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The Bully in Donald Trump’s Bully Pulpit – How MAGA Uses Violence to Consolidate Power

Andrea Mazzarino

President Trump, his cabinet, and those who have profited from his rise seem to revel in public displays of cruelty. Take former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk, holding a chainsaw at a televised event to celebrate the firing of civil servants. Or Trump’s White House sharing a video featuring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers marching handcuffed immigrants onto a deportation flight, with Jess Glynne’s musical hit “Hold My Hand” playing in the background. Or how about ICE allowing right-wing TV host Dr. Phil to film its sweeping immigration raids for public consumption? And don’t forget those federal agents tackling California Senator Alex Padilla to the floor (and handcuffing him!) when he asked a question at a Department of Homeland Security press conference. Or what about during the first Trump presidential campaign, when the then-candidate boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York City and he wouldn’t lose a voter?

Violent imagery helped launch this made-for-TV president on his journey into the Oval Office. Now, he’s using it to govern with fear.

As journalist Adam Serwer put it, “Cruelty is the point.” Physical attacks and threats serve both to dehumanize vulnerable Americans (especially people of color) and to suggest what could happen to individuals who speak out against the wealth gaps and other problems of our times.

The underbelly of MAGA malice is, of course, greed. Compare the scenes I’ve just mentioned to the president welcoming to his inauguration not public figures who had done positive things for the welfare of Americans, but billionaires who made seven-figure donations to that very event. At the Oval Office, he also loves to host those who have presented him with shiny baubles — like Apple CEO Tim Cook, who had given him a gold trophy with his company’s logo on it. (Even then, Trump used the occasion to mock his visitor’s slight frame.)

Or consider Vice President JD Vance, who got the U.S. military to raise the level of a river so he could take a birthday boat trip on it. And that, tellingly, was only weeks after a real flood in Texas had killed more than 100 people, while the administration slow-walked aid in response to the disaster. And don’t forget that the president spent about $45 million taxpayer dollars on a military parade on his birthday in Washington, the very city in which he’s decried the homeless population as “unsightly” (and has now sent the National Guard into its streets). Those same funds could have paid for a significant amount of housing for hundreds of people in that same city.

America’s leadership has come unmoored from the values of equality and self-determination outlined in this country’s founding documents. They would prefer to display a let-them-eat-cake America that today boasts more than 800 billionaires (compared with around 60 in 1990), one where the average hourly wage has risen just 20% over the past 35 years — less than half what working people need to afford basic necessities like housing, food, and healthcare.

Mind you, Donald Trump is anything but solely responsible for creating such steep inequalities. However, he’s shown us how little he cares to make things right by cutting spending on health insurance, schools, farm subsidies, and so much more, while attacking the working poor and those who stand up for them.

American Carnage

Violence against people of color — especially workers of color who dare strive for better conditions — was already baked into American history. After all, we’re a nation that supersized our economy by using free or low-wage work. For example, the lynching of Black slaves and later Black Americans was one way that American leaders showed marginalized groups what they might expect if they spoke out.

In thousands of documented incidents in the history of this country, White mobs, often led by wealthy landowners, whipped, beat, hung, or otherwise murdered Black people in public places. (No surprise, then, that to this day, police violence against Blacks is all too commonplace.) Historically, in many lynchings, law enforcement either carried out the violence directly, organized the mobs who did, or at least stood by and watched without intervening.

With recent police crackdowns on protesters in L.A. and on people simply showing up to work, it should hardly come as a surprise that many Black Americans are now being punished for incidents when all they did was exercise the sorts of rights that many of us take for granted like going to school, writing, or gathering without the permission of Whites. Once upon a time, in places like pre-Civil War Virginia and North Carolina, the law forbade enslaved people from gathering for any reason, even to worship. Nor, in the post-Civil War South, were Whites subtle in their condemnation of Americans of color who managed to advance economically or challenged the status quo.

In 1892, for example, the Memphis office of Black journalist Ida B. Wells was destroyed by a mob whose members threatened to kill her after she wrote an article condemning the lynching of three Black men who owned a successful grocery store. Incidents like that may look very different from the sorts of confrontations Americans are now witnessing on their streets, but they remind me that we have long lived in a country where unfettered capitalism at the expense of so many of us thrives on violence meant specifically to silence people at the bottom.

