Trump opens the way to persecuting the opposition

WashingtonThe screams of "Fight, fight, fight!" that Donald Trump brandished After surviving the Butler attack, they were not only a tool to galvanize his own followers. They were also a promise of revenge that, a year after the episode, is rampant throughout a much more fractured society in which the president has opened the way for the persecution of the opposition. Whether in universities, scientific research centers, the media, or in the streets. The censorship of Jimmy Kimmel's show for a comment about Charlie Kirk's murderer and the announcement that he will classify the anti-fascist movement as a "terrorist organization" are the most recent examples, but they will not be the last.

Kirk's murder has only been one more pretext to leave euphemisms behind in a political and social arena where the ultraconservative movement has always considered the left to be the enemy. Trump's return to the White House was a necessary condition to free the United States from what they call "the agenda." woke". The summer of the campaign, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation –the think tank ultraconservative behind Project 2025–, explained on Steve Bannon's podcast: "For the first time in history, the conservative movement in that country is as organized as they are [the left]. What we're building here is not just for 2025, it's for the next century of America." He added: "I want to be part of what I call the second American revolution, which will happen bloodlessly if the left allows it."

Trump, consciously or not, is driving this "second American revolution" surrounded by loyalists who don't stop him and also by some of the authors of Project 2025. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, who threatened to use the network –"We can do it willingly or by force"–, is one of the authors of the document. Like border czar Thomas Homan, who has cracked down on migrants, and the president's advisor, Stephen Miller, the great ideologue behind the campaign of mass deportations.

Miller spoke this way about the left in the country these days, before Trump announced his intention to designate anti-fascism as terrorism: "We are going to channel all the rage we have about the organized campaign that led to this murder into rooting out and dismantling these terrorist networks... identifying, dismantling, dismantling, and destroying these networks, and making America safe for the American people again." Miller criminalizes a large portion of the citizenry, where it seems there is only room for one American people, which is his own.

Calling a movement as broad as anti-fascism a terrorist movement is not an oversight either. Vagueness and vagueness are part of Trump's administrative language, which he exploits to stretch to the limit and accommodate anything that bothers him. It's the same pattern that has been followed. to try to interfere with academic freedom in universities, accusing them of allowing antisemitism. Under the Trump administration, any public stance critical of the Gaza war can be considered anti-SemiticUnder this broader reworking of the concept, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reviews the social media accounts of visa applicants. and takes it into account as a criterion for denying them.

The DHS has also been harassing the media online these days, publicly accusing them of spreading hate against immigration agents with their news stories about raids on undocumented immigrants. "We call on the media and the left to stop the hateful rhetoric against President Trump, his supporters, and our brave officers," the department wrote in a press release Wednesday. On Thursday, it shared a story from the Associated Press and accused the department of "attempting to create a climate of fear and discredit law enforcement" to explain the negative impact of Washington's militarization in the attendance of migrant children in school.

In the same way that Trump has been responsible for eroding the two great countervailing powers of the system of checks and balances of American democracy – the legislative and judicial branches – now wants to bring the fourth branch to its knees: journalism, which in democracies is known by that name for its oversight work. But the president's absolute ego does not fit with the idea of accountability. The intention to subdue the press under his alternative reality was already proven at the beginning of his term, when he banned the Associated Press from pool (the group of journalists who follow the president) from the Oval Office for not accepting the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as "America's Golf Course," as he had ordered. AP had to ride out the punishment until the judges ruled in their favor.

Even the First Amendment, which protects freedom of expression, has been questioned by Attorney General Pam Bondi. Regarding Kirk's murder, Bondi posted on social media that "hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is not protected by the First Amendment; it is a crime." The statements from the Trump establishment have even made their own people shake their heads.

Former Fox host Tucker Carlson said: "We hope that a year from now, the chaos we're seeing in the wake of [Kirk's] assassination is not exploited to introduce hate speech laws in this country. If that were to happen... there would never be a more justified time."

Trump began the purge in two directions: from within, cleaning out the administration's civil service so that it wouldn't hinder him, and from below, targeting undocumented immigrants, the weakest tier of society. Now the repressive campaign that began on day 1 of his term is only following the logical path, from the inside out: the media. And from the bottom up: his citizens.