In June 2019, we published a special issue on the first 180 days of the Bolsonaro administration. Six years later, we take on the challenge of taking stock of the first six months of Trump II, whose scale and political significance are of a different order. On July 9, Trump announced that the tariffs to be applied to Brazil would be the highest in the world, citing the “unfair judicial process” against Bolsonaro as justification. The measure was confirmed at the end of July when, based on the Magnitsky Act, extreme, unjustifiable, and imperial sanctions were imposed on Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.
Despite the differences in scale and brutality, a robust common thread connects Brazil in 2019 and the US in 2025: chaos as a method of governing—chaos that, in Trump’s case, has been portrayed as a strategy of “shock and awe” or “flood the zone.” In other words, a state of permanent political excitement caused by consecutive presidential decrees (largely unconstitutional), obscene measures of institutional destruction, threats of invasion of foreign territories, neo-Nazi physical performances, and political scenes that could be described as pornographic.
For this reason, one of the articles published in the special report on Bolsonaro’s first 180 days draws an analogy between the obfuscation caused by this profusion and the scenes of fascist perversion depicted in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film, 120 Days of Sodom. Brutal images that provoke revulsion, but from which we cannot take our eyes off. In the same vein, Judith Butler described the first acts of the Trump II administration as unbridled sadism. The chaotic and cruel political and visual broth that overflows from this scenario both fuels the agitation of the MAGA base and the transnational far-right and spreads confusion, dispersion, and paralysis. To resist the impacts of this deluge, it is essential to decipher it—an arduous task given its scale and vertiginous nature.
Between January and June, Trump’s brutal immigration policy, implemented through the hunting of migrants and mass deportations, morphed into open militarization of political repression, as seen in Los Angeles a few weeks ago. Before that, there was a proliferation of arbitrary and coercive political actions against voices critical of the genocide in Gaza, researchers, academics, and universities. As predicted by a conservative French senator, in early March, Trump’s “hit first, negotiate later” foreign policy style would culminate in blatant military hegemony with the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 21. A few days earlier, in Minnesota, Democratic Senator Melissa Hortman and her husband were victims of the first political assassination of the Trump II era.
When analyzing this scenario, it is necessary to take into account the geopolitical tensions of so-called multipolarity. Within it, Israel’s military expansionism and the unstoppable genocide in Gaza stem from the definitive intertwining of the geopolitical interests of Israel and the United States. In addition to the collusion between the government and Silicon Valley interests, there is the tariff standoff, a new national budget that decimated health and social protection financing and increased investment in the arms industry complex. No less critical, this landscape is rife with internal and external instability and uncertainty. As, for example, strong criticisms from part of the MAGA base of the attack on Iran or the announcement by Elon Musk, as this bulletin was being finalized, that he will create a new political party to challenge Trump’s political project.
This bulletin is a modest contribution to the effort to decode this complex, fleeting, and grim landscape. The first section provides general interpretive keys to capture the meanings and antecedents of the internal and external scenarios being redrawn, with fire and brimstone, by the regime taking shape in the US. We then examine the offensives at work in various “flood zones,” offering, in each case, a qualified compilation of complementary analysis. A final section offers preliminary reflections on resistance.
Keys to understanding
An epochal transition
What we have been witnessing since January 20 cannot be read solely as a new shift to the far right in US politics, with colossal global effects due to the economic and military power of the US. The avalanche unleashed by Trump is profoundly and definitively reconfiguring the international order established in the 1940s after the defeat of Nazi-fascism, which was altered at the end of the Cold War without, however, displacing US hegemony.
In the turmoil caused by the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, we learned that the impacts and directions of epochal transitions are not immediately apparent. Time is needed to understand their directions better. In the case of Trump’s return, however, signs of these possible directions are rather robust. By leaving the WHO, the UN Human Rights Council, and the Paris Agreement, Trump made clear his contempt for multilateralism, which also explains the dizzying destruction of USAID and the transfer of its functions to the State Department. As already mentioned, the presidency’s interventions in foreign policy—disagreements involving the deportation of migrants, tariffs, the destruction of Gaza, the war in Ukraine, and now the bombing of Iran—are guided by the logic of hitting first and negotiating later, with all the uncertainties that this type of game implies.
