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New York

Listen up, all you true-believers of the “Make America Great Again” persuasion: Congratulations! Your fever dreams have come true. Your seventy-seven million votes in the last presidential election birthed a new nation: the United States of Donald J. Trump, king of white Christo-fascism.

Behold thine Führer: a multiply convicted felon, adjudicated fraudster and sexual predator, renowned deadbeat, world-class liar, huckster of gewgaws, serial adulterer, crypto shyster, mad bomber, incontinent vulgarian, six-time bankruptee, racist landlord, flatulent megalomaniac, a man who cakes his face in more makeup than all three Kardashian sisters combined—and a delusional heathen who told reporters at a White House press gaggle, “I think God is very proud of the job I’ve done.”

What do you think, MAGAts?

Are you, like God, proud of missions undertaken by masked, heavily armed federalized thugs under Herr Trump’s command? Proud of their deadly missions accomplished in a single month in the cities of a single state? The Russian-born journalist Masha Gessen summarized the stark brutality in an essay for the New York Times—

                   “Since early January, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement

expanded its operation in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, federal officer have: killed Renee Good [mother of three]; menaced a pregnant immigration lawyer in her firm’s parking lot; detained numerous U.S. citizens, including one who was dragged out of his house in his underwear; smashed in the windows of cars and detained their occupants, including a U.S. citizen who was on her way to a medical appointment at a traumatic brain injury center; set off crowd-control grenades and a tear gas containers next to a car that contained six children, including a 6-month-old; swept an airport, demanding to see people’s papers and arresting more than a dozen workers there; detained a 5-year-old.

“And now they have killed another U.S. citizen, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse with no criminal record…The agents had him down on the ground, subdued, before they apparently fired at least ten shots at point-blank range.”

We mainly understand the fascist creed by its first tenet: brute and bloody force as a means of civic control, by way of amoral policing. Case in point: When the federal thug who shot and killed Renee Good was done with the deed, he was caught on video shouting, “Fuck that bitch!”

State terrorism of this sort, especially directed against persons of unfavored races and doctrines, is effective in the short run, as we recollect from the World War 2 era. Hitler had his brown-shirted Sturmabteilung; Mussolini had his black-shirted Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale for similar purposes of intimidation; Francisco Franco had his blue-shirted Falange.

And in today’s United States of Donald J. Trump, the president rules with the help of Die Schläger—goon squads togged out in battlefield camouflage, helmets, and gas masks. They are louts on the public dime, just bright enough to pull triggers, swing truncheons, hurl cannisters of chemical irritants, slam women to the pavement, and cause children to scream as their immigrant parents are wrestled into armored vehicles and disappeared.

Yet these louts are shy, perhaps ashamed at some level. They cloak themselves in balaclavas and refuse to disclose their names.

These men, for they are nearly all mouth breathers of that sex, are the otherwise unemployable grunts of ICE squads (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) and the CBP (Customs & Border Protection). Herr Trump calls them, variously, “true patriots” and “great heroes” who are “doing a job nobody else wants to do” as front-line troops in “the invasion of criminal illegal aliens” who slither their way into the U.S. of D.J.T. as “rapists” and “murderers” and “hardened, vicious, horrible criminals” who victimize our (white) citizenry.

Never mind that Donald Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod (1912-2000), was born in Scotland. And never mind that two of his three wives—Ivana Marie Zelníčková (1949-2022) and Melanija Knavs (1970—) hailed or hail from Middle Europe. Never mind that the now Mrs. Melania Trump taught her son Barron to speak her own first language—Slovenian.

…Never mind that Donald Trump’s mother-in-law, Amalija Knavs (1945-2024), was born in Judendorf-Straßengel, Austria. Never mind that his father-in-law, Victor Knavs, was born in 1944 in what was then German occupied Yugoslavia, where he held required membership in the League of Communists of Slovenia.

…Never mind that Mr. and Mrs. Knavs lived in the White House during Herr Trump’s first presidential term, from 2017 to 2021. Never mind that Donald Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump (1869-1918), was born in Kallstadt, Kingdom of Bavaria, where he became an illegal emigrant under Bavarian law upon fleeing to New York at age 16 to avoid compulsory military duty.

—Großvater Friedrich would eventually take a few years’ leave from New York in order to run a brothel in Canada’s Yukon Territory during the Klondike Gold Rush days. There, he amassed a half-million-dollar fortune, meaning about $18 million today, or €15 million. (He tried returning to Kallstadt, but German authorities declared him undesirable and denied his entry.)

Never mind—all of it. Donald Trump maintains a curiously hateful fixation on immigrants.  

