Por Paul Street
I believe we can defeat this government if we just take a stand…nothing that is worth doing is something that you can do for free, Everything that is worthwhile is going to cost something…. if I don’t sacrifice something, it’s just words, and words are easy to ignore. If I don’t put myself out there in a big way, it’s just noise, and there’s plenty of noise…We can change what’s happening in our country if we are willing to pay a price for it.
US Air Force Major John Watson, August 17, 2026
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The zone-flooding fascism of the Trump47 nightmare is relentless. Here below are seven examples from the news this last week through Thursday afternoon at 3pm Central time, August 20, 2026. It is entirely possible that new horrific developments will trump some or all these stories later today or early Friday morning. On a happier note, my report concludes with an encouraging and hopeful story courtesy of a brave American airman.
“We’ll Bomb the Shit Out of Them”
Last Monday morning, the fascist leader Donald John Trump said this to FOX (Fatherland) News about what he sees as the Middle Eastern nation of Oman’s failure to properly align with his arch-criminal and mass murderous war on Iran: “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.”
Oman, which claims neutrality in the war and has been playing a role in negotiating an end to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, is the third largest country on the Arabian peninsula and home to five and a half million people.
It is a profound violation of international law and basic norms of decency, to say the least, to threaten to carry out the imperial obliteration of a neutral country that poses no danger to the nation making the threat. It takes brazen and reckless chutzpah to make such a threat, consistent with Trump’s earlier threat to “bomb Iran back to the Stone Ages where it belongs.”
It’s consistent with recent reports that Trump is considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran, and with Trump’s Monday posting of a map showing the Strait of Hormuz as “a new US territory.”
Trump’s domestic political fascism is intimately bound up with his wildly lawless conduct and rhetoric on the global stage. He is dedicated both at home and abroad to the accelerated shredding of the rule of law and basic human morality.
A Fascist Primary
The MAGA fascist party of Trump is loaded with open Amerikaner fascists who are chomping at the bit to turn the US into an authoritarian white Christian ethno-state. One such Republifascist is US Rep. Randy Fine, who won his Republican primary for the Florida’s Sixth Congressional District last Tuesday. Fine has said that Israel should starve Gazans, has compared Muslims unfavorably to dogs, and called for “more Islamophobia.” His top primary challenger was Dan Bilzerian, a neo-Nazi influencer” who calls Fine “a fat Jew: and denies the Nazi Holocaust. Raw Story reports that Bilzerian has “released an AI-generated music video on X that muses about a second Holocaust: ‘Jewish supremacist, Satan’s creepy little minions / should we revisit that Austrian painter’s opinions?’ …Lest the reference be too subtle, the line is overlaid over a graphic of Adolf Hitler wearing a painter’s apron.”
This is just a small taste of the fascist swill that the Trump era has let loose across the US “Citty on a Hill.”
Hegseth Trashes Transgendered People in Iowa
Speaking of which, the open Christian evangelical white nationalist head of the US Pentagon, Trump’s “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth made a vulgar statement about transgendered people during a campaign stop in Iowa last Monday. Breaking with the longstanding norm that maintains a firm barrier between the Defense Department and partisan politics, Hegseth said this to a crowd of Amerikaner Republifascists at the Iowa State Fair: “At the Department of War, we do training, not trannies.”
“The word he used,” LGBTQ Nation observes, “is an anti-trans slur, and he used it both in the specific sense of the Department of Defense banning trans service members last year and also as a symbol of how he believes that treating service members with respect runs counter to the effectiveness of the US military. ‘It is a day and night difference,’ he continued… ‘Training, lethality, accountability, discipline, readiness — the bedrock of what it means to be an American warrior — is the only focus of our department. Colorblind, gender-neutral, merit-based. That’s it.”
Far from “gender-neutral,” the fascist leader Hegseth’s ongoing war on women, gay, and trans military personnel is hyper-masculinist, consistent with the aggressive patriarchy that is a key lynchpin of fascist ideology and with his recent advance of testosterone testing for US soldiers.
Penalizing Colorado For Imprisoning a Trumpist Election Meddler
One year after Mein Trumpf threatened the state of Colorado with “harsh measures” unless its governor commuted the prison sentence handed to Tina Peters, a former county clerk convicted of tampering with voting machines on Trump’s behalf after the 2020 election, Colorado’s cowardly Democratic governor was convinced to commute Peters’ sentence last May.
The New York Times is now reporting about a sick, richly impeachment-worthy Trump extortion plot. Following Trump’s criticism of Peters’ imprisonment last year, the Times reported last Monday, the White House conducted a “brainstorm call” with five federal agencies to discuss slashing federal funding to Colorado. The next day Trump’s Departments of Energy and Transportation announced they were removing grants worth hundreds of millions of dollars for Colorado projects. Trump subsequently targeted Colorado by vetoing clean water funding, relocating Space Command, and moving to dismantle a federal climate research office. .