These traits are being rightly read as symptoms of a conflictual but definitive geopolitical reconfiguration. For Brazilian philosopher Marcos Nobre, in an article published before the attack on Iran, Trump lays bare the dysfunctions of the order established at the end of bipolarity, formalizing a crude geopolitical logic in which force—military, territorial, economic, cultural, and technological—once again becomes the ultimate criterion of global power games. Nobre also elaborates an extensive argument on the urgency for the progressive and democratic camp to adopt a realistic position in the face of this highly volatile reconfiguration.
Read here a compilation of analyses on the matter.
Long cycle, the Gramscian turn, transnationalism
Undoubtedly, elements of the national political context preceding the 2024 presidential elections must be taken into account when analyzing Trump’s return to power and its ramifications. However, his new victory should not be read solely as the result of last year’s electoral process in terms of its immediate antecedents, the forces rallied around his project, and the profile of his voters. It can and should be described as the culmination of a long process of reorganization and reconfiguration of ultra-conservatism and the far right that began to take shape in the 1970s.
The Heritage Foundation fully illustrates this longevity. Founded in 1974 as one of the first institutional bastions of this long-running reorganization, from 2022 it coordinated the drafting of Project 2025, a detailed strategic plan to guide the actions of a new ultra-conservative government in the US, which has been systematically implemented since January.
As analyzed by Sonia Corrêa in recent interviews (Revista SUR, Esquerda Diário), this ultra-conservative reorganization did not take place only in the US. Equivalent intellectual movements in Western Europe preceded it. And, since the beginning, primarily through ultra-Catholic and evangelical fundamentalist connections, it has involved intense exchanges with Latin America. With regional variations—more secular in Europe and more ultra-religious in the Americas—these investments produced a hybrid but powerful transnational fabric. In the 1990s, with the end of bipolarity and the advent of digitalization in life and politics, this web gained scale. Twenty years later, it would be fueling the robust electoral shifts to the far right that would sweep across Europe and the Americas.
Even more importantly, as this reconfiguration evolved, these forces have read and reinterpreted Marxist and post-Marxist texts, especially those of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. They adopted new modes of action to drive a broad and profound transformation of societies, states, and international affairs. Named by its creators as metapolitics, this ultra-conservative revolution has long invested in the battle for hearts and minds to cement its political project. In academic literature on the far right, this shift has been referred to as the Gramscian (or Frankfurtian) turn. This critical reading of left-wing thinkers, which sounded bizarre a few years ago, is now explicitly stated, even with humor, by ultra-right intellectuals involved in this reengineering.
In the middle of the last decade, the transnational connections of this new (old) far right became more complex and denser. The geometric multiplication illustrates this after 2019 of political forums such as the Conservative Political Action Conferences (CPACs) in the Americas, the Conservative Nationalism Conferences in Europe, the Madrid Forums in Latin America, as well as summits and meetings of the Political Network for Values on several continents. In the new era that began on January 20, the views and proposals emanating from Washington circulate through these channels, catalyzing and infecting equivalent political dynamics in other contexts, particularly those where the far right continues to rise or is in power.
Read here a compilation of analyses on the subject.
Fascism in post-fascist times
When electoral shifts to the far right took shape in the past decade, the term fascism returned with force to the political vocabulary, sparking heated debates. Should we call fascism what we were witnessing? Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to describe it as right-wing populism? Or illiberalism (a term coined by Viktor Orbán)? Presently, this debate is over. Renowned researchers of historical fascism, such as Robert Paxton and Timothy Snyder, no longer hesitate to label many features of the political scene taking shape in the Americas and Europe over the past decade as fascist. In June, shortly before the murder of the Hortman couple and the attack on Iran, a global anti-fascist manifesto was launched by renowned intellectuals. This new consensus does not mean, however, that differences between the past and the present can be erased. Nor should it lead to the widespread and careless application of the term, trivializing its use at a time when its precise and firm application is more urgent than ever.
Yet, identifying the current contemporary forms of fascism is no trivial task. As Umberto Eco analyzed in his classic text, fascist politics and discourse have always been metamorphic. Today, their mutations are increasingly intense and fleeting, not least because, over the last fifty years, the revitalization of fascist ideas and practices has been adapted to the conditions of a world in which fascism was considered to have been overcome. It was not a uniformed fascist brigade that executed Melissa Hortman and her husband, seriously injuring another couple. They were killed by an ordinary man, a Trump voter and a fundamentalist evangelical. Even so, these crimes can be interpreted as replicas of fascist murders of the past.