His so-called “Operation Metro Surge” is centered on urban Minnesota at this time, standing as the largest ever federal action against immigrants who lack documents that would allow them to continue as the overwhelmingly honest workers and good neighbors they are and have been for decades. A combined deployment of three thousand ICE and CBP agents now swarm the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul. (By comparison, the Minneapolis police department, largest municipal force in the state, numbers six hundred.)   

Alleged pride of the Lord for Herr Trump’s job performance aside, may God help us here in a land of immigrants from all corners of the world—those arrived voluntarily or otherwise, and including indigenous peoples who trace their ancestry to northeastern Asia.

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American governments, like political organisms practically everywhere else, are prone to the political necessity of pleasing the plutocrats and the assorted captains of ruthless capitalism. Two purposes are served: efficient statecraft, and personal financial gain.

No government form serves this cause better than fascist authoritarianism—again, in the short run. No pesky legislative dithering here, no mess of democracy. Dear Leader calls the shots and takes his cut, mostly with hand extended beneath the table.

The already well-to-do pudgy old fellow currently in residence at the White House (when not golfing in Florida)—the man who tries valiantly to cover over the hideous, puss-filled *bruises on the backsides of his little hands with cosmetic foundation—may not be adept at statecraft, but he is of Olympic ability in pursuit of fattening his personal exchequer.        

Herewith, Herr Trump’s unashamed results—by the numbers:   

                                                PERSONAL REVENUE, 2017-21

• According to the Washington-based non-governmental organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, or CREW, the federal government paid a total of $1.6 billion (€1.34 billion) for a four-year supply of goods and services contracted with Trump corporate entities.  

• Foreign government payments to such Trump properties, according to CREW: at least $7.8 million (€6.51 million), ranging upward to as much as $13.6 million (€11.35 million).

• Taxpayer and political spending, according to Treasury Department reports: The Trump Organization, the president’s umbrella corporation, took in at least $2.5 million (€2.09 million) of taxpayer money, largely for overnight Secret Service lodgings at Trump-owned hotels and/or golf resorts. In addition, an estimated $8.5 million (€ 7.09 million) from political fundraising groups under the president’s control.

PERSONAL REVENUE, January 2025 forward

The Center for American Progress, a Washington-based non-partisan research organization, estimates this one month total at a whopping $1.8 billion (€1.50 billion) in cash gains from cryptocurrency ventures through Trump corporations, which are forecast to gain just as much every year for the next three years of the Trump regime.

Thus, is validation of fascism’s overriding feature—as defined by the father of fascism, Italy’s Benito Mussolini (1883-1945): „Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.“ *About those bruises: Donald Trump is possibly plagued with common symptoms of secondary syphilis, a stage of latent venereal disease in which reddish brown spots take root on the hands of fatigued victims who may fall fast asleep at inopportune moments. Syphilis has struck down a number of American gangsters, most notably Al Capone (1889-1947).  

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The underlying theme of all three Trump presidential campaigns—his victories in 2016 and 2024, his loss in 2020—was the candidate’s messianic vision. At the mention of virtually every social problem back 2016, he famously declared, “I alone can fix it!” Satanic opponents of the rival campaign, he insisted and insists to this day, thwarted his 2020 reëlection bid by “rigging” the vote.

But then came 2024, when Donald Trump travelled the road to Damascus, and announced at the end of his journey, “God is on my side!”    

By such attitude, Herr Trump is one with his pal in Pyongyang, President and Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, last of the “Kimilsungism” Trinity—a family line of divine rulers as a complex substitute for religion in the officially atheist state of North Korea. In keeping with complexity, President Kim is routinely photographed atop a white horse galloping along pathways of the sacred Mount Baekdu as its rider seeks Heavenly guidance for critical decisions.

Likewise, Dear Leader Donald’s standard packet of campaign literature and political art includes an A.I.-generated illustration of himself on some imagined triumphal ride atop a galloping white horse.

When he survived an assassination attempt in July 2024 while campaigning in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump barnstormed the country with bandaged ear to help heal a bullet wound, he told voters at every stop, “God saved me for a purpose…I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of Almighty God.“    

Herr Trump, who holds a mountain-high opinion of his wisdom and therefore brooks no challenge to what he terms his “big, uh, brain” appropriates some of the Lord’s almighty quality for himself. What he knows, or thinks he knows, is what goes.

Hence, legacy media delivers “fake news,” those who disagree with his political outlook are “far left lunatics.” And an explosive scandal or scandals still hiding among the several million pages of documents that make up the so-called *Epstein files is dismissed as a “hoax.”

