[Trump is considering invoking the Insurrection Act on his first
day back in office.]
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A TRUMP REELECTION THREATENS TO MAKE AMERICA FASCIST AGAIN  
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Clarence Lusane
December 5, 2023
Tom Dispatch
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_ Trump is considering invoking the Insurrection Act on his first day
back in office. _

Former President Donald Trump attends the UFC 295 event at Madison
Square Garden on November 11, 2023, in New York City., Sarah Stier /
Getty Images

 

On February 19, 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066
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It initiated a Department of Defense program that resulted in the
rounding up and incarceration of about 122,000 individuals of Japanese
descent. They were to be placed in federal “relocation centers”
that would popularly become known as “internment camps.” As it
happened, they were neither. They were prisons set up to house and so
violate the civil and human rights of a despised and racially
different group defined as “the enemy.”

Although that executive order did not, in fact, mention a specific
ethnic or racial group, it was clearly understood that the prisons
were not being established for citizens or residents of German or
Italian descent, the other two nations then at war with the United
States. While not a single person
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of Japanese ancestry was found to have spied on this country or to
have committed acts of sabotage against it, pro-Mussolini and
pro-Hitler demonstrations, rallies, and propaganda had been
commonplace. Before the war, fascist groups
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had been allowed to organize and spread propaganda from coast to
coast. Some even had influence over and alliances with members of
Congress, mainstream journalists, and well-known scholars.

Such a travesty of justice was not just being pushed by Roosevelt, one
of the most liberal presidents in American history, but by notables
like California judge Earl Warren (later to become a liberal Supreme
Court justice) and renowned journalist Edward R. Murrow.

Although lawsuits challenging the prison camps were filed, the Supreme
Court allowed them to continue to operate. More than half of those
incarcerated were U.S. citizens. None had been charged with any
crimes. Often under the banner (made popular again in our time) of
“America First,” far-right, racist policies had been put in place
and millions suffered from them.

The openly discussed basis for unity in those years was, at least in
part, opposition to non-Aryans and non-Protestants, whether they were
Japanese, Jewish, or African American.

In 1981, 36 years after World War II ended with the atomic bombing of
two Japanese cities, a Presidential Commission on Wartime Relocation
and Internment of Civilians issued a report
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imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent in such striking numbers
“was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions which
followed from it… were not driven by analysis of military
conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions
were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political
leadership.”

TRUMP THREATENS

It’s important to keep this history in mind since Donald Trump and
his MAGA associates are planning to emulate it on a grand scale in a
second (and what they hope will be a never-ending) administration.
Promises of new “camps,” should The Donald be elected a second
time in 2024, are already pouring out of Trumpworld. These would be
“huge camps” for migrants near the border with Mexico, as the _New
York Times_ reported recently
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“to detain people while their cases are processed and they await
deportation flights.” To ensure that Congress has no direct role in
funding them, they will be built and operated with money taken
directly from the military budget.

Just to be clear, Trump isn’t against all immigrants. Anything but.
After all, he married two, one from the Czech Republic
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and the other from Slovenia
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Instead, the targets of the pending Trumpian anti-immigrant tsunami
will, of course, be individuals and families from the global South.
The racism embedded in such a future effort isn’t beside the point,
it _is _the point.

Trump’s former adviser and fellow xenophobe, Stephen Miller, stated
that such a new administration would build “camps” — think:
prisons — that could house up to a million undocumented immigrants
while preparing them for mass deportations. As he told the _New York
Times_, “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the
slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast
arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration
crackdown. The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s
happening.”

And rest assured about one thing: the next Trump administration
won’t just go after undocumented immigrants trying to enter the
country. It will build an unprecedented gulag system to round up and
deport millions of people of color, one that would be unimaginable if
those undocumented immigrants came from Canada or Denmark. The Trump
gang has stated
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that they will end TPS (temporary protected status), reinstate the
former president’s Muslim ban, reimpose and expand health
restrictions on asylum seekers, revoke visas for foreign students who
participated in protests against recent Israeli actions, shut down the
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and deport
immigrants who had been allowed into the United States for
humanitarian reasons.