“Gender” and “race” in the eye of the storm
In this multifaceted and troubled scene, gender and race are not side issues or moral questions, as is often repeated ad nauseam in Brazil and eventually other places. Anti-gender and anti-racist policies occupy a central place in the storm, not least because a visceral aversion to social struggles organized around these dimensions of social life has always fueled the reorganization of the far right. In the US, for example, Stonewall (1969) and the Roe v. Wade decision—which recognized the constitutionality of abortion rights (1973)—fueled the first ultra-conservative unrest articulated around the Moral Majority Movement.
In the 1990s, these same forces fabricated the accusatory category “cultural Marxism” (learn more about the origin of the term here) to target anti-racist, feminist (especially pro-choice), gay rights, migrant rights, and environmental activism as the new (internal) enemies of the American nation and Western civilization. In the 2010s, electoral shifts to the far right were, in most cases, fueled by anti-gender mobilizations, which in the European context were (and continue to be) associated with racist and anti-immigration agendas. Now in power in Hungary, Brazil, local governments taken over by Vox in Spain, and more recently in Italy and Argentina, the far right has transported anti-gender ideology in various ways into state grammar and public policy, as is now happening in the US.
The timing of American anti-gender politics does not, however, coincide with the cycle observed in Europe and Latin America. In 2016, Trump’s campaign, although openly misogynistic, did not trigger anti-gender fantasies. In 2017, Trump attempted an anti-trans offensive that did not prosper as planned. Three years later, already on the road to the 2020 elections, in the context of the Black Lives Matter mobilizations, the US far right disfigured the term “woke” to fabricate a new version of “cultural Marxism.”
This novel discursive strawman served to discredit the ongoing anti-racist struggle drastically and add new targets to the original list of “bad things” that, in the view of the far right, must be fought: “gender,” the humanities, critical race theory, and intersectional perspectives. In the 2020 elections, fierce attacks on sexual diversity and critical race theory multiplied at the state level, subsequently mobilizing an avalanche of anti-trans law provisions.
In early 2023, at a pre-campaign event, Trump declared that in his second mandate, he would vigorously combat “gender ideology” (learn about the origin of the category). What we are witnessing today, therefore, is a robust implementation of that promise. As a dozen executive orders issued since January show, this relentless fight has mainly translated into a visceral rejection of gender identity rights—that is, trans rights—justified in the name of women’s rights.
The first of these orders, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth in the Federal, published on January 20, literally abhors the concept of gender and establishes by decreeing the sole existence of two biological sexes. It also asserts that the truth of sexual difference is determined at conception, a definition that solidly connects anti-gender and anti-abortion politics.
Additionally, the repudiation of gender fuels attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies, which also encompass measures to curb discrimination and affirmative action for women and racialized people. And all this fits into the big basket of “wokism.” Since January, the term “woke” — which now also includes the accusation of “anti-Semitism” — has been repeated ad nauseam by state authorities to justify the implosion of rules, values, norms, policies, and institutions that the American far right wants to see abolished as quickly as possible.
Read here a compilation of analyses on the subject
Flooding the zones
“Demolishing the deep state”
The welfare state established in the US after the Great Depression of 1920 has always been a target of the ultra-conservative camp. During the Cold War, it was associated with “communism,” “social engineering,” and “lack of freedom.” From the late 1980s onwards, these discourses would be fueled by the expansion of neoliberal rationality (deregulation, downsizing of the state, privatization), which, as we know, also feeds de-democratization[1].
In the 21st century, as the far right grew stronger, attacks on the “big state” gained leverage in its intellectual and discursive repertoire. Sophisticated theories proliferated about the totalitarianism inherent in the liberal state, and dark narratives about the “deep state” and its many conspiratorial figures spiraled. And many recipes for dismantling this “perverse machine” were crafted, among them the numerous pages of Project 2025, detailing hundreds of procedures for dismantling the “deep state” to make sure that Trump would now do what he had failed to do between 2016 and 2020.
In January 2025, this priority task was assigned to the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed until June by Elon Musk. For six months, dozens of structural state institutions were raided, “streamlined,” or closed. Significantly, the blitzkrieg began with two agencies with a transnational scope: the Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC), which implemented several programs in partnership with USAID in the area of communicable disease control, such as HIV/AIDS.
