“For anyone holding their breath,” someone said online a couple weeks ago, “waiting for this fascist Trump regime to hit rock bottom: There is no rock bottom. Their depravity will continue to shock the world, week after week, for as long as they hold power.”

It is a good time to reflect on how true this statement is as we approach the one-year anniversary of Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump’s second presidential election.

Mad “king” Trump is now blowing up random boats, slaughtering innocents in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, claiming without a hint of a wisp of a scent of evidence that the people he is massacring in cold violation of international and national law and basic decency are “enemy combatant” narco traffickers “at war with the United States.”

Trump is gathering major military forces off the coast of Venezuela in preparation for a likely regime-change war on that nation. He may also attack Colombia, whose president has angered him by criticizing his extrajudicial executions in international waters.

Trump and the key people around him... are dedicated sociopathic fascists eager to stamp out the last embers of American democracy, decency, deliberation, and rule of law by any and all means “necessary.”

He is sending $20 billion to Argentina to back his fellow far-right president there as 42 million US Americans face hunger because he is cutting off their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

Former SNAP recipients will join masses of federal workers Trump has thrown out of work on food lines as Trump demands $230 million from his Department of Justice as “compensation” for its (badly belated) indictment (under former President Joe Biden) of Trump for… you know, trying to overthrow electoral democracy and the rule of law at the end of his first horrific administration (and for absconding with classified documents and obstructing efforts to retrieve them).

Trump has just maniacally torn down the East Wing of the White House, planning to replace that former historic landmark with a gargantuan, gaudy ballroom funded by some of his favorite capitulating corporations, including the tech giants Google, Meta, and Palantir and the leading “defense” firm Lockheed Martin.

The Congress has been essentially dissolved by Trump through his command over the Speaker of the US House, the obsequious Mike Johnson (R-La.). This makes legislative branch oversight of Trump’s war moves and plans impossible. It also prevents the release of the Epstein Files, which contain information on his close relationship with a disgraced pedophile, and congressional action to restore SNAP benefits (food stamps). (Johnson is meanwhile refusing to seat a duly elected congresswoman from Arizona since, according to media reports, she would tilt the US House majority to the side of the files’ release.)

Trump has slapped 50% tariffs on Brazil to punish it for properly prosecuting and convicting his fascist comrade Jair Bolsonaro (the onetime “Trump of the Tropics”) for sparking an attempted insurrectionist coup (Brazil’s January 6) in that nation’s capital on January 8, 2023.

Among the many ways in which Trump is mimicking his role model Adolph Hitler is his attempt to rule through executive order and memorandum.

A recent Trump memo–NPSM-7–absurdly attributes recent domestic US political violence to a supposedly top-down movement of left-wing terrorism and tells federal law enforcement to investigate and potentially prosecute any group or individual who advances “anti-fascist” ideas, including even criticism of “Christianity” and “traditional” family and gender relations.

Trump has unleashed his Department of Justice on a transparently political campaign of prosecutorial retribution against his enemies and critics. He has even directed his fascist attorney general to investigate people Joe Biden pardoned.

The deranged, orange-sprayed POTUS responded to the remarkable outpouring of 7 million Americans in the No Kings Day protests held in more than 2,500 cities and towns two weeks ago by posting an AI video showing “King Trump” wearing a crown while piloting an Air Force bomber that dumped liquid shit on protesters in New York, Chicago, and other US cities.

There’s far more than online fantasy in the menace Trump poses to the US cities. Herr Donald’s 21st-century Gestapo, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and its junior partner Border Patrol, are many months into a reign of racist, xenophobic-nationalist, and militarized police state terror across urban America. Among its many outrages, this assault has included the disgraceful deployment of Black Hawk attack helicopters and hundreds of heavily armed storm troopers against the residents of a large apartment complex in the Black Chicago neighborhood of South Shore. Small children of color were thrown on the street, zip-tied, and tossed into vans.

The Trump regime is recruiting ICE agents from the ranks of the Proud Boys and other paramilitary fascist groups. It is building mass detention camps from coast to coast with taxpayer funding that makes ICE more well-funded than the militaries of every nation except the US and China.

But what did we expect? Is any of this surprising? Trump45 led an insurrectionist coup attempt on January 6. 2021. He campaigned on political “retribution” and a promise of racist mass deportations animated by his Hitlerian claim that brown-skinned immigrants are “poisoning our blood.”

Trump’s sadistic puppy-killing Homeland Security head Kristi Noem, aptly nicknamed “Gestapo Barbie,” coldly rejected Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s request that she suspend the terror in Chicago for Halloween weekend so that Chicago-area children could go out trick-or-treating without fear of being tear-gassed and zip-tied by Trump’s gendarmes.

Mein Trumpf47 has invaded Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Memphis with the National Guard. He sent the US Marines into Los Angeles. He is pressing to militarily invade Portland, Oregon on the basis of the utterly absurd claim that “radical left terrorists” are “burning” that city “to the ground.” In a nod to the Slaveowners’ Confederacy, whose virulent racist legacy he and his openly Christian white nationalist (neofascist) “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth uphold, Trump has asked his Supreme Court to summarily reverse lower court rulings that have so far blocked his bid to put Texas National Guard troops in Chicago.

