The first week of Trump’s return to office

If President Donald Trump gets his way, U.S. society is in the process of hurtling far to the right, and in the process further emboldening far right political forces.

Trump’s return to the White House has restored the recklessness and chaos of his first term, but with a more intentional authoritarian bent. Trump is a great fan of the presidential “executive order,” which he believes gives him unlimited power to shape U.S. society by issuing a flood of personal edicts, rather than face even a hint of congressional scrutiny. But with both the House and the Senate dominated by a slim margin of Trump’s minions, not much scrutiny is emanating from Congress.

It would be impossible to list all of Trump’s draconian executive orders in the last tumultuous week, but here are some of the most egregious, beginning on his Inauguration Day, January 20:

Pardoning the January 6 Capitol rioters. On January 20, he issued “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all… individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021,” including those who assaulted police. His pardon involved about 1,500 of those who rioted in the Capitol on that day in an unsuccessful attempt (at Trump’s behest) to overturn Biden’s election—and included key figures from the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys organizations. He commuted the sentences of 14 serving out their prison terms.

The newly freed Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, who had been serving an 18-year sentence, said he was “very grateful” to Trump for commuting his sentence. Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, former head of the Proud Boys, who was serving a 22-year prison term, was openly defiant. As the BBC reported, he said that “members of the congressional committee who investigated the riot ‘need to be imprisoned.'” He added, “I’m happy that the president’s focusing not on retribution and focusing on success, but I will tell you that I’m not going to play by those rules,” he said. “They need to pay for what they did.”

Ending birthright citizenship. On the same day he was inaugurated, Trump also issued an executive order stating explicitly:

[N]o department or agency of the United States government shall issue documents recognizing United States citizenship…to persons: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.

Such a sweeping edict, as a judge stated days later when he blocked this order, is “blatantly unconstitutional.” Nevertheless, overturning citizenship rights to all babies born on U.S. soil has brought widespread fear in migrant communities. “Some studies suggest,” the Washington Post argued, “more than 150,000 children born in the United States each year would no longer qualify for citizenship.”

Even if this executive order eventually loses in the courts (although, given the right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, there is no guarantee it will be fully rejected) it has introduced yet more anti-migrant vitriol into mainstream discussion, once again emboldening the forces of reaction.

Mass deportations. Trump has always reveled in theatrics, and he is implementing his deportation policies with “Gestapo-style raids,” as Robert Kuttner recently described in the American Prospect. In his inauguration speech, Trump pledged to deport “millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.”

But these “criminal targets” might only be charged, but not convicted, of a crime as minor as shoplifting. ICE invited “embedded” Fox News journalists to film their raids in Boston and Chicago—both of which had been previously declared “sanctuary cities” by their Democratic mayors—in the days following his inauguration.

Kuttner speculated of Trump,

He is hoping for maximum publicity showing his ICE officers rounding up immigrants and sending them away on military planes. The agents wore tactical gear and vests with large letters displaying “Police ICE” and “Homeland Security.” According to CNN, at least two agencies told personnel to wear made-for-TV outfits, in case there were video opportunities.

This stunt suggests the performative aspect of these Gestapo-style raids, as red meat for Trump’s base. Trump has directed that ICE increase its raids and summary deportations, from a few hundred per day to at least 1,200 to 1,500.

That would total over 400,000 a year. In fact, Biden’s administration actually deported close to 400,000 migrants in 2024, but with none of the Nazi-style stunts.

But Trump has also made a few changes from Biden’s deportation policies, which might impact deportation numbers. ICE and other police can now arrest people who simply lack documentation if ICE officers just happen upon them while searching for their list of so-called “criminal targets.” Biden did not endorse so-called “collateral arrests.”

Trump also has ended guidelines that restricted ICE from operating at “sensitive locations” like schools, churches or hospitals. Already there are reports of migrants staying away from their churches and schools, or perhaps not going to the hospital when they need medical care in fear of arrest and deportation.