The point was driven home for me by a scene in Percival Everett’s timely 2024 novel James, a rendition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of the title character, an escaped slave. The narrator watches a slave owner beat and hang a Black man who stole a pencil so that James could write something. As I read, it was easy for me to imagine life leaving the man’s body as he endured the lashes, and to feel his community’s terror. The lynched man’s last exchange during the beating involves him mouthing the word “Run!” to James, who is hiding in the bushes nearby.

The message of that scene should resonate today: If you want to express yourself or even just live in certain American towns and cities (including our capital!) in Donald Trump’s America, you’d better know that you’re risking your neck. Considered against such a historical backdrop, Trump and his followers could be thought to come by their moments of cruelty — as the saying goes — honestly (although if that’s honest emotion, what a world we’re now living in).

Our Contemporary Public Square

Since the president’s second inauguration, millions of Americans have turned out to stand up for fired federal workers, women, and LGBTQ+ people, as well as immigrants and people of color who have been the focus of ICE raids and extrajudicial detentions. The vast majority of those demonstrators have been peaceful, showing up in the streets or at immigration courts where they take down the information of those being detained so ICE can’t simply “disappear” them. Some have even waved Mexican flags to show solidarity with immigrant families hailing from that and other countries. Most importantly, such demonstrators committed their own bodies, including their eyes and ears, to ensure that people facing increasing state violence in Donald Trump’s America don’t always have to experience it alone.

In the Los Angeles area this spring and summer, ICE raids drew national attention for the frequent way they targeted Latino neighborhoods, with masked federal agents swarming public places and chasing workers based on skin color, type of job, and language. From just early to mid-June, tens of thousands of people actively protested such raids in Los Angeles, expressing solidarity with the people and neighborhoods targeted.

To be sure, a handful of those protesters made the demonstrations less productive by setting police and private vehicles on fire and vandalizing storefronts, causing significant damage. However, it just may be the understatement of the year to say that the law enforcement response to those protests was disproportionate to the threat. In addition to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and other local police responses, Trump ordered 2,000 National Guard members and 600 Marines into Los Angeles, despite the warnings of local leaders that doing so would only escalate the confrontations between protesters and law enforcement.

And those concerns turned out to be all too well-founded. The police violently attacked at least 27 journalists, using supposedly non-lethal crowd-control munitions and tear gas. All too sadly, for instance, an LAPD officer struck a photographer in the face with a rubber bullet, fracturing his cheek and tearing open his eye, forcing him to undergo five hours of emergency surgery and potentially leading to permanent vision loss. ICE agents typically shoved David Huerta, a labor union leader, to the ground while he was observing raids in the city’s fashion district. Huerta would be hospitalized for his injuries. State police shot a New York Post journalist in the forehead with a rubber bullet as he filmed anti-ICE protests from the side of the highway, causing him to fall and leaving him with severe bruising and neck injuries. The journalist said he thinks he was shot because he was isolated and so “an easy target.”

Meanwhile, at least five police officers were treated on the scene for injuries sustained when a few of the protesters threw rocks from highway overpasses onto cars and one fired paintballs at officers. They were also harmed by their own flash-bang grenades and tear gas. Numerous protesters were, of course, injured, some by being tackled by police officers and others by tear gas and “non-lethal munitions.” Hundreds were arrested then (and continue to be), including peaceful observers and legal monitors attempting to track “disappeared” immigrants through the system.

Not surprisingly, I found it hard to get anything like a full count of people injured or detained in those demonstrations, which leads me to think that one future project of the Costs of War Project that I’ve long been associated with might be to tally up injuries and possible deaths among Americans whose streets are clearly going to be increasingly overrun by law enforcement and National Guard troops in this new Trumpian era. With the president already sending federal law enforcement officers and the National Guard into this country’s capital, surely, in the months to come, he’ll do the same into minority-led Democratic-majority cities (including, undoubtedly, New York, should Zohran Mamdani be elected mayor there in November). In my own backyard — I live near Washington, D.C. — it’s likely that we’ll see an increase in violent confrontations, too.

The rhetoric of the president and his followers has played no small role in the escalations we’ve witnessed in Los Angeles and elsewhere as he focuses the anger of Americans against each other. For instance, before he deployed troops in L.A., Trump stated, “We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean, and safe again,” while describing protesters as “animals” and “a foreign enemy.” His close advisor Stephen Miller wrote on X, “Deport the invaders, or surrender to insurrection.” And note the ambiguity there. It’s not clear whether the invaders are immigrants, protesters, or both. Such statements give new meaning to the term “the bully pulpit” and the tacit permission the administration gave the police to hurt civilians (or else).

