The Rise & Fall of Donald J. Trump

Originally published in the Winter/Spring 2025 edition of the Virginia Defender  

The population of the United States today is 63% white. In 20 years, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, whites are expected to be less than half the population, thus becoming a minority, one among many.

This apparently scares the hell out of some white people, leading to the desperate chant raised in Charlottesville in 2017, “You (or “Jews”) will not replace us!” Knowing what it means to dominate, these whites fear being dominated by others.

The same fear of being replaced haunts the U.S. ruling class, which has dominated the globe since the end of World War II. With China now the world’s second largest economy and powerful new international alignments like the BRICS formation (Brazil, Russia, India, China and SouthAfrica, with more countries joining), the 1%of the 1% that really runs the U.S. is now running scared.

This is the way of big, ambitious powers. England occupied Ireland, not so much because it wanted it, but because it was afraid that Spain or France, both Catholic countries like Ireland, might ally with it to attack England. President Thomas Jefferson recruited Lewis and Clark to explore the West and claim it for the U.S., not because the U.S. needed it, but because he was afraid that England might expand south from Canada, or France might move up from Mexico.

And after World War I, England and France divided up the collapsed OttomanEmpire and created new countries they could control, not because they really wanted the Middle East (the riches and power of oil weren’t yet fully understood), but because they were afraid the new and revolutionary Soviet Union might move in.

Today the U.S. ruling class sees the world it once dominated moving toward a multipolar reality, economically, politically and militarily. So, evidently, powerful sections of that ruling class have decided to reclaim their dominant position. “Make America Great Again ”doesn’t just refer to going back to a pre-civil rights society in the U.S., it means aggressively taking back the world.

That’s what’s behind Trump’s seemingly mad talk about taking over Greenland (“one way or the other”), “taking back” the Panama Canal, depopulating and absorbing Gaza and making Canada the 51st state. Some of this is hyperbole, but it’s dangerous to think there are limits to how far Trump and his billionaire buddies are willing to go.

Meanwhile, here at home, Trump and his puppet/puppeteer Elon Musk are systematically dismantling every part of the federal government that benefits the broad masses of people. They’re clearing the deck, consolidating power and eliminating all potential opposition, while freeing up billions to build up the military, already the most powerful in the history of the world; and jockeying for power between them.

The attacks here at home

The Trump administration is shutting down government agencies. Sending immigrants off to horrific prisons in El Salvador. Targeting trans people. Reporting political dissidents. Gutting education and support for veterans.

All this has led many people to describe Trump and his allies as fascists. And there’s a lot of evidence to support that.

But we need to go beyond the individuals and examine Trumpism as a political phenomenon. Is it fascism? A right-wing dictatorship? An oligarchy?

How we define where we’re at politically is important, because it will tell us what we need to do to fight back.

In preparation for this article, I read four books:

• “A brief history of the Third Reich: The rise and fall of the Nazis,” by Martin Whittock
• “Adolph Hitler,” by John Toland
• “Fascism: What it is and how to fight it,” by Leon Trotsky
• “The New Jim Crow,” by Michelle Alexander

I had already read a half-dozen books about the Nazi period as it affected Ukraine. And when Ana Edwards and I were in Poland a few years ago, we visited the site of the Oscar Schindler Museum in Krakow, the site of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, now a state museum. And when I traveled to Odessa in Ukraine in 2016, I had encounters with modern-day fascist militias like Right Sector and the Azov Battalion. So we know a little about the subject.

A lot of our friends, especially prisoners,

tell us we’re already in fascism. And when you know something about the hellholes like Red Onion and Wallens Ridge, you can believe it.

But true fascism is different. Fascism is when in 1941 the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators marched long lines of Jews out of the capital city Kiev to the Babi Yar ravine, stripped them naked and, over the next 48 hours shot and pushed into the ravine more than 30,000 men, women and children, many of them not yet dead. The killing continued for several more days.

Before the war was over, six million Jews were murdered, along with millions of communists, Romas, LGBTQ+ and disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war and other “undesirables.”

