No, This Past Week Was NOT Trump Backtracking and Listening to Cooler Heads.
This Was Fascism Honing in on Key Goals and Fighting to Consolidate Itself
April 17, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
This past week, various media pundits and ruling class spokespeople argued that Trump had begun to listen to his cooler-headed, more experienced advisers. They said this showed that the Trump/Pence regime was becoming a more “normal” administration, and straying from its agenda.
Well, look at what Trump/Pence actually did, just this past week of April 9-15:
Ramped Up Fascistic Assaults on Immigrants, Latinos, Black People and Women:
- Immigrants: On Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border at Nogales, Arizona to give a hate-filled, racist rant demonizing immigrants as part of a “tide of evil” boiling up from Mexico, and announced the further escalation of the Trump/Pence war on all immigrants and the undocumented. This week alone, the regime opened bidding for the construction of the border wall. Sessions said he was making persecuting immigrants a Department of Justice (DOJ) focus. He instituted new, much harsher punishments for immigration violations, including criminalizing marrying, housing, or in any way helping the undocumented. (If you drove your undocumented family to the park, you could now be charged with “transporting” aliens.) Sessions has packed the immigration enforcement agencies with rabid white supremacists. The DOJ slashed even minimal, basic protections for detainees, including having access to translators or lawyers, medical care for the sick, watching over suicidal detainees, and limiting solitary confinement. All these moves were part of a program of terrorizing, incarcerating, and deporting millions. Even one long-time federal prosecutor called Sessions’ moves “fucking horrifying.”
- Black and Latino Youth: The Trump/Pence DOJ continues to push cops to “take the gloves off” in harassing, brutalizing, arresting, and even murdering Black and Latino youth. This escalation was signaled April 2 when Attorney General Sessions announced the DOJ was no longer enforcing or pursuing consent decrees with local police departments, which imposed minimal reforms and restraints on police terror and mass incarceration. This heralds unprecedented, even more genocidal levels of police brutality and murder to come.
- Women: On Thursday, behind closed doors, Trump signed a measure paving the way for states to cut funding to any abortion provider, like Planned Parenthood. This involves funding for essential women’s healthcare including birth control, cancer screenings, and testing for sexually transmitted infections. This hits poor, Black and Latino women hardest—four million now depend on Planned Parenthood and other women’s health clinics and providers that had been getting the funding now being cut. Trump "has delivered a gut punch to the millions of Americans who rely on family planning providers for their basic healthcare needs," the Center for Reproductive Rights said.
- Green Light to Attacks on LGBT Rights. On Friday, the DOJ announced it was dropping its lawsuit, filed during the Obama administration, against the state of North Carolina for its hateful, discriminatory “bathroom” law barring transgendered people from using bathrooms according to their gender identity. The DOJ claimed it was doing so because North Carolina replaced this law with a new one. However, the new law is being vehemently condemned by LGBT groups for continuing the same discrimination against trans people in a slightly different form. The Trump/Pence regime had already rescinded federal guidelines upholding transgendered students’ rights to use school bathrooms of their gender identity. Now, by dropping its lawsuit, the regime’s DOJ is signaling loud and clear to states: go ahead, we have no problem with you enacting bigoted, anti-LGBT measures.
Continued the All-Out Assault on the Environment:
» Gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): This week Trump’s EPA began gutting programs that offer some basic health and environmental protections, with more drastic cuts to come. The cuts include slashing programs that monitor drinking water for toxins like lead. This equals more Flint, Michigans—more cities or regions whose water supply is poisoned by chemicals like lead, a toxin that causes permanent and irreversible damage to the nervous systems of children! Trump’s budget cuts environmental restoration and “Superfund” programs by a third. This means that toxic waste dumped by business or government—cesspools of death like those portrayed in the movie Erin Brockovich—will not be cleaned up, and the many thousands living nearby will be at risk of suffering or dying from cancer. And these are only a few of the cuts being made to health and environmental programs.
Took Leap in Fascist Restructuring of Government and Society:
» Supreme Court: On Monday Trump swore in Christian fascist-enabler Neil Gorsuch as a justice on the Supreme Court. Gorsuch has consistently ruled in favor of breaking down the separation of church and state, and has voted to protect the “freedom” of anti-abortion and anti-birth control corporations and institutions to obstruct access to these rights for their female employees. His nomination cemented Trump’s alliance with the Christian fascist movement. And Gorsuch is now poised to help pave the way for a vast expansion of executive power and a fascistic assault on the rule of law.
Escalation of U.S. Aggression and Threats of War Across the Globe:
» Dropping the biggest non-nuclear bomb ever. On Thursday, under Trump’s authority, the U.S. military dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat on Afghanistan. Officially called a MOAB, this is a 30-foot long, 21,000 pound weapon of mass murder and terror that, according to one description:
unleashes a devastating fireball that incinerates and vaporizes anything within 30 feet upon detonation…all the oxygen would have been forced out of the tunnels and for hundreds of feet around, literally sucking the life out of [its intended victims], suffocating them as their lungs imploded…in a flash the fiery shockwave would have radiated outwards at the speed of sound for up to a mile, causing huge blunt force trauma injuries to anyone caught in its path, leveling buildings and trees. Ears would have been left bleeding and internal organs battered by the sheer force of the shockwave. The blast would also have caused many within two miles of the blast to lose their hearing. Anyone caught inside the tunnels would have been crushed as the force of 19,000 pounds of highly complex explosives caused them to collapse...
Dropping this bomb, and nicknaming it the “mother of all bombs,” is aimed at getting people used to the U.S. carrying out indiscriminate mass murder with weapons of mass destruction—weapons one step away from using nukes. This sick shit is what “America First” really means!
» Surge in killing civilians. This massive bombing comes on the heels of a surge in civilians murdered by U.S. bombs. In March, according to the website Airwars.com, the number of civilians killed by U.S.-led air strikes in Iraq and Syria rose sharply from the already-high previous total to as many as more than 3,400 people, four times the number from the previous month. Trump’s response? Hailing all this as big “successes.”
» Nuclear roulette in the Korean Peninsula. Trump has flipped from flattering Russia into threatening it and is now playing nuclear roulette with North Korea. On Sunday Trump dispatched an aircraft carrier attack group toward the Korean Peninsula. Later in the week he threatened to solve the North Korean “problem” himself—in other words, he threatened a preemptive U.S. attack on North Korea. Trump’s reckless fascist threats and bluster sent tensions soaring, heightening the danger a confrontation that could get out of control and spiral into nuclear war. North Korea responded to Trump’s threats with warnings of “thermonuclear war” if the U.S. attacked. The Chinese government stated “we’re on the brink of war.” On Friday, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said, “We have the potential for a nuclear war that would take millions of lives.”
All this in one week.
Don’t listen to the rulers’ mouthpieces telling us Trump is becoming a “normal” president because he bombed Syria and is finally “standing up” to Russia. This is not normal. This is fascism.
Join the Refuse Fascism contingents at the upcoming marches.
Spread the message: NO! In the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America! Drive Out the Trump/Pence Regime!
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