Imagine going to a protest and having to worry about some version of those crowd-control munitions or even a bullet getting lodged in your body. Imagine fearing getting tackled by the police and sustaining injuries, particularly in a country where nearly half of all adults are either uninsured or underinsured. Egged on by the highest office in the land, police violence makes a distinct point: it shows that, in the era of Donald Trump, Americans like you or me, should we decide to speak out, could find ourselves in danger.

Violence in Unexpected Places

These days, state violence (or the threat of it) arises even in places you might not expect. Recently, for instance, the Texas Senate attempted an untimely gerrymander meant to recarve that state’s electoral maps, diluting districts with large minority populations and so possibly delivering five more House seats to Trump’s Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections.

In a move of creative civil disruption, dozens of Texas Democratic senators, including significant numbers of women and minorities, promptly fled the state to ensure that there would be no quorum possible in that state’s senate and so delay a vote on the proposed new electoral map. The response from Texas Governor Greg Abbott? To urge Trump to have the FBI find and arrest those senators and force them back to Texas.

That Texas attempted gerrymander is exactly the sort of escalation of tactics that will only normalize the bullying of law-abiding Americans and could lead to the sort of democratic backsliding that, in 2028, might land us all in a full-fledged military dictatorship.

To counter such heavy-handed tactics, we should be ever clearer and more public about the violence that MAGA leaders are likely to commit against anyone who crosses their ravenous path. Sadly enough, television images of chainsaws, handcuffed migrants, and ICE raids don’t simply speak for themselves in the United States of 2025. They could just as easily offer the message that we should indeed hate minorities, poor workers, and homeless people as suggest that this president is violating basic freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution. While Trump and his followers may not always have the courage to say what they really mean, those of us who care about freedom of speech and assembly and other basic American freedoms certainly should — as loudly as we can.

If you have a few minutes, grab a pencil, a pen, or your laptop and make some noise about what you see “our” government doing, particularly when it involves such contempt for human life and dignity. Write your lawmaker, or a letter to the editor, or post something on social media. Make a sign and go to a protest. Stand up for America and against terror. After all, at this point in our history, what choice do we have? Where is there to run to?

[Andrea Mazzarino co-founded Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She has held various clinical, research, and advocacy positions, including at a Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, with Human Rights Watch, and at a community mental health agency. She is the co-editor of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Courtesy: TomDispatch, a web-based publication, founded and edited by Tom Engelhardt, aimed at providing “a regular antidote to the mainstream media”.]

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Kennedy’s Firing of CDC Director: A Coup Against Science and Public Health

Evan Blake

The firing of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Susan Monarez on Wednesday evening, coupled with the immediate resignation of four high-level public health officials in protest, represents a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration’s war against science and public health. This coordinated assault is unfolding as the United States is now in the midst of the 11th wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, while Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is moving to entirely ban COVID-19 vaccines.

On Thursday afternoon, hundreds of CDC employees and supporters staged a walkout outside the agency’s Atlanta headquarters in a powerful show of solidarity with the ousted officials. Current and former CDC staff members marched, held signs and applauded as three senior leaders who had resigned in protest—Chief Medical Officer Deb Houry, Dan Jernigan and Demetre Daskalakis—were escorted from the building by security personnel.

In their resignation letters, these officials explicitly condemned the “weaponizing of public health” and the “politicization” of scientific decision-making, while Houry remarked that the CDC leadership had “reached a tipping point.”

The events of Wednesday began with a tense confrontation Monday in Kennedy’s Washington office, where he and his principal deputy chief of staff Stefanie Spear demanded Monarez either resign or comply with two ultimatums: accept all recommendations from the agency’s vaccine advisory committee, whose members Kennedy had replaced with hand-picked allies hostile to childhood immunizations, and fire a number of high-level officials at the agency. When Monarez refused both demands and to “rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives,” Kennedy moved swiftly to remove her.

On the same day as her firing, Kennedy announced new restrictions that fundamentally alter COVID-19 vaccine access, requiring that all Americans receive a doctor’s recommendation in order to receive a vaccine. For the vast majority of Americans, this effectively means they will lose access to COVID-19 vaccines without taking inordinate and in many cases prohibitive measures. Furthermore, multiple sources report that Kennedy is planning to fully revoke access to mRNA COVID-19 vaccines within months.

