Donald Trump and his allies aren’t making a secret of it: if they win, they’re going to launch a campaign of repression to destroy the pro-Palestinian movement and the organized left. 

　　This election season has been a tumultuous and widely debated one for the Left, on both moral and strategic terms. But strangely absent from these discussions have been the explicit promises and detailed plans from Donald Trump and his team to kick off a third Red Scare and destroy the organized left if they win. 

　　Just this month, on the anniversary of October 7, the same Heritage Foundation that brought us Trump’s Project 2025 released “Project Esther,” their “blueprint to counter antisemitism in the United States.” On the basis that the American pro-Palestinian movement is “part of a global Hamas Support Network” that is “supported by activists and funders dedicated to destroying capitalism and democracy” and gets the “the support and training of America’s overseas enemies,” Project Esther lays out a strategy to “dismantle” this movement within one to two years and “level a decisive blow against both antisemitism and anti-Americanism.” 

　　That strategy envisions a whole-of-government campaign of intimidation, slander, and “lawfare,” at both the federal and state levels and working with private organizations, to crush pro-Palestinian activists’ First Amendment rights and carry out a wave of repression. The stated end goal is to make it impossible for activists to organize while turning the public against the movement. 

　　The document suggests using the anti-racketeering RICO Act — originally created to take on the mafia, and more recently used to bring trumped-up charges against “Stop Cop City” protesters in Georgia — along with “counterterrorism, hate speech, and immigration laws,” as well as audits, propaganda campaigns, investigations, and public shaming. It self-consciously takes as its model the 1930s anti-fascist “Brown Scare,” whose tactics and tools weren’t just the prototype for, but directly evolved into, the very same ones used against the Left during Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare of the 1950s — including by the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). 

　　As per the document, the hoped-for goals and outcomes of this campaign are the same ones that came out of that shameful historical episode, as well as the earlier Red Scare of the 1920s, including: schools purged of both teachers and material that Trump’s people ideologically disagree with; prosecutions and imprisonment; ideologically undesirable foreigners deported or pushed to “voluntarily” leave the country; and a witch hunt that will intimidate sympathizers into cutting ties with, denouncing, and marginalizing the Left. 

　　Trumpworld’s plan is, in other words, an unholy cocktail of the “war on terror” of this century and the Red Scare of the last one; and it is, quite openly, one targeting the entire Left, not just antiwar campaigners. 

　　The “active cabal of Jew-haters” in the country, Project Esther’s executive summary states, is “aligned with the far left, progressive movement,” which has a “strong strain of antisemitism that is running rampant.” Project Esther singles out what it calls the “Hamas Caucus” — which it specifies as Bernie Sanders, the Squad, and a number of other progressive lawmakers — as part of this “cabal” serving in Washington, who must be “marginalized” as one of the nineteen core goals that will lead to the project’s success. 

　　This isn’t the only sign of a coming wave of McCarthyite repression. It’s long been known Trumpworld plans to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the military on US soil against protesters. One of the figures behind these plans, former Trump official Ross Vought — who currently heads a pro-Trump think tank and is rumored to be in the running for Trump’s chief of staff — has said they’re already writing executive orders and regulations to that end and setting up legal rationales, so that the administration is “able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community” call off this state violence via legal concerns. 

　　According to ProPublica, which exposed Vought’s speeches on the topic, he pointed to the 2020 George Floyd protests as an example of the kind of thing a future Trump administration would deploy US troops to put down, and has talked about the need to stop “the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover” that the country is supposedly in the middle of. 

　　Trump ally and GOP House majority leader Steve Scalise has likewise been recently caught on video outlining to pro-Israel lobby AIPAC his plans to induce campus repression of pro-Palestinian speech by threatening to pull billions of dollars of funding from elite universities. He also warned that the initiative, which would be coordinated with a future Trump White House, would involve pulling schools’ accreditation after investigating them for alleged civil rights violations. 

　　“You’re not playing games anymore, or else you’re not a school anymore,” he threatened. 

　　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. 

　　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. 

　　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. 

　　Editor: Zhong Yao  Deng Panyi 

　　From:https://jacobin.com/2024/11/trump-red-scare-palestine-blm?_refluxos=a10 (2024-11-2)