Trump and Trumpism present a blunt example of far right governance. It is difficult to say which aspects are the most horrifying, between the expanded scope and violence of ICE and Border Patrol, the accumulating international atrocities, and the revelations of the personal depravity of the ruling class. People in the United States and around the world have rightly been shocked by these attacks and revelations and the space for resistance and revolt has grown accordingly.
Writing from the outside and with limited space, it is impossible to paint a complete picture of the situation in the United States. Nevertheless, it is important to draw the lessons we can from the developments in the country.
Around the world, many other countries are following a similar trajectory with the rise of the far right and the adoption of increasingly authoritarian policies by their governments. These are processes that feed and inspire each other and the resistance against them can do the same.
Violence without pretext
Trump’s reelection was enabled by a cost of living crisis, deep dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party and racist reaction against all social progress. Years of austerity and scapegoating prepared the ground for its success. The government it birthed is one of violent reaction: a coalition of fascists, white supremacists, and misogynists – many of them rapists. In its outward communications, this is a government that derides anything deemed feminine, fetishizes violence, and celebrates cruelty. It chooses to protect the interests of the American ruling class through the short-sighted systematic plunder and degradation of the United States and the wider world.
Faced with a system in crisis, the decline of American imperialist and capitalist power is not a peaceful process. Unable to project power in the way it once did, US imperialism is both extending power bluntly in its own hemisphere and lashing out like a wounded animal.
Beyond its borders, the US has abandoned past humanitarian pretenses and soft power, scrapping funding for humanitarian aid and opting for overt bullying, even of its NATO allies. This rampant nationalism is exemplified by tariffs, wielded by Trump as a cudgel as well as a far-reaching policy of imperialist violence.
Trump has continued his predecessor’s support for Israel’s genocide in Palestine and imposed an overtly colonial mockery of a peace plan on Gaza. He has intensified the murderous sanctions regime imposed on US rivals including Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. The usual violence of the American Empire has been supplemented by overt piracy, expanded campaigns of murder, and the abduction of a head of state – all of it overtly celebrated by the state and its allies in the media.
Echoing Britain’s Reform Party and the wider European far right, Marco Rubio celebrated Europe’s colonial history, repeating the lie that colonial plunder was a civilizing mission to take pride in, to applause from European leaders at Munich.
Colonial violence turning inward
The Trump administration is filled with a rogues’ gallery of white supremacists and sexual predators, the president foremost among them. They claim to protect (white) women and children while denying and justifying their own abuses, consistently shifting the blame to migrants and LGBTQ-people.
American racists have long blamed racial minorities for its epidemic of gun violence, and increasingly the right wing has turned to blaming trans people for every mass shooting. In reality, these attacks are overwhelmingly carried out by cis men and the most reliable uniting factor is a history of violence against women.
Anti-trans rhetoric and policy has been pushed as the tip of the spear of attacks aimed at the wider LGBTQ-community. The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) tracked 616 anti-LGBTQ bills across the United States in 2025, in addition to numerous executive orders from the White House attacking DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) and gender identity.
Trump’s government has worked to purge evidence of racism and historical Black figures from federal buildings and parks. Measures to discourage discrimination in hiring have been caricatured as attempts to undermine supposed American meritocracy. Campaigns of incitement against Haitians have been followed by racist campaigns against Venezuelans, Somalis, and Armenians.
As part of the wider attack on women’s reproductive health the number of people arrested and prosecuted for miscarriages has steadily increased. Numbers collected by Pregnancy Justice suggest that the number of pregnant people charged with crimes relating to pregnancy per year has more than doubled since the overturning of Roe v Wade.
The personal depravity and violence of members of the Trump administration was no secret even before the revelations from the Epstein files. The aptly titled Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, has a throughline of misogyny in his public and private life. Elon Musk and Donald Trump have both been accused of sexual harassment and assault.
The mountains of documents from the Epstein investigation released to the public have helped expose the extensive ties that wide swathes of the Western ruling class had to Epstein himself, including Trump, his Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnik, his former strategist Steve Bannon, former head of DOGE Elon Musk, and more.
Epstein’s abuses and those of his coconspirators were open secrets. The FBI had been alerted to his crimes as early as 1996 by Maria Farmer, one of the victims. It would take ten years before Epstein’s first arrest, resulting in a slap on the wrist by future Trump Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta in 2008. When Ava Cordero, a transgender Latina woman, sued Epstein in 2007 for the abuse she had suffered, the media response was transphobic ridicule rather than a closer look at Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement.
