It’s no longer enough to talk about authoritarian drift, democratic backsliding, or any of the polite euphemisms liberals prefer. We are watching, in real time, the formation of a fascist state in the United States. Not a theoretical possibility. Not a warning sign. A fact. And like all fascisms, it’s coming not with a single rupture but through the slow corruption and recomposition of what was already there.
Three events this week tell the story more clearly than a thousand think-pieces. First, Judge Hannah Dugan, a Milwaukee county judge, arrested by federal agents at her own courthouse. Her supposed crime? Allowing a man — an undocumented migrant — to leave the building without being handed over to Trump’s immigration police. She didn’t destroy evidence. She didn’t obstruct a court order. She didn’t storm a federal building in a cosplay coup. She exercised basic human decency. And for that, the federal state decided to make an example of her.
Second, Pam Bondi, the grinning hatchet-woman now running Trump’s Department of Justice, rescinded protections for journalists against government subpoenas. Journalists can now be hauled into court, forced to reveal their sources, prosecuted if they resist. Bondi dressed it up in the language of “national security” and “treasonous leaks” — but make no mistake: this is about terrorising the press into submission. Exposing Trump’s corruption is now legally adjacent to betrayal of the state.
Truth is treason in a fascist regime.
Third, and most telling, Trump has signed an executive order gutting civil rights protections by eliminating “disparate impact” standards. Under the old framework, agencies could be held accountable if their policies disproportionately harmed Black, brown, disabled, or marginalised communities — even without explicit racist intent. That is now gone. Discrimination must now be proven as deliberate, conscious, premeditated. Otherwise, it is no discrimination at all. Racism has been legalised by the simple act of defining it out of existence.
Fascism doesn’t just rule through violence; it rewrites the law to make injustice invisible.
The sequence is familiar to anyone who has studied the twentieth century: first the migrants, then the courts, then the press, then the civil rights infrastructure itself. The vulnerable are brutalised first, the dissidents silenced second, the institutions gutted third, and the concept of justice quietly erased fourth. What Trump is building is not an improvisation or a strongman fantasy. It is the slow, deliberate reorganisation of the American state along fascist lines. He doesn’t need new symbols or new armies. He doesn’t need a thousand-year Reich. He needs a judiciary that’s afraid of him, a media that can be dragged to heel, and a legal system that no longer even pretends to protect the oppressed.
The fascist project always relies on the same mechanism: turning the machinery of the state into an instrument of personal rule. That’s what is happening. Trump’s claim that he is “entitled” to deport migrants without trial. Ignoring the Supreme Court, ignoring basic constitutional rights, isn’t just a throwaway comment. It’s the logical next step. It’s the executive declaring that it no longer recognises any limit to its authority except its own will.
Fascism, Marxists have long understood, is the naked violence of capital when it can no longer rule by consent. What we’re seeing now isn’t the old liberal nightmare of a sudden coup, a dramatic storming of democracy. It’s the fascism of administrative orders, DOJ memos, federal agents doing their job. It’s a bureaucracy repurposed to crush opposition without even needing to change the letterheads.
Pam Bondi’s move against the press is particularly chilling because it shows how little resistance there really is inside the system. Biden’s old protections were weak enough, and they collapsed at the first serious test. Now the attorney general can sign off on subpoenas against journalists at will. Watch how quickly the “legitimate” news organisations fall in line. Watch how “security concerns” will be invoked to explain away every act of censorship. Fascism doesn’t need to nationalise the media when it can simply intimidate it into being an extension of the state.
And what of the courts? The arrest of Judge Dugan is a warning shot across every judge, every local official, every civic body that once thought itself insulated. The message is simple: you are either with Trump or you are expendable. Not even elected judges are safe. That’s the hallmark of fascist rule: there are no neutral spaces. There are no autonomous institutions. There is only loyalty and disloyalty.
The spectacle still matters. Trump understands that. It’s why the arrest had to be public. Why Bondi’s memo had to be leaked. Fascism doesn’t just repress, it makes repression visible. It makes you feel the powerlessness, it forces you to internalise it. That’s the real terror. Not just the fact of state violence but the way it colonises your imagination, shrinks the horizon of what you dare to hope for.
There’s a grim irony that the Biden years were sold as a return to normality. But like the proverbial parrot it was already dead. Biden just papered over the cracks for a little while. Trump is building the future that neoliberalism made possible: a hollowed-out democracy, an authoritarian capitalist state, a system where law and order mean nothing but the supremacy of the strong.
What we are witnessing now is the operationalisation of fascism. Not its arrival. Its expansion. Its consolidation. The long, slow betrayal of every principle of bourgeois democracy in favour of naked class rule, enforced at gunpoint if necessary.
The left has a choice. Either we tell the truth about what is happening, or we become complicit by our silence.
The United States is becoming a fascist state.
Say it.
The United States is becoming a fascist state.
Say it again.
The United States is becoming a fascist state.
Build your strategy from that fact.
Or watch history repeat itself, as tragedy once more — and then as permanent nightmare.
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