By Greg Oxley
The United States today is a country run by a gang of brutal and blatantly racist authoritarian thugs, steeped in corruption. They are hell-bent on using their power to attack the living standards and democratic rights of the people, to boost the profits of multi-billionaire capitalists and amass tremendous personal wealth for themselves along the way.
Indeed, corruption and bribery have seeped into every level of government. Never in the history of the United States has corruption been so widespread. The use of political power to clinch business deals, subvert institutions, to enrich the complicit and silence opponents has become endemic, affecting all levels of government.
Changes in the law made a decade ago, which considerably restricted the legal definition of bribery, effectively legalising many forms of corruption, mean that there is little need to hide it. The brazen system of “pay to play” is being normalised and carried out in broad daylight. Through unprecedented ownership stakes in private companies, members of the Trump administration have modified the relationship between the government, big business, and the “markets”.
Whereas all capitalist governments, of the Republican or Democrat variety, have always sought to defend and extend the power of the ruling class, this administration is also, and in the most flagrant manner, concerned with building up the wealth and strategic reach of the ruling family.
Rampant corruption in public affairs
One important source of the rampant corruption in public affairs is the link between tariffs and corruption in international trade. The erratic and punitive cycle of tariffs, which has become the hallmark of the Trump administration, has caused upheaval in the world economy. This is a major factor in the declining living standards in the US. American consumers are facing an average tariff rate of 27%, the highest in over 120 years!
The tariff wars have also caused great economic disruption and ruin within the national economy. However, not everyone has been on the losing end of this madness. The “negotiations” with foreign powers and multinational companies have also given rise to what one US journalist, Fareed Zakaria, called “an orgy of corruption”, because, as he explains, “with tariffs, come tariff waivers” for specific industries and products, favouring “contributors, which then encourages pervasive corruption”. This is exactly how things have gone with Trump.
$4bn for the Trump family in one year
The “unconditional gift” of a $400mn aircraft from the Qatari royal family, which Trump wants refitted at a cost to the taxpayer of a billion dollars, made the headlines internationally. But this was only the tip of the iceberg. The Center for American Progress, which tracks the amount of cash and gifts garnered by Trump, his wife Melania and his two sons, estimates that they took in at least $1.8bn by selling presidential power over 8 months. Four months later, in January 2026, this figure has grown to at least $4bn, $2bn of which come from presidentially levered deals in cryptocurrency.
No stone is left unturned in furtherance of Trump’s vindictive and greedy schemes. In 2023 and 2024, when he was out of power, he demanded that the Justice Department hand over $230mn to him as compensation for federal investigations into his behaviour while in office. Now this outlandish claim has resurfaced, with the difference that the present-day Department of Justice is run by his own personal defence lawyer! The idea is no doubt that the department appointed by Trump will cut a deal with him and be signed off by his own former attorney.
More recently, Trump and his sons have decided to sue his own IRS (Internal Revenue Service) for $10bn, for not having prevented a leak showing that he pays almost no income tax on his immense personal wealth. So here we have a president suing branches of the very government he runs and whose officials he has personally appointed!
Just days before Trump returned to office in January 2025, an investment firm controlled by a senior member of the United Arab Emirates royal family secretly pledged to pay $500mn to acquire 49% of a cryptocurrency startup owned by the Trump family. A few weeks later, the White House announced it would allow the UAE to import Nvidia AI chips, which the Biden administration has restricted, because of the relationship between the UAE and China.
As The Guardian wrote (February 2, 2026), “It’s dizzying to keep up with the ways that Trump has monetised the presidency and used it for personal profit in his second term.” The US senator for Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, has drawn up a long yet non-exhaustive list of 100 actions of the Trump administration that gives some idea of the extent of the intertwining of governmental decisions and the financial and strategic interests of the Trump family. Similar lists could be produced about all the departments of the present government.
Highly lucrative detention centres
For instance, there is the very lucrative business of running the prison camps that are springing up all over the United States for the detention of then tens of thousands of people arrested by so-called law enforcement in the ongoing wave of repression spearheaded by ICE and Border Patrol agents. There are about 73,000 being held in these camps, in appalling, inhuman, conditions.
The DHS made 113,413 arrests in 2024, and 260,000 in 2025. The government now wants to build 16 new “processing facilities” and seven new “warehouse” camps, with rows of parallel structures similar to those the Nazis built in the 1930s. This will allow them to hold something like 200,000 people. The Fort Bliss camp in Texas, where three people have died in custody over recent months, holds 3,000 detainees, or “bodies”, as the camp guards refer to them. The new camps being planned will hold up to 10,000 people each.
