By David Morera Herrera
New authoritarian screw tightening
What is left of the supposed (bourgeois) democracy in the US? It was never more than a façade, but it served enough for the US to demarcate itself from rival powers or countries with the prurience of “Western democracy” and its division of powers. However, in any case, we know how to distinguish between the regime of bourgeois democracy and the defense of democratic freedoms in general and for the workers’ and popular movement in particular.
It is extremely serious that the loopholes of elementary democratic freedoms, such as freedom of organization and expression, due process, right to defense and other “sacred” principles of bourgeois democracy, are being systematically eroded by Trump.
Trump and his friend Bolsonaro
Like his emulus Bolsonaro who engineered the seizure of the Planalto government house in Brasilia, (for which he was sentenced to 27 years and 3 months in prison for having attempted a coup d’état), ignoring Lula’s electoral triumph, let us not forget that Trump flagrantly attempted to manipulate the electoral result and incited and organized underhandedly the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, two months after his defeat in the 2020 presidential elections.
It is not by chance that Trump has an offensive against Brazil’s sovereignty and self-determination in support of his friend Bolsonaro. In all brazenness, on the conviction of Jair Bolsonaro, Trump has declared is “very surprising” and compared it to his own past judicial problems. “It really looks like what they wanted to do to me,” he declared in an exchange with the press.[i] In the “world of the upside down,” State Department chief Marcos Rubio, an expert in “witch hunts” and interventionism expressed: “Human rights abuser Alexandre de Moraes and other members of Brazil’s Supreme Court have decided to unjustly imprison former President Bolsonaro. The United States will respond accordingly to this witch hunt.” [ii]
The infamous ICE raids
On the other hand, Trump, through executive orders, violating the autonomy of federal states and against the will of governors, has imposed large military deployments of the National Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in cities such as Los Angeles, Washington, New York, Boston, and recently scheduled the militarization of Memphis. Trump has ordered a redoubling of his deportation efforts, with a specific focus on large cities governed by Democrats such as Los Angeles, Chicago, New York. ICE’s ferocious hunt to deport Latino migrants left and right for the “crime” of their skin color or language is based on the hoax that the Latino community and the cities that Trump chooses at his whim are nests of crime and drug trafficking. The construction of the horrendous “Alcatraz of the Crocodiles” to confine the detainees violates their most basic human rights and is reminiscent of the notorious dungeons of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
According to the Los Angeles Times, “Immigrants are being detained on their way to work, outside courthouses and in store parking lots in metro Boston as President Donald Trump targets so-called sanctuary cities. As families hunker down in their homes, afraid to leave and risk arrest, advocates are reporting an increased presence of unmarked ICE vehicles parked in lots and other public areas in immigrant communities, where agents appear to be targeting work vans. One man captured video of three landscapers working on Saugus City Hall property being arrested after agents smashed the window of their van. North of Boston, the city of Everett canceled its annual Hispanic Heritage Month festival after its mayor stated that it would not be right “to celebrate at a time when members of the community do not feel safe.”[iii] The city of Everett also canceled its annual Hispanic Heritage Month festival after its mayor stated that it would not be right “to celebrate at a time when community members do not feel safe.”[iii
It is a highly probable hypothesis that the deployment of large numbers of troops in major U.S. cities is a rehearsal to “normalize” these presidential dictates and prepare for the use of force if the electorate does not favor him for reelection.
The murder of Charlie Kirk and its instrumentalization:
The real witch hunt in the USA
Add to this a wave of persecution and dismissals of US citizens for their political opinions. The pretext to strengthen the authoritarian and repressive drift takes a leap with the suspicious and unclear murder of Charly Kirk, ultra-conservative founder of Turning Point and MAGA at the University of Utah on September 10, perpetrated by a white, Mormon sniper from a Republican family (neither black, nor Muslim, nor Latino, nor trans). Kirk’s speech, an advocate of the carrying and use of high caliber weapons, racist, anti-immigrant, homophobic and anti-feminist, hastened Trump and his minions, without proof, to indicate that it was the work of the radical left.