This choice confirmed the contempt for multilateralism and paved the way for a crude display of anti-wokism (see our compilation). Based on lies and distortions, the blitzkrieg led to the closure of the agency and the suspension of thousands of projects worldwide. One of the falsehoods used in the crusade against USAID claimed that millions of condoms donated to Gaza had been turned into Molotov cocktails by Hamas. The real beneficiary of the donation was actually a province in Mozambique, a country with a very high prevalence of HIV.
In a recent article, the New York Times reports that although this was not the original plan, the end of USAID was sealed within two weeks. This summary and haphazard process became the template for subsequent demolitions. As Jane Galvão states in a recent paper the impact of USAID destruction was cruel and devastating. This assessment has been confirmed repeatedly by extensive coverage of the sudden dismantling of projects, particularly in Africa, especially in the case of policies aimed at containing communicable diseases, such as HIV (since USAID managed PEPFAR), and malaria (see more here and here). Although Latin America is not usually mentioned in these assessments, across the region, the effects were not negligible, particularly in Colombia. Similarly, analyses have paid less attention to what the demise of USAID meant for initiatives aimed at promoting democracy, including independent media or, in the same vein, projects enhancing LGBTQIA+ rights [2].
The intervention in the CDC also left harmful traces that were not much debated outside the United States. Immediately, the censorship of an extensive list of biomedical terms related to gender, sexuality, and abortion was denounced. Later, in June, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine published solid evidence that the CDC’s health database began to be deleted as soon as Trump took office. The intervention in the CDC also had drastic effects on the implementation of PEPFAR, as the agency was co-manager of the program in many countries. The reengineering of the National Institute of Health (NIH) also had little international repercussion, even though its impact on thousands of scientific partnerships around the world is highly significant.
But, many other state institutions were subjected to this destructive mode of reengineering: the Department of Education, which was also abolished, the Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Social Security, and the Internal Revenue Service. The same happened to research funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the Woodrow Wilson Institute, a historic institution dedicated to the study of multilateralism that was also closed (read our extensive compilation on the “re-structuring” implemented by DOGE).
An article on the Wired website describes in detail how these war operations were carried out by voracious SWAT teams of young engineers recruited by Musk. Another article on the same website shows how the aim of these brutal interventions is not only to reduce the cost of the state, as announced, but also to terrorize employees and, above all, to collect the databases stored in these institutions, both for surveillance purposes and for their eventual privatization.
Elon Musk abruptly left the government in June, amid an open conflict with Trump. He left behind a catastrophic trail of thousands of unemployed career employees (and the loss of knowledge and experience that this implies), countless social projects in ruins around the world, and domestic social and environmental protection policies slowly dying.
In parallel, however, the Republican-dominated Congress has been cutting funding for social programs since January, such as the food voucher system established in the early days of the welfare state. Russel T. Vought, who coordinated the drafting of Project 2025, remains the federal budget sheriff. In other words, the “demolition man” has returned to the vast world of his business, but the era of destruction is not over, not least because, as already mentioned, the recently approved budget is heading in the same direction.
Anti-immigrant fury
The anti-immigrant fury that is sweeping the American landscape comes as no surprise, since as soon as he first came to power in 2017, Trump closed the borders to citizens of several countries and began building a wall to separate the US from Mexico and, by extension, from Latin America. The infrastructure that supports the policies currently in place dates back much further and has been maintained during the Biden administration. But its brutality is typical of the current times. It shows how the old imaginary about migration and the melting pot as positive values of the American nation was definitely contaminated by structural racism. Today’s arguments against migration reproduce 19th-century tropes that sustained slavery. This resurgence became evident in the portrayal of migrants as “savages” who feed on pets used by Trump in the electoral campaign. Now, it is again blatant in an e official statement on sexual harassment, which claims that the invasion of migrants arriving at the southern border is the main cause of the increase in the number of rapes in the US.
Since January, a frightening display of arbitrariness, intimidation, and coercion of migrants, actions that evoke the Nazi pogroms of the 1930s has been witnessed. Handcuffed deportees are photographed to the delight of the MAGA crowd, while teams from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) hunt down professionals at their workplaces, children at schools, and pregnant women in hospitals. People are being sent irectly from airports and their homes to prisons that house those who will be immediately deported. There are many reports of denial of access to justice and, according to Heidi Beirich of the Global Project Against Global Extremism (GPAHE), many people have disappeared since ICE operations began.
