In Twilight-Zone USA

The Editors

Chicago: May Day Defense of immigrant rights. (Sarah Jane Rhee)

IN THE UNITED States’ post-Constitutional twilight zone of the second Trump presidency, interlocking conflicts are converging. Neither the domestic nor global orders are any longer “rules-based” in the ways that have been previously assumed. The consequences are unpredictable but likely to be explosive.

Socialists of course are the sharpest critics of the United States’ much-acclaimed constitutional order with all its entrenched anti-democratic fences. And the “rules-based international order” for the global South has always meant imperialist domination and exploitation, crushing debt and carnage.

We recognize, however, that today’s attacks from the right and ultra-racist, Christian-supremacist forces — abetted by the bottomless cesspool of Trump and his cronies’ corruption — are squarely aimed at crippling basic democratic rights and freedoms, not extending them.

That must be the starting point for any meaningful discussion of the present situation. The crises that demand central attention in the present moment include:

1) The genocidal destruction of Gaza and the imminent threat to the survival of the Palestinian people in their homeland. U.S. imperialism is indifferent to the fate of Palestine — any outcome will do, as long as there’s “stability” and U.S. supremacy in the Middle East. But the current Israeli government, and the neo-nazi settler movement that drives its agenda, envisions a future without a significant Palestinian population blocking the growth of “Greater Israel.” This project demands the mass removal of the Gaza (and West Bank) population, but there is of course no place to move them.

The realities of mass starvation in Gaza, as accurately pre­dicted months ago, can’t be hidden any longer from global attention or the U.S. public — hence the collapse in support for Israel and U.S. policy especially, among young people and the Democratic Party’s voting base. Globally, the spectacle of this catastrophe is shredding America’s prestige and “leadership” image — although not nearly fast enough.

Meanwhile, this imperialist crime-of-the-century is feeding straight back into U.S. politics. The Trump regime’s exercise of extortion and dictatorship over U.S. universities is spearheaded by the weaponized smears about “rampant campus antisemitism.” (See Purnima Bose’s detailed discussion of Indiana University in this issue.)

Reign of Terror in Immigrant Communities

2) Most of the U.S. population is not living under police-state conditions. But a significant sector is facing exactly that reality: immigrant families and communities — and not only the undocumented individuals, who at any moment may be snatched up by masked ICE goons in unmarked vans, for incarceration in mass detention concentration camps followed by peremptory deportation.

The far-right Supreme Court majority (it’s entirely misleading to call it “conservative”) has abetted these practices in a series of rulings that are being energetically called out in eloquent warnings by Justices Jackson and Sotomayor in particular.

Beside the cruelty of sadism-for-its-own-sake, waves of anti-immigrant raids, detentions and deportations — with no process of appeal — to third countries (El Savador, Guatemala, South Sudan!) is the Trump regime’s leading method of testing the exercise of unlimited executive power overriding established legal procedures and long-established Constitutional protections.

These methods can be extendable to everyone, citizen or resident or any other status. The use of mass sweeps; proclamation of clearly fraudulent “national emergency” pretexts for deployment of National Guard and military on the streets; demonization of communities of people with legally-protected status (“they’re eating the dogs!”), peremptory removal of their status — these can all be portents of measures for use against broader populations.

Previous administrations preferred to keep removals and deportations mostly under the radar, while for Trump and his clearly fascist advisors like Stephen Miller, the point is to be as open and as vicious as possible. This satisfies the MAGA base and terrorizes communities with the specter of disappearances, of “Alligator Alcatraz,” Guantanamo and the Salvadoran CECOT torture prison.

This campaign may bring about waves of self-deportations of people for whom trying to live and work under police-state terror is just too much. On the other hand, community-based and legal immigrant defense efforts are growing, along with popular disgust over snatches of people at their court hearings, peremptory deportations of young people and of working immigrants who have lived in the United States for decades, even from childhood.

Deportations and rumors-of-deportations can also have crippling effects on the agriculture, construction, and hotel and restaurant industries. The simple fact is that the broken, restrictive U.S. immigration system is incompatible with much of the economy’s actual reliance on immigrant labor.

The Birthright Test

3) Trump’s blatant attempt to abolish birthright citizenship most frontally challenges any limits on arbitrary executive power. The move has been blocked by court rulings and will ultimately be heard in the far-right majority Supreme Court — whose legitimacy is also at stake.

Nothing in the U.S. Constitution, indeed few things in the English language, can be clearer than the plain wording of the post-Civil War Fourteenth Amendment — that all those born in the U.S. “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” (i.e. other than diplomats’ families not subject to U.S. law) — are “citizens of the United States and the states where they reside.”

Besides the obvious enormous importance in its own right for individuals and families affected, removing the right of birthright citizenship would effectively make all assumed Constitutional protections — from the First Amendment to voting rights — subject to the whims of executive power.

The result would be a yawning vacuum of what constitutes eligibility for citizenship, or the authority to confer or take it away, and create a whole class of stateless-from-birth persons without “the right to have rights” (as Hannah Arendt famously put it). Even further, the Trump apparatus is ready to try stripping a wide swath of naturalized U.S. citizens of their citizenship.