On the political front, a factory worker in Berlin told a friend a funny joke about Hitler. A snitch overheard the joke and reported the worker, who was arrested – and executed. That’s fascism. It’s when one party takes over the whole country, destroys all opposition, starting with the left parties, then the unions and rules with an iron hand. It’s characterized by extreme racism, hatred of foreigners and the scapegoating of “minorities.” And it inevitably leads to war.

And under true fascism, there’s no possibility of open resistance.

Most of the above could also be true of a right-wing dictatorship, but there’s one major difference: Fascism depends on popular support.

Fascism comes to power in times of extreme economic crisis, when the middle class fears its own financial ruin and the possibility of a revolutionary workers’ uprising. Fascism comes in and promises that, if people just unquestionably follow the “Leader,” life will get better – even “great.”

A right-wing dictatorship can be just as brutal, just as totally controlling, but it doesn’t need popular support. It survives by ruthless repression alone.

Fascism needs a popular movement willing to collaborate with the government, so long as it delivers on its promise to make life better for the favored race.

The model for Trump and the Republican Party he controls isn’t Nazi Germany – it’s Hungary.

Viktor Orbán has been Hungary’s prime minister since 2010. In that time, he’s gutted the judiciary, solidified control over the legislature, restricted the media, persecuted the LGBTQ+ community and whipped up hatred against immigrants and Muslims.

Here’s Trump’s opinion of the man widely considered a dictator:

“Let me just say about world leaders, Viktor Orbán, one of the most respected men, they call him a strong man. He’s a tough person. Smart prime minister of Hungary.” (NPR, 9/10/24)

In August of 2022, Orbán travelled to Dallas to speak at the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which describes itself as “the largest and most influential gathering of conservatives in the world.”

Commenting on Orbán’s appearance, NBC News stated, “… he has extolled the value of racial purity, is vehemently anti-immigration … is widely criticized around the world for systematically dismantling his country’s nascent democracy during his 12 years in power – but that hasn’t stopped him from emerging as a darling of many on the right in America.”

Trump spoke at the same conference, as he had at CPAC’s conferences from 2021 to 2025.

In July 2024, following a NATO Summit in Washington, D.C., Orbán traveled to Trump’s Mar-a-Largo seaside retreat in Florida. The two are buddies.

Orbán came to power as a right-wing “populist.” Hungary was hurting economically, and instead of explaining the role of the Western banks in bleeding the country dry after the collapse of socialism, Orbán blamed immigrants. Not that there were many in Hungary, but they made a convenient target. And, like Hitler, he promised some concrete things to the working class.

Once in office, Orbán moved to consolidate his power by severely weakening anyone or anything that could oppose him. He kept the formal structures of a democracy – the legislature, courts, some weak opposition parties – but he gutted their ability to defy him. He didn’t need his own private fascist army, like Hitler or Mussolini.

Trump has followed that playbook to power. He blamed all the country’s problems, real or imagined, on immigrants. He demonized trans people, a tiny and misunderstood part of the population. He promised some concrete relief, like not taxing tips, which affect a relatively small part of the workforce, or not taxing Social Security benefits, which are received by some 73 million people.

And he played on the already widespread right-wing fear of immigrants “taking over the country.” He exploited the Democratic Party’s abandonment of the working class. And he learned and applied the lesson about the power of the Big Lie:

“If you tell a lie, tell a big one,” and “If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth,” advised Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda.

And then there are the attacks on DEI: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Trump says he just wants to make sure some people aren’t getting jobs, promotions and other things just because of their race or sex.

But what’s the opposite of diversity? Uniformity. Equity? Inequity. Inclusion? Exclusion.

Trump and his allies want to go back to the days when the white man was dominant, and everyone else, including white women, were subservient.

And underlining this is the assumption that white men are just better at everything- they’re “superior.” That’s pretty much the definition of white supremacy.

Now, back in power again, Trump is systematically dismantling all the nonrepressive parts of the federal government, while targeting all the social gains won by the great movements of labor, civil rights, women, the LGBTQ+ community, disabled people, environmentalists – the majority of us.

And to make sure he can succeed in doing all this, he’s gutting the watchdog agencies; attacking the courts; purging the agencies of repression like the FBI, Justice Department, ICE, etc. of anyone without the only real qualification he wants for his subordinates: unquestioning loyalty to The Leader.

