The Skinny: More Nixonian Than Nixon

Author’s note: in addition to my work here on NIDC, I also blog about fascism and current affairs on the Fediverse; click here to check it out. Want more? Click here to subscribe to NIDC today.

 

Grievance, Revenge, and Conspiracy Theories

Wounded by bad polling and self-inflicted wounds in court, the Trump regime spent this past week lashing out, seeking revenge, and unleashing its private Gestapo, ICE, on migrant children. Simultaneously, the regime is working to criminalize its political opposition, Trump wants to strip-mine protected lands, and Elissa Slotkin has a new anti-Trump revolutionary strategy custom made for 1996. The hits don’t stop coming, but here at The Skinny we’re always ready to peer into the dark heart of American fascism with short media analysis blogs that help you understand the news is a way corporate media would probably prefer you didn’t. As always you can follow the links below to check out these stories on my Fediverse blog, or simply read them in their entirety on page two by using the navigation buttons at the bottom of this article.

 

 

April 24th – 30th, 2025

 

Doxing, Revenge, and the Trump Regime’s Garcia Problem

“The problem with every Trump administration authoritarian operation is that they’re Russian nesting dolls of fascist fuckery that start out wrong on the merits, and get more outrageous and disconnected from reality as the situation evolves. The regime had no legal authority to traffic any of the men it sent to CECOT for what appear to be the civil violation of being in America without documentation; full stop. Deportation is a legal process that requires the government to prove they have a valid reason to remove a person from the country, and the defendant gets a chance to argue against that evidence. Whatever happened here, kidnapping brown men with tattoos to traffic them to a torture prison in El Salvador, they weren’t deportations and they weren’t legal.”

 

Strip Mining America as the World Burns

“Obviously this is an extraordinarily bad idea for too many reasons to list fully here; not the least of which being that there is no energy emergency because the United States is already “extracting more oil and gas than any other country in world history.” On a boiling planet run by genocidal billionaires, the last damn thing anyone needs is the US government helping Trump’s fossil fuel industry donors extract more oil and gas that we shouldn’t be burning, out of the ground on federally protected lands. I’m not surprised environmental groups are planning to sue to stop this, and I hope they win; assuming court orders mean anything to this administration at all – it’s currently not clear that they do.”

 

Weaponizing the State Against the Opposition Party

“We can talk till we’re all blue in the face about getting money out of politics, but when the fascist GOP can take full advantage of billionaire money because of Citizen’s United, and the Klepto Kaiser is simultaneously trying to shut down the political opposition’s small dollar donation apparatus because of a fake corruption scandal cooked up by the regime’s allies in Congress, you are looking at an obvious way for the nazis to put their thumb on the scale and thereby pre-determine the outcome of American elections.”

 

Talking Like a Nazi Won’t Defeat Trump

“The truth is however that there’s nothing special about Slotkin, Newsom, and Emanuel; in my now forty-eight years on this Earth this is exactly how monied people in the Democratic Party have reacted to every political tremor in modern US history. When your purpose is to get paid for serving the needs of wealthy ruling class donors, your solution to every problem is always going to be shift rightward and protect rich people; they don’t care at all that Trump is a fascist, just that their donor class maintains control of both major political parties in America. Which is probably why folks who think like them, have managed to lose not one but two separate elections to a reality TV show nazi oligarch whose catchphrase is literally “you’re fired.”

 

Regime Escalates Turf War Against the Judiciary

“I think it’s safe to say the Trumpenreich is actively trying to intimidate judges who defy their mass deportation plans, while gearing up for a propaganda war about how courts that won’t let them do whatever they like to create an ethnostate are somehow illegitimate. This is another example of the Trump regime employing fascist theater to justify the enforcement of unreality; in this case their supposed right to arrest a Judge for stopping the American Gestapo from caging another undocumented immigrant because they didn’t have the paperwork to allow them to do so.” Note: as this story developed, I published an update on my Fediverse blog.

 

A Pattern of Behavior

“Mainstream analysts have been either unable, or unwilling to actively separate whether or not Downmarket Mussolini “can” do something, from whether or not he “should” do something. This isn’t a videogame; emergency presidential powers presupposes an actual emergency that justifies them or Trump is just stealing power for the executive branch and the media has a responsibility to report that because it’s part of the story. Yes, the President has the authority to declare a bunch of national emergencies, but that doesn’t mean we have to believe him when he makes up a bunch of fake crises and then insists that those fake crises give him the power to literally do fascism.”

 

Fighting Narco-Terrorism by Punishing Children

“I definitely remember a time when Americans were up in arms because Trump was separating migrant families in detention and essentially trafficking children to Christian American foster families. So for the Trump regime to be working on a backdoor way to deport unaccompanied migrant children under the guise of fighting a made up reactionary moral panic about stopping “child trafficking” under Joe Biden, is both nauseating and outrageous. I can think of dozens of more appropriate government agencies than DHS and ICE to monitor the welfare of what amount to child refugees, but it’s irrelevant because the Trump regime’s own internal documents say they picked the Gestapo because they want to deport literal children.”

 

Capitalism Is Killing Our Planet

“I guarantee you that twenty-seven trillion is a bigger number than most of the people reading this can even comprehend; I know I can’t. Look, I don’t want to give people trying to do something useful for climate justice a hard time; this study is revealing, even if it does adopt a capitalist framework to describe what is frankly mass fucking murder in slow motion. In my experience however studies like this have a rather large blind spot towards the human cost of conducting capitalism on a boiling planet where everything, including our governments, is owned by billionaire nazis, so it’s likely that these folks are actually underestimating the climate costs of “doing business” for the top corporations they studied.”

 

 

• Nina Illingworth

 

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.

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