Mind you, Trump proposed or tried to institute much of this while
still in office, only to be thwarted by his administration’s
ineptitude, Democratic resistance, grassroots organizing, and the
courts. If, in the wake of the 2024 election, the GOP were to gain
control over both chambers of Congress as well as the White House —
a formula that would ensure the appointment of ever more
Trump-friendly federal judges — success (as he defines it) will be a
given for many of these efforts.

When Trump tells
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his followers that “Our cruel and vindictive political class is not
just coming after me — they are coming after YOU,” he means that
he hates the very same people they do and will provide the retribution
for all the harm supposedly done to them by immigrants (of color),
Muslims, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native peoples, feminists, and other
enemies.

THE FASCIST AIMS OF AMERICA FIRST

While Trump is the likely GOP nominee in 2024, the election is still a
year away and any number of unforeseen developments could lead to
someone else being nominated. At this moment, the other potential
Republican candidates are Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former U.N.
Ambassador Nikki Haley, business executive Vivek Ramaswamy, and former
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Christie excepted, there isn’t a
sliver of policy difference between any of them and Trump. And
notably, Christie supported
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Trump for nearly all of his administration. In addition, each of them
would need the former president’s far-right MAGA base to win the
nomination.

Trump’s people have cloaked themselves in an “America First”
aura without in any way owning that as a meme. In fact, it harks back
both to the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the
American fascist movement of the 1930s. By the mid-1920s, the KKK had
ballooned to between three and eight million members and, as scholar
Sarah Churchwell notes in her remarkable book
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Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream_,
it had already adopted “America First” as a motto.

While both Democratic President Woodrow Wilson and Republican
Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge had used the term
earlier to promote American isolationism, nativism, and
“exceptionalism,” it was the KKK that truly embraced its white
supremacist core ethos. As one example, 1,400 Klansmen chanted
“America First” as they marched in a Memorial Day parade in
Queens, New York, in 1927. And consider it more than ironic that, as
Churchwell documents, their presence evolved into a riot that led to
the arrests of five Klansmen, one bystander (by mistake), and under
circumstances that remain less than clear, Fred Trump, the father of
the future 45th president of the United States.

In 1940, the America First Committee (AFC
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was founded. At its height, it would have more than 800,000 members.
Initially, it was seen as isolationist — that is, against American
entry into the war already being waged in Europe — and even
anti-imperialist. As a result, its ranks initially included liberals,
progressives, and socialists, as well as conservatives, libertarians,
and avowed fascists. The latter, however, would eventually come to
dominate, especially after the nation’s leading anti-Semite and
pro-Hitler celebrity, pilot Charles Lindbergh
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became its most popular spokesperson. The fascist-loving AFC then
joined other U.S.-based far-right groups in celebrating German nazism
and Italian fascism, while making America First their rallying cry.

Of course, the historically challenged Donald Trump undoubtedly
doesn’t know much, if anything, about this history. But give him
full credit. From the beginning, with the instincts of both a fascist
and a white nationalist, he intuitively grasped the mobilizing value
of seemingly patriotic but xenophobic slogans. Count on one thing,
though: some of his allies know all about the noxious roots of
“America First” and still embrace it. Such jingoistic patriotism
has, in fact, become a thinly veiled cover for a revised and expansive
contemporary version of white nationalism.

The proliferation of America First groups run by former Trump staffers
and supporters is daunting. The dizzying array of them includes
America First Legal, America First Action, America First Policies,
America First Policy Institute, America First P.A.C.T. (Protecting
America’s Constitution and Traditions), America First
Foundation/America First Political Action Conference, and America
First 2.0, the latter a contribution from Republican presidential
aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy.

America First Legal [[link removed]] is run by Stephen Miller
and promotes itself as an alternative to the American Civil Liberties
Union, but its deepest focus is on defending whiteness and amplifying
Miller’s white nationalist proclivities. During the 2022 midterm
election cycle, it typically produced radio and television ads like
this fact-free
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one:

“When did racism against white people become OK? Joe Biden put white
people last in line for Covid relief funds. Kamala Harris said
disaster aid should go to non-white citizens first. Liberal
politicians block access to medicine based on skin color. Progressive
corporations, airlines, universities all openly discriminate against
white Americans. Racism is always wrong. The left’s anti-white
bigotry must stop. We are all entitled to equal treatment under the
law.”