Such a vast network of prison camps, apart from the “normal” prisons available, are largely outside the reach of the law, in that the normal rights of unconvicted prisoners do not apply, and where the screams of small children in overcrowded spaces can be heard from outside. For this administration, they could be used not only for “illegal immigrants” but perhaps in the future, for any other type of prisoner. If they build them, they will use them.
This perspective is horrific for the working class but very promising for the private companies running these camps for profit. The largest of these companies, GEO and CoreCivic, are making huge amounts of money from what they call an “attractive opportunity for investors”. They are paid per inmate and so have a direct interest in increasing the number of arrests.
Those same companies donated millions of dollars to help get Trump elected. This, no doubt, explains why the DHS fix quotas for the numbers of arrests to be made, irrespective of the legal status and record of the victims. Taxpayers’ money is funnelled into private companies as payback for donating millions of dollars to get Trump into office.
Falling Living Standards
Dozens of other examples of this kind of graft could be cited. And while Trump and his political associates have raked in billions of dollars over the last year, ordinary, hard-working Americans are struggling to keep their families fed, clothed, and in good health. The prices of almost all foodstuffs and basic household necessities are rising, cutting into family budgets. Jobs are being lost throughout the economy, particularly in manufacturing.
Hospitals and nursing homes are cutting back on services. Many are closing. Tens of millions of citizens are losing their health insurance because of huge increases in premiums. These have more than doubled for 20 million Americans nationwide.
Slashing of government expenditure on health cover and other types of social spending has directly benefitted the ultra-rich in terms of tax cuts. Resources previously spent on health subsidies have been funnelled into financing the violent rampages of the ICE and Border Patrol thugs in paramilitary garb, directed against ordinary workers.
A Terrifying Racist Rampage
Governmental power has been turned into a tool of vengeance and intimidation, especially in places where votes went the wrong way for Trump in the last three presidential elections. Masked and unidentified agents kick down doors, drag people from their homes, jump on people and beat them up in the street. Little children scream in terror as they see their parents assaulted, insulted, cuffed, and taken away.
Tear gas and flash-bang grenades have been used in the presence of children and babies. Checkpoints are set up in predominantly Black and Brown neighbourhoods where people are actively racially profiled, stopped and asked to prove their identity.” People are arrested in schools, in hospitals, in churches and in their own homes, deemed as “suspects”, based on the colour or their skin or their accent.
There are literally thousands of videos of the violent methods ICE and Border Patrol agents carrying out random arrests, throwing even the elderly and the sick to the ground, causing serious injuries and in some cases death.
One of the better-known incidents of this kind involved US citizen Aliya Rahman, a disabled software engineer who was driving to an appointment for the treatment of a traumatic brain injury. Blocked by an ICE operation in Minneapolis, she was ordered to move forward towards some ICE agents ahead.
Mindful of previous murders committed by police, she did not do this. It could have been claimed she was using her car as a weapon, and she could have been killed. She was violently dragged from her car, repeatedly told agents she was disabled and had a brain injury, and hauled off to detention in the Whipple Federal Building, where her pleas for medical attention were ignored.
A chilling example of strong-arm tactics
When she was finally taken out of detention, she was unconscious. She was not charged with any crime. Her courageous testimony provides a chilling example of the strong-arm tactics of these racist thugs in paramilitary garb. She describes how what the ICE agents called “bodies” were piled into overcrowded rooms, shackled and pleading for help. She said that what she saw in the detention centre was “truly horrific”.
Many people have been seriously injured. Bones have been broken. Some people have been murdered, such as Renee Good, the nurse Alex Pretti, and lesser-known homicide victims such as Silverio Villegas-González, who died from being shot in the neck by an ICE agent in Chicago, and the Cuban migrant Geraldo Lunas Campos, a father of four, who was held down by several ICE agents and strangled to death in a detention facility in Texas. Within an hour of their deaths, Good and Pretti were branded as “domestic terrorists” by the administration, and no charges have been brought against their murderers.
Police brutality and racist killings by the police are nothing new in America. But what is happening now is qualitatively different. It is an organised campaign of terror on a scale and with a strategic purpose that mark a new stage in the political history of the United States. This is not just about racially motivated beatings and killings by local police officers, which, of course, are very serious incidents in themselves. But now we are faced with a federally coordinated and systematic campaign of terror and persecution, backed up with huge material resources and directed against minorities and indeed anyone who stands in the way of the Trump administration’s racist and authoritarian agenda.