The timing of these actions is particularly ominous. They coincide with the 11th wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, with an estimated 1 in 93 Americans now actively infectious. Over 4 million Americans are now likely being infected each week. This surge is proceeding with virtually no mainstream media coverage or public health reporting. This information blackout coincides with the planned elimination of mRNA vaccines just as the winter respiratory virus season approaches, leaving the population totally unprotected against a pathogen that continues to evolve into new, potentially more dangerous variants.

In addition, the purging of the CDC’s leadership comes less than three weeks after the August 8 attack on CDC headquarters by Patrick Joseph White, who was motivated by anti-vaccine disinformation that Kennedy has spent decades promoting. White fired over 180 rounds at the CDC campus, driven by his belief that COVID-19 vaccines had harmed him and others. In the aftermath, traumatized CDC employees have reported receiving harassing phone calls featuring gunfire sounds, while Trump has said nothing about the violent attack.

The ouster of Monarez completes Kennedy’s consolidation of control over the nation’s premier public health agency. He now has free rein to implement the most sweeping attacks on vaccines and public health that he has been plotting with Trump and the fascistic anti-vaccine networks in his orbit.

Since assuming office, Kennedy has overseen the termination of over 20,000 federal public health workers at all Health and Human Services (HHS) agencies, with 2,400 at the CDC alone. He has systematically purged vaccine advisory committees, firing all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replacing them with eight vaccine skeptics, none of whom are immunologists or epidemiologists.

Kennedy’s attacks on mRNA vaccines, one of the most revolutionary medical technologies in human history, represent perhaps the most devastating blow to pandemic preparedness and medical innovation. These vaccines have proven extraordinarily safe and effective, preventing millions of deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic. The cancellation of $500 million in mRNA vaccine research has terminated 22 critical projects aimed at developing vaccines for avian flu and other emerging threats.

Beyond infectious disease prevention, mRNA technology is showing great promise in cancer treatment. Moderna and Merck’s personalized mRNA cancer vaccine has demonstrated remarkable efficacy against melanoma, reducing cancer recurrence risk by 49 percent and metastasis risk by 62 percent in Phase 2 trials.

These attacks on science and public health occur alongside the broader social devastation being unleashed by the Trump administration, whose underlying aim is to lower life expectancy and eliminate all social spending. Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” will drive insurance premiums higher, while millions more lose access to Medicare and Medicaid coverage. Families are being forced to reduce food purchases as tariffs increase the cost of basic necessities.

Kennedy may be a particularly deranged individual, but his anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and reactionary policies have a very definite basis in social relations and serve specific class interests. His attacks on science provide ideological cover for the systematic dismantling of social programs and public health infrastructure demanded by the financial oligarchy. The apparent irrationality of Kennedy’s positions masks their rationality from the standpoint of a ruling class determined to eliminate all social spending that does not directly serve capital accumulation.

From the mid-19th century on, spectacular gains were made in public health, sanitation, workplace safety and social welfare. A deliberate reversal of these achievements has been underway for decades, vastly accelerated since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has now killed upwards of 30 million people and debilitated hundreds of millions more with Long COVID globally. The daily barrage of the Trump administration’s counterrevolutionary policies amount to an endlessly mutating political pandemic, intersecting with and reinforcing the COVID-19 pandemic’s destructive impact on human civilization.

The silence of the Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO in response to the Trump administration’s war on science and public health is deafening. Rather than mobilizing opposition, they have remained largely silent, reflecting their own complicity in the broader attack on social programs and scientific institutions.

Kennedy’s attacks on vaccines and public health flow logically from the policies initiated under the Biden administration, which systematically undermined COVID-19 vaccine access and denigrated protective measures after ending the Public Health Emergency in May 2023. The Biden administration terminated federal vaccine mandates, ended free testing requirements for private insurers, and began transitioning COVID-19 vaccines to the commercial market. Trump and Kennedy have qualitatively deepened these attacks, but they build upon the foundation laid by Biden’s surrender to corporate interests that demanded an end to pandemic restrictions regardless of public health consequences.

Significant opposition is emerging among scientists and healthcare workers to Kennedy’s attacks on public health. A petition demanding his resignation has garnered over 1,000 signatures from clinicians, scientists and public health professionals, including four Nobel Prize laureates. The petition denounces Kennedy as posing “an immediate and long-term threat to the health of the American public” through his “profound misunderstanding of science coupled with a failure to grasp his own limitations.”

