For many of us, day to day life in the United States proceeds as it would under a usual American federal government. We may be more distressed by the news than usual, we may be organizing or attending rallies and meetings, but still we go to work, hike or bike, meet up with friends for coffee or a drink. The ability to more or less continue our daily routines makes it easy to lose sight of the fact that we live in a country whose head of state has gone full-on authoritarian.
The dictatorship is here. The constitutional crisis is now.
Trump does as he pleases. He does not even bother to seek the Congressional approval that he might well be able to get given that his fellow Republican Fascists control the federal legislature. While most federal district courts have been doing all they can to rein him in, he has been able to use a combination of appeals and noncompliance to disregard many of their orders. While the Supreme Court has not rushed to endorse his every move, neither has it acted decisively to restrain him nor to demand he and his Cabinet obey lower courts.
What Trump pleases is to use force and federal prosecutorial power to attack, physically and legally, the progressive and Democratic blocs in the United States. Wretched as it is that he has turned his ICE goon squad on immigrants and detained and deported them without due process, his use of DOJ, DHS, the FBI, ICE, the National Guard, and the U.S. military has gone much further.
Trump has used all of these agencies and forces to threaten and disrupt major U.S. cities. He recently instructed ICE agents to target "America's largest cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York [because] these, and other such cities are the core of the Democratic Power Center." At the G-7 Summit, he falsely stated, "Biden allowed 21 million people to come into our country.... Most of those people are in the cities, all Democrat-run cities. And they think they are going to use them to vote. Not going to happen." These comments make it clear: the federal invasion of Los Angeles is part of a larger program. Trump hates immigrants, to be sure. But his mass deportation program is in service of destroying any organized political opposition.
Starting in January and continuing to the present, Trump has targeted elected Democrats and liberal judges in an effort to portray them as enemies of the United States. The attacks are more extensive than most people appreciate.
We must, all of us, see the situation for what it is. Trump is attempting to establish a perpetual Republican Fascist federal government. Perhaps like Putin and Orban, Trump will hold mock presidential elections. He has no more intention of respecting a democratic transfer of power than those two have ever had.
We must not stay on the sidelines nor give in to despair. Get involved in local and state politics. Talk to your friends, neighbors, and families and make them aware of the authoritarian takeover of much of the federal government. With time, letters, and donations, support the institutions and individuals who are not bending the knee. Join others in the public square when mass actions to demand democracy are convened. If you already do any of these, keep doing them and try to do even a bit more.
Nothing counts but pressure, pressure, more pressure, and still more pressure through broad organized aggressive mass action - A. Philip Randolph
For New Mexicans, it is imperative that we make the 2026 statewide election here as free and fair as possible and that we support every Democrat or progressive Independent facing a Republican opponent. It does not matter whether the Democrat or progressive Independent is to the left or to the right of you. The Republican Party, in the states and at the national level, is all in for perpetual dictatorship. The best bulwark is to put Democrats in control in the states. In New Mexico, this means electing a Democratic governor, lieutenant governor, state attorney general, and commissioner of public lands. It means putting Democrats in control of both houses of the state legislature.
There is not going to be a deus ex machina that vanquishes Trump and Republican Fascism, that in one fell swoop restores U.S. constitutional democracy. The fight requires each of us to act continually, in ways small and large. In the words of Alice Paul:
[T]he movement is a sort of mosaic. Each of us puts in one little stone, and then you get a great mosaic at the end.
Do not surrender. Acting together, we can fight fascism and pave the way for a restored, revitalized American republic.