The current release of documents has been damaging to the MAGA movement. The responses from its spokespeople have been varied, offering an array of excuses that true believers are invited to choose from. Some choose to focus exclusively on Epstein’s ties to elite academia and the Democratic party – absolutely damning, but not the whole picture.
Others have chosen to minimize the scope of Epstein’s crimes, like former Fox News presenter Megyn Kelly who suggested it was wrong to call Epstein a pedophile since his victims were teenagers, and current Fox news presenters Waters and Gutfield, who joked about the man being a ‘sex rabbi.’ On the most extreme fringes, fascistic influencers like Nick Fuentes have even chosen to valorize Epstein’s abuse as part of their war on women.
It is worth mentioning that while the stated purpose of Trump’s politics is the safety and prosperity of American (white) families, that is not the result. While the cost of living was a significant factor driving Trump’s reelection, no meaningful steps have been taken to address this. The claims that migrants/trans people/women are somehow responsible for all of the nation’s ills are all obvious lies. Instead, the combined impact of tariffs and budget cuts are guaranteed to make things worse. American consumers and firms are estimated to carry 90% of the burden of the tariffs. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill preserved his tax cuts at the expense of cuts to healthcare funding and food benefits. The average expense of health insurance is expected to more than double the rate of inflation in 2026.
Rather than addressing any of these issues, the government has chosen to pursue a domestic campaign of violence. The most dramatic expression is undoubtedly the expanded use of ICE.
The increase of funding to ICE has given the agency a larger budget than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. These funds have been used to build concentration camps like ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ and to recruit overt white supremacists alongside anyone eager to punish perceived ‘illegals.’ The agency claims to have more than doubled its number of officers in the space of a year from 10.000 to 22.000. That growth is worrying on its own, but the drive to round up enough immigrants has also seen more than twenty thousand agents from other federal agencies transferred to assist in the persecution of immigrants.
Given the task to oversee mass deportations, masked thugs have been unleashed to grab perceived immigrants. People have been arrested by agents waiting outside of places of work, schools, courthouses, daycare centers and more. ICE has been detaining people seemingly at random to reach their quotas for arrests, but at the same time they have been able to conduct very sophisticated searches with the immediate collaboration of the tech companies.
By the end of 2025, over 65,000 people had been arrested by ICE and locked up in detention centers – often far removed from where they were first captured. A solid majority had no criminal convictions.
The deportation of captives to the El Salvadoran prison CECOT – sometimes in defiance of court orders – is an atrocity in its own right: In exchange for a modest fee, El Salvador’s president Bukele has been happy to house alleged criminals without trial in a prison where inmates are denied legal representation and regularly subjected to torture. The treatment of prisoners in the United States itself is hardly better. The conditions in the – often privately owned and profit-driven – detention camps are reminiscent of the Japanese internment camps built by the United States during the Second World War. In the previous year, at least 32 people died in these concentration camps.
At the same time, ICE has also been put to more targeted political use. At the behest of far-right zionists like Betar, they were deployed to persecute specific pro-Palestinian activists. Trump’s former advisor, Steve Bannon, has further advocated for using ICE to engage in voter intimidation at polling stations across the country.
It has to be stressed that Trump is relying on a preexisting repressive infrastructure which has been expanded, not on a new creation. Three fourths of the masked agents of the state currently abducting people were already trained and armed by previous governments of both major parties. In this regard, we can look to similar structures present in our own context and see how they could be deployed. In Belgium, for example, the key function of ICE would be carried out by the Belgian police, who already have a record of racist violence toward migrants and who the present government is trying to empower with the ability to more easily search homes for undocumented migrants. On the European level, the role of the Border Patrol is taken up by Frontex, which enforces a murderous anti-migration policy that had already claimed the lives of more than 2.000 people by 2021.
Limits
While Trump’s reelection by a very narrow margin was hailed as a stunning victory and important cultural shift (a whole 32% of eligible voters!), at no point has his movement had a large democratic mandate. Protests have been organized across the United States since his inauguration, in solidarity with immigrants, against DOGE cuts and more.
The organizers of the Hands Off protests on April 5th of 2025 estimated at least three million participants. The No Kings protests the following June saw a turnout of five million and seven million in October.