The Thursday demonstration at CDC headquarters represents a significant escalation of this opposition, with federal employees risking their careers to publicly denounce Kennedy’s assault on scientific integrity.

Fundamentally, the attacks on science and public health are aimed at the international working class, which bears the brunt of disease, disability, and early death when protective measures are eliminated. Workers and their children will suffer disproportionately from vaccine-preventable diseases, while wealthy elites will retain access to the highest quality private healthcare that money can buy.

The defense of science and public health cannot be separated from the broader struggle against capitalism and for international socialism, the only progressive path forward for humanity in the face of capitalism’s descent into barbarism. Scientists, healthcare workers and all those committed to defending public health must turn to the international working class as the only social force capable of implementing the rational, planned development of society necessary to unleash the full potential of scientific knowledge.

[Courtesy: World Socialist Web Site, the online publication of the International Committee of the Fourth International.]

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The Trump Administration: White Supremacy in Action

Sharon Kyle

Donald Trump has made a career out of drawing lines—between insiders and outsiders, loyalists and enemies, those deserving of forgiveness and those marked for punishment. But in his second term, that line is drawn sharper than ever along racial, political, and ideological fault lines. White rioters who stormed the Capitol are welcomed back as patriots. Brown immigrants, even those with no criminal record, are treated as enemies of the state. Black and brown elected officials who dare to resist are handcuffed and smeared. And now, even the U.S. military—long touted as the nation’s most diverse merit-based institution—is being reshaped to purge diversity in the name of “anti-woke” politics.

The anecdotes are piling up, and together they tell a story too powerful to ignore.

At its core is this undeniable truth:

Donald Trump pardons white insurrectionists convicted of violent felonies, while Black and Brown people—including duly elected officials—are arrested, manhandled, and dragged away, often stripped of due process.

1) January 6th: The crimes, the pardons, the relapse into violence

On January 6, 2021, Americans watched in horror as rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol. They weren’t tourists. They weren’t peaceful. They were armed with flagpoles, pepper spray, tasers, and even firearms. They smashed windows, beat police officers, and sent lawmakers fleeing.

The convictions. Over the next four years, hundreds of rioters were charged and convicted. Their crimes ranged from assault on federal officers, obstruction of an official proceeding, and civil disorder to, in the most serious cases, seditious conspiracy. Leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were found guilty of attempting to overthrow lawful government authority. The courts treated these as felonies of the highest order—acts of violence meant to subvert democracy itself.

The pardons. On January 20, 2025—Trump’s first day back in the Oval Office—he issued a sweeping clemency order freeing nearly 1,500–1,600 Jan. 6 defendants. Fourteen high-profile figures, including leaders of far-right militias, were granted full commutations. Federal prosecutors, judges, and law enforcement leaders warned that such a mass absolution was unprecedented and reckless. Yet Trump painted it as correcting a “historic injustice.”

The fallout. Predictably, some of those released reoffended almost immediately. At least 10 individuals have been arrested again since their release, facing new charges including burglary, weapons violations, and even drunk driving that led to fatalities. One died in a violent confrontation with police. Rather than repentant citizens, many emerged from prison emboldened, wrapped in Trump’s narrative that they were “political prisoners” unfairly targeted by a “deep state.”

The message was clear: violence in Trump’s name is not only excused—it’s rewarded. This mirrors a long American tradition of excusing white political violence, from the pardons of Confederate leaders after the Civil War to the impunity granted white supremacist groups during Reconstruction.

2) Immigration: Punishment without crime

While Jan. 6 rioters received clemency, another group—immigrants, overwhelmingly Brown—faced a radically different fate.

The quotas. Trump’s DHS reinstated mass deportation quotas, pressuring ICE agents to hit 3,000 arrests a day. This wasn’t about removing violent criminals; it was about numbers. Non-criminal immigrants—workers, parents, long-time residents—were swept up in raids. “Collateral arrests” became the norm: if ICE agents encountered someone without papers, even if they weren’t the target, they were detained.

The militarization. Federal agents began targeting places once considered “sensitive”—schools, churches, and courthouses. Families were torn apart in broad daylight. In several major cities, Trump deployed the National Guard and federalized police forces under the guise of “public safety,” despite crime rates being flat or declining. The optics were intentional: military vehicles patrolling immigrant neighborhoods, a show of dominance meant to instill fear.

The reality. Most of those arrested had no violent history. Many had lived in the U.S. for decades, working and paying taxes. Their crime was paperwork. Their punishment was detention, deportation, and family separation.