Racist video of the Obamas
The latest illustration of Trump’s racism was the posting a video (later taken down) showing Michelle and Barack Obama as apes, inspired by KKK propaganda, on his Truth Social website. This is from the same depraved mind that claimed that Haitians in Springfield in Ohio were killing and eating the pets of white people, from the same man who described the Somalian inhabitants of Minneapolis as nothing but “garbage” to be thrown out of the country.
This kind of racist rhetoric reflects what is really the de facto official policy of the US government. Stephen Miller (White House Deputy Chief of Staff), Kristi Noem (Secretary of Homeland Security), Tulsi Gabbard ‘Director of National Intelligence), and many other powerful officials have all used extremely violent language against “aliens” – who are in fact most often American citizens or legally established residents in the US – to stir up racial hatred, criminalise the innocent, and push their white supremacist ideology.
Just to give one example, on December 1, 2025, Kristi Noem posted: “I just met with the President. I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies. Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”
Stephen Miller, Russell Vaught (Director of Management and Budget and a key author of the ultra-reactionary “Project 2025”) and her advisor Corey Lewandowski all push a narrative “world view” close to that of the Nazis and White Supremacists in that they foster the idea that some “races” are naturally and rightfully superior to others. In fact, on DHS online material, the imagery used is in some cases clearly inspired by nationalist and supremacist propaganda from the past.
Trans people hounded by Republicans
Some parts of the community have suffered immeasurably from Trump’s diktats. The federal government no longer recognises the existence of trans people and has smashed all of their rights to live in their gender identity. It has used financial pressure against schools and hospitals to strip them of any rights or to necessary medical treatment. In state after state, MAGA politicians have imposed the most draconian measures – erasing trans identities on drivers’ licences and passports and hunting trans-supportive parents as child abusers. This has caused a huge wave of internal migration from red to blue states.
In terms of attacking the so-called ‘woke’ community – a regular target of Republicans – trans people are an ‘easy’ target, but their unparalleled persecution is a foretaste of what could be in store with other parts of the working class community in the future. Some of the earliest victims of fascism in 1930s Germany were LGBT people and organisations.
Together with this policy of state sponsored “divide and rule” goes a concerted effort to undermine the right to free speech and a free press, and attempting, at the very least, to intimidate critical voices both in the street and in media into silence. There is a growing list of TV “personalities” and newscasters who have been singled out for special attention by the White House.
There is the well-known case of Jimmy Kimmel, who was taken off the air on Trump’s request. Don Lemon, renowned journalist and former CNN host has been charged with conspiracy to deprive rights and interfering with religious freedoms, when he was simply filming an anti-ICE protest in a church. The popular South African actor and comedian Trevor Noah has been threatened with legal action for suggesting a link, in a joke, between Trump and Epstein’s infamous island home.
The home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson was raided by the FBI, who seized her phone, her laptops and her Garmin watch. More widely, protesters and even simple passers-by are regularly pepper sprayed, gassed, beaten, and arrested, to stave off witnesses to the violent tactics of ICE and Border patrol goons.
Controlling the ballot
A series of manoeuvres are presently underway to influence the results on the midterm elections this November and the presidential elections in 2028. As is well known, Trump claims that he was the real victor in the 2020 elections and was complicit in the organisation of the attempted coup d’état on January 6, 2020, when a massive reactionary mob stormed the United States Capitol in Washington, to prevent the certification of the election results and allow Trump to retain presidential power.
One of the reasons why Trump has singled out Minnesota is his defeat there in the presidential elections of 2016, 2020 and 2024. Trump claims that he won all three elections in Minnesota but was deprived of victory by a “crooked” state administration. There is absolutely no evidence to support Trump’s claims of electoral fraud, whether in Minnesota or elsewhere. In Fulton County Georgia, if there had any way to prove even a small amount of election fraud, Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani would not have settled the defamation lawsuits brought against him by election employees and the company that provided voting systems.
The Republicans’ line seems to be that any elections which they lose are “stolen” or “fake”. If Trump is presently revamping the lies about how the 2020 was “stolen”, it is clearly with an eye to the elections of 2026 and 2028.
Part of the strategy being carried out involves gerrymandering. Texas has redrawn congressional maps to add as many as five Republican-friendly congressional districts. But then California responded with its own redistricting, and Indiana has refused go along with Trump’s demands. The plan was to guarantee republican control of the Congress, but instead it has generated resistance and lawsuits.
The pushback led Trump to raise the idea of “nationalising” or federalising the elections in a hit-list of “15 places”, including, to quote Trump, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Atlanta. Trump says, without a shred of evidence, that the elections in all these places were rigged and crooked. Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to use ICE as leverage to get hold of voter rolls and election data in Minnesota, offering to put an end to the ICE invasion, on the condition that state authorities turn them over to federal government. Minnesota refused.
