Trump Is Serious About Repression

These are not just some eccentric, obscure ideas that one or a handful of Trump’s people see as a passion project, but which the man himself is unlikely to pull the trigger on. Both Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, have publicly talked about “aggressively attack[ing]” universities and “reclaim[ing]” them from “Marxist maniacs and lunatics,” which makes it hard to argue Project Esther or Scalise’s threats don’t have support at the top of the ticket.

More broadly, destroying the Left has been an animating idea for Trump and many of his supporters since at least as far back as 2020, when he declared to bipartisan applause that “America will never be a socialist country” and privately admitted that socialism “might not be so easy” to beat in an election. While Trump started his political career attacking immigrants, China, and bad trade deals, anti-socialist rhetoric has become steadily more central to his and his allies’ messaging over the past five years, with the former president saying in a speech last year that America was in the midst of “the final battle” and that “at the end of the day, either the communists destroy America, or we destroy the communists.”

Prominent Trump supporters have written books openly calling for a state crackdown on the Left. Vance and others in Trump’s orbit have even endorsed one of them, a book that calls leftists “unhumans” and suggests waging violent campaigns to annihilate them, pointing to brutal dictators like Augusto Pinochet and literal fascist Francisco Franco as models.

Trump himself has repeatedly vowed to make good on these words, promising a group of wealthy donors this year he would “set that movement back twenty-five or thirty years” if reelected, referring to campus protests against Israel’s genocide, and calling them part of a “radical revolution” that he would defeat. Go back and read those headline-grabbing authoritarian Trump quotes the mainstream press has spent the last year raising the alarm about: they aren’t just referring to Democratic lawmakers and liberal celebrities, but are often explicitly directed at left-wing activists.

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump said last Veterans Day.

When Trump talks about “the enemy within,” he sometimes says he’s referring to Democratic lawmakers and the press. But he has also made clear that he means those “radical left lunatics” whom he thinks the military should be deployed against, or “the Marxists, the communists.” In fact, at his Madison Square Garden rally this past Monday, he made it clear he sees the Democratic Party as simply the front for the real enemy that must be destroyed.

“We’re running against something far bigger than Joe and Kamala, and far more powerful than them,” he said, “which is a massive, vicious, criminal radical Left machine that runs today’s Democrat Party. They’re just vessels. In fact, they’re perfect vessels, because they’ll never give them a hard time, they’ll do whatever they want. . . . It’s just this amorphous group.”

Some wave this away by saying Trump didn’t do any of this in his first term. But many authoritarian leaders don’t instantly seize absolute power, instead doing so gradually over a matter of years, according to the needs of maintaining their grip on power. That is certainly the case for Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, Trumpworld’s chosen model for leadership, who lost reelection after his first term and only began centralizing power upon returning to office eight years later. They also tend to do so as guardrails disappear — as they will have for Trump, who is now committed to ensuring that the few voices of restraint in his first presidency won’t be there to hold him back this time.

This also misses that Trump’s final term did see an alarming jolt of authoritarianism, as militarized police and Homeland Security agents attacked protesters, seized them off the streets in unmarked vans, and even summarily executed one.

The Left likely won’t be able to depend on the same kind of across-the-board, institutional liberal resistance to Trump in his second term. Already, ultrawealthy liberals are retreating from the loud opposition to Trump that carried so much social and cultural cache after 2016 in the face of his threats. As early as a year ago, liberal civil servants were carrying out preemptive self-censorship out of fear of an eventual Trump presidency.

Trump’s planned assault on the pro-Palestinian movement and leftists will likely get crucial support from right-wing Democrats in Congress who have an antagonistic relationship with the Left and have sided with Republicans over the past year in support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer is already promising to pass a speech-chilling “antisemitism” bill in the lame duck period after the election, which would be a boon to Trump’s McCarthyite plans. Corporate-funded groups that hold sway within the Democratic Party like Third Way have long been looking for the opportunity to purge the party of its progressive and socialist wing.

It’s not clear if the liberal establishment press, which has played a key role in demonizing pro-Palestinian protesters and legitimizing police violence against them, will step up either. Look at the recent exchange between Vance and CNN’s Jake Tapper over Trump’s threat to sic the military on what he called “the enemy within”: when Vance protested that Trump was simply talking about “far-left lunatics” and “people rioting” — meaning, in the language that elites in both parties now use, George Floyd protesters and other demonstrators — Tapper ignored this flagrantly alarming statement and instead repeatedly pressed Vance on whether Trump was actually talking about Democratic members of Congress like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. The question raised is whether Tapper would be comfortable with Trump training the military “only” on powerless protesters instead of powerful Democratic officials.