Thus far, while ICE has claimed that “the worst go first” —rounding up violent gang members in targeted operations—the agency has offered little to no information about those they are actually deporting. And anecdotal evidence suggests that many others are getting caught up in the dragnet. For example, in Maryland on January 27, ICE arrested 13 people: nine were targets, but the other four were people ICE agents picked up during the raids.

Attacks on transgender rights and diversity, equity and inclusion programs (DEI). In his inauguration speech, Trump linked his efforts to end transgender protections and DEI as aimed at stopping efforts to “socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.”

Ending DEI programs, including hiring policies in the federal government, is just the latest assault on racial justice—stemming from the baseless claims of “reverse racism against white people” that have been at the core of attacks on affirmative action for decades running.

Since Inauguration Day, Trump has issued numerous executive orders: one stating that the federal government will recognize only two sexes, depending on whether people are born with either eggs or sperm—not their chromosomes. This order contradicts the views of both the American Medical Association and American Psychiatric Association that gender is a spectrum, not a simple binary structure made up only of males and females.

In 2017, Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, a member of the AMA Board of Trustees, argued, “Prejudice and discrimination affect transgender individuals in many ways throughout their daily lives, often in the form of physical or verbal abuse or bullying.”

The right enjoys ridiculing “wokeness”, yet combatting abuse and bullying are not social extravagances but rather a matter of life and death. A study from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that 81 percent of transgender adults in the U.S. have thought about suicide, 42 percent of transgender adults have attempted it, and 56 percent have engaged in non-suicidal self-injury over their lifetimes. This statistic does not include those who are killed or injured by homophobic physical assaults.

On January 27, Trump poured more fuel on the fire, banning transgender troops in the military, citing “a radical gender ideology” and claiming that “a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service.”

And while Trump’s first week back in office witnessed a virtual tidal wave of reactionary policies, most of his right-wing cabinet nominees sailed through their Senate confirmation hearings.

Even Pete Hegseth, who admitted paying $50,000 to silence a woman who accused him of an alcohol-fueled rape in 2017—and who is also on record against allowing women to serve in military combat roles—was confirmed as Secretary of Defense on January 25. Trump’s misogynist vice president, JD Vance, cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the former Fox News host.

(At the time of this writing, it remains to be seen whether the anti-vaxxer and animal torturer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services.)

Trump’s “new imperialism?”

Many wondered what Donald Trump was talking about when at a press conference before his inauguration, he mused about seizing Greenland, “taking back” the Panama Canal and making Canada the 51^st state of the U.S.

Perhaps it’s foolish to take anything Trump says as an articulation of core principles or beliefs. In his inaugural address, he pledged to “take back” the Panama Canal, and to make the U.S. a “growing nation . . . that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.” And a few days into his administration, he conducted what The Economist described as a “fiery call” with the Danish prime minister, who insisted that Greenland (an autonomous part of Denmark) was not for sale.

But isn’t Trump supposed to be a supporter of “America First,” eschewing foreign intervention and entanglements to secure the U.S. “homeland” instead? That assertion ia based on a superficial understanding of Trump’s foreign policy, or at least the part of it he chose to highlight in his campaign.

There are many historical referents to what Trump is talking about. First, there is the history of the U.S. empire, which had, first, a continental focus (“Manifest Destiny”) and, second, a regional focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. Before the U.S. became a Eurasian power following its intervention the two Twentieth Century world wars, it established hemispheric hegemony by defeating Spain and making off with Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines.

But there is a specific history to “America First,” which was a substantial current in both the U.S. political elite and the populace in the late 1930s. From the late 1930s up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941, a substantial sentiment against U.S. intervention in the European war (much of it infused with pro-Nazi views) developed. America First also called for a U.S. military buildup to defend the continental U.S.—a policy that came to be known as “Fortress America.”

In the 1990s and 2000s, far right, anti-Semitic pundit and presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan carried the “America First” torch for a while. Buchanan won fringe support inside the Republican Party then, but many of his positions are dominant in the Trump GOP. Interestingly, Buchanan himself mused in 1990 about an expanded U.S. that would incorporate seceding Canadian provinces and a U.S. purchase of Greenland from Denmark. He concluded “The 21^st century could then not but be the second American century.”