And, most ominously, he’s purging the top ranks of the military of anyone he thinks might refuse future orders, such as firing on peaceful protesters, something he’s already suggested.

With the dismantling of the federal bureaucracy, Trump is not only eliminating agencies that actually help people, but he’s also expanding executive power to the point where he’s consolidating his position as dictator.

And the nongovernmental opposition?

He’s threatening universities with massive cuts in federal support if they don’t bend to his will on a range of issues. (The University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University have already announced they’re eliminating all DEI programs, while the Virginia Military Institute has decided, without giving a reason, to not renew the contract of its first Black superintendent.)

Trump defies the courts, then gets hit with lawsuits, most of which he loses, But then he appeals, figuring that any important decisions will be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, which, thanks to his three appointees in his first term, has a right-wing majority.

As for the unions, he’s fired the head of the National Labor Relations Board (the first Black woman ever to be appointed to the NLRB), leaving the board with just two members when it needs three for a quorum, which means it can’t certify union elections or rule on worker grievances. (See the related stories on page 7.)

Further, firing large numbers of federal workers weakens the union movement as a whole, because public-sector workers are unionized at more than five times the rate of private-sector workers (As of 2024, 32.2% of public-sector workers were unionized, as opposed to just 5.9% of private-sector workers.)

The power of the press? He’s taking steps to muzzle it.

Social media? Musk owns X (formerly Twitter). Other incredibly rich oligarchs own Alphabet (Meta, Google, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp), Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft and Trump himself is talking about his Truth Social platform or maybe the federal government buying TikTok.

We are reminded of the old saying, “The only free press is the one you own.”

Now here’s the hopeful part: He’s not going to succeed – at least in the long run.

The flaw in the plan

Many historians argue that Hitler would have succeeded if he’d been satisfied with just taking over weaker, nearby countries like Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia and a few others. But his increasingly ambitious plans for a Greater Germany, his fanatical hatred of communism, which he believed was a Jewish conspiracy, and his dismissive views of the Slavic peoples, led him to attack the Soviet Union, which turned out to be a fatal mistake.

And as the war went increasingly bad for the Nazis, the German people began to lose faith in them and their support for Hitler began to weaken.

(One joke from that time had two Germans commiserating about the bombings they were experiencing. One said, “Five days after they bombed my town, glass was still flying out of the windows.” The other one said, “That’s nothing – 14 days after they bombed my town, pictures of Hitler were still flying out of the windows!”)

In the domestic arena, Trump is falling into the same egotistical trap. Having come to power with a great desire for revenge and a long list of  enemies, he has assumed he can ignore how his cutbacks and firings are affecting the very people who make up his base: the MAGA folks.

Let’s take a look at how his actions are affecting Virginia.

Federal workers: Trump is firing them. There are about 2.4 million federal workers, not counting active-duty military and postal workers. Virginia has the second highest number of any state. And they don’t just live around D.C. The whole state is being affected.

Trump wants to get rid of tens of thousands of civilians who work for the military. Virginia is the state with the third highest number of military bases, after much larger California and Texas.

Agriculture: Trump has shut down almost all foreign aid programs administered by the Agency for International Development (AID). We can talk about the real purpose of these programs another time, but they do feed hungry people. And the food is bought from U.S. farmers. Agriculture is Virginia’s largest private industry, with an economic impact of $82.3 billion annually, providing more than 381,800 jobs in the Commonwealth.

International tourism: Canadians and Europeans in particular are canceling plans to visit the U.S over the Trump tariffs, and tourists are now actually banned from visiting from some other countries.

Then there are the tariffs: 25% on imports from Canada and Mexico, 10% on those from China and more on many other countries. Trump says tariffs are a tax on other countries. That’s BS. They’re a tax paid by the U.S. companies importing the goods. And the cost of those taxes inevitably gets passed on to the consumer – that’s us. That’s why Target and Best Buy are loudly opposing the tariffs. Most of the things they sell are imported, and they’re worried their customers won’t pay the higher prices. (By the way, the money the government collects from tariffs goes to the Department of Homeland Security …)

Education: Trump is closing down the Department of Education, which oversees civil rights laws affecting students and also provides money to school districts with low-income students – including in rural (Republican) districts.