Already in Action

If you’re still not convinced of Trump and his allies’ seriousness, then consider the fact that we’ve already seen Republicans put this agenda into motion on a smaller scale.

There was, for instance, last year’s campaign by ultraconservative state-level Republican officials to undermine the American Library Association (ALA) over its election of self-described “Marxist lesbian” Emily Drabinski to its presidency. One part age-old Red Scare hysteria, and one part Biden-era right-wing “groomer” gay panic, the controversy saw state Freedom Caucuses work, one after another, to withdraw their state libraries from the ALA over Drabinski’s political beliefs and sexual orientation.

The episode is one illustration of the way that Trumpworld’s planned crackdown would work in practice. The aim here wasn’t necessarily to destroy the ALA, but, as with Scalise’s threats against universities, to intimidate and incentivize it to cut ties with and carry out its own repression of left-wing and other undesirable voices. And unfortunately, Drabinski’s constitutional rights did not always get a full-throated defense from liberals, who responded more with a defensive crouch.

Indiana, meanwhile, has seen several bills passed through its GOP-controlled state legislature and signed into law this year that read like a state-level forerunner of Project Esther. Arguably most alarming is SEA 202, written and pushed through by the state’s conservative GOP officials and bitterly opposed by its university faculty organizations, with the aim of punishing professors for speech that conservatives disagree with.

Part of the bill is a tenure review measure of the kind that has popped up in similarly Republican-dominated states, barring faculty from getting promoted or tenure if they press on their students’ political views that don’t have to do with the discipline they’re teaching or fail to foster “free expression” and “intellectual diversity,” forcing tenured faculty to be reviewed and, if appropriate, disciplined every five years.

The other part sets up what Indiana University South Bend associate professor Benjamin Balthaser calls “a snitch system” that empowers students, colleagues, and staff to accuse professors of violating these rules, and which lets the state’s governor-appointed commission on higher education survey students about whether their college encourages “expression of different opinions and ideologies.”

The bill, which has already been challenged in court by the state ACLU, wound its way through the legislature at the same time as a separate bill that would have banned antisemitism from Indiana’s public education system using a controversial, overly broad definition of the term that includes criticism of Israel. Though that bill was vetoed — not because of objections from free speech advocates, but because in the process of legislative compromise, its supporters didn’t think the final language went far enough — the fact that the two bills passed more or less simultaneously is disquieting to critics of Israel’s war, suggesting that they were part of a unified agenda.

“It could be on one level a box-checking exercise that amounts to nothing, or it could be supercharged and be this giant purge,” says Balthaser. “All the tools are there for a purge, but it’s political: if Trump wins, it’ll be supercharged.”

That’s on top of all the other speech-chilling measures we’ve seen from deep-red states like Florida, like “anti-riot” legislation that is in reality aimed at sharply limiting the right to protest, and the banning of Students for Justice in Palestine from campus. There is clearly an appetite among GOP elites nationwide to launch a crackdown on political views and activists they don’t like that a second Trump term will fully unleash.

A Looming Threat

Eight years’ worth of rhetoric against Trump as an authoritarian and fascist have, by this point, numbed many people to these kinds of accusations, even on the Left. But it is very clear that whatever label you want to put on it, Trump and his allies are planning a concerted assault on both the movement for Palestinian justice and the broader Left that has not been seen in decades. And it is more than likely this is a not only campaign that he will have broad latitude to unilaterally wage, but also one that will likely get crucial support from the other two branches of government, including from both Republican allies and right-wing Democrats in Congress.

A Harris presidency will no doubt have its own costs, given the corporate, centrist campaign she has run, the conservative coalition she’s assembling, and the dreadful, wrongheaded lessons the Democratic Party will learn from winning an election on the back of carrying out a genocide and shutting out that crime’s progressive opponents. But a second Trump term won’t be to the benefit of the Left either, instead leading to, at best, four years of organizing diverted to endless defensive battles, and at worst, a wave of government repression that weakens, and possibly destroys, both the pro-Palestinian movement and the Left.