By contrast, Trump has shown difficulty in mobilizing his own base – one reason he relies on the use of state power and state forces. The turn-out for his military parade, for example, fell far short of its target attendance. Even with huge incentives and reduced standards, ICE has struggled to recruit as many agents as intended. Confrontation with the reality of what mass deportations actually entail has alienated many people who bought into the Republican anti-immigrant rhetoric: 55% of Americans believed immigration to the United States had to decrease in 2024, in June of 2025 that number had dropped to 30%.
Trump can still rely on a significant layer of the population driven by racism and spite, his core supporters and the target audience for the administration’s sadistic media-output, but this is not a majority and that same sadism alienates and enrages many others.
There is a clear and widespread hunger for a political challenge to the Trump administration, and equally a lack of faith in the Democratic Party as an instrument to serve this purpose. Despite winning a few recent special elections, two thirds of registered Democrats report being frustrated with the party, with many pointing to the party’s insufficient leadership and inadequate response against Trump. This creates a space for independent left wing forces to grow and necessitates more grass-roots resistance.
The campaign against ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis serves as an example
Starting in December of last year, large numbers of ICE and CPB (Customs and Border Protection) agents were deployed to Minneapolis, the epicenter of the 2020 George Floyd rebellion. Titled Operation Metro Surge, this has been an increasingly violent campaign of terror targeting people of color. In pursuing this course, the fascistic section of Trump’s government has overextended itself, stirring up necessary and inspiring resistance.
This resistance has not come from a formal opposition party, but from grass-roots movements drawing on lessons from the BLM movement, prior protests against ICE, and from their own, immediate experience. Local congregations, community groups, teachers unions and other volunteers organized networks to deliver food and necessary supplies to families in their community fearing abduction. Separately, people formed rapid response networks to monitor and impede the actions of ICE agents, adapting along with the tactics deployed by ICE. When ICE carried out large raids on apartments, activists gathered in large numbers. When ICE agents switched its tactics to grab individuals, the rapid response networks changed as well, becoming more local in order to respond even faster. Participants tracked ICE officers, alerted others to the presence of the officers using whistles and Signal messages and gathered to observe, record, outnumber, and impede them.
Activists also targeted hotels housing federal agents with noise demonstrations, both to pressure the hotels not to house the agents and to deny the agents sleep and blocked the gates of the regional ICE headquarters.
They were met by violence and surveillance from ICE and CBP, culminating in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. While it is true that many of the new ICE agents are unreliable and poorly trained, that alone does not explain this escalation of violence. The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti were carried out by veterans of the CBP, one of them a veteran of the occupation of Iraq.
The violence from the state did not succeed in quelling the movement, instead spurring on resistance. After the death of Good, this escalated to a general strike in Minneapolis – a Day of Truth and Freedom – organized by local activists and ultimately endorsed by major unions. Tens of thousands of participants turning out in freezing weather and solidarity actions were organized across three hundred cities.
This strike was the result of the grassroots character of the resistance. It wasn’t called for by the labor leaders, who were mostly dragging their feet, or the Democratic Party officials, who continue to focus on an electoral challenge to Trump. The push for the strike grew from local activists and groups committed to opposing ICE’s invasion of their city, including rank-and-file union members, and shop stewards. This built pressure on union leaders to endorse the strike and gave it a clearly political character.
Under pressure from sustained and widening resistance, the government has been forced into a retreat. Operation Metro Surge has officially ended and a partial withdrawal of federal forces from the region has been announced. Thousands of people have been arrested, countless people have been injured and abused, and at least two were killed.
The price was high and the victory limited. There will be new confrontations with ICE and with the rest of Trump’s agenda, but the experience of the protests that have gone before have inspired many thousands of activists to rise to the occasion. Those activists will be able to learn many lessons from Minneapolis.For the confrontations with our own states and our own fascists, we can attempt the same: Every demonstration that ordinary working-class people are capable of challenging a monstrosity like Trumpism is heartwarming and motivates others to do the same. The power of mass action to confront state power and bring about change is inspiring, and so is the example of building that mass action (partly) outside of traditional structures. The flexible use of tools, tactics, and organization is impressive. The importance of solidarity as a value and organising principle is also clear. Finding ways to cooperate with a variety of activists and organisations committed to the same purpose is vital and doing so in ways both durable and flexible is a humbling challenge, but one we all have an obligation to face.