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"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, August 2018)
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"How do you spell ICE in German? GESTAPO." (S. Jonas, July 2025)
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Tom Paine, December 23, 1776
THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. . . . [I]t would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.
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This is Part 1 of a three-part series on TrumpRepubloFascism and my proposal for how the Democratic Party could deal with it in the upcoming mid-term and then Presidential elections. Creating and implementing a United Front Against TrumpRepubloFascism is a program-and-policy around which all sectors of the Democratic Party and its electoral allies could unite. This column and next week's contain an updated review of the subject, abbreviated as "TRF." Part 3 will contain the details of my proposal for creating a United Front for the Restoration of U.S. Constitutional Democacy, "United Front" for short. And now on to this periodic revisit to "TRF," and what it is all about.
As my regular readers know, I have been dealing with Trump, and what has become what I call TrumpRepubloFascism, for quite some time. As it happened, I published my first column on Trump-and-Fascism, entitled "Is it Hair Trump or is it Herr Trump?" in late 2015 (republished in 2024, Click Here). As well, I have published a six volume(!) set of my "Trump" columns (2015-2021) in Kindle on Amazon (Click Here). I last definitively dealt with what I have defined as "TrumpRepubloFascism" back in 2025. As long as the movement, and the government it currently controls, are with us, the subject is worth a periodic re-visit.
Let's begin with the definition of "fascism" that I use:
"There is a single, all-powerful executive branch of government, in service of an industrial/financial/sales-and-marketing/communications ruling class, that controls, for the most part, the functions of production, distribution, finance, and exchange. There is no separation of the principal governmental powers: executive, legislative, and judicial. They are all held by the Executive branch. There is no independent judiciary/civil/criminal/justice system. There are no independent media. There is a single national ideology, based on some combination of racism, misogyny, religious bigotry, authoritarianism, homophobia, and xenophobia. There is a political party supporting the movement. There is a state propaganda machine using the big and little lie techniques. There may be a full-blown dictatorship, a charismatic leader, engagement in foreign wars, and the use of the mob/private armies to enforce governmental control."
Since the time that some form of government was structured in any state that had a central government in one form or another, the central element of its structure has been that it had, in some form, three principal components: the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judicial. In the monarchies, or their equivalents, the three components/branches of government were all combined under one central authority. The only exception was that under some monarchies/imperiums the Courts might have some degree of independence.
As it has happened in history, THE distinctive feature of the government in the newly created United States of America in late 18th century was that these three central components of any government, the Executive, Legislative and Judicial, were functionally separated. Further, that Separation of Powers --- the concept, formalized in the mid-18th century by the single-named French political philosopher Montesquieu --- was ensconced in a written Constitution.
The principal goal of those forces that are running Trump's second term, like Project 2025's Russell Vought, installed at the powerful Office of Management and Budget, is to end the Separation of Powers, at the legislative and judicial branch levels. This was made clear on Trump's very first day in office, with the creation of the so-called "Department of Governmental Efficiency" (DOGE), simply by the ORDER OF THE PRESIDENT. Before getting to what it actually did in destroying almost overnight the structure and function of many Federal governmental departments and offices --- by firing or relocating personnel, or unilaterally redefining roles and functions --- consider that it did so without the benefit of legislation. This is the essence of a government functioning without the separation of powers, as noted historically in monarchies and empires, and over the past hundred years or so in governments that are generally described as Fascist, e.g.: Nazi Germany; Fascist Italy; 20th century Imperial Japan; 20th century Franco-Spain; 20th century, between the Wars, under Admiral Horthy, Hungary; 21st century Orban-Hungary; 20th century Peron-Argentina; 20th century Chile-Pinochet; present-day North Korea; and so forth.
These nations certainly have had different histories and became fascist states by different routes --- elections in the case of Germany, created by Royal decrees in the case of Italy and 20th century Hungary, violent overthrow of an elected government by an armed-forces coup in the case of Japan, triumph-in-a-civil-war in the case of Spain, elections in the case of modern Hungary. But once in power, the leaders/controllers of the fascist states all shared that one common feature --- there was the unification of the three primary powers-of-government at the central government level, usually under the control of one person, who could called "Dictator," or "Leader" (Fuhrer), of even "President," which by definition described what the decisions and orders of that person did for the whole of the nation: Dictate, or lead, just about everything being done in government, with no separation of powers.