During the month of June, more brutality was added to this scenario. According to the podcast 404 Media, ICE is now using a new mobile phone facial recognition technology that facilitates mass deportation without criteria (because facial recognition is known to involve serious identification errors). The executive branch has also moved forward with measures aimed at denaturalizing foreign nationals accused of serious crimes, which, in the current political climate, could easily slide toward the punishment of political dissent, as happened during McCarthyism.
The government has also announced that a new tax will be imposed on remittances that migrants send to their countries. Then in June, Trump made a spectacular visit to the new migrant detention center in Florida, nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz” or “Crocodile Auschwitz,” whose conditions are reminiscent of the worst prison fantasies of Hollywood. In early July, the budget approved by Congress increased ICE’s budget from $8 million to $50 million, making it the largest law enforcement agency in the country.
As has always been said, this open war has a particular impact on Latin America, since almost 50% of migrants living in the US, either legally or illegally, are Latin American (half of them Mexican). In contrast, and confirming the marked racist traits of this anti-immigration policy, the government recently received, with great pomp and circumstance, a group of white South African families who, according to US authorities and the president himself, were victims of “reverse racism.”
“State of exception”
In the 2000s, in the context of the so-called war on terror, Bush reopened the US prison in the enclave of Guantánamo, Cuba, to imprison prisoners captured in Afghanistan and Iraq in conditions that would be legally unacceptable in the US, including sophisticated practices of torture. This shift of a “state of exception” regime to another location was interpreted at the time by critical voices as a strong symptom that American democracy, the iconic model of liberal democracy, was in decline. Twenty years later, this regime of extraterritorial exceptionalism has been reestablished in even more drastic terms.
Trump almost immediately established a partnership with Nayib Bukele to send “criminal migrants” identified by ICE to CECOT in El Salvador, a country where a “legal” state of exception has been thriving for three years. The precedent for this agreement was the pact signed in 2019 between Trump and Bukele to receive people seeking asylum in the US, which led to a complex and obscure relationship between the law enforcement agencies of the two countries.
As soon as these deportations began, journalistic investigations revealed that 75% of the people thrown into the CECOT had no criminal record. Among Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran who had been accused, without evidence, of being a gang member in his country. His deportation was challenged in court, and he returned to the US, where he was arrested again on charges of human trafficking. On June 23, Abrego was once again released and is now an icon of resistance to the anti-immigrant furor sweeping the northern Rio Grande Valley.
While his case was in court, Trump took a firm step toward extending the “state of emergency” to the political sphere. Without consulting the governor of California, as required by law, he sent a huge contingent of National Guard troops and 700 marines to suppress protests against immigration policy in Los Angeles. At the same time, a massive military parade took over the streets of Washington to mark the 250th anniversary of the army, and his 79th birthday. Then, without congressional authorization, as required by Article 1 of the Constitution, he ordered the bombing of nuclear sites in Iran. To justify this blatant violation—and to appease MAGA sectors opposed to new involvements in war — Vice President JD Vance stated that the US had not gone to war with Iran, only “against its nuclear program.”
In June, in a new development in its anti-immigration policy, the government imposed partial or total restrictions on entry into the US for people holding passports from 12 countries[4], announcing shortly afterwards that this number could rise to 50. Draconian rules for issuing visas, both for students and other visitors, were also established. Procedures that already existed, such as checking the content posted on social media by applicants, will be especially rigorous. There have been reports of people being prevented from entering the country because they posted criticism of the Trump administration, the genocide in Gaza, or anything else that could be interpreted as contrary to “American values” on their social media accounts.
Furthermore, arbitrary measures of indictment, imprisonment, and deportation are also being applied to people accused of “anti-Semitism” or complicity with terrorism, such as the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student who led pro-Palestinian protests and was imprisoned for more than three months.
No less important, the production of knowledge is a priority target of the “state of exception.” The strong pressure that had already been exerted since 2024 by the far right against the country’s most prestigious universities on charges of ‘wokism’ and complicity with “anti-Semitism” has gained momentum. Today, it is exercised through blatant financial coercion to impose rules that compromise academic freedom (see compilation). Regrettably, Trump’s strategy is working, as most of the institutions coerced have given in, producing a scene described as capitulation. The exception is Harvard University, which since April has resisted pressure, challenging the coercive measures in court and winning its cases.
At the end of June, in his usual style of anticipating realities, Trump declared that a reasonable agreement had been reached with the university. Immediately afterwards, however, he intensified the pressure by accusing the university of violating the civil rights of its students. The effects of these offensives have contaminated the higher education environment in the country in a widespread and profound manner.