The contrast is grotesque: those who beat police and tried to topple government walked free, while mothers and fathers without papers were shackled and deported.

This scapegoating has precedent. From the 1924 Immigration Act designed to preserve a white demographic majority, to Operation Wetback in the 1950s, to post-9/11 roundups of Arab and Muslim immigrants, America’s oligarchic order has long relied on immigrant persecution to maintain division and control.

3) Elected officials of color: Criminalized for oversight

Trump’s selective mercy doesn’t stop at anonymous groups. When elected officials of color push back against his policies, they, too, find themselves criminalized.

Senator Alex Padilla (D–CA)

On June 12, 2025, Padilla was forcibly removed, thrown to the floor, arm twisted, handcuffed, and detained at a DHS press conference in Los Angeles after questioning the administration’s deportation raids. Witnesses confirmed he identified himself as a U.S. Senator. Still, he was dragged away. Padilla later called it a chilling abuse of power: “If they will handcuff a U.S. Senator, what will they do to ordinary citizens?”

Mayor Ras Baraka (Newark, NJ)

On May 9, 2025, Baraka joined members of Congress outside Newark’s Delaney Hall ICE detention facility to demand transparency about conditions inside. For this, he was arrested and charged with trespassing—on public property. The charges were later dropped, and Baraka filed suit against federal officials, calling his arrest “an authoritarian stunt.”

Rep. LaMonica McIver (D–NJ)

When officers tried to arrest Baraka, McIver stepped forward to shield him. For that, she was indicted on felony counts of resisting and impeding federal officers. She dismissed the charges as “political intimidation in its purest form.”

Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D–NJ)

Also present, Watson Coleman was hit with a misdemeanor trespass charge. She argued they were performing oversight, not committing crimes. In her words: “They want to make lawful dissent look like lawlessness.”

When immigrants are targeted, those who defend them are also criminalized. Oversight becomes trespass. Advocacy becomes obstruction. Resistance becomes crime. This too is structural—echoing J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO, which targeted Black leaders under the guise of law and order.

4) Trump’s military pivot: Recruiting inducements + DEI obliteration

The Trump administration’s two-tiered system of justice is mirrored in the armed forces. At the very moment the military faces a recruitment crisis, Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth are remaking its culture—not for readiness, but for ideology.

A. Expanding inducements

Military recruitment has struggled for years, with fewer young Americans willing or able to serve. In early 2025, Trump touted “record gains” in enlistment and announced new inducements: expanded signing bonuses, broadened eligibility criteria, and a slick national recruitment campaign. Hegseth unveiled the Military Service Recruitment Task Force, tasked with selling military service to the next generation.

B. Purging DEI

But alongside these inducements came a sweeping rollback. On his first day back, Trump signed Executive Order 14151, eliminating all federal DEI programs. The Pentagon followed suit, shutting down DEI offices, halting observance months like Black History Month, and even erasing profiles of minority pioneers—Tuskegee Airmen, Native code talkers, women combat leaders—from official sites.

Hegseth declared diversity initiatives “the dumbest phrase on planet Earth.” He targeted military leaders he branded as “DEI hires,” including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. He banned transgender service and halted gender-affirming care for troops. He framed the moves as restoring “cohesion” but in reality they stripped the armed forces of hard-won inclusion.

C. The demographic consequences

Here’s the irony: the U.S. military is one of the most diverse institutions in the nation. Roughly 30% of service members are minorities, and by 2027, the majority of America’s recruitable population will be people of color. In other words, the future of the all-volunteer force depends on Black, Latino, Asian, Native, and immigrant youth.

DEI programs weren’t window dressing—they were pipelines. They broadened access, supported cohesion, and helped the military tap into diverse communities. Eliminating DEI, banning trans service, and scrubbing minority representation isn’t just ideological—it actively narrows the pool of who can serve.

By catering to anti-woke politics, the Trump administration is undercutting the very demographic foundation of the future military. The result? A whiter, less representative, and ultimately less capable armed force. Historically, the military has been a rare path of social mobility for marginalized communities; Trump’s rollback slams that door shut.

5) The ideology underneath: White supremacy as an organizing principle

The question is why. Why offer clemency to violent white rioters while criminalizing immigrants with no record? Why pardon insurrectionists while prosecuting Black and Brown lawmakers for protest? Why erase DEI at the very moment the armed forces depend on it?