An email documenting the “brainstorming” session was disclosed during a court hearing last Tuesday. It was sent by special White House assistant Emily Underwood just days after Trump launched a barrage of Truth Social posts demanding Peters’ release from prison. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson. “The very idea that the president… would target a state because they don’t feel that the state and its administrators are in line with the current administration’s priorities is phenomenal.”
Let’s be clear about just exactly what “the current administration’s priorities” are: making over US government and society on white supremacist, patriarchal, xenophobic nationalist, and arch-authoritarian – that is, fascist – lines. Legitimizing the attempted Trump coup against the 2020 presidential election, a coup in which Tina Peters participated, is a key part of the MAGA fascist project.
Mass Election “Monitoring” Announced
Trump’s Department of [in]Justice, headed by a 2020 election denier and Trump’s personal January 6 attorney Todd Blanche, announced last Wednesday that it will saturate the nation with 1,000 federal “election monitors” at polling places across the country during the midterm elections this fall. This chilling declaration came one day after Blanche indicated that the DOJ may take its case for the federal takeover of state voter rolls all the way to the Trumpist Supreme Court.
Military Guns Drawn on Reporters in California
Last Monday night, The Guardian reports, five news reporters and two members of the military who were invited to a groundbreaking event at the Vandenberg Space Force base in California were stopped at gunpoint and detained by security officers. The journalists missed the event they were supposed to cover and the military has offered no apologies over an incident that is all too symptomatic of the Trump-Hegseth Pentagon’s repressive stance towards the media.
“Be Quiet! You’re Very Disrespectful”
Last Monday, the arch-patriarch Trump engaged yet again in the sustained verbal abuse of a female reporter but this time with even more misogynist venom than usual. CNN reporter Kristen Holmes asked Trump t respond to Sen. Jon Ossoff’s claim that Trump would “rather travel with your aide Natalie Harp and build the ballroom than do your job as president.” Trump called Ossoff a “Pee-wee Herman look-alike,” and deflected from the question about Harp, and then shouted the following at Holmes as she asked him why he had pulled back the US from military drills with South Korea and if he had spoken to North Korean dictator Kim Jog Un
“Quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet! You’re very disrespectful in front of this young man [said while looking at a right-wing male reporter]. Don’t you find her disrespectful? He understands. Quiet. You’re fake news. You are a loud and your boisterous person, you’re fake news. Be quiet. Be quiet! You’re a fake reporter and you report fake news.”
As usual and sadly enough, nobody in the press gaggle seeing Trump engage in yet another vicious attack on a female reporter said a word in the reporter’s defense.
Hours later, the White House ramped the gender abuse to a higher level by posting this on X: “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive.”
Trump’s “gal Friday” and close personal assistant Natalie Harp fits Trump’s fascist view of the ideal woman: blond, blue-eyed, and slavishly devoted to her male master, against whom she would never lodge the hint of a complaint.
A Positive Story: the Courage of Air Force Major John Watson
But let’s end with a story of courage, not cowardice. Last Monday night, the Trump impeachment and removal advocate US Air Force Major John Watson was placed into “pretrial confinement” by the US Air Force. He was not formally charged with any crime during or after his arrest but was seized right after he said the following on CNN:
“What is happening with President Trump is not normal… he is flagrantly violating the Constitution, breaking the law, engaged in rampant corruption and is killing Americans. And that is unacceptable to me and it should be unacceptable to all of us. I feel like, unfortunately, many of us have gotten used to this and we’ve normalized his conduct, and we think that there’s nothing we can do about it. One of the reasons I chose the pseudonym ‘Just Nobody’ is to underscore that you do not have to be somebody special to take action and reject this government. We can all do something about what’s happening in our county and I want to just inspire people …I believe we can defeat this government if we just take a stand.”
Major Watson, previously arrested for standing on the steps of the US Capitol with a sign reading “Impeach, Convict, Remove,” went to on CNN with full knowledge that he faces likely Court Martial and the loss of salary and benefits under Uniform Code of Military Justice Article 88, which criminalizes “contemptuous words against the president, vice president, Congress and other top officials.” As he told CNN’s Erin Burnett:
“nothing that is worth doing is something that you can do for free, Everything that is worthwhile is going to cost something. It’s going to be hard. It requires sacrifice. We are in an incredibly challenging time and in order for us to get out of this situation we all have to have courage…If I don’t take action, if I don’t sacrifice something, it’s just words, and words are easy to ignore. If I don’t put myself out there in a big way, it’s just noise, and there’s plenty of noise…We can change what’s happening in our country if we are willing to pay a price for it.”
I wish Major Watson had described Trump’s “not normal government” as fascist and added that the Trump regime has killed hundreds of Latin Americans, thousands of Iranians, and hundreds of thousands of Africans, not just US-Americans, but that was a very righteous and admirable statement on his part. The rest of us would do well to follow his example in whatever ways we can.
Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).
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