WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance plan to accelerate their revenge campaign against “the left” and its supposed funders, possibly as soon as two weeks from now, both say. Other figures in the MAGA movement are joining in and piling on.
Their pretext: The assassination of prominent right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, a top Trump ally, while he spoke at a university in Utah.
After Kirk’s murder on Sept. 11, Trump ordered flags lowered to half-staff and spent a four-minute speech on Sept. 17, accusing “the left” of fomenting the violence that led to the assassination.
Trump’s targets have long included so-called “leftist” groups, even when their left-wing credentials are not at all clear. One such target is the so-called “antifa” trend, which is a shortened word for “anti-fascist.” The problem is that antifa does not really exist as an organization. It has no elected leaders, no headquarters, no bank accounts, and cannot be contacted in any way.
In recent years, the media took to narrowly labeling street protesters who often dress in black, wear masks, or engage in vandalism as “antifa.” The actual politics of those whom the corporate press have lumped together in the antifa category are varied. They’ve included anarchists, anti-globalization groupings, anti-racist demonstrators, climate protesters, and more.
The original “antifa” groups arose in the 1920s and ’30s in Italy and Germany. The word antifa first appeared in German in 1930 as a shortened form of the name of the group Antifaschistische Aktion. Anti-fascist movements have existed ever since in countries around the world and have resisted figures like Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Augusto Pinochet, Trump, and other far-right leaders.
To be known as an anti-fascist was long an honorific title. The World War II alliance against Nazi Germany between the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain, for instance, was often designated an “anti-fascist coalition.”
Now, however, Trump wants to use “antifa” as a smear to justify targeting all those who stand against him. Singling out that label and applying it broadly provides a convenient tool to designate almost anyone opposed to the Trump agenda as part of the alleged organization, and thus as a terrorist, according to administration officials.
CPUSA denounces violence
The Communist Party USA is one of the few strong voices so far denouncing Trump’s anti-left crusade and his use of Kirk’s murder as a pretext.
The party opposes violence, including murder, and says such acts solve nothing and give Trump the pretext to attack the left. Co-chair Joe Sims said in a statement posted on YouTube that mass peaceful struggle and resistance against Trumpite fascism is what is absolutely necessary to solve the systemic problems of racism, exploitation, the wealth gap, and skyrocketing prices that are hurting the overwhelming majority of the population.
“We do not agree with assassinations. We do not agree with acts of terrorism. That only brings about greater repression,” said Sims.
“The problem” of repression “is not solved by eliminating individuals. The problem is systemic, and our goal is to fundamentally change the system…by mass public pressure from the working class and the broader public. Such peaceful resistance would include strikes, occupations, demonstrations, running for office, and collective action,” said Sims.
The dragnet expands
It’s not only avowedly left organizations that are being pointed to by MAGA. Unions could be in the Trump-Vance crosshairs, too. Vance explained Trump targets will include non-profit non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Months ago, News Guild President Jon Schleuss pointed out that unions—who have been in the vanguard of opposing Trump’s dictates—are non-profit NGOs.
The administration is also pledging to go after sources of funding, particularly when it comes to tax-exempt organizations they don’t like.
Trump recently used his megaphone, the “Fox & Friends” program, to announce that he wants a federal racketeering investigation into liberal donor and multimillionaire George Soros and his foundation. Trump later told NBC News that Soros “should be put in jail.”
The 95-year-old Soros, who has long been a target for right-wing antisemites, is a Hungarian Jewish refugee who survived the Nazi occupation of his country as a young man. He’s been a target, for both his politics and his religion.
Vance also put the left-liberal magazine The Nation on the list of possible investigation targets. At one point, it received a Soros donation.
MAGA politicians in Congress are also joining in the effort, which is becoming more reminiscent of the McCarthy Red Scare period. Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., chair of the House Oversight Committee, demanded Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent investigate and prosecute multimillionaire Neville Roy Singham, alleging that he is an “unregistered foreign agent” for the Communist Party of China.
Comer alleges that Singham is “funding and supporting various extremist entities” in the U.S., such as CodePink, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the People’s Forum. Citing a right-wing post on X as supposed evidence, Comer claimed that Singham’s activities “expanded to include the foment of unrest and civil disobedience in Los Angeles.”
