Washington DC, 9 AM, November 3, 2025
“For anyone holding their breath,” someone wrote me recently, “waiting for this fascist Trump regime to hit rock bottom: there is no rock bottom. Their depravity will continue to shock the world, week after week, for as long as they hold power.”
“Mad King Trump”
It is a good time to reflect on how true this statement is as we approach the one-year anniversary of Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump’s second presidential election.
Mad “king” Trump is now blowing up random boats, slaughtering innocents in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, claiming without a hint of a wisp of a scent of evidence that the people he is massacring in cold violation of international and national law and basic decency are “enemy combatant” narco-traffickers “at war with the United States.”
Trump is gathering major military forces off the coast of Venezuela in preparation for a likely regime change war on that nation. He may also attack Colombia, whose president has angered him by criticizing his extrajudicial executions in international waters.
He is sending $20 billion to Argentina to back his fellow far-right president there as 42 million US Americans face hunger because he is cutting off their SNAP benefits.
Former SNAP recipients will join masses of federal workers Trump has thrown out of work on food lines as Trump demands $230 million from his Department of Justice as “compensation” for its (badly belated) indictment (under Joe Biden) of Trump for…you know, trying to overthrow electoral democracy and the rule of law at the end of his first horrific administration (and for absconding with classified documents and obstructing efforts to retrieve them).
Trump has just maniacally torn down the East Wing of the White House, planning to replace that former historic landmark with a gargantuan, gaudy ballroom funded by some of his favorite capitulating corporations, including the tech giants Google, Meta, and Palantir and the leading “defense” firm Lockheed Martin.
The Congress has been essentially dissolved by Trump through his command over the Speaker of the US House, the obsequious Mike Johnson. This makes legislative branch oversight of Trump’s war moves and plans impossible. It also prevents the release of the Epstein Files, which contain information on his close relationship with a disgraced pedophile, and Congressional action to restore SNAP benefits (food stamps). (Johnson is meanwhile refusing to seat a duly elected Congresswomen from Arizona since, according to media reports, she would tilt the US House majority to the side of the files’ release.)
Trump has slapped 50% tariffs on Brazil to punish that country for properly prosecuting and convicting his eco-fascist comrade Jair Bolsonaro (the onetime “Trump of the Tropics”) for sparking an attempted insurrectionist coup (Brazil’s January 6) in that nation’s capital on January 8, 2023.
Among the many ways in which Trump is mimicking his role model Adolph Hitler is his attempt to rule through executive order and memorandum.
A recent Trump memo – NPSM-7 – absurdly attributes recent domestic US political violence to a supposedly top-down movement of “left wing terrorism” and tells federal law enforcement to investigate and potentially prosecute any group or individual who advances “antifascist ideas,” including even criticism of “Christianity” and “traditional” family and gender relations.
Trump has unleashed his Department of Justice on a transparently political campaign of prosecutorial retribution against his enemies and critics. He has even directed his fascist Attorney General to investigate people Joe Biden pardoned.
The deranged, orange-sprayed POTUS responded to the remarkable outpouring of 7 million Americans in the No Kings Day protests held in more than 2,500 cities and towns two weeks ago by posting an AI video showing “King Trump” wearing a crown while piloting an Air Force bomber that dumped liquid shit on protesters in New York, Chicago, and other US cities.
There’s far more than online fantasy in the menace Trump poses to the US cities. Herr Donald’s 21st Gestapo, ICE and its junior partner Border Patrol, are many months into a reign of racist, xenophobic-nationalist, and militarized police state terror across urban America. Among its many outrages, this assault has included the disgraceful deployment of Black Hawk Attack Helicopters and hundreds of heavily armed storm troopers against the residents of a large apartment complex in the Black Chicago neighborhood of South Shore. Small children of color were thrown on the street, zip-tied and tossed into vans.
The Trump regime is recruiting ICE agents from the ranks of the Proud Boys and other paramilitary fascist groups. It is building mass detention camps from coast to coast with taxpayer funding that make ICE more well-funded than the militaries of every nation except the US and China.