Decrying (fake) racism against whites fits well with Trump’s
hysterical, desperate accusations
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that Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, New York
Attorney General Letitia James, and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin
Bragg are all “racists” out to prosecute him because he’s white,
not because he broke the law in their jurisdictions. (So far, none of
Trump’s Black supporters have echoed that call — perhaps a bridge
too far even for them — but Miller and others on the far right
certainly have.)

Linda McMahon, former head of the Small Business Administration under
Trump, is now the president of the America First Policy Institute
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principles are “liberty, free enterprise, national greatness,
American military superiority, foreign-policy engagement in the
American interest, and the primacy of American workers, families, and
communities in all we do.” That well-funded group takes on policy
and culture war issues. You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn
that it recently held a gala at — yes! — Mar-a-Lago.

The America First P.A.C.T. [[link removed]], led by
former Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward, focuses on running
state candidates on a far-right MAGA agenda and prioritizes raising
funds for GOP candidates. Blasted across its website is the phrase
“A weak republican is more dangerous than a democrat.” Ward is
under investigation
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in Arizona for her alleged involvement in a 2022 fake-elector plot
there.

Perhaps this country’s best-known white nationalist (and former
Trump dinner guest) Nick Fuentes is the founder and president of the
America First Foundation [[link removed]]. It
sponsors the annual America First Political Action Conference, an
unabashed gathering of white supremacists and other far-right and
extremist elements. Fuentes founded AFPAC because he thought the
Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was too moderate.
However, the political distance between the more traditional CPAC and
AFPAC has narrowed. Noted Islamophobe Michelle Malkin
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for example, spoke at both in 2019, as did conservative journalist Jon
Miller
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in 2020. Neither Malkin, who is Asian, nor Miller, who is African
American, called out Fuentes and other bigots at the conferences on
their racism.

The 2022 AFPAC conference
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featured a who’s who of contemporary American extremists, including
disgraced former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, defeated Arizona
election-denier Kari Lake, longtime founder and publisher of the white
supremacist _American Renaissance_ Jared Taylor, Florida-based
Islamophobe and anti-immigrant warrior Laura Loomer, extremist
activist Milo Yiannopoulos, and former
too-toxic-for-even-the-House-Republicans Representative Steve King.
Current Republican congress members who have spoken at AFPAC include
(you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn) Representatives
Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar.

VIOLENCE AS POLITICS

Like fascists and racists of old, Donald Trump and the America First
crowd are demonizing and dehumanizing their opponents. In October
1923, Klan leader and Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans gave a fiery
anti-immigrant speech
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Texas railing against the “polluting streams of pollution from
abroad” that immigrants were bringing to the United States. This
October, exactly 100 years later, Trump gave an interview
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to the far-right _National Pulse_ in which he declared that immigrants
are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

In his 2024 campaign, he’s not only planning to go after immigrants,
but a broader group of liberal and progressive citizens and even
Republicans who stand in the way of his fevered lust for heading a
genuinely authoritarian government. If he returns to the Oval Office,
he’s already declared
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that he’ll “root out” what he’s called “communists,
Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin
within the confines of our country.”

“Vermin” (a classic Hitlerian
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word choice) and those who would “poison” the nation must be wiped
out, annihilated. Responding to criticism of such language, Trump
campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung called
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the very notion “ridiculous,” even as he reinforced the point by
insisting that the former president’s critics suffered from “Trump
Derangement Syndrome” and “their entire existence will be crushed
when President Trump returns to the White House.”

None of what Trump and his allies plan to do is likely to be passively
accepted. In fact, they’re already anticipating a massive popular
revolt and preparing for it. As the _Wall Street Journal_ noted
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in 2020 Trump first contemplated invoking the Insurrection Act, which
allows a president to employ the military to enforce federal laws
under special circumstances, to break up protests related to the
murder of George Floyd and other African Americans by the police and
racists. He was talked down. Its use was then suggested
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by Trump ally Roger Stone and evidently considered by the president as
a way to “put down” any “leftwing protests” related to the
2020 election. Again, the idea went nowhere.

The third time, however, could be the deadly charm. The _Washington
Post_ has reported
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that Trump is now considering invoking the Insurrection Act on his
first day back in office. One thing is certain: should he somehow,
despite four criminal indictments and multiple trials, return to the
White House on January 20, 2025, we can’t say we weren’t warned.

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Clarence Lusane is the author of _Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet
Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy._
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* Donald Trump; Election 2024; Threat of Fascism; Insurrection Act;
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