By contrast, most congressional Democrats have been supine in their responses, though some denounced both Kirk’s murder and that of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortmann, a Democrat, and her husband weeks before—by a right-winger.
Trump’s corporate enablers
The mass mobilization Sims demands may have to occur soon. As Trump sounds the clarion call to war against the left, others in his MAGA camp are listening and obeying. And corporations, interested only in their bottom lines and in government aid to enhance their cash and clout, meekly obey, just as German industrialists did when Hitler came to power.
A prime recent example is the fate of ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. The network summarily fired him after an innocuous monologue about Kirk. Under pressure from its affiliate stations—who also eye the bottom line—ABC cancelled his show.
This came after Brendan Carr, the Trump-named chair of the Federal Communications Commission, which licenses TV networks and stations, issued an “obey or else” threat in a televised interview. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr declared.
ABC caved, as other corporations, also eyeing the bottom line and fearful of Trumpite clout and orders, have. Trump renewed the pressure on Sept. 18 on the way back to the U.S. from a state visit to Britain where he claimed inflation in the U.S. “is solved” and the economy is in good shape. His attacks on the left, some observers say, are also an attempt to draw attention away from his poor performance on the economy.
He is using the Federal Communications Commission to further that policy. He told reporters aboard Air Force One that the FCC should consider yanking broadcast licenses for networks “that give me only a bad name. “All they do is hit Trump,” he elaborated. “They’re licensed! They’re not allowed to do that. They’re an arm of the Democrat Party.”
Trump’s critique brought a sharp response from the public interest group Common Cause. “If media giants keep caving, free speech is at risk,” it warned in urging people to sign a petition to demand the big media firms find some spine. They haven’t so far.
“Time and time again, when Trump or his cronies say ‘Jump,’ corporate media giants ask ‘How high?’ When our government…threatens to retaliate against its critics, these profit-driven companies are all too willing to comply in advance.”
Right wing excels in cancel culture
“The president wanted these people”—Kimmel and other commentators—“cancelled and their shows cancelled,” another analyst said. Even with such shutdowns, “they [the right] won’t stop. They’ll keep gobbling and gobbling and gobbling things up.”
Kimmel, he added, “was a sacrifice” to a greater corporate goal: FCC approval of a monster merger involving ABC.
Another Trumpite aim is to inject fear into its foes in advance of next year’s off-year elections. By going after both left-leaning groups and their funders, Trump and company seek to dry up the election volunteer and campaign dollar streams for progressive candidates.
Rewriting history
Trump’s lie about the left also rewrites U.S. history. The national record is full of violence from the right, with very little from the left. It traces back to Southern aristocratic planters who enslaved Black people, leading to several brutally crushed rebellions.
The right-wing violence runs through the “No Irish Need Apply” Know-Nothings of the 1850s, the Civil War, post-Reconstruction Jim Crow, and lynchings of hundreds of Blacks and one Jew from the 1870s through the 1950s.
It also includes the “Red Scares” of 1919 and the 1950s; government bullets killing strikers in Minneapolis, San Francisco, West Virginia, Chicago’s South Side, and Ludlow, Colo.; along with anti-war students at Kent State University in Ohio and Jackson State University in Mississippi; J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and its witch hunts; and the KKK.
Right-wingers murdered Medgar Evers, four elementary school girls in Birmingham, Ala., three college-age civil rights crusaders in Mississippi, Malcolm X, and Dr. Martin Luther King.
Even Watergate was violent, though nobody died. One Nixon aide proposed torching the progressive Brookings Institution think-tank. And Nixon’s “Plumbers” burglarized not just the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate offices in D.C., but the office of the psychiatrist for Daniel Ellsburg, the analyst who revealed the Pentagon Papers.
Right-wing violence culminated, of course, in the Trumpite invasion, insurrection, and attempted coup d’etat at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, which killed five people and injured 140 more. It continues in the readiness of MAGA loyalists, mostly singly, to strike again, a former FBI director has told Congress.
“They’re trying to create an atmosphere that will lead to greater repression,” CPUSA co-chair Sims elaborated about Trump and his cavalcade of acolytes and torrent of threats. “But I don’t think the American people are going to go for that.”
C.J. Atkins, John Wojcik, and Chauncey K. Robinson contributed to this story.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
CONTRIBUTOR
