On August 25, the White House released another executive order by U.S. president Donald Trump, ostensibly “to address the crime emergency in the District of Columbia” [D.C.].

The order directed the Defense Department (since then renamed the Department of War) to take a more expansive role in domestic law enforcement, including by “quelling civil disturbances,” as Trump threatens to broaden deployments of the National Guard in cities across the country.

The directive formalized the creation of “a standing National Guard quick reaction force that shall be resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment.” These forces are slated for rapid mobilization to ensure “the public safety and order.”

Such “quick reaction” forces are similar to those the U.S. military uses in warfare abroad. They can now be deployed domestically, under the President’s direction. They are aimed at the U.S. population. They will increasingly target working people — as is now being done in raiding factories, farms, hotels, restaurants, and other worksites to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. They will target unions, strikes, pro-Palestinian and other protests, civil rights and other organizations, and any form of dissent that irks the White House.

EDITORIAL

Trump’s new executive order also directed a task force in Washington led by White House adviser Stephen Miller to create an online portal for “Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience” [emphasis added] to apply to join federal agents in enforcing Trump’s “crime emergency” order in D.C.

This is clear sign that Trump is appealing to ultra-rightist thugs to join federal forces and improve their training in order to attack opponents and ultimately intimidate and violently crush any resistance.

“Fascism has generally relied on extralegal shock troops to prepare the way for taking power. This has not — yet — been a defining feature of Trump’s rise,” World-Outlook noted last February in Trump’s 2nd Term: One-Man Rule & the Danger of Incipient Fascism. “However, on his first day in office Trump pardoned more than 1,500 of those connected to the January 6, 2021, mob action aimed at overturning the 2020 presidential election. Those pardoned include more than 1,100 who had been convicted in court. These are people who have already auditioned for the role of such shock troops. Many will respond to new calls from Trump, should he find them necessary, to confront resistance to his moves.”

Having said that, it is important to recognize that we do not yet live under a full-fledged dictatorship or a fascist regime in the United States today — at least not yet.

As Marxist scholar George Novack explained in his book Democracy and Revolution: From Ancient Greece to Modern Capitalism, “Fascism makes a clean sweep of everything that stands in the way of its monopoly of power. The state flings its forces of repression first of all upon the working class as the main enemy. It imprisons and executes their leaders, outlaws their organizations and destroys their rights, pitilessly punishing the least resistance to repression.”

At the same time, Novack explained in the same book, “the various forms of anti-democratic rule are not separated by impassable partitions. The lines of demarcation between them are often blurred and one can in the course of time grow into another. A ‘strong government’ can give rise to Bonapartism.^[1] A Bonapartist regime can yield to a military dictatorship or bow before fascism, as it happened in Germany in 1932-33.”

Fortunately for the working class and its allies, we are not there yet. It’s important, though, to clearly see, and warn working people of the dangers, of each qualitative turning point.

Coming on the heels of Trump’s hostile takeover of the D.C. police, and his deployment of more than 2,000 National Guard troops and hundreds of federal agents in the U.S. capital, Trump’s August 25 executive order represents a major escalation in his unmistakable march toward dictatorial rule.

An increasing number of commentators in the big-business media now recognize this trend but fail to highlight the deadly danger it poses for working people.

‘Men in masks pulling people into vans’

“I see the evisceration of due process,” said New York Times journalist Ezra Klein in the August 27, 2025, column Trump Is Building His Own Paramilitary Force. “I see detention centers being built where it is extraordinarily hard for lawyers and families to reach the people inside. I see men in masks refusing to identify themselves and pulling people into vans. I see armed U.S. troops in camo, some on horseback, riding through MacArthur Park in Los Angeles like they’re an occupying army. I see Trump sending in armed forces to take over the American capital.”

“What is going to happen when, predictably, a protester throws a rock at an agent? Or a Marine hears a car backfiring and thinks it’s a gunshot?” Klein asked.

“In an instant, this could all explode. You could have American troops firing on American civilians in an American city in a country-defining crisis. What happens then?

“Because that’s the other picture I see — the one that keeps coming into clear focus. Not Trump cleaning up crisis or disorder but Trump creating crisis and disorder so he can build what he has wanted to build: an authoritarian state, a military or a paramilitary that answers only to him — that puts him in total control.”

Trump charges ahead unchecked

Another column in the Wall Street Journal, In Trump’s Second Term, a Bolder President Charges Ahead Unchecked, also published on August 27, sounded similar themes.

“Seven months into his second term, Trump has also taken to riffing more frequently about authoritarianism, after positing during the campaign he would be a dictator only on ‘day one’ of his presidency,” the Journal pointed out.

“In the Oval Office on Monday [August 25], Trump praised his own tough-on-crime policies in Washington, D.C., by returning to the theme. ‘A lot of people are saying, “Maybe we like a dictator,’’’ he said,” the Journal continued.

