One hundred days have passed since the septuagenarian “consensus candidate for America’s robber baron caste," Donald Trump, returned to the US presidency on a tidal wave of popular support made possible by a pseudo-democratic, two-party political system in which voters, to use an old idiom, are stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Since his second inauguration, the president and his hand-picked underlings have been on a messianic mission to institutionalize injustice in the American nation-state’s every nook and cranny along the confines of trademark far-right ideologies, such as ultranationalism and hatred of equality.

Purging state institutions of critics of the new regime, criminalising dissent, and eroding the separation of powers that keeps autocracy in check have become the new normal in the US.

The recent arrest of a Wisconsin judge by a hijacked FBI now headed by a Trump die-hard who seems poised to return the country’s principal law enforcement agency to the persecutory glory days of J. Edgar Hoover constitutes yet another escalation of government attacks on an independent judiciary in what is being called a “constitutional crisis”, a euphemism for dictatorship-in-progress.

Whether it is Trump's attempts to dissolve entire federal agencies and remodel them beyond recognition so that they are in alignment with his retrograde agenda or his repeated threats to annex Canada and Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) and take control of the Panama Canal and what is left of the Gaza strip after nineteen months of "Israel’s" scorched-earth warfare, a few seem willing or able to counter the two-time president’s efforts to MAGAfy the country and expand American Lebensraum.

How alarming the situation is can be gauged by the fact that no US government has invited so many comparisons with the policies and behaviours of Nazi Germany in its formative years as Trump 2.0.

Be it Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) being likened to the Gestapo for systematically rounding up undocumented immigrants and foreign-born university students with legal status, Trump’s Gleichschaltung of state institutions, or his toxic rhetoric that mirrors Hitlerian hate speech, history is repeating itself today with frightening familiarity.

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'Gleichschaltung' in Trump’s America

The American fascism of Trump’s current term in office is not an aberration. McCarthyism and the mass internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II are just two of many domestic historical precedents for today's all-out persecution of Palestine solidarity activists and the mass incarceration of migrants in ICE detention centres, the Guantanamo gulag or Salvadorian mega-gaols.

It would also be remiss not to point out that Trump’s post-truth antics of saying one thing and doing another are not the sole monopoly of far-right US Republicanism. The Democratic Party is every bit as proficient in the politics of deception and putting lipstick on the pig of America’s so-called democracy, if not even more, as their rivals.

Malcolm X’s wolves-and-foxes analogy springs to mind, the essence of which he distilled into a powerful one-liner during his legendary Oxford Union debate when he said, “I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he’s wrong, than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil.”

Acts of organised malice, such as Trump’s racist deportation frenzy, are not occurring in a vacuum. Need we remind ourselves that it was the Democratic faux angel Barack Obama who oversaw more forced removals of immigrants than any president in US history, earning him the well-earned nickname Deporter-in-Chief?

Cloaked under the shroud of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives and minority representation, America’s politics of harm continued to thrive under the Biden administration.

Lest we forget the Black White House press secretary who would regurgitate Genocide Joe’s manufactured justifications for backing "Israel’s" ongoing colonial bloodlust in Gaza, or the Black UN emissary, equally indoctrinated by Zionism, whose grandmotherly demeanour belied her capability for cruelty when she would repeatedly raise her cursed hand to veto any attempt to end what has entered the annals of anti-hegemonic historiography as the “holocaust of our time.”

The key difference to the ousted Democrats is that with Trump, America’s proverbial chickens have come home to roost. We are simply witnessing the US empire’s autocratic and malevolent behaviour abroad turn inward.

After 100 days in power, Trump and his ilk, the greater of two elected evils which rule America on a rotating basis in what must be one of the most brazen examples of socially accepted political price-fixing, remain hell-bent on causing maximum harm with malice aforethought to humankind at home and beyond under the predictable pretext of putting “America first", even if that means hitting the self-destruct button on the world’s most powerful nation in the process.