s bridges and power plants, explicitly adding that the nation’s entire population of 91 million might soon be without electricity. This Hitlerian threat of collective punishment – illegal under the Geneva Conventions – raises the specter of sheer humanitarian catastrophe on a monumental scale. The fact that Trump could make such a sociopathic threat is symptomatic of his and his regime’s eliminationist/genocidal mindset.

Fake Threat: Rubio’s Claim that Cuba is Directing a Wave of Radical Left Terrorism in the US

Last week the fascist US Secretary of State Marco Rubio released a bizarre 100-page report entitled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism. This paranoid-style neo-McCarthyite document names more than 40 liberal and leftish politicians, influencers and groups as tools of Cuba’s alleged “sustained campaign of subversion” against the US. Presenting no serious evidence for its truly wild claims that Cuba has conducted “a campaign that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the US government [!], recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of leftwing terrorism on American soil [!], and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history [!]” (emphasis and exclamations added), Rubio’s report contains a not-so fearsome roster of US “radical leftists” including New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, streamer Hasan Piker, Ben and Jerry’s founder Ben Cohen, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, the Amazon Labor Union leader Chris Small, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, US Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA), and US Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN).

Rubio’s deranged document absurdly claims that the mildly social democratish Democratic Socialists of America “serve as a particularly potent illustration of the ideological victory of Cuba’s effort to position itself as the spiritual capital of Third-Worldist radicalism.” The unhinged report shamelessly invokes the supposed positive legacy of “the blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions” as instruments of the post-WWII Red Scare’s “effectiveness at dismembering the Communist Party USA.”

“The Very Survival of Humanity”

Mein Trumpf’s top political and policy adviser, the open fascist Stephen “We are the Storm” Miller took RepubliNazi redbaiting to new levels this week. He said this about the 2026 midterms elections:

“The very survival of freedom, liberty, humanity, your family, your children and your future depends on ensuring that we do not allow communism to take hold. AOC, Bernie, Omar—these are people who, even 10-15 years ago, would have been relegated to the outermost fringes. They are now the heart of the party. The Democrats have become the party of freaks, weirdos, losers, and crazies.”

The notion that “communism” has taken hold of the Democratic Party is of course pure fascist fiction. This wild claim is being rolled out again nearly eight decades after the Cold War Red Scare as part of the Trump regime’s determination to cancel the midterms or refuse to honor their outcomes this coming fall and winter. (The “progressive” Dems AOC, Bernie, and Mamdani are mild social democrats at leftmost, hardly sympathetic to the communist revolution[s] that humanity requires if it not going to experience societal collapse [at best] and extinction [at worst] thanks to the accelerating depredations of the world capitalist-imperial system.)

“No Choice But to Seize Voting Machines”

The liberal voting rights expert Ari Berman recently and rightly said this to The New Republic’s Greg Sargent about Trump’s continuing mad........

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