The answer, many observers argue, is white supremacy.

White supremacy is the belief that whiteness—whether in culture, identity, or political alignment—confers superior value, status, and entitlement. It doesn’t always wear hoods or wave Confederate flags. In policy, it looks like clemency for white rioters while immigrants are caged. It looks like silencing Black and Brown elected officials while elevating violent loyalists. It looks like purging the military of DEI even when diversity is vital to readiness.

In viewing the clear difference in treatment, many are interpreting the administration’s actions as driven not simply by partisanship but by white supremacist ideology. That ideology sorts people into two categories: those who belong and those who don’t. Those who deserve forgiveness and those who deserve punishment. Those whose violence is patriotism and those whose mere existence is a threat.

6) Oligarchy, democracy denied, and the destruction of hope

This isn’t just hypocrisy. It’s another pillar of oligarchy. As I’ve argued before, the United States has never been a true democracy—it has always been an oligarchy, where power rests with the wealthy, the connected, and the entrenched. What Trump is doing doesn’t merely expose the system’s structural flaws; it cements them. By deciding who deserves forgiveness, who deserves punishment, and who even belongs in the armed forces, Trump is narrowing an already constricted political order.

For most people in this country, democracy has always been aspirational—a promise more than a practice, an idea often withheld from the majority. But what Trump and his ilk are destroying is even more dangerous: they are dismantling the possibility of achieving a working democracy in the future. The dream of democracy—never fully realized in America—is being buried under the weight of oligarchy married to white supremacy.

Final Word

History will remember Trump’s pardons of Jan. 6 rioters as a betrayal of accountability. It will remember the arrests of Padilla, Baraka, McIver, and Watson Coleman as warnings that oversight itself had become criminalized. It will remember the purging of DEI from the military as a self-inflicted wound—shrinking the force to appease ideology rather than strengthen readiness.

But perhaps most importantly, history will record that the through-line was white supremacy joined with oligarchy: a system that forgave violent white loyalists, punished Brown immigrants and Black dissenters, and sought to preserve whiteness and wealth at the expense of democracy.

Unless we name it, resist it, and refuse to normalize it, this two-tiered system will calcify. And once that calcification is complete, it won’t just define Trump’s legacy—it will define America’s future.

[Sharon Kyle JD is a former president of the Guild Law School and is the publisher and co-founder of the LA Progressive. For years before immersing herself in the law and social justice, Ms. Kyle was a member of several space flight teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where she managed resources for projects like Magellan, Genesis, and Mars Pathfinder. Sharon is a former member of the Board of Directors of the ACLU and is on the editorial board of the BlackCommentator.com. Courtesy: LA Progressive, a newsportal founded by Dick and Sharon whose mission is to provide a platform for progressive thought, opinion and perspectives on current events.]

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Like Dictators of the Past, Trump is Building a Private Army

C.J. Atkins

Not since the days of Hitler’s S.A.—the “Brownshirt” stormtroopers—has a leader in an advanced capitalist country wielded a private political army outside the regular military and police forces that is answerable only to them. But if a new scheme hatched by President Donald Trump and his top adviser Stephen Miller comes to fruition, that may be exactly what the MAGA mogul will have.

A new executive order signed by Trump on Monday grabbed headlines for its creation of special “law and order” National Guard units that can be called out by the president and the Defense Secretary without having to go through state governors—who by law are the commanders of the Guard—for the purpose of “quelling domestic disturbances.”

The move is raising serious questions about legality, the separation of powers, and civil liberties, but another part of the same executive order potentially poses even more dangerous possibilities.

It authorizes a Trump-created task force to start recruiting civilian volunteers “with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience” to work alongside established federal law enforcement entities to carry out Trump’s orders in places he designates as facing a “crime emergency.”

D.C. was first on that list and would see the initial deployments of both the Trump-controlled National Guard units and the private MAGA army. His executive order explicitly says, however, that these troops could be sent “whenever the circumstances necessitate” to “other cities where public safety and order has been lost.”

It will be at the president’s sole discretion to make the call as to when the order has been lost. Chicago stands as the likely second target for this new vigilante unit.

‘Maybe we like a dictator’

It can be expected that the private Trump army will be flooded with “volunteers” from the ranks of the president’s political base. Ex-cops, former soldiers, and others eager to help round up immigrants and repress Trump’s political opponents and the people’s movements will likely be among the first to sign up.