On January 28, a high-profile armed FBI raid with the personal participation of the National Intelligence Director, Tulsi Gabbard, seized election materials, data and ballots from Fulton County in Atlanta, Georgia. In the words of Rep. Saira Draper (Dem.), this was “a blatant attempt by our federal government not just to interfere with Georgia’s elections, but to take them over […] When President Trump is talking about nationalising elections, he is talking about Georgia.”
Pressure to “find” non-existent votes
In the 2020 election, it was in relation to Fulton County, Atlanta, that Trump, in a recorded phone call, tried to pressure the Georgian Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, a conservative republican, to “find 11,780 votes”. When Raffensperger refused, he and his family were subjected a vicious campaign of threats and intimidation. Lower-level officials and conscientious vote-counters received death threats from Trump supporters.
The drive to seize voter information is not just about Georgia and Minnesota. Voter rolls, election data, and all the personal voter information that comes with them, have so far been demanded of 42 states, of which 32 refused and 10 agreed to comply. We can expect more operations like the seizure of election materials in Georgia.
Strong-arm tactics and insistent demands on state authorities also have propaganda value. They are intended to undermine public confidence in election procedures and back up any future claims that elections that go against the Republicans in key states are “crooked” and should not be certified.
Measures are also being prepared to prevent people from turning out to vote. The right-wing extremist Steve Bannon, former White House strategic adviser, speaking on the platform of the 2025 Bellator Awards, said: “If we lose the midterms and we lose 2028, some of us in this room are going to prison, me included.” And same Steve Bannon has said that federal agents will be sent to “surround” polling stations in November.
That is not all. The Trump administration is working on a plan to deprive some people of their citizenship, and therefore of the right to vote. Birthright citizenship is clearly set out in the American Constitution, whose 14th Amendment states that “all persons born or naturalised in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside”. And yet the Trump administration has announced, through the Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, that it “does not believe” that that birthright citizenship is “constitutional”!
Where Is America Going?
What do all these developments mean for the future of the working people of America and for American democracy? It is impossible to reply to this question with any degree of certainty, of course, if only because none of these issues can be resolved, in one direction or another, without major clashes between the social forces involved. It means inevitably a sharpening in class struggle and in a struggle of living forces, the outcome cannot be foretold in advance.
However, what we can say is that in the United States of today and in the years that lie immediately ahead, such struggle is inevitable. There is no “middle ground”. If “Trumpism” – with or without Trump himself – is not defeated, it will mean the end of democracy in the USA, a collapse of the hopes and living standards of the working class, and a return to the darkest days of racial hatred and violence.
Purges have been carried out in the command structure of the armed forces and intelligence and policing agencies at the federal level, so they are now headed by elements whose political leanings are more in keeping with authoritarian methods at home and aggressive imperialist policies abroad. The Congress majority, enjoying the spoils of the unbridled executive power and the generous cheques of lobbyists, has voluntarily surrendered any independent role it could have. The Supreme Court is likewise a docile enabler of abuses of power.
And so, the institutions that are supposed to hold the powerful executive to account have become its slaves. Clearly, if we bring together the main strategic threads of the present administration as outlined above, it is obvious that the holders of state power and their billionaire backers are shaping up for what Trump has called a “reckoning and retribution” on an historic scale.
Further mass demonstrations and street clashes are on the order of the day. The spirit of resistance and solidarity of the millions of people who have joined the struggle against the vicious fascist agenda of ICE and Border Patrol should inspire us all and give us hope for the future. Certainly, the midterm elections will take place amid bitter social and political conflict, and they will be an important testing ground for the balance of forces in American society.
There are many signs that the electoral tide is turning against the government. Trump knows this, of course, but it is most unlikely that he will accept defeat in the midterms, and even less so in 2028. All the actions of his government only take on meaning, if they are seen as part of a wider plot to maintain the MAGA wing the Republican Party in power beyond 2028-2029.
Mid-term elections
Losing power could have extremely dire consequences for the ruling group. Trump has said that if the Republicans lose the midterm elections next November, his presidency will be “basically over”. That, unfortunately, is not true. However, given the sickening crimes revealed in the Esptein files (and many more still being withheld), and given all the corruption and illegal actions that are going on, the criminal and murderous behaviour of ICE and US Border Patrol, the innumerable wrongful arrests and deportations, if ever the Republicans lose power and Trump is out of office, many key players in the present administration are likely to face criminal proceedings.