Trumpian claims of news fakery may be ludicrous, but corporate media institutions have found it best to accede to his litigation. So far in this second regime, the president’s high-profile lawsuits against disputatious corporate publishers and broadcast outlets have resulted in these court-ordered settlements:

                • $24.5 million (€20.67 million) from YouTube

                • $25 million (€21.09 million) from Facebook

                • $16 million (€13.5 million) from Paramount/television

                • $15 million (€12.65 million) from ABC television news

                • $10 million (€8.44 million) from X/formerly Twitter

Individual reporters, few having the wherewithal to survive court-ordered settlements won by Donald Trump’s battery of lawyers, are therefore put on notice.

On the night of January 29, former CNN Television journalist Don Lemon was awakened at his home by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and arrested on charges of violating the religious freedom rights of congregants belonging to a St. Paul, Minnesota church.

Specifically, Mr. Lemon was accused of being part of a rowdy January 18 demonstration by church outsiders, there to protest the fact that one of the church pastors was also a high-ranking official of ICE. Mr. Lemon contends he was merely live-streaming the demonstration.

Nabbed along with Mr. Lemon as an alleged fellow protestor was Georgia Fort, a local independent television journalist and mother of three—whose children were traumatized by the presence of twelve FBI agents sent to arrest her at the family’s home in the wee hours of Friday, January 30.

The arrests of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort came on direct orders proudly announced by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, prominent among Herr Trump’s circle of sycophants. If convicted at their eventual trials, Mr. Lemon and Ms. Fort each face up to ten years’ imprisonment.

In a fascist society, transmogrified “justice” is swift.

*About that Epstein file: Late in the afternoon of January 30, some three million pages of heavily redacted documents linking Donald Trump to his longtime best buddy Jeffrey Epstein, the late pedophile and multi-millionaire said to have committed suicide in a Brooklyn jail cell while awaiting federal trial in Manhattan on charges of running an international sex trafficking ring, were finally released to the press by Ms. Bondi. She had been under orders by Congress to do so—by the deadline date of December 19. Still, there are some three million more documents were withheld. Reporters are hard at work shuffling through what documents are at hand. Stand by for a more fulsome picture of squalorous activities at Mr. Epstein’s mansion on Manhattan’s east side, a haven for wealthy gentlemen with a taste for minor girls in a building teeming with hidden cameras.

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Coldly efficient as the fascist model may be, tactical mistakes will be made. The “worst of the worst” mistakes, as Herr Trump might put it, involved a battle plan by Herr Hitler at the height of World War 2.

In the approaching winter of 1941, the Nazi chancellor issued a directive to his military commanders to blockade the enemy city of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), located in the bitterly cold northern region of the Soviet Union. With the city choked off from much of Europe, the Luftwaffe would bomb it into oblivion. Thus would Germany avoid a costly street-by-street assault.

Or so Herr Hitler reasoned.

Three years passed until the Soviet Red Army finally ended the siege of Leningrad in January of 1944—a siege in which more than a million Russian civilians died, mostly from hunger due to food shortages caused by the blockade. To maintain their resistance to Nazis, the starving people of Leningrad were reduced to feeding on boiled leather or wallpaper paste.

…or to the desperation of cannibalism.

Despite the daily horrors of Nazi occupation, the rich cultural life of Leningrad became a weapon against brutality. At one point, loudspeakers were strung up in the center of the city for the people to hear the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. The composer announced, via those loudspeakers, “I dedicate my Seventh Symphony to our struggle against fascism, to our future victory, and to my native city, Leningrad.“

It took those three years of horror for Adolf Hitler to realize his mistake: You must not invade a wintertime city in the winter.

Minneapolis and St. Paul are wintertime cities separated by a river, each with a robust cultural life. The Minneapolis-based Minnesota Orchestra performs in symphony halls around the globe; likewise, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. The Twin Cities are second only to New York in the number of venues for stage plays. Bruce Springsteen, the troubadour, performed his new, protest song “Streets of Minneapolis” as a surprise guest at a “Concert of Solidarity and Resistance” in support of the grieving families of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.  

The whole world was listening.

The whole world watched as Donald Trump’s fascist pigs invaded the wintertime Twin Cities—in this coldest winter in decades. Every day in the bone-chilling air, tens of thousands of ordinary Minnesotans filled the streets to shake their thunder against Herr Trump’s criminal regime. 

There is something in that cold air that brings purposeful clarity to the protest against immorality that is plain to see.   

Cities all across America have organized protests of their own, in solidarity with the siege of Minneapolis-St. Paul.

And the whole world is watching.

Moral clarity will defeat fascism.  

Click here for his monthly essays in our magazine.

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