Cities, towns and counties: Trump is threatening cuts in federal funding if they don’t cooperate with ICE.

Pension and retirement funds: These funds are invested in the stock market, which has been experiencing wild swings under Trump. (It’s a truism that business abhors uncertainty, and no one knows what Trump is going to do from one day to the next.)

Veterans: Trump is cutting workers at the Veterans Administration. This shows a particular weakness in his program: He’s going to have to be able to count on the military to carry out both his domestic and foreign policies, but how are rank-and-file GIs going to feel about his undermining veterans’ health and benefits?

Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security: All are on the chopping block. Musk has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” and as of April, all recipients will have to go to an SS office, in person, and register in order to keep receiving benefits. Obviously, this is intended to cull the ranks of recipients.

In other words, Trumpism is hitting middle- and working-class people all across the political spectrum.

Right now, the polls are reporting that most Republicans still support Trump, but, like Democrats, they’re also worried about inflation. Prices may not be going up as fast as they were (they were already slowing when Trump took office), but they’re definitely not going down.

At some point, some sections of the MAGA base are going to have to face the fact that their lives aren’t getting any better – let alone greater – and, for some, disaster is looming. For the die-hard racists and other reactionaries, attacks on immigrants and trans people may be enough, but not for everyone. Some people are beyond redemption, but I have to believe that many other working-class people will eventually wake up to the fact that they’ve been royally screwed, bought a pig in a poke and have been left out to dry.

And that’s where the hope comes in. Trump’s apparent abandonment of his base means he’s not really trying to build a truly fascist state, which would be much harder to fight. Not that fighting his right-wing dictatorship will be easy – far from it – but at least he won’t have a mass base in addition to the cops, the military and the right-wing militias.

Barely two months into Trump’s second presidency, protests are already breaking out across the country. Led by federal worker unions, liberal organizations and everyday folks fed up with the wrecking ball, there have been attempts to build a national opposition. Many lawsuits have been filed. Town hall meetings called by Republican politicians are seeing angry pushback to the cuts and layoffs. There have even been calls for national “don’t buy anything” campaigns, as well as selective boycotts against companies that have abandoned their DEI programs. (The protests at Tesla dealerships are especially helpful.)

All these are important and keep the spirit of resistance alive. But, by themselves, they can’t succeed.

The international context

When a quarter-of-a-million people marched on Washington, D.C., in August 1963, the pressure that action put on the federal government helped win passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Part of the reason was that the march embarrassed the U.S. government before the eyes of the world at a time when it was in an ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. As each camp competed to gain influence with the emerging countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, the U.S., faced with the demands of a growing Civil Rights Movement, was forced to address the apartheid system of racial oppression here at home.

Washington doesn’t feel that same pressure today. Faced with a world that is steadily becoming more multipolar, with other countries flexing their economic muscles, an influential section of the ruling class – the section that’s backing Trump – has decided that it needs to reassert itself in a much more aggressive way in order to regain the global dominance it had after World War II, when Europe, the Soviet Union and Japan lay in ruins.

No, today it’s going to take much more than protests to have any kind of effect on the Trump regime.

But what about the Democrats?

The conventional wisdom is that the Democratic Party is in “disarray,” with no clear path to counterattack. But many pundits – political consultant James Carville, former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and others – argue that they need to abandon “elite” issues like defending abortion and trans rights.

We’ve been saying it for years: If all we have between us and fascism is the Democratic Party, we are in deep doo-doo.

How to fight – and win

For nearly a quarter-century, the Defenders have been involved in the still-ongoing struggle to reclaim and properly memorialize Shookoe Bottom, Richmond’s downtown district that once was the epicenter of the U.S. domestic slave trade.

That was a struggle, as opposed to just a protest movement. Yes, there were many protests, all of which helped keep the issue in the public consciousness. But the struggle was more than just protest.

The most important lesson we learned in this fight was to determine what our opponent wanted, how much they were willing to pay for it, and then raise the cost above what they were willing to pay.