It’s doubtful that Trump knows any of this history, although some of his Project 2025 cadre surely do. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s program for the Trump administration, notes that the U.S. has a “vested interest” in a “united and economically prosperous” Western hemisphere. It calls the region’s “overwhelming number of socialist and progressive regimes” that it considers “hemispheric security threats.” It also warns repeatedly, in a redux of the 1820s “Monroe Doctrine,” against Central and South American countries “moving rapidly into the sphere of anti-American, external state actors” such as China, Iran and Russia.

So “retaking” the Panama Canal and expelling the Hong-Kong based multinational that operates part of the canal’s operations under contract to the Panamanian government, is certainly in line with the anti-China thrust of Trump’s (and Biden’s before him) foreign policy. Trump’s lie that the Chinese army runs the canal provides ideological cover the way the old “domino theory” used to justify U.S. intervention to keep countries from falling to the “Red Menace”.

Trump’s obsession with Greenland can be understood similarly. Project 2025 also identifies the U.S., because of Alaska, as an “Arctic nation” which must assert itself against “global competitors, who are interested in exploiting the region’s strategic importance and accessing its bounty of natural resources.” The chief global competitors Project 2025 notes are Russia and China. It calls for strengthened economic and diplomatic ties with Greenland. But Trump, who famously mused about using the U.S. military to seize oil fields in the Middle East, certainly wouldn’t hold back if he decided to use force to get the U.S.’s hands on the island’s minerals.

As the left-wing scholar of Latin America Steve Ellner wrote,

Trump made his case for the annexation of the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland (a gateway to the Arctic) by arguing for the need to block China’s growing presence in the hemisphere. Trump’s threat to annex the territory of a sovereign nation says a lot about the bellicose mentality of the incoming president. It is also a reflection of the desperation of segments of the US ruling class and political elite in the face of the nation’s declining economic power. The real reason why Trump is targeting China, while he plays peacemaker between Russia and Ukraine, is economic.

China has displaced the U.S. as Latin America’s leading trading partner. And the U.S. wants to reverse that decline. Whether Trump’s bellicose moves will accomplish that is another story. Greenland and Panama, as well as NATO allies Canada and Denmark, aren’t just going to stand by while the U.S. tries to turn them into U.S. colonies. The end result of Trump’s bluster may be renegotiated terms of existing relationships, like Trump’s cosmetic rebranding of the North American Free Trade Agreement that he regularly denounced as a disaster on the 2016 campaign trail.

But the fact of a U.S. president openly embracing rhetoric and proposing policies that are throwbacks to 1898 should be a wake-up call to anti-imperialists everywhere.

Democratic Party liberal opposition is muted, and the need for a revolutionary left has never been greater

On January 27, while announcing the Trump administration’s suspension of trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans while his administration conducts an ideological review of federal spending, Matthew Vaeth, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, claimed “wokeness” as a major problem: “The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.”

As absurd as this claim is, the voices in opposition to it in mainstream politics are decidedly muted.

Democratic Party opposition to Trump’s assaults has been subdued, at best—not only in Congress, but in Democratic controlled states and cities. As Kuttner noted, in response to ICE’s aggressive raids on migrants, “Despite brave words about sanctuary cities, state and local officials have not cooperated but have not resisted. Citizens who try to shelter targets of these raids are themselves inviting arrest.”

Democrats have disproved themselves from claiming legitimacy in opposing Trump’s attacks—precisely because they paved the way for his draconian policies over the last decades. The urgent social crisis that we face cannot be resolved by Democratic Party politicians.

Nor will it be resolved in courtrooms—unless there is enormous outside pressure in the form of mass demonstrations.

The far right is gaining confidence and opposing them has never been more urgent. At this moment, the U.S. left is in complete retreat, mostly operating inside the Democratic Party in the futile hope that it can “be changed from within.”

At the same time, a new generation is being radicalized by the same contradictions described above. The hope for the future lies with them—and the formation of a new revolutionary left.