As pointed out in the analysis of the weekly bulletin of the GPAHE on the political assassination of Senator Hortman and her husband, in an environment where the state fuels political excitement, disobeys the law, coerces, and persecutes, radicalization and violence are inevitable:
The tragedy in Minnesota proves that authoritarianism not only endangers abstract institutions—it murders those who defend democratic principles. The United States must recognize that theological radicalization breeds real killers, not just ideological opponents. We are seeing this rise in political violence that is deeply troubling and yet somehow very predictable, as the boiling point of our society keeps everything in a state of high tension, anger, aggression, and incitement.
The anti-gender ire: meaning and ramifications
The war against gender
As said, the “fight against gender ideology” promised by Trump during the election campaign has been vigorously implemented since January 20, based on several executive orders and other measures. Between January and February, seven executive orders [SC1] were issued, whose full reading we recommend. The first establishes the ideological framework for enshrining the “biological truth of sex” in US state policy by decree. As soon as it was published, on January 20, trans blogger Erin Reed, from Erin in the Morning, wrote a detailed analysis of its content.
According to Erin, although the order is not a law, its transphobic meaning is undeniable, and it will have an impact on normative definitions in the area of discrimination, as well as concrete effects on bathroom use, prison policies, and social identity records in legal documents, including passports. The requirement to specify the sex assigned at birth when applying for US visas, as demanded by Brazilian congresswomen Érika Hilton and Duda Salabert, tells us that Erin´s predictions were very accurate.
Based on this ideological framework, the other anti-gender executive orders prohibit “ideological indoctrination” in basic education, the participation of trans women in women’s sports, the provision of comprehensive health care to trans children and adolescents, and “justify” the exclusion of trans people from the armed forces. The semantics used are the same: brutal, accusatory, untrue, in some cases crossing gender and race, as the following excerpts show:
“The impression of anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on the children of our country not only violates anti-discrimination civil rights law… but also usurps the basic authority of parents. For example, directing students toward surgical and chemical mutilation without parental consent or involvement, allowing men access to private spaces designated for women… Similarly, requiring acquiescence to ‘white privilege’ or ‘unconscious bias’ that promotes racial discrimination and undermines national unity.”
“In recent years, many educational institutions and sports associations have allowed men to compete in women’s sports. This is humiliating, unfair, and dangerous for [SC2] women and girls, and denies them the equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports.”
“Currently, across the country, medical professionals are mutilating and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our nation’s history and must end.”
“In accordance with the military mission and long-standing policy of the Department of Defense, the expression of a false ‘gender identity’ that diverges from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards required for military service. Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, the adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in their personal life.”
In terms of substance, the executive orders to combat “gender ideology” reflect the hybridization between doctrinal conceptions of the Vatican and biologistic conceptions of sexual difference defended and propagated by essentialist feminist currents[4]. Furthermore, as Paisley Currah astutely analyzes in an article in the New Yorker, these orders are not just instruments of attack on vulnerable groups or fuel for moral panic. They are part of a broader arsenal for demolishing the “administrative state,” because a welfare state cannot regulate, ensure social protection, or guarantee rights if it cannot adjust its parameters for classifying individuals and groups to new social and political demands.
Also, as already mentioned, the visceral rejection of “gender” combined with the accusation of “wokism” has also served to justify the elimination of Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI) policies in state agencies, universities, and federally funded projects and, as we shall see, to coerce the private sector in the same direction. The accusation of DEI as “wokeness”, widely used in the dizzying demolition of USAID, has also been used to remove two high-ranking officers from the armed forces—a thorny issue that quickly disappeared from the news.
As economist Paul Krugman ironically observed, “that’s woke” is now the favorite and immediate accusation used to disqualify anyone who ever criticizes Trump’s policies. On the other hand, the draconian rules abolishing DEI are also being applied extraterritorially as a requirement for service providers from other countries to sign contracts with US embassies. This conditionality, which violates principles of state sovereignty—with regard to the governance of human rights and citizenship—has already been challenged in court by the Spanish government. This will not prevent the Trump administration from extending it to other areas of transnational negotiation, however.