The conservative daily quoted Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University, in Houston, Texas. Trump is motivated by “having control over all American institutions,” Brinkley said. “He seems to want to grab everyone by the neck and say, ‘I’m in charge.’”

“Trump has also pushed the optics of the presidency in a monarchical direction, holding a military parade in June for the Army’s 250th birthday,” the Journal continued.

“The president gives away campaign-style baseball hats to visitors emblazoned with the phrase ‘Trump 2028’— even though the Constitution bars him from running for another term — and keeps them in a White House office…. The Trump era is marked by concentrating federal power in the Oval Office. ‘I have the right to do anything I want to do,’ Trump said Monday [August 25].”

This trend is also reflected in Trump’s latest attempts to pack with loyalists the Federal Reserve — the U.S. central bank, an institution allegedly independent of the presidency.

It is important to note here that most industrialists and financiers in the U.S. ruling class and its institutions — from the Supreme Court to Congress and beyond — have been pushing or allowing for decades the concentration of power in the Oval Office. As it often happens, this process was gradual. But now the chickens are coming home to roost. The concentration of power in the executive is taking giant leaps in the hands of a confirmed autocrat.

In its September 5 nightly summary, the news site Politico hit the nail on the head when it stated, “Pat Buchanan may have lost the 1992 GOP presidential nomination, but it appears he won the war.”

Buchanan, seen by many as an incipient fascist, ran for U.S. president in the 1992 GOP primaries, and again in 1996.

“More than three decades after his quixotic primary bid against President George H.W. Bush, the former Nixon aide is experiencing a rebirth of sorts as a new generation of conservatives discovers the parallels between the paleoconservative former television pundit’s right-wing populism and the key tenets of Donald Trump’s MAGA ideology,” Politico noted.

Today, Politico continued, “Buchanan’s politics embody the dominant strain within the GOP. And he’s viewed by many as a forerunner to Trump while the Bush dynasty and its brand of establishment conservatism have become anathema.”

Democratic façade

Trump and his allies are marching toward one-man rule while keeping a democratic façade — for now.

In his book Democracy and Revolution, Novack explained that in its first steps an anti-democratic regime “need not immediately dismantle or wholly discard parliamentary institutions or parties; it renders them powerless. These may be permitted to survive, provided they play a merely supernumerary and decorative roles. Whether they rubber-stamp or resist the mandates from on high, these prevail as the law of the land.”

Trump has succeeded in reshaping the Republican Party into his image and in using the party’s majorities in both houses of Congress as a rubber stamp. He is now going out of his way to keep a GOP majority in the House of Representatives in the next elections.

As we noted in our last editorial, this roadmap includes “the GOP-led gerrymandering drive (now being matched… by some Democratic-led states) to enable Republicans to boost their haul of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 elections. Trump’s plans to ‘get rid of mail-in ballots’ and voting machines nationwide — restricting access to the ballot box before next year’s midterm elections — is an even more ominous threat to democratic rights.”

MAGA’s wrecking ball could next fall on the Voting Rights Act. Of Course, the Voting Rights Act Would Die at This Moment, read the headline of a guest essay by Linda Greenhouse published in the August 25 New York Times. “The crowning achievement of the civil rights era is unlikely to see its 61st birthday,” its subhead noted.

Twelve years ago the Supreme Court gutted the 1965 law in the Shelby County case, in which the court disabled the section of the legislation requiring that states with a history of voting discrimination obtain federal approval before making changes in their election laws — including redistricting. The Supreme Court is now scheduled to hear arguments on October 15 in a Louisiana redistricting case. A ruling on that case may put the final nail in the coffin of this historic accomplishment of the civil rights movement.

“Now it is white people who are depicted as the victims of discrimination in many quarters, including the White House,” Greenhouse wrote, while assessing how we got to this point. “When white South Africans are invited to enter the United States as refugees while actual refugees are remitted to their fates, and when the president demands that a museum designed to tell the African American story must tell a happier tale, can it really be a surprise that a 60-year-old voting rights law may not live to see its 61st birthday?”

The newly minted Department of War

Trump’s march toward one-man rule at home is mirrored by a foreign policy that can lead to more wars abroad. On September 5, Trump signed his 200^th executive order, renaming the Pentagon the Department of War.

“We won the first World War, we won the second World War, we won everything before that and in between,” claimed Trump, who has been vociferous about his desire for a Nobel peace prize (!) but now says he is motivated by winning wars. “And then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to the Department of Defense,” he added, referring to the 1949 decision by the Truman administration at the onset of the Cold War. “So, we’re going Department of War.”

Why is this the case?

“U.S. imperialism, once the undisputed number one world power economically and militarily, has been in decline for some time. Washington faces increased competition for domination of global markets, trade, and technological innovation, especially from China, which is rapidly rising as the world’s second capitalist power and threatens the status and profits of U.S.-based businesses,” World-Outlook pointed out in Trump’s 2nd Term: One-Man Rule & the Danger of Incipient Fascism.