Trump’s sadistic puppy killing Homeland Security head Kristi Noem, aptly nicknamed “Gestapo Barbie,” coldly rejected Illinois Governor JB Pritzker request that she suspend the terror in Chicago for Halloween weekend so that Chicago-area children could go out trick or treating without fear of being tear-gassed and zip-tied by Trump’s gendarmes.
Mein Trumpf47 has invaded Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Memphis with the National Guard. He sent the US Marines into Los Angeles. He is pressing to militarily invade Portland, Oregon on the basis of the utterly absurd claim that “radical left terrorists” are “burning” that city “to the ground.” In a nod to the Slaveowners’ Confederacy, whose virulent racist legacy he and his openly Christian white nationalist (neofascist) “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth uphold, Trump has tried to put Texas National Guard troops in Chicago.
Trump has said that Illinois governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson “should be in jail” since they have not ordered state and city police to join ICE and Border Patrol’s racist kidnapping operations.
Three weeks ago, the depraved fascist-in-chief Trump ordered 800-plus generals and admirals to Quantico, Virginia, from across the vast American global empire to hear him say that America’s real adversary is “the enemy within,” meaning the residents of the nation’s majority nonwhite and “radical left” cities. Trump told the stone-faced brass that American cities need to become “training grounds” for the US military.
In his current emergency request for a Supreme Court shadow docket ruling that will greenlight the military occupation of Chicago and other cities, Trump has dispensed with his past invocations of federal statutes that supposedly permit him to bypass the Posse Comitatus Act and the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution and argued instead that the judicial branch has no constitutional right to rule on his power to deploy the military anywhere he wants for whatever reason.
If he doesn’t get what he wants from the Christian fascist Court he appointed during his first term he will likely invoke the ancient slaveowners’ Insurrection Act to put troops in Democratic Party-run majority nonwhite cities.
The Trump regime is moving in numerous ways to rig the 2026 mid-terms, which may well take place in the intimidating, vote-suppressing presence of occupying troops in US cities.
Trump’s ICE and Border Patrol – unencumbered by the Tenth Amendment and Posse Comitatus and filled with the most racist and reactionary thugs in government – have already undertaken a vast military assault on US cities.
A Spoof That Had to Be Checked
In a sign of how insane and depraved things have gotten atop the US government (and how lamely Weimar-like some top Dems are), I recently put up this Onion-style spoof online:
“Unnamed sources report that Donald Trump has ordered the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to present a plan next week for the nuclear annihilation of every US city with a population of 500,000 or more. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) says that ‘any such plans would be contrary to the national interest and inconsistent with the Democrats signing on to a budget agreement to end the government shutdown.’ Asked for comment, former president Obama said that ‘the nuking of our major cities by our own military would be a major setback for our great nation.’ Obama cautioned that ‘Democrats should seek bipartisan support for a Congressional resolution questioning the legality of a US nuclear attack on major US cities. I know it can sometimes be difficult to win votes on the other side of the aisle,’ Obama added, ‘but the genius of America is that at the end of the day we’re all on the same team. It would be terrible to lose Chicago or St. Louis, of course, but we’re still all Americans at the end of life on Earth.’”
Crazy, right? And yet serious, intelligent people understandably felt the need to make sure it wasn’t for real. As one of my brilliant readers commented: “My first thought was to laugh, my second thought was ‘Let me Google this and make sure it’s a joke.’ I was relieved to discover it was not a real story but disturbed that I felt the need to check because it sounded like something he might consider.”
That’s because there really are no limits to the depravity of this fascist regime. There is no rock bottom.
Fascism, as Promised
But what did we expect? Is any of this surprising? Trump45 led an insurrectionist coup attempt on January 6. 2021. He campaigned on political “retribution” and a promise of racist mass deportations animated by his Hitlerian claim that brown-skinned immigrants are “poisoning our blood.”
On his first day in office, Herr Trump pardoned more than 1500 January 6 putschists/criminals and commuted the long prison sentences handed down to the nation’s top two paramilitary fascist leaders (The Proud Boys’ Enrique Tarrio and the Oath Keepers’ Stuart Rhodes) for their roles in the Capitol Riot. He signed an executive order purporting to end the explicit constitutional right of birthright citizenship.
On July 1, 2024, Trump’s Christian fascist Supreme Court granted him forever immunity from prosecution for any crime he committed past or future under the rubric of “official presidential duties.”