Members of groups like the white supremacist Proud Boys and others who played the role of shock troops during Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt will have a new outlet for their violent propensities.

The order mandates the Miller-led task force, along with Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice, to “immediately create and begin training, manning, hiring, and equipping” this “specialized unit.” There are no indications where the funding will come from, but recruitment is to start immediately via the creation of an online application and intake portal.

The establishment of such a private armed body outside regular law enforcement channels—along with the takeover of the National Guard under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—takes the U.S. further down the road toward fascism.

After signing the orders Monday, Trump himself injected the idea of a dictatorship into public conversation. Purportedly responding to those opposed to his actions, Trump claimed he’s not a dictator but said that Americans may actually like to have one. “They [critics] say: ‘We don’t need him. Freedom, freedom, he’s a dictator, he’s a dictator,” Trump told the television cameras. But, he then alleged, “a lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator.’”

It is not the first time Trump has dismissed criticism of his dictatorial moves while also signaling his interest in unlimited power. In December 2023, while running for another term, he said he would not be a dictator “except for Day 1.” He later said he was being sarcastic but that “a lot of people” liked the idea of him being dictator, and he regularly muses about running for a third term, even though it’s unconstitutional.

There is nothing sarcastic about Monday’s executive orders, though. They carry the country headlong down the road toward the establishment of a presidential dictatorship.

A poll from earlier this year showed that many Americans could already see what was coming. Conducted in February and March 2025, an Axios poll showed 52% of people in the U.S. saw Trump as “a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.”

Almost half a year later—after the deportation blitzkrieg, the damaging trade war, the undermining of the courts, the gerrymandering of electoral districts, the campaign to destroy all labor laws, the military occupations of L.A. and D.C., and now these newest executive actions—certainly even more people would agree.

Monday’s executive orders also take other steps to strengthen executive branch control over D.C., presumably previewing what is planned for other Black- and progressive-led cities across the country.

The Secretary of Housing and Urban Development is empowered to investigate “non-compliance with crime-prevention and safety requirements” by the District of Columbia Housing Authority or HUD housing landlords and to call out the police to deal with them. This sets the stage for an assault on the residents in public and subsidized housing, who are overwhelmingly poor and working-class people of color.

Similarly, the door is opened to a crackdown on those who rely on public transit in D.C., with the Secretary of Transportation given power to “take appropriate remedial action” if crime is determined to be an issue on trains or buses. As with other parts of the order, determining when crime is a problem is the sole prerogative of the executive branch.

The National Park Service is ordered to hire more U.S. Park Police officers to patrol the parks and presumably kick out any unhoused people looking for a place to rest or demonstrators looking for a place to protest.

It’s a ramping up of militarism in all areas of public life.

Democracy in danger

Taken as a whole, the executive order creates a double-sided framework for unrestricted presidential control over “law and order” nationwide: Hegseth’s federalized National Guard and Trump’s private MAGA army. Using the fake excuse of a crime emergency, it lays the foundation for domestic military operations throughout the United States.

The takeover of the Guard violates the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which made it illegal to use federal troops for policing purposes except in times of a complete breakdown of local or state governments. None of the cities on Trump’s hit list—not Los Angeles, not D.C., not Chicago—face such a situation. This is purely a power grab with dangerous consequences.

As for Miller’s civilian volunteers, they are nothing more than a presidential paramilitary that can be deployed at will wherever Trump wants to assert control or silence dissent.

The current Republican-dominated Congress is, of course, no bulwark against what’s happening; under Speaker Mike Johnson, it is an accomplice. Despite that, the House and Senate must be bombarded with messages of opposition from the public.

The courts are one outlet to challenge these actions, but even there, MAGA control has already extended far and wide, including to the Supreme Court.

The midterm elections of 2026 stand out as the first chance to establish a legislative beachhead against Trump, but U.S. democracy—already so compromised—may not make it until then. It’s time for action now.

On Aug. 28, there will be a March on Wall Street to demand economic justice. On Labor Day, there will be hundreds of protests around the country. The people and labor movements have to participate in them all.

The danger to democracy is undeniable, but its further decline is not inevitable. If ever there was a time that demanded a united front against fascism, that time is now.

[C.J. Atkins is the managing editor at People’s World. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from York University in Toronto and has a research and teaching background in political economy and the politics and ideas of the American left. Courtesy: People’s World, a voice for progressive change and socialism in the United States. It provides news and analysis of, by, and for the labor and democratic movements.]