America’s Fascism Didn’t Start with Trump

Page one of the American history book is stained with blood. The first lines tell the story of genocide against the continent’s original peoples—a campaign of dispossession and dehumanization. Colonists didn’t just steal land; they stole names, cultures, and futures. This erasure set the tone for centuries to come.

The brutality continued with chattel slavery, the forced labor and subjugation that built the nation’s wealth. Turn a few more pages and you’ll find Japanese American internment camps, the redlining of Black communities, crushed labor movements, and the relentless expansion of arguably the most complex security state the world has ever seen. The story of the U.S. empire is not one of a nation suddenly threatened by authoritarianism. The American dream has always relied on violence, exclusion, and control.

American fascism didn’t descend a golden escalator. Just crack open the history book—if you’ve got the stomach for it. This nation was founded on blood, dispossession, and state-sanctioned terror. American exceptionalism was born of genocide, carried out by the so-called founding fathers and their successors in wave after wave of deliberate extermination. The Mystic Massacre, Sand Creek Massacre, and Sullivan Expedition weren’t isolated incidents—they were state policy. George Washington, lionized as a hero, ordered the destruction of Iroquois villages, burning crops and homes and leaving entire communities to starve and freeze.

The U.S. didn’t just use bullets and bayonets. The state deployed every tool: forced removals, reservations as open-air prisons, weaponized disease and starvation, and the systematic destruction of cultures through boarding schools and forced assimilation. The message was clear—conform or die. If that’s not fascism, what is?

They say genocide was America’s original sin, and chattel slavery was its business model. For centuries, the American economy ran on the backs of enslaved people, bought, sold, and brutalized as property. These atrocities didn’t happen in spite of the state—they were engineered by it. Laws defined people as property, stripping them of humanity and unleashing a regime of terror to keep them in line.

Every institution played a part. Congress wrote fugitive slave laws turning white Americans into bounty hunters. Slave patrols—the forerunners of modern policing—stalked the countryside, authorized to brutalize or kill. If enslaved people rebelled, they faced public execution and mass reprisals. The abolition of slavery didn’t end the terror. Jim Crow laws, lynch mobs, and chain gangs ensured white supremacy remained the law of the land—North, South, East, and West.

The state’s appetite for oppression didn’t stop with Indigenous people or African-Americans. Anyone who threatened the established order—radicals, immigrants, workers—became targets. The machinery of surveillance and suppression was running long before the NSA or Patriot Act. During the Red Scare, the state waged war on leftists and labor organizers. Decades later, COINTELPRO was initiated as the FBI’s secret war on Black liberation, antiwar groups, and socialists. The message was always the same: step out of line, and the full weight of the security apparatus will crush you.

None of this is ancient history. Legalized violence, mass incarceration, surveillance, and criminalized dissent are the backbone of the American state. The capacity for repression has only grown more sophisticated and totalizing. Enter Donald J. Trump. Liberals and the “Blue MAGA” crowd claim Trump is a rogue president who warped the system. In reality, Trump is the system’s most authentic creation. Strip away the spray tan and gold-plated bravado, and you have a man wielding the same tools the state has always held: repression, scapegoating, and the rabid pursuit of executive authority. Trump’s authoritarian populism isn’t a break from American tradition—it’s an acceleration of it, following a playbook written long before he took office.

From the moment Trump launched his campaign, he tapped into America’s deep well of grievance, encouraging violence, demonizing immigrants, and promising to use state power against enemies—real or imagined. His first 100 days were a master class in cruelty and chaos: mass deportations, family separations, crackdowns on protest, and open contempt for the rule of law. But these tools were forged by decades of bipartisan support: the imperial presidency, militarized borders, the surveillance state, and normalized executive overreach. Trump simply dropped the polite pretense.

If you listen to the “resistance,” you’d think America is locked in an epic battle for its soul. But look past the talk show monologues, hashtags, and strongly worded letters, and you’ll find a liberal establishment that’s less a bulwark against fascism and more a tool for normalizing it. The DNC and its media allies have mastered symbolic outrage—pink hats, sound bites, fundraising emails promising to “fight back.” For decades, the opposition has perfected the politics of the lesser evil, asking voters to choose between open cruelty and a more polished brand of polite violence.

With every election, the Overton window is dragged further right. The “acceptable” political spectrum narrows until the radical left is little more than a myth. Healthcare for all, a living wage, police abolition—ideas that once animated campaigns are now dismissed as utopian fantasies or, worse, Russian plots. The liberal idea of resistance is a return to “normalcy,” which for millions means the same old misery, wrapped in a blue ribbon. Meanwhile, the far right grows bolder, the left grows emptier, and the state’s capacity for unchecked brutality remains unrivaled. The liberal establishment’s greatest trick is convincing the public that voting for the “lesser evil” is the height of engagement. But the empire rolls on, unmoved by hashtags or hope.

If we’ve learned anything from the past decade, it’s that real resistance doesn’t come from “voting blue no matter who.” The idea that the state will reform itself out of existence is pure fantasy. The system can’t be fixed from within—it made the rules. If you think a kinder, gentler ruling class is interested in reversing centuries of oppression, it’s time to wake up.

Anarchists have always known the problem isn’t who holds the office, but that the office exists at all—and the sprawling apparatus of domination that surrounds it. Real resistance means rejecting the state and the rigid rules it imposes while ignoring them itself. It’s mutual aid networks feeding and sheltering those abandoned by all parties. It’s direct action disrupting pipelines, evicting ICE, and blocking deportations. Most of all, it means refusing the narrow limits of “lesser evil” choices. The system will not save us from itself—only we can do that.

So next time you see a Blue MAGA agent warning that Trump is turning America into Nazi Germany, remember: America was perfecting ethnic cleansing long before the Nazis. Removing Trump won’t fix the problem if the state remains.

The Center for a Stateless Society (www.c4ss.org) is a media center working to build awareness of the market anarchist alternative