And so, getting back to DOGE, its creation and functioning were very significant, politically and historically, (and one can be sure that the powers within, and closely aligned with, the Trump government, like the Heritage Society, knew, and know, exactly what they were/are doing). By the stroke a pen, and by the appointment of a program administrator (Musk) without even a nod in the direction of Congressional oversight of (to say nothing of any Congressional approval of the creation of a new [in this case very powerful] Federal government office, as required by the provisions of Article I of the Constitution*), the TrumpRepubloFascists (TRFs) just did it. With a stroke of his pen, and the steps of Trump and his boys (literally, it would seem, in certain cases at least) Trump and Musk repealed the Civil Service Act of 1883, as amended. They also unilaterally ended Federal government programs which had been created by legislation, like the U.S.A.I.D. (which closure just happened, as a by-product of TrumpRepubloFascism, to have killed several hundred thousand people [so far]).
Of course, as is known even to the most superficial student of the U.S. Constitution, as noted above, the Separation of Powers is literally written into it: the Structure and Functions of the Legislative Branch are set forth in Article I, of the Executive Branch in Article II, and of the Judicial Branch in Article III. The Republican Party is currently in total control of the legislative and judicial branches, and while the latter has presented Trump with a limited number of "no's," more often than not those have to do with Trump's personal rather than governmental matters.
A feature of fascist governments is National police force, the parameters of the structure and functions of which are set forth by the central, fascist, government, not by statute. A peculiar arm of the central government in Nazi Germany was the "Geheime Staats Polizei," GESTAPO for short: the "Secret State Police." It was a government-control-enforcement agency that had in combination three primary policing/law-enforcement powers that in modern bourgeois (that is non-fascist) governments of capitalist states are kept separated.
Those powers are to: 1) arrest persons for suspected crimes; 2) subject those persons to some kind of criminal procedures, in which the accused has certain rights before the law, such as the right to know of the charges against them in some detail (as in a warrant for their arrest), the right to remain silent, the right to an attorney for due process, (always denied by the GESTAPO and also by ICE when they can get away with it [which is most of the time]); 3) the right to imprison persons convicted of crimes, also without the due process of law. On occasion, the Gestapo did carry out executions on the street of perceived "Enemies of the State" (sound familiar?).
As it happens, the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution --- "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized" --- clearly prohibits virtually all of the actions that have been undertaken by ICE.
The GESTAPO did and ICE does combine the powers of arrest and imprisonment, and, in the case of ICE, arbitrary deportation. For the former the end result in most instances was imprisonment for an indeterminate term. For ICE, if they move quickly enough, it means deportation before the person has any access to due process, or imprisonment for an indeterminate term while awaiting the "wheels of justice" to grind, which in such cases can take quite some time, and, so far to a limited extent (although very tragically for the victims and their families) it means, among other things, shooting anyone who they think is getting in their way, in one way or another, for any reason as determined by the ICE-agent doing the shooting.
Also, before the Nazis took over the central government of Germany, they also had an unofficial private army, Die Sturm Abteilung, the Storm Division, the SA, the "Brown shirts." Before Hitler was appointed as Chancellor on January 30, 1933, and then Der Fuhrer on March 23, 1933, the SA operated outside of any government authority, to advance the interests of the Nazi Party by both legal and often illegal means. The TrumpRepubloFascists don't have a formal SA yet, but one could easily be formed from various right-wing "militias" already in place around the nation. What they can then easily do was clearly demonstrated in the "January 6th" Mob Attack on the Capitol.
To be continued, next week.
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The United Sates Constitution:
*ARTICLE I, Section 1. All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
(Article changed on Aug 21, 2026 at 12:18 PM EDT)
(Article changed on Aug 21, 2026 at 1:53 PM EDT)
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