Trump's America in Turmoil
Sukla Sen
Drawing by Sonia Mitralia
The turning point
Minneapolis rises up, Trump falters!
by Yorgos Mitralias
As the tragic and shocking events in Minneapolis mean that the crisis in the United States under Trump now seems to be reaching both its peak and its point of no return, we must stop mincing our words in order to disguise the horrible reality of Trumpism, and therefore, from now on, call things by their name. Why? To make our ideas about the nature, objectives, and methods of Trump and Trumpism as clear and precise as possible. Because the fate of Trumpism, and therefore our own fate, will be decided within the United States, not outside it. And all this so that we can confront Trump and Trumpism with a strong chance of success, knowing that the outcome of this mother of all battles will profoundly influence the present and future of this world.
So, let's start with the infamous ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), which is currently making headlines with its successive cold-blooded murders of Minneapolis citizens. There is no doubt that ICE is a private (overarmed) militia, serving Trump and his openly racist and fascist policies. Recruiting its agents partly from neo-Nazi and supremacist circles, ICE is accountable for its criminal activities only to its leaders, who are totally subservient to Trump himself, and as a result acts outside the law. Initially designed to hunt down migrants, who have effectively become what Jews were to the Nazis, its mission has now expanded to hunting down and repressing racialized people even when they are living in the country legally. However, as time goes by, it is clear that ICE is expanding its scope of action even further, also targeting left-wingers and anyone who opposes Trump!
Although ICE's raids in working-class neighborhoods, workplaces, and homes to arrest or kidnap people of all ages, even children, make it resemble the Nazi Gestapo, the evolution of its activities, combined with Trumpism's clearly expressed desire to crack down hard on its opponents, makes ICE seem destined to become the Trumpist equivalent of the SA, the Nazi storm troopers before they took power in 1933. Obviously, the current 22,000 ICE agents cannot be compared to the 400,000 members of the Nazi SA in 1932, but the success of its ongoing recruitment campaign could rapidly inflate its ranks, making ICE even more dangerous. On the other hand, the “qualities” of the ICE thugs are already quite comparable to those of the SA thugs, starting with the monstrous ICE chief Kristi Noem, who is every bit as bad as her Nazi counterpart, Interior Minister Heinrich Himmler, when she proudly displays her incredible sadism by describing in writing how she shot and killed her puppy because it did not obey her orders quickly enough...
But, one might ask, why these repeated references to Nazism, why these comparisons of ICE to the Gestapo and, above all, to the Nazi SA? Our answer is categorical: because there is much more than mere similarities or elective affinities between Trumpism and Nazism. Because despite their very real differences, there is a conscious and increasingly acknowledged connection between these two forms of the same fascist “brown plague”! In reality, it is as if Trump were following, often to the letter, not only what Hitler said, but also and above all what Hitler did during the first phase of his dictatorial power, before the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
However, we must not believe that the Nazi tendencies of Trumpism are the work of one person, Trump himself. In reality, the cream of the crop of the dominant core of the Trumpist leadership, including White House strongman Stephen Miller, Elon Musk and his South African friends David Sacks and, above all, Peter Thiel, make no secret of their nostalgia for the days of Nazi omnipotence, which they want not only to rehabilitate but also to revive in the United States! In their case, it would be naive to believe that they are harmless clowns who merely adopt the outward signs of Nazism. People like Peter Thiel are convinced Nazi billionaires, highly trained in Nazism,, very experienced, and intelligent, and therefore extremely dangerous because they have a nightmarish political, social, and economic agenda... which they are already implementing.
But beware: the above does not in any way mean that Trumpism is invincible or that nothing can be done against it. The exemplary anti-ICE mobilizations—still ongoing—by the residents of Minneapolis are living proof of the opposite, of the very real and tangible ability of citizens, and especially the working masses, to organize themselves to resist all together the armed gangs of the Trumpist “brown plague.” Of course, in order to achieve this exemplary resistance, which is probably the founding event of the awakening and counterattack of the American working class and those from below, Trump and his acolytes had to make a serious error of judgment: choose Minneapolis and Minnesota as the testing ground for the savagery of ICE agents.
Indeed, neither the general strike that paralyzed Minnesota on January 23, the first general strike in the United States in 80 years (!), nor the mass demonstration that followed, nor the resistance of the people of Minnesota, came out of nowhere. This small federal state has a long history of exemplary struggles, especially by workers, including the extraordinary general strike of 1934, which lasted more than two months and was marked by bloody clashes between armed picketers and employer militias supported by the army. (1) A long history of struggles such as the more recent, victorious, and nationwide ones for higher wages and better working conditions, but also mass mobilizations such as the one that led to the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020.
In short, Trump's choice of Minnesota to break popular resistance and terrorize the population of a major American city once and for all was doomed to failure from the outset. He lit the fuse with results that could be catastrophic for the White House resident, who now sees solidarity mobilizations with the brave residents of Minneapolis multiplying and spreading like wildfire, while his January 23 general strike is inspiring unionists elsewhere in the country who now want to do the same. So, although it is still too early to gauge the full impact of this veritable show of force by the working class of Minnesota, it is entirely possible that it will go down in history as the founding event of the awakening and remobilization of the gigantic American proletariat, which has been defeated and dormant for too long. And there is no doubt that this awakening of the exploited and oppressed in America will surely find its hero in the person of Alex Pretti, the young unionized intensive care nurse from Minneapolis who was murdered by ICE killers simply because he wanted to help migrants hunted by ICE and help his fellow human beings who were assaulted and abused by Trump's militia thugs. In this era of barbarism, inward looking and the of the far right, selfish individualism and resurgence of the fascist threat, there is nothing better than to take as an example Alex Pretti, a man with a big heart, who did not hesitate to confront the ICE thugs with his bare hands, in order to give tangible meaning to the terrible words he loved to repeat: "freedom is not free. We have to work at it, nurture it, protect it and even sacrifice for it,”
Notes
1. See Wikipedia, Minneapolis general strike of 1934 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis_general_strike_of_1934
2. Among the countless reactions provoked by ICE's actions, we have chosen the following comment, both relevant and eloquent, from Cleveland Cavaliers (NBA) star player Larry Nance Jr, who reposted this excerpt from Anne Frank's diary on his X account. It was written on 13 January 1943 in Nazi-occupied Holland, but it could very well have been written today in the United States of Trump and ICE : "Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.