Trump has said that Illinois Gov. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson “should be in jail” since they have not ordered state and city police to join ICE and Border Patrol’s racist kidnapping operations.

Three weeks ago, the depraved fascist-in-chief Trump and Hegseth ordered 800-plus generals and admirals to Quantico, Virginia from across the vast American global empire to hear them say that America’s real adversary is “the enemy within,” meaning the residents of the nation’s majority nonwhite and “radical left” cities. Trump told the stone-faced brass that American cities need to become “training grounds” for the US military.

In his emergency request for a Supreme Court shadow docket ruling that will green-light the military takeover of Chicago and other cities, Trump has dispensed with his past invocations of federal statutes that supposedly permit him to bypass the Posse Comitatus Act and the 10th Amendment to the Constitution and argued instead that the judicial branch has no constitutional right to opine on his power to deploy the military anywhere he wants for whatever reason.

If he doesn’t get what he wants from the Christian fascist court he molded during his first term he will likely invoke the ancient slaveowners’ Insurrection Act to put troops in Democratic Party-run majority nonwhite cities.

The Trump regime is moving in numerous ways to rig the 2026 midterms, which may well take place in the intimidating, vote-suppressing presence of occupying troops in US cities.

Even without National Guard or regular duty troops deployed, the direct federal gendarmes of ICE and its junior partner Border Patrol–unencumbered by the 10th Amendment and Posse Comitatus law and filled in its ranks with the most racist and reactionary thugs in the federal state–have already this year undertaken a federal military attack on US cities, replete with advanced weaponry and Black Hawk attack helicopters. The nation’s cities, and most especially those cities’ Latino sections, are already under de facto military occupation.

But what did we expect? Is any of this surprising? Trump45 led an insurrectionist coup attempt on January 6. 2021. He campaigned on political “retribution” and a promise of racist mass deportations animated by his Hitlerian claim that brown-skinned immigrants are “poisoning our blood.” On his first day in office, he pardoned more than 1,500 January 6 putschists and criminals, commuted the long prison sentences handed down to the nation’s top two paramilitary fascist leaders for their roles in the Capitol Riot, and signed an executive order purporting to end the explicit constitutional right of birthright citizenship.

On July 1, 2024, Trump’s Christian fascist Supreme Court granted him forever immunity from prosecution for any crime he committed past or future under the rubric of “official presidential duties.”

Trump and the key people around him, including above all Stephen “We Are the Storm!” Miller, are dedicated sociopathic fascists eager to stamp out the last embers of American democracy, decency, deliberation, and rule of law by any and all means “necessary.” The Trump regime and the Trump party’s wild denunciation of the second No Kings Day protests as “radical left,” “Marxist” (I’m one), and “terrorist” rallies dedicated to “hating America” is symptomatic of their fascist ideology, which requires socialist, Marxist, and communist enemies even when such enemies do not exist to any significant degree, as in the US today (unlike in Germany in the early 1930s).

The Trump regime’s obsessive hatred of “the left” more than merely echoes Hitler and Goebbels’ fanatical calls and pledges to “restore German greatness” by saving it in from dreaded Marxists and “Judeo Bolsheviks” who had supposedly “stabbed the nation in the back” during and after World War I.

The former Fatherland News co-host and current “Secretary of War” Pete “I’ll Stop Drinking if You put Me Atop the Pentagon” Hegseth (member of a far-right church whose pastor says that the best period in American race relations was the era of Black chattel slavery) is a “Christian” white nationalist zealot who salivates over the prospect of unleashing the US military on US cities. He holds his position despite his monumental incompetence in great part because Trump47 is counting on him to do what Trump45’s military chiefs wouldn’t do: Use bloody force against US citizens and residents on US soil. A recently leaked Signal chat shows that Hegseth has been thinking about sending the elite US Army 82nd Airborne to crush anti-ICE protests in Portland.

In a sign of how insane and depraved things have gotten atop the US government (and how lame and Weimar-like some top Dems are), I recently put up this Onion-style spoof online:

Unnamed sources report that Donald Trump has ordered the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to present a plan next week for the nuclear annihilation of every US city with a population of 500,000 or more. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) says that “any such plans would be contrary to the national interest and inconsistent with the Democrats signing on to a budget agreement to end the government shutdown.” Asked for comment, former President Barack Obama said that “the nuking of our major cities by our own military would be a major setback for our great nation.” Obama cautioned that “Democrats should seek bipartisan support for a congressional resolution questioning the legality of a US nuclear attack on major US cities. I know it can sometimes be difficult to win votes on the other side of the aisle,” Obama added, “but the genius of America is that at the end of the day we’re all on the same team. It would be terrible to lose Chicago or St. Louis, of course, but we’re still all Americans at the end of life on Earth.”

Crazy, right? And yet serious, intelligent people understandably felt the need to make sure it wasn’t for real. As one of my brilliant readers commented: “My first thought was to laugh, my second thought was ‘Let me Google this and make sure it’s a joke.’ I was relieved to discover it was not a real story but disturbed that I felt the need to check because it sounded like something he might consider.”

That’s because there really are no limits to the depravity of this fascist regime. There is no rock bottom.

After understanding this, the next and obvious question is what to do about it?