If the Supreme Court — which already blocked the authority of district courts to issue nationwide injunctions against arbitrary executive power — ultimately allowed the Trump gang to strip birthright citizenship, all Constitutional protections would be effectively reduced to decorative wallpaper (including the authority of the Court itself), opening up the spectacle of individual states making their own definitions of citizenship.

Because in this almost unimaginable scenario it is not entirely guaranteed that the country would emerge in one recognizable piece, it seems logical to assume that Trump’s executive assault on birthright citizenship will be stopped.
But there are already two far-right Justices (Thomas and Alito) for whom no protection or precedent, not even (for example) the right to contraception, is beyond reconsideration. As in other circumstances, the degree of public concern and attention will influence the legal outcome of this genuine Constitutional crisis.

Explosive Contradictions

4) The enormous greed and indolence of the U.S. ruling class, and the barely-hidden racism of much of it, makes much of Trump’s economic agenda widely attractive to capital. But Trump’s runaway (mostly illegal) imposition of tariffs threaten the stability of the U.S. and world economy, including the threat of a “stagflation” recession and potential hemorrhaging in the bond market, which via the sale of Treasury bills is absolutely essential to financing the U.S. debt. A disaster on the scale of the 2008-09 housing collapse, or the impact of the Covid pandemic, looms.

Fragments of the tariff agenda make some sense from an imperialist standpoint. If the United States is to rule the world (which is not our agenda, but certainly that of U.S. capital), it does require domestic steel, aluminum and semiconductor industries. But sweeping tariffs, including on friendly allies who are essential in a U.S. confrontation with China, serve only as a regressive sales tax that hurts less affluent U.S. consumers and hits the poor hardest — while forcing Canada, Mexico and European countries to scramble for more diverse trading partnerships.

Even this pales in comparison to the Trump/DOGE gutting of the federal government. It’s not really cutting costs, but destroying the very parts of government that actually work well and provide vital services, from monitoring dangerous weather to providing accurate economic data — and the terrifying threats to public health with the cancellation of vaccine development and shredding of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Observers are amazed to witness Republican “mainstream conservatives” subordinating themselves to the Trump cult, voting for Cabinet appointments, Medicaid cuts and other budget measures that they absolutely know are ruinous.

The Big “Beautiful” Bill puts the country firmly on the road to bankruptcy ($3.4 trillion added to the debt over 10 years), throws rural and some urban hospitals at extreme risk due to Medicaid cuts, wipes out essential scientific research and extreme-weather warnings, and perpetrates a whole series of other disasters. Possibly saving the Republicans from the furious political backlash is the fact that the Democratic party is deservedly even more unpopular and lacking any identifiable vision on the national level.

What’s the Purpose?

The Trump administration did not inherit a deep immediate crisis. There are longterm problems of the federal apparatus, and certainly an imperial imperative to face the growing rivalry and potential confrontation with China. Things like higher education are increasingly unaffordable (a problem that the drive to turn our colleges into branches of Trump University makes worse, not better).

None of this demanded a wholesale destruction of state services or the violent police-state assault on vulnerable immigrant communities.

If we think of examples of reactionary or authoritarian regimes, in general their policies serve some identifiable purpose. The 1980s Reagan presidency began with the sharp recession induced by interest rate hikes under Paul Volcker to squeeze out inflation, then produced neoliberal “supply-side economics” — with dire consequences for the working class but highly tangible benefits for capital’s profits and “stability.”

The Pinochet coup in 1973 Chile beat back a potential working-class revolutionary challenge, and unleashed savage free-market “reforms” that at least initially satisfied capital and sectors of the middle class.

Even if we look at extreme totalitarian cases, the first few years of Hitler’s rule reflated the German economy, strengthening his political base. And the initial period of Stalin’s rule (the mid-1920s) in the Soviet Union saw economic recovery and a few relatively good years for the peasantry — before the violent turn to forced collectivization, producing genocidal famine in Ukraine and other horrors.

Without in any way equating these disparate examples, they each represented some class project and/or response to crises. The Trump agenda, aside from a few identifiable strategic points of economic nationalism (e.g. steel tariffs) and military capability (the appalling expansion of war-making capabilities to AI and space technology, catastrophic in themselves), produces more problems than it “solves.”

There’s some speculation about whether the 2026 midterm elections might be somehow cancelled on some “emergency” pretext. This hardly seems necessary. The extreme partisan gerrymandering already underway, again enabled by the Supreme Court, could do the trick in a country where the national electorate is narrowly divided. We’re also seeing Trump’s attempts to sharply restrict new voter registration, legal threats and harassment at voting places, and to change the Census.

We understand how the deep roots of Trump’s ascendancy are fed by the appalling growth in inequality, the justified fears of much of the population that they and their children have no affordable future, and the contradictions of an imperial colossus seeking to rule the world while its domestic society faces stagnation and worse.

The institutional twilight zone created by Trump and his cult presents many frightening features and even nastier potential outcomes, including what could become a full “post-Constitutional crisis.” We have only briefly touched some of the central threats from the new Trump presidency — the first time as farce, the second as tragedy.

What emerges highly depends on how the population, social movements and above all labor and the unions, respond. The “May Day Strong” initiative from activist sectors of the labor movement is only the beginning. The working class must not be a spectator to its own destruction — or to the genocidal starvation of Gaza.

September-October 2025, ATC 238