According to the BBC: “Vice President Vance said: Those who celebrate the murder of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk should be held accountable, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance said Monday. Report them, and what the hell, call their employer, Vance said while serving as guest host of an episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, a daily podcast that Kirk hosted before he was shot in the neck last Wednesday while starring in a debate at Utah Valley University.” Nothing to envy from the darkest days of McCarthyism.[iv]
Dozens of people, among them journalists, teachers or firemen, have been fired from their jobs in the last few days for making comments considered inappropriate about the murder of the US conservative activist Charlie Kirk. For the rotten morality of Yankee imperialism, Kirk’s murder is assumed with all kinds of solemn funeral honors, medals and eulogies, while in Congress (Democrats and Republicans) endorse and finance the genocide in Palestine.
One of the most talked-about firings is that of political analyst Matthew Dowd, who was fired from MSNBC after suggesting that Kirk’s murder was motivated by his polarizing speech. “Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which in turn lead to hateful actions,” he stated on television. Another prominent case is that of an agent of the U.S. Secret Service, the agency charged with protecting the president, who was terminated after expressing on social networks that Kirk “spread hate and racism” on his show and that “karma is inevitable.” Also the Carolina Panters, an NFL team, or the airline Delta have announced the dismissal of workers for comments on social networks about Kirk’s death.[v] The following are some of the cases in which Kirk has been fired.
The dismissal of professors such as Tom Alter of California State University, a militant of Horizons Socialist and the International Socialist League, for whose reinstatement our international current is carrying out an international campaign to which we call on your readers to join through the following link: https://www.change.org/p/we-demand-texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
The declaration of ANTIFA as a terrorist organization should be the object of national and international repudiation and mobilization.
Trump’s narrative of fallaciously attributing Kirk’s murder to the radical left is baseless. However, Trump’s search for a scapegoat now leads him to declare ANTIFA a terrorist organization, without any proof (what attack has ANTIFA committed?).
This is an organization, rather a social movement that today in the United States, has a largely anarchist inspiration. It is significant to note that the ANTIFA movement in Germany arose in the 1920s and 1930s, during the Weimar Republic, when groups of labor activists formed to confront Nazism. The comparison between Hitler and Trump becomes inevitable.
No confidence in the Democratic Party and its various wings.
To confront this very serious wave of repression and its increasingly fascist features, it is useless to wait passively for the next elections from the wings of the Democratic Party (the other face of cynical U.S. imperialism). It is only possible to advance in depth with the mobilization in the streets and the independent organization of the working class and the people, from a radically socialist perspective.
[i] https://www.lanacion.com.ar/estados-unidos/nuevo-ataque-de-trump-a-las-ciudades-santuario-el-ice-reforzara-las-deportaciones-de-migrantes-y-nid16062025/
[ii] https://azmedios.net/2025/09/15/marco-rubio-sobre-caso-bolsonaro-eu-respondera-en-consecuencia-a-esta-caza-de-brujas/
[iii] https://www.latimes.com/espanol/eeuu/articulo/2025-09-16/aumentan-redadas-de-ice-en-boston-mie our-sanctuary-cities-face-new-trump-operation
[iv] The term McCarthyism is used in reference to accusations of subversion, in which there is no due respect for a fair legal process where the human rights of the accused are considered. It has its origin in an episode in the history of the United States that took place between 1950 and 1956, during which Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957) unleashed an extensive process of declarations, unfounded accusations, denunciations, interrogations, irregular processes and black lists against people suspected of being communists. The sectors that opposed McCarthy’s irregular and indiscriminate methods denounced the process as a “witch hunt”, an episode that was described, among others, in The Witches of Salem (1953), by the playwright Arthur Miller.nour-cities-sanctuary-face-new-operation-of-trump
[v] https://efe.com/mundo/2025-09-13/decenas-despidos-eeuu-asesinato-charlie-kirk/