Right to abortion and the resurgence of pro-natalism
Abortion rights
A broader perspective on the attacks against “gender” necessarily includes measures and proposals related to reproductive matters. With regard to abortion, as soon as he took office, Trump signed an executive order prohibiting the use of federal public funds for access to abortion care. Predictably, he reactivated the so-called gag rule, cutting funding for international NGOs and other countries that provide abortion services and promote abortion rights. In the same vein, the US returned to the so-called Geneva Consensus, a club of countries that reject abortion and promote family-based policies.
Next, censorship measures were also applied to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), whose website has blocked access to epidemiological and legal data on abortion since January. Subsequently, funding was cut from Title X, a program for reproductive planning services for low-income people. Parallel to the political and regulatory siege on abortion rights, an intense disinformation campaign is underway against mifepristone, one of the substances that, together with misoprostol, make up the medical abortion pill.
In June, the government revoked the rules adopted by the Biden administration shortly after the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion (Roe v. Wade) in 2022, which guaranteed the procedure for terminating pregnancies in women facing medical emergencies. At the same time, the Supreme Court defeated a lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood of America (PPA) against the state of South Carolina that has serious implications for access to abortion. PPA is one of the largest providers of abortion services in the country and, precisely for this reason, has long been a priority target of the far right.
Even more appalling, these measures are blatantly inciting the radicalization that explains the brutal murder of Senator Melissa Hortman, who was a staunch defender of abortion rights. Her killer, a Christian extremist, kept a list of healthcare professionals and lawyers involved in ensuring this right. Check out our compilation on the state of abortion rights under the Trump II administration.
The announced return of pro-natalism
Historically, birth rates have been a concern of religious ultra-conservatism and the far right, as demonstrated by both Catholic doctrine and the pro-natalist policies of historical fascism. Then, since the 1990s, concern about declining fertility rates in Europe became a priority issue for the resurgent far right, subsequently translating into discursive phantasmagories about the “demographic winter” and the “great replacement”, directly associated with anti-immigrant xenophobia. Today, as Françoise Girard has shown, the arc of neo-pronatalism stretches from China to the United States, where until very recently such concerns did not exist, having been fueled by the growth of the far right and, most principally, its return to power in 2025.
This became flagrant when Trump chose JD Vance as his vice-presidential candidate. An ultra-Catholic and vocal pro-natalist, Vance repudiates divorce and single women without children and supports the creation of a “baby bonus” financial subsidy for families with children. After taking office, inspired by Orbán’s family-oriented and natalist policies, the government issued an executive order facilitating access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment. Concomitantly., strategies to persuade young women to marry and have children were launched, based on welfare and health programsthat are alignedwiththe Make America Healthy Again (MAHA[SC3] ) movement. The government is also, very intriguingly, implementing fertility incentives through the Department of Transportation.
Pro natalism nurtures the synergy between religious ultra-conservatism and the techbros of Silicon Valley, with Elon Musk and JD Vance being the most spectacular illustration of this pairing. The father of at least 14 children, Musk frequently expresses anxieties about “population collapse” and is investing financially in promoting pro-natalism domestically and transnationally. Last year, he sealed a partnership with the World XY platform, created by Katlyn Novak, former president of Hungary, to promote heterosexuality and fertility growth.
However, the motivations are not identical in each of these camps. Religious ultra-conservatism values natalism in itself because it is a central element of its doctrines on the natural (heterosexual) family. The techbros, on the other hand, are the eugenicists of the 21st century: they aim to increase fertility among the rich, white, and “most intelligent,” leaving all those remaining outside this “magic circle” subjected to inequality, precariousness, or, at worst, blunt necropolitics.
This difference, however, does not jeopardize their joint action: Musk is an icon of techbroderism, and Katlyn Novak is a spokesperson for ultra-Catholicism. The transnational contagion effects of this collusion are rapidly becoming visible beyond the US and Europe. Whether in Javier Milei‘s – the best friend ever of Musk’s – post claiming that fertility is low in Argentina because abortion was legalized in 2020, or the policy proposal of a “birth bonus” recently announced in Chile by José Antonio Kast, a rising Opus Dei political figure. Journalist Flor Alcaraz, responding to the demographic panic that is now taking hold in Argentina, rightly begins by arguing that blaming feminism does not solve the decline in fertility, whose causes are multiple and very complex.
The Supreme Court is demolishing rights
An excellent interview published last year by the Convergence website reconstructs the long history of the takeover of the Supreme Court, which began with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that abolished racial segregation in education. It also examines how this long-term plan was consolidated during Trump’s first term, with the immediate effect of the Dobbs decision of 2022, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion secured in