Tony Chiado

Renee Good was murdered by the State before the New Year could exhale. She joins dozens of others as martyred by American Fascism. Millions more feel the weight of this regime’s oppression. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 road-mapped us to this particular moment. In July of 2024, Kevin Roberts aptly called this a revolutionary moment that would “remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be.” I had long appreciated, in an unpleasant sense, his candor. Of course, I took him to mean that the coming years could avoid bloodshed so long as the Left didn’t arm itself in resistance. But the past week shows me that I was wrong, and so was Roberts. Trump’s fascist movement had no end but war, no matter the peaceful path his opposition took.

In just the past month, Trump unilaterally violated the sovereignty of a foreign country and then threatened a half dozen more (including our allies in NATO). This is unparalleled in the history of American Foreign Policy. At home, the Regime significantly escalated against Somali-Americans the type of rhetoric that precipitates a pogrom. With a supportive media blowing wind into the Regime’s sails, it invaded Minneapolis to seize the political moment. Conducting widescale operations, ICE publicly executed Renee Good and the Trump Regime began a full media assault to push a big lie that betrays our eyes. We are confronted with the harsh understanding that this is now structural and cyclical as Timothy Snyder discussed in his recent article, “Maduro in Minneapolis.” War builds at home as it does abroad. On a dozen more fronts, the temperature rises.

The Trump Regime’s full escalation to war was always inevitable if the Regime was not toppled. There was no threading the needle and peacefully protesting injustice while avoiding the state’s crackdown. Such fantasy was always a type of tromp l’oeil painted upon our collective hope. Rather, Roberts was wrong in that the Left could not avoid bloodshed because the Trump Regime’s fascist project inherently needs war.

The entire Fascist project is aesthetically driven. In Nazi Germany, it was about the aesthetic of a master race. In Trump’s America, it is about the aesthetic of America’s fail sons still being entitled to a most privileged life. If aesthetics drive the fascist project, German theorist Walter Benjamin suggested that “all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.” Underlying the fascist beliefs about a master race or the stolen inheritance for fail sons is a belief that aesthetics of strength can create the fascist’s ideal hierarchy.

So war was always the culmination. At home as abroad, the projection of strength satisfies the fascist urge. Violence. War. They come from that. Now, The Trump Regime enters the 5th Stage of Robert Paxton’s Five Stages of Fascism: radicalization or entropy. As Fraenkel termed it, we now bear witness (and certainly play a role one way or another) to whether or not the Trump Regime will successfully fully entrench the “prerogative state,” a total radicalization of American politics, or have to retreat to some degree.