In the case of Shockoe Bottom, all the many actions carried out by all the many organizations and individuals had the cumulative effect of educating the community about the importance of this sacred ground and helping it come to the conclusion that anything other than proper memorialization was unacceptable. (This newspaper, founded in 2005, and the long- running (2005-2013) “Defenders LIVE!” program on WRIR radio played major roles in this educational effort.)

As a result, the politicians began to fear for their political careers. And they also gradually came to realize that there was a great deal of money to be made from the tourism that would result from the memorialization.

And that’s why today there’s a quarter of a billion dollars on the table to create a 10-acre Shockoe Bottom memorial park. (For an update, see page 10.)

So when it comes to Trump, what does he want? What does Elon Musk, the richest person in the world who’s taking a chainsaw to every agency and program that in any way benefits the working class – what does he want? What do the other high-tech oligarchs want?

They want more: – more money, more power, more control. Mostly, more money.

And that’s how we get to them.

In almost every other country where the people mount a real challenge to their government, they have mass protests – and the unions call for a General Strike.

That’s when all the workers, organized and unorganized, go out on strike together. Sometimes it’s for a day, sometimes a few days, sometimes indefinitely.

And they’re supported by the students, the small business owners and the civic organizations. They call for a broad United Front, formulate their demands, reach out and involve broader and broader sections of society. And they keep it up until the economy grinds to a halt, the corporate heads begin to panic and the government has no choice but to admit defeat.

A broad mass mobilization, with marches, rallies and civil disobedience – and self-defense, combined with a general strike of all the workers and their allies, with a clear program, usually combining economic and political demands.

Back during the Great Depression, there were general strikes led by the Teamsters in Minneapolis, the Longshoremen in Oakland and against the Goodyear Company in Akron, Ohio. According to some sources, there hasn’t been another since 1946 in Oakland.

But in 2011 in Wisconsin, when Gov. Scott Walker was pushing a bill effectively banning collective bargaining for public workers, and more than 100,000 workers and their supporters came out to rally at the State Capitol, Madison’s central labor council began talking about calling a general strike. (The Defenders organized a contingent of antiwar activists to travel to Madson to support the workers.)

Because it had been so long since there had been a general strike in the U.S., the council had to call on unions in Canada to send down information about how to pull one off. But the idea was beginning to gain momentum.

Unfortunately, the leadership of the state AFL-CIO put a stop to that, opting instead for a referendum to recall the governor, thus moving the battlefield from one the workers could control to one vulnerable to the influence of Big Money, especially from the right-wing Koch brothers.

The referendum failed, and the momentum was lost.

But, as we said, general strikes are common in other countries. There was one earlier this year in Greece. And some labor leaders here are already floating the idea.

What’s necessary at this point is agitation on the grassroots level, so pressure will build up on the union leadership as a whole. This can start with union members talking up the idea at work and then introducing resolutions in their union locals. Workers without unions can still spread the word through conversations, leaflets and social media.

For the Defenders’ part, for months now we’ve been promoting the idea of a Virginia United Front Against Fascism: a broad network of unions, civil rights organizations, immigrant and community groups, student activists, the Palestine support movement and more, with a three-point program:

• Supporting each other by attending each other’s actions, bolstering the numbers so no one is isolated.
• Developing a legal and bail fund arm so we don’t have to start looking for lawyers and bail money when people are targeted for opposing Trumpism.
• Expanding our own security to protect ourselves, our organizations and our communities.

This has been a long piece, but it still doesn’t exhaust the subject – not by a long shot. Trumpism will affect different communities in different ways. Its effects will fall most heavily on the communities of color, immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community.

What is needed now more than anything else is Solidarity. We need to take up the old union slogan of “An Injury to One is an Injury to All!”

When ICE comes to take away our neighbors and co-workers, we need to gather in the hundreds and form a solid wall of protection. When some group calls a rally and the Proud Boys show up, we need to show up first, stronger, and more determined. When LGBTQ+ events are threatened by reactionary bigots, we need to stand shoulder-to-shoulder.

This is no time for discouragement, despair or burnout. It’s time to stand up, stand together and fight back – and win!