Trump and the key people around him, including above all Stephen “We Are the Storm!” Miller, are dedicated sociopathic fascists eager to stamp out the last embers of American democracy, decency, deliberation. and rule of law by any means “necessary.” The Trump regime and the Trump party’s wild denunciation of the second No Kings Day protests as “Radical Left,” “Marxist” (I’m one), and “terrorist” rallies dedicated to “Hating America” is symptomatic of their fascist ideology, which requires socialist, Marxist, and communist enemies even when such enemies do not exist to any significant degree, as in the US today (unlike in Germany in the early 1930s).
The Trump regime’s obsessive hatred of “the Left” more than merely echoes Hitler and Goebbels’ fanatical calls and pledges to “restore German greatness” by saving it in from dreaded Marxists and “Judeo Bolsheviks” who had supposedly “stabbed the nation in the back” during and after World War I.
The former Fatherland News co-host and current “Secretary of War” Pete “I’ll Stop Drinking if You put Me Atop the Pentagon” Hegseth (member of a far-right church whose pastor says that the best period in American race relations was the era of Black chattel slavery) is a “Christian” white nationalist zealot who salivates over the prospect of unleashing the US military on US cities. He holds his position despite his monumental incompetence in great part because Trump47 is counting on him to do what Trump45’s military chiefs wouldn’t do: use bloody force against US citizens and residents on US soil. A recently leaked Signal chat shows that Hegseth has been thinking about sending the elite US Army 82nd Airborne to crush anti-ICE protests in Portland.
Flood DC
So what is to be done? We now need masses of Americans, ultimately millions, to flood Washington DC — the actual seat of US power – to demand (for starters) the removal of the Trump fascist coup regime before it it’s too late and it cements authoritarian/dictatorial rule for the indefinite future. As Refuse Fascism (RF) notes in its urgent call for masses to come to DC this fall, starting November 5th:
“Hopes of waiting this out are illusion. Every accommodation – even in the name of preserving some ability to do some good – only fuels Trump’s demand for ever more slavish submission. Every capitulation – by universities, law firms, agencies – only feeds the regime’s ravenous hunger to remake all of society in its grotesque image.
This is FASCISM. A different form of brutal rule. It cannot be lived with. It must be defeated.
The elections are way too late. Besides, no honest person can expect the tyrant who instigated, and then pardoned, the January 6th insurrectionists to respect any election he loses.
But there is a way… By millions rising in massive, unrelenting, nonviolent protest and resistance. By defying and refusing to comply with fascist dictates. By walking out. By shutting down. By fearlessly using our platforms and influence to inspire and challenge others to join us.
By doing all this day after day. Coming back stronger in the face of attack and repression. Uniting, not dividing, across many viewpoints and backgrounds. Fostering a collective spirit of courage and righteous fury. Willing to sacrifice for the greater good of defeating this fascism.”
Examples of Popular Forced Removal
Among the many historical examples of when multitudes of people have successfully arisen to force the removal of authoritarian regimes or block bids for authoritarian rule we can include what the masses did in Caracas in April of 2002, what masses did in Manila (leading to the forced resignation of the Marcos dictatorship) in 1986, the Eastern German and Eastern European uprisings (leading to removal of corrupt state-capitalist and fake socialist dictatorships) of 1989, the Arab Spring of 2010-11 (leading to regime changes in Egypt and Tunisia), the mass Puerto Rican protests and strikes that led to the resignation of the noxious authoritarian governor Ricardo Rossello in 2018-2019, the mass anti-martial law protests in Seoul, South Korea (leading to the removal of an authoritarian president) last winter, and the Nepalese “Gen Z rebellion” (forcing the resignation of an authoritarian prime minister) this summer and fall.
It is common in some “learned” circles to say that “American exceptionalism” prevents the United States from hosting the kinds of sustained mass uprisings that have forced the removal of authoritarian rulers in other nations.
Well, guess what? “American exceptionalism” was supposed to prevent the rise of a fascist regime (“It Can’t Happen Here”) in the US and here we are, facing not just the threat but the actual existence of a fascist regime atop the world’s most powerful and dangerous nation – an existential menace not only to US Americans but to all humanity and prospects for a decent much less liberated human future.