In many cases, as Steve Bannon, Republican political strategist says, those within the administration “will face jail time”. It is not accidental that Trump has militarised some branches of law enforcement and is actively seeking an opportunity to be able to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would enable him to send troops against the civilian population. What better time to do this than in the midst of an election?
According to how events play out, and with or without Trump at the helm (others in his camp, such as Vance, covet his throne), this sinister plot may or may not succeed. However, if the polls are going against the Republicans in the run-up to the 2028 presidential election, an attempt, at least, to carry out some kind of coup seems likely. Many features of the present situation point in that direction. The groundwork is being laid at the present time. They tried it on January 6, 2020, and now, more prepared and better armed, and with so much more at stake, why wouldn’t they try it again in 2028?
If ever the real course of events was to confirm this hypothesis, it would mean a decisive break in the social and political history of the United States, opening a period of unprecedented turmoil and struggle. The social equilibrium of the country would be entirely broken and irrecoverable.
The struggle to defend living standards and democratic rights, the struggle against the persecution of minorities, police brutality, unwarranted arrests, detention and deportation, will take on mass proportions. Social consciousness will necessarily undergo a transformation in circumstances such as these, raising the question, in the minds of millions of workers and young people, of the need to fundamentally transform the political, social and economic order of the United States.
Challenging the billionaire oligarchy
This, in turn, could lay the basis for the emergence of a widespread and deeply-rooted socialist movement, whose aim must be to challenge and overthrow the economic and political power of giant corporations and the billionaire oligarchy. Democracy in the modern epoch, if it is really to serve the interests of the working people, cannot be confined to the political sphere.
It must be extended into economics, into the sphere of production, distribution and exchange. It must include the popular control of the wealth generated by collective effort. If the power of big business is not broken, formal “democracy” can only serve to mask and perpetuate exploitation, inequality, and oppression.
The Democrats, for the most part, have denounced the Trump administration. But the Democratic Party is also linked to “corporate America”. When in office, they have done nothing to address the fundamental problems created by the capitalist system, which they do not contest.
And now, in the opposition, they are only concerned, with a few exceptions, with taking advantage of the present chaos to find their way back into power. But what will they actually do to address the concrete problems faced by the American people and bring about meaningful social change? What are they doing now, in places where there are Democratic mayors and governors?
Trump still has three years in office. The immediate priority is surely the mobilisation of the unions, of communities, in the streets and in places of work, to defend neighbourhoods and repulse the attacks of ICE and Border Control thugs. Moral indignation and bluster about broken laws, traditions, and constitutional rights, is not enough.
Themagnificent fightback by communities in Minneapolis against ICE, with scores of people out monitoring and hampering these thugs, in freezing weather, on every street and corner – this has happened despite the Democratic Party and in no sense because of it.
A warning to all workers
The present regime in America is authoritarian. The fascist ideologues in and around the Trump administration will try to push America further along this road. This is a very great danger that should not be underestimated. The concepts of democracy and dictatorship are often counterposed to one another, but in truth there is no impenetrable wall between the two.
In the right set of historical circumstances, the former can slide into the latter with relative ease. Elected parliaments and judicial systems, cowed by threats or enlisted through a share in the spoils, can be the enablers of tyrannical rule. This is what is happening at the present time in the USA.
Authoritarian tyranny rests not only upon institutional support, armed force, and intelligence agencies. It also needs a wide basis of support in the population. Obviously, Trump has this support. There are clearly enormous social reserves behind the right-wing nationalist and xenophobic policies of the present government, and many people would be prepared to fight, arms in hand, for their reactionary ideas, if called upon to do so. Even though polls show that approval rates for the government are falling, it still has the support of something like 35%-40% of the population.
US society is deeply divided
US society is deeply divided. Therefore, the struggle for change will be difficult and at times dangerous. Nonetheless, it must be undertaken, if the United States is not to be trampled underfoot by this carnival of tyranny. Many Americans have a favourable attitude towards socialism. A recent Gallup poll recorded that 74% of likely Democratic voters saw democratic socialism as coming close to their viewpoint, while only 16 percent said the same of capitalism.
The poll described democratic socialism as a system where the government takes a more active role to improve lives, with higher taxes on corporations and high-income earners. It described support for regulations that protect workers and consumers, and more public ownership of key industries like housing, healthcare and utilities.
That shows the potential that exists for the building of a mass socialist movement. The capitalist system must be fought and overturned, and government of, by, and for the ultra-rich replaced by a socialist democracy in which the tremendous resources and wealth of the United States of America can be used for the benefit of the mass of the people.
[Feature picture from Wikimedia Commons, here. Similarly, inset pictures are from Wikimedia commons, here]
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