Antimídia - The Rule and Ruins of Trump – Shuli Branson – Anarchist Voices #15

In collaboration with Antimídia, an anarchist and anticolonial video collective based on the territories of the Kaingang, Xokleng and Guarani peoples, occupied by the brazilian state, Shuli wrote the text for a video giving a trans/anarchist perspective on what has been going on since Trump took office. You can watch it in English or Portuguese. The video in English and the text are below, including links to the Antimídia sites. You can also follow the collective on social media, both non-corporate and corporate.

The link for the video in English: https://antimidia.org/the-rule-and-ruins-of-trump-shuli-branson-anarchist-voices-15/

The link for the video in Portuguese: https://antimidia.org/o-reinado-e-as-ruinas-de-trump-shuli-branson-vozes-anarquistas-ep-15/

You can also access it through kolektiva: https://kolektiva.media/w/3WJU2ELDLwMwPJz6bYQpLD

Text:

The Rule and Ruins of Trump

Despite the insistence that Trump’s return to office would be a repeat of the incompetent first term, even while Tr ump and his allies told us exactly what they planned to do; despite the liberal assurance that Trump could not possibly win, while ignoring the fact that Israel’s genocide on Gaza was driving potential voters away; despite people’s belief that the institutions of the American state are strong enough to right themselves after an attack from the inside, which can only be an anomaly—Trump took power by a narrow margin and began dismantling the constitutional state. Following Steve Bannon’s strategy to “flood the zone,” using the blueprints of Project 2025, his attack has taken the form of an unceasing series of executive orders and sacking of government officials, with the sheer number of both driving many people into inactive despair. But this attack has also led many commentators to insist on the fact that not all of these orders will become actual policy or law, that the policies will be defeated in court, and that the storied institutions of the US state can withstand this assault. However these commentators did not keep in mind the fact that the law and the constitution are imaginary, only effective to the extent they are enforced and obeyed. With the removal of officials and the anticipatory rush of people to obey his racist, misogynist, anti-trans, and eviscerating economic plans even before they become official policy, his orders now become fact. There is still the potential obstacle of incompetence in the fact that the bureaucratic replacements are loyalists but not experienced, but this roadblock isn’t assured. It is possible  his administration has success in consolidation of power and instigates some form of further devastation. That consolidation relies at least partially on obedience— not only by these loyalists, but also by opposition politicians, the so called resistance, and the rest of us.

Equally unexpected was the oversized role Elon Musk would play as a kind of shadow executive behind Trump. While both of them are basically incompetent rulers, they do have a destructive drive for power that reflects a narcissistic glee in seeing their orders become fact. Trump is clearly in mental and charismatic decline, while Musk, who lacks any kind of appeal except to online incels, has used bogus claims of inefficiency based on incorrect interpretation of government information to dismantle any benefits the state affords its so-called citizens, and to bend the state to serve his own endless search for profit and glory.

We could go through all of the cabinet appointees who foreshadow eviscerating policies that will destroy education, public health, and civil liberties. None of these people are competent or have ideas that reflect any kind of ideal democratic public good. It’s almost comical the extent to which these people are evil villains driven by the hatred of anyone who isn’t a Christian patriot. The mask is fully off and those in power no longer even pretend a reverence for the foundational US ideals—besides racism. And even the Christian soldiers stand to lose the little they have with the ongoing economic downturn and Trump’s threats to undermine the global economy that relies on the US dollar.

As in other countries, trans people have become a lightning rod for grabs at authoritarian power—though the specific violent ways of targeting trans people might vary place to place. Like abortion, the right wing in the US has used anti-trans talking points and legislation to rally a chunk of the population to direct their resentment at a minute percentage of the population, with the aim of opening the door for direct control over people’s bodies (and reproductive capabilities). Paired with attacks on migrants, trans people have become the target of white resentment—where most of the US population finds life harder and harder, less pay and higher prices, living off debt, with little to no access to reliable health care, and poor prospects all around, they follow the claim led by politicians on the right and left that “these” people (such as trans people, migrants) are somehow receiving freedoms at the expense of the white majority. The healthy body politic must be purged. In the wake of attacks on migrants and trans people there has also been a dismantling of any policies that support Black people, people of color, disabled people, and so on—racism collapsed into the shadow of the so called woke, or DEI.

Immediately upon taking office, Trump issued a proclamation against “gender ideology,” the catchall term invented to encompass any form of transness in the name of protecting women. If we read the convoluted language of this executive order, we can identify a paradox of this expansion of executive power, which perhaps also points to a way for us to sneak by.  

The executive order frames itself as protecting women from the attack of gender. In the US, there is a long history of “defending women”—that is, white women—in order to excuse murderous policies, typically against Black people, immigrants, people of color, gays. We can see in this language too the nascent attack on education, as the order locates what they claim is an undermining of biology and scientific fact in phrases that echo queer theory: “This unhealthy road is paved by an ongoing and purposeful attack against the ordinary and  longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms, replacing the immutable  biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from  biological facts.”Instead, they claim that, “basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.” People have pointed out the irony of this administration calling on science to back up this claim, as they are also willing to oppose so-called objective scientific facts for other purposes like rejecting vaccines and other effective medicines. The ridiculousness has extended in new legislation attempts and court cases to define gender as formed “at conception,” which is of course a bait and switch of Christian fascism with pseudoscience. As this mimics language that opposes abortion, we see these attacks as the bald attempts at fascist control over the “health” of the nation’s population. But this lengthy and jumbled order also shows to us the impotence of the state to regulate gender, except by force. As they say themselves in this order, “The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.”.

Transition is a kind of minor freedom, sometimes accessed through state institutions, that points to routes for escape, an ungovernability. There is a clear violence in moving incarcerated trans people from the prisons that match their gender to incorrect prisons where they will be subjected to more violence and control. There is also violence in removing trans people of all ages from access to healthcare. There is a violence in reverting government documents to assigned gender, creating a visual dissonance between the body and the document that makes trans people vulnerable to the forces of the state at different crossing points.

Though in the US, we have had a few years where transition was made more possible through open and overt means, and trans people were gaining more representation and paths to assimilation, there is a long history of trans people navigating their needs in and out of state institutions and sharing knowledge and resources to reproduce our lives and the possibilities of transition. This history, which is still present, like with abortion care, is where I take my inspiration for the moment.

At this point, it is undeniable that the edifice of the US state has irrevocably crumbled . We are not going back to how it was before, there will be no return to normal, except in an adaptation and acceptance of this implementation of a more direct and overt fascism. We should not be ignorant of the fact that the last 50 plus years have been a right wing gathering of resources, policies, positions to instantiate this authoritarian rule that strips any protections and benefits from the state. While this counterrevolution is violent and does not follow our dreams and wishes, it still is a rupture where we can take action. Instead of a top-down view that sees our lives completely determined by what is going on in government, we take inspiration in the ongoing networks of mutual aid and resource sharing that allow for our lives to continue regardless of the regime. We also can draw strength from the increasing frequency of uprisings and the learning process of more and more youth about how to fight in the streets. There will be suffering and repression, but there are clear weaknesses in Trump’s moves at this moment that can offer us opportunities for care and rebellion. Don’t forget what operates in the dark. Don’t forget the damage affinity groups can do. Don’t forget the spontaneous eruptions where people come together regardless of politics or identity markers to wreak havoc on the cities that try to contain us (unless authoritarian leftists sap our energy). We have recent memory of fighting and getting each other’s back, we can ramp up the militancy and prepare for a future where we know  that we will need each other because there is no one but us.