If the right and its ruling class allies can blow up supposed “American exceptionalism” to advance fascism, we the people can blow it up to fight fascism and save the future.
It’s time for the nauseating wannabe strongman-for-life Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump to join the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos (removed thanks to sustained mass demonstrations and strikes in 1986), South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol (removed following mass demonstrations and strikes), Puerto Rico’s Rossello (removed after sustained mass demonstrations and strikes in 2019), Nepal’s KP Sharma Oli (removed from power after sustained mass demonstrations and strikes last month), and many other disgraced authoritarian rulers who have been driven from power by popular resistance.
The urgency of this task is without historical parallel thanks to the vile fascist, pandemicist, imperialist, and (last but not least) eco-cidal content of Trump’s authoritarian regime and the historically unmatched power and reach of the American Empire in a world on the brink of terminal climate crisis and full of ever more lethal and advanced nuclear weapons. That lethal power and reach (far beyond the power, reach, and menace of the German Third Reich in 1939) amidst ecological crisis and resurgent nuclear proliferation is why Noam Chomsky accurately described Trump and not Hitler as “the most dangerous criminal in human history” nearly six years ago. The arch-criminal Amerikaner regime that Trump stands atop must go now if homo sapiens and other species are going to have any chance of avoiding true catastrophe in the very near future.
Read RF’s full call here: https://refusefascism.org/events/nov5/
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate
4 Comments
Dear Progressive Radical Democrat,
Your “spontaneous DC flooding” idea is dangerous and useless adventurism, similar to murder of Charlie Kirk, but with much more negative consequences for the Left movement in this country. And “nonviolent protest and resistance” is not usually associated with “willing to sacrifice”. And what are you calling to sacrifice for? For replacing Trump with Vance or even with corporate Democrats? What other “progressive” alternatives do we have? Anything beyond this will depend on the actions of non-systemic left forces (e.g. pro-socialist organizations), which are, unfortunately, politically and socially insignificant at the present time, and the most effective way to make them significant is to organize a united left front for social progress, democracy and anti-authoritarianism, which, unfortunately, remains only a talking point. One of the long-term goals of the united Left in this country should be to become such an alternative, whether by joining/taking over the Greens or another way.
The time of (neo)liberalism or benign (social-democratic) capitalism is over. And it’s never been benign for the most of the world population anyway. The reason is simple – profitability. Preservation of the status quo in this country, and all developed countries in general, is becoming increasingly difficult economically by using liberal-democratic methods.
Marches, demonstrations, meetings, petitions, and other liberal forms of protest are only effective under bourgeois democracy and are very unlikely to change and even influence the policies that are intended to establish a different style of governance. Only really radical and militant actions, such as a national strike, and a powerful people’s movement, with organized workers in the lead and as the backbone or, in Lenin’s words, “iron battalions of proletariat” can possibly affect these policies. Regrettably, we cannot count on this in present social, political, and economic situation, first of all because of the absence of any semblance of the ‘revolutionary situation’ in any Western country, which makes the situations for the left even more urgent and precarious at the same time.
While “the Trumpian tyranny” (of course, Trump is just an incidental historic character, but very suitable for an autocratic regime) has not solidified and even not clearly materialized, the most urgent organizational task of the Left is to create a united front. This initiative and follow-up actions are crucially important and urgent at the present time for these left forces to become visible and relevant political players and, hopefully, change or at least oppose the current social, economic and political tendencies. The time for civilized resolution of a looming social, economic, and even environmental/ecological crisis is running out, and a broad popular left front is the most (if not the only) viable option for various left oriented organizations, organized working class, and all progressive forces in general not only to remain politically and socially relevant, but maybe even contribute to the preservation of human species.
Another fantastic article from Z! Truth fearlessly emanating from a publication that refuses to embrace fascism and jump on the bandwagon driven by an insane power junkie who despises and seeks to destroy everyone with sense enough to oppose him… especially those persons in prominence. Perhaps there is still a chance that America… the America that valued human/civil rights and democracy will return into existence. I certainly hope so!
You are not radical Paul this trump Regime is the most radical thing that has ever happened to the United States of America.
It’s Adolf Hitler, not Adolph Hitler.