“Many among the billionaire families that rule the United States are no longer confident the policies of traditional liberal or conservative administrations over the last half century can reverse this decline. A considerable number of them, by backing Trump, are opting for autocracy at home, combined with visions of territorial expansion abroad, to salvage their declining international position.”

The U.S. president’s “expansionist saber-rattling, attempts at resource grabbing reminiscent of the colonial era, and aggressive protectionism could lead to new wars and possibly another world conflagration,” World-Outlook continued. “This is more likely in an increasingly unstable world in which ultra-rightist forces have already ascended to power, or are knocking on its doors, in a rising number of ‘first-world,’ or more accurately imperialist, countries.”

The inextricable link between foreign and domestic policy was highlighted in a meme Trump posted on his social media site Truth Social on September 6. The news site Politico summarized it well in its September 7 morning news summary.

“Trump posted a meme on Truth Social yesterday that reimagined Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War dystopia ‘Apocalypse Now,’ putting the president’s face over that of Robert Duvall’s character,” Politico said. “On one side, military helicopters fly over the Chicago skyline; on the other, a raging explosion. ‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning,’ reads the meme, paraphrasing Duvall’s famous line about napalm. ‘Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.’ Nearby, in the movie title’s font: ‘Chipocalypse Now.’” [Emphasis in the original.]

“It’s worth pausing to take that in,” Politico continued.

“Any one of the aspects of it would be notable on their own: The president threatening to show an American city ‘why it’s called the Department of WAR’ … or likening it to the Vietnam War … or favorably comparing himself to Duvall’s character. The AP headline plays it straight: ‘Trump threatens Chicago with apocalyptic force and Pritzker calls him a ‘wannabe dictator’’.”

We should not underestimate the danger this represents, which some could dismiss as outrageous bluster. The fascist and ultra-rightist forces that are part of Trump’s base are being encouraged in preparation for further military mobilization, especially on the domestic front.

Their aim is the destruction of all bourgeois democratic forms.

Muted resistance

So far, Trump has faced relatively minimal resistance in his drive toward authoritarianism and war. The Democratic Party is still largely in a state of disarray. Many of its officials in positions of state power exhibit fear in face of the accelerating attacks on democratic norms.

The top labor union officials are largely taking their cue from the Democratic Party leadership, as they have done for decades.

That’s the main reason behind the relatively muted response by trade unions to some of the most onerous attacks on labor in decades: the accelerating arrests and deportations of immigrant workers, the mass layoffs of federal employees and the annulment of the contracts of most federal workers who still remain on the job.

Since returning to office, Trump has stripped more than a million federal workers of their right to collective bargaining.

However, all is not lost. Bourgeois democracy, preferable to any kind of dictatorship, is bruised but not destroyed yet. There is still time for working people and all who favor democracy to organize and stop the forces of reaction in their tracks.

What is to be done?

We need to start by explaining patiently and widely the danger of the rise of incipient fascism represented by the Trump administration’s actions. Most working- and middle-class people, including many who oppose some of Trump’s measures, do not yet understand, or even perceive, the possibility or extent of such a danger. The label “fascism,” so carelessly thrown around by many liberals and much of the left, has made such understanding more difficult.

Mobilizations in the streets to oppose Trump’s attacks on labor and democratic rights, as well as countermobilizations against any assaults by racists or ultrarightists, should be the order of the day. Emphasis on united-front actions around immediate demands — such as opposing the hostile federal takeover of D.C. — open to all supporters of democratic rights, and thumbs down on sectarian “join my group to fight Trumpism” edicts, are needed.

We must also try to win as many working people as possible to reject the “America First” outlook — advocated by Republicans and Democrats alike. Our motto should instead be “Workers and Farmers of the World First.” A united working class is the only effective wall against the billionaires’ race to the bottom. It is the only class that can ally with other exploited producers, like family farmers and other small businesspeople, to lift the world out of the bloody wars and dog-eat-dog competition of the profit system.

For the U.S. labor movement, that means recognizing that it is impossible to protect “American jobs” while ignoring the plight of our brothers and sisters in other countries. It is just as important to understand that immigration strengthens the working class, and that mass deportations are weakening it.

Mobilizations to oppose ICE raids and deportations, efforts to defend due process and other democratic rights for the undocumented, and pushing for amnesty and a path to citizenship for the millions of immigrants without papers in the United States must be a central task of the labor movement today.

The issues will be decided in struggle.

NOTES

[1] As George Novack explains in his book Democracy and Revolution: From Ancient Greece to Modern Capitalism (p. 214), “Bonapartism [emphasis added] carries to an extreme the concentration of power in the head of the state already discernible in the contemporary imperialist democracies. All important policy decisions are centralized in a single individual equipped with extraordinary emergency powers. He speaks and acts not as a servant of parliament, like the premier, but in his own right as ‘the man of destiny’ who has been called upon to rescue the nation in its hour of mortal peril.”

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