The authoritarian turn of the Trump presidency is reaching alarming proportions, raising the question of whether even basic rights can be defended against it, argues John Clarke

In Jack London’s 1908 novel, The Iron Heel, he imagines a future US society dominated by a dictatorial oligarchy that is ready to crush all forms of dissent and working-class resistance with the utmost brutality in order to preserve its power. London’s vision of the future was once applied to fascist dictatorships that emerged in the middle of the last century, but the rapidly intensifying authoritarian agenda of the Trump administration seems to offer a present-day point of comparison.

In an article for Counterfire on 5 October, Chris Bambery looked at the extraordinary meeting that took place in Washington, where Trump and his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, subjected senior US military commanders to tirades on the more warlike conduct that is expected of them under the present administration. Bambery noted, very correctly, that this gathering was intended to drive home an even greater commitment to US involvement in ‘forever wars’ across the world.

Domestic repression

It is worth noting that, in bringing together the top representatives of the armed forces, Trump also wanted to focus on the notion of a role for the military in his plans for greatly increased domestic repression. According to an Associated Press report, the president ‘proposed using American cities as training grounds for the armed forces and spoke of needing U.S. military might to combat what he called the “invasion from within”.’

As he addressed the stone-faced commanders, Trump ‘underscored … efforts not only to reshape contemporary Pentagon culture but to enlist military resources for the president’s priorities and for decidedly domestic purposes, including quelling unrest and violent crime.’ He declared that: ‘We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military … We’re under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.’

Trump’s commitment to the widespread use of immigration raids was the initial cutting edge of his effort to deploy repressive force against urban populations across the country. As the BBC reported in June, the administration wants to unleash the ‘largest deportation programme of criminals in the history of America.’

Senior Trump advisor, Stephen Miller, has even suggested that under ‘President Trump’s leadership, we are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day, and President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every day.’ Such an objective, obviously, rests on a capacity to set in motion a massive immigration enforcement operation, but the objectives of the exercise have now been expanded.

The administration is now claiming that, beyond arresting immigrants, the use of federal enforcement agencies is required to deal with a supposed crisis of rampant criminality within US cities. This has included an executive order, entitled ‘Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,’ that declares that endemic ‘vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe.’ It seems that even homeless people are now part of Trump’s ‘enemy within.’

Seizing upon the recent killing of Charlie Kirk and utilising his death as an opportunity to escalate the attack on dissent and protest, Trump and his leading functionaries are now accelerating their overall drive to turn many urban communities into effective war zones. 

On 8 September, two days before the shooting of Kirk, a statement was issued announcing that: ‘Today, the Department of Homeland Security announced Operation Midway Blitz in honor of Katie Abraham who was killed in a drunk driving hit-and-run car wreck caused by criminal illegal alien Julio Cucul-Bol in Illinois. This ICE operation will target the criminal illegal aliens who flocked to Chicago and Illinois because they knew Governor Pritzker and his sanctuary policies would protect them and allow them to roam free on American streets.’

This intensive crackdown has led to more than 800 arrests and it included a shocking operation in the early hours of 30 September. In this, according to Yahoo News, federal ‘agents rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters. Dozens of others, their faces hidden behind masks, arrived in moving trucks. In total, 300 officers stormed a South Side apartment building that Department of Homeland Security officials say harbored criminals.’

While those responsible for the raid defiantly asserted that federal ‘law enforcement officers will not stand by and allow criminal activity to flourish in our American neighborhoods,’ by their own reckoning, the raid only resulted in the arrest of two ‘confirmed Tren de Aragua [gang] members’ and one ‘suspected’ of affiliation.

The raid on the building was clearly and obviously a calculated exercise in intimidation and humiliation. The notion that some major blow was struck against criminal activity is absurd but, as Brandon Lee, a spokesman for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, put it, it ‘was a violent show of force in the middle of the night.’ He added that: ‘Taking families out of an apartment building in a residential neighborhood like that is harmful, is traumatic, and that is not something that people can easily recover from, whether they themselves were taken or whether they witnessed it.’

Military deployment

Using the crackdown on immigrants and a manufactured crisis around crime and other social problems, the Trump administration is seeking to advance its authoritarian agenda rapidly and this includes the unleashing of repressive power, going up to the level of military deployment. However, given that there is widespread opposition to Trump’s attacks on democratic freedoms, including a significant level of disagreement within the US establishment centred around the Democratic Party, it is hardly surprising that the use of federal security agencies in the major cities has come up against legal obstacles.

As reported in the Guardian, a federal judge has decided to ‘not immediately block the deployment of national guard troops in Illinois,’ in response to a lawsuit from that state but another judge in Oregon did prevent the use of such forces in Portland. Trump must obviously obtain a free hand to deploy the forces he needs, if he is going to be able to advance his plans successfully.

In response to these legal problems, Trump is again threatening to use the emergency powers provided by the Insurrection Act to clear the path to unrestricted military deployment. ‘We have an insurrection act for a reason,’ he told reporters. ‘If people were being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure I would do that.’

Tactical shifts and turns aside, Trump’s objectives are becoming clearer with every passing week. He wants something very close to the oligarchic rule depicted in Jack London’s novel and for this to be imposed and maintained on the basis of presidential edict. 

As one of the most venomous of Trump’s entourage, Stephen Miller is always one to watch. On 4 October, he put up a revealing post on X that proclaimed: ‘The issue before us now is very simple and clear. There is a large and growing movement of left-wing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.’

That the Democratic Party is included in this characterisation of the ‘enemy within’ is enormously telling. Obviously, that party is anything other than ‘far left’ and it has shared with the Republicans the role of politically directing the affairs of US imperialism over generations. However, the inclusion of the Democrats within an operation devoted to ‘left-wing’ terrorism that must be ‘dismantled’ through the use of ‘state power’ takes us in the direction of the one-party state.

As Trump’s second term unfolds, the assumption that he will take more authoritarian directions, while preserving the elements of bourgeois democracy, is being called into question. His ongoing attempt to elevate the executive order to the level of royal decree, his intense use of repressive forces in the major cities and his readiness to treat even mainstream political rivals as treasonous enemies speaks to a fundamental threat to democratic norms and the most basic freedoms.

Within the US, mass action and decisive resistance against the attacks of the Trump administration are taking on an ever more vital quality. Without a mobilised movement of sufficient breadth, power and determination, the future that Trump is preparing looks grim and the Iron Heel is no fanciful concept.