The Week of Colonial Fever Dreams From a Sundowning Fascist

Afew months in the past, when my editors requested me to strive my hand at a brand new “Authoritarian Watch” column within the new yr, a part of me apprehensive that some weeks I might battle to seek out materials. In spite of everything, absolutely even the Trump administration would decelerate; absolutely, not all their actions can be authoritarian.

Seems I needn’t have apprehensive.

Take Venezuela, or, extra precisely, take Venezuela’s chief and spirit him away to a jail in Brooklyn after which take Venezuela’s oil and promote it on the open market. Who will decide how the revenue is divvied up? “Me,” Trumps said, in a uncommon second of honesty.

Or take Greenland, or extra precisely, properly… “take Greenland.” As a result of, as Trump so piquantly places it, “Ownership is very important.” He went on to inform his New York Occasions interviewers that “that’s what I really feel is psychologically wanted for achievement.” This can be a Twenty first-century model of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes’s hubristic claim, “I might annex the planets if I may; I typically consider that. It makes me unhappy to see them so clear and but thus far.” (Properly, Elon Musk is set on colonizing area and realizing Rhodes’s dream.)

In the meantime, Trump is more and more set on creating his personal Lebensraum right here on planet earth. Whereas Hitler sought dwelling area for his German Volk, Trump seeks to safe useful resource area: entry to limitless oil by way of Venezuela, entry to uncommon earth minerals by way of Greenland, and entry to pliant markets throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. All of that is backed by a pledge to vastly increase US military spending (final week he posted on social media that he wanted a 50 p.c enhance in navy spending over the subsequent yr)—thus placing the whole financial system and nation on a everlasting struggle footing. And he could certainly want the navy after declaring that the whole Western Hemisphere now exists solely to pleasure and enrich the United States. He calls this grotesque philosophy by the anodyne identify of the “Donroe Doctrine.”

“In overseas coverage, he has found he can do regardless of the hell he desires,” Steven Levitsky, Harvard professor of presidency and director of the David Rockefeller Heart for Latin American Research, stated of Trump’s new doctrine. “There aren’t any constraints. This must be terrifying for anybody who believes within the worldwide order.”

Within the blink of a sleepy Trump eye, the world has regressed from a purportedly postcolonial period to a most avowedly colonial one. And, because the US presents itself to the world in full colonial finery, Stephen Miller, Trump’s ghoulish immigration enforcer and now overseas coverage guru, has stated that Europe’s nice powers had been unsuitable to have ditched their empires and much more unsuitable to then have allowed these brown and Black ex-colonials emigrate to the First World and “reverse colonize” them.

One can nearly see Miller, in khakis and a pith helmet, guarded by Pete Hegseth and his vandal hordes, slashing his approach by way of the jungle whereas quoting Rudyard Kipling—or, since Twenty first-century American colonialists appear considerably much less poetically inclined than the previous British empire builders, belting out some skinhead anthem as he subdues the natives.

Miller’s white nationalism is infecting each side of the US authorities. Not too long ago, the top of the Equal Employment Alternative Fee posted a video requesting that white males who had suffered job discrimination contact the federal government to see if they might file a declare for racial or sexual discrimination. As a result of, in fact, if one appears to be like on the huge historical past of discrimination in america, it’s white males who’ve been handled most unfairly. That now appears to be the Trump administration’s official view. In spite of everything, Trump not too long ago famous that the end result of the civil rights motion was that “white people were very badly treated” and that the nation embraced “reverse discrimination.”

After ICE brokers murdered Renée Good in Minneapolis, Secretary of Homeland Safety Kristi Noem spouted a slew of lies about Good from a podium emblazoned with the emblem “One of ours, all of yours.” In different phrases, “Dare to fuck with us as we implement our government-sponsored pogrom in opposition to Somalis and different non-white residents in Minneapolis, and we are going to come in any case of you.”

Tales have emerged in latest weeks that in DHS’s $100 million effort to enlist 10,000 further ICE brokers, recruiters are targeting gun exhibits, UFC Combat Nights, and different far-right hangouts; and in these efforts, they’re utilizing what critics have labeled a neo-Nazi song, “We’ll have our residence once more.” The division has additionally printed Uncle Sam recruitment posters emblazoned with the words: “America has been invaded by criminals and predators. We’d like YOU to get them out.”

It’s onerous to take a look at all of this and never consider the fascist paramilitaries and nativist propaganda machines led by males corresponding to Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, and Pinochet. And for those who don’t wish to take my phrase for it, take Joe Rogan’s. The podcaster, whose help for Trump was instrumental in his 2024 election win, is now describing ICE as a “Gestapo” company.

Reviews out of Minneapolis have detailed ICE agents’ repeatedly invoking the killing of Good, basically warning protesters that what befell Good will befall them in the event that they proceed to oppose the federal government’s pogroms. That’s not legislation enforcement; that’s terrorism with a federal uniform. And, to make this menace a actuality, Trump is threatening to invoke the Rebellion Act, permitting him to deploy closely armed navy personnel to Minneapolis.

In 2025, the administration all however ended the nation’s refugee resettlement program, letting in solely right-wing white Afrikaners from South Africa. In 2026, Trump has upped the ante nonetheless additional, announcing this week a ban on immigrant visa processing for individuals from 75 international locations. Have a look at the listing, which encompasses roughly a 3rd of the international locations on earth, and nearly all them are predominantly non-white, majority non-Christian, or, within the case of nations like Colombia and Brazil, led by presidents who’ve had the temerity to problem Trump.

In regular occasions, such a unprecedented—and unlawful—motion as upending US immigration coverage with none enter from Congress would dominate the information; this week, so deep has the nation sunk into Christian white nationalist mire and so acclimatized have we turn into to Trump ruling by fiat quite than by laws, it merited barely a point out.

So, too, the FBI’s being sicced on Washington Submit reporter Hannah Natanson received buried below the avalanche of different examples of authoritarianism. Brokers raided her residence this week to seek for information she had compiled whereas reporting tales on fired federal employees. And whereas the gorgeous information that Federal Reserve chair was going through a clearly politically motivated investigation into spending selections surrounding the renovation of the Reserve’s DC headquarters did create ripples, by midweek it, too, had largely been misplaced amid the opposite authoritarian muddle.

“I stated in February I believed we had been in a constitutional disaster,” outgoing New Jersey Legal professional Common Matthew Platkin, whose time period concludes on January 20, advised me this week. From the president on down, he defined, members of the administration are repeatedly “thumbing their noses on the rule of legislation.”

Platkin—who says that in personal many Republican state attorneys common agree along with his criticisms however are too scared to go public with their issues—defined that he remained hopeful that decrease courts would proceed to push again in opposition to Trump’s excesses and that in the end an aroused public would evict these lawbreakers from the halls of energy. “This isn’t who we’re as a nation,” he stated. “We can not settle for a situation the place federal legislation enforcement officers working for a rogue company with no coaching can kill US residents with impunity.”

Platkin is scathing in his observations about Trump cupboard members who’re enabling the slide to full authoritarian governance. “They’re performing like legal guidelines don’t apply to them, and that’s simply not true. Trump’s proven us how fragile our system is. And except individuals see there’s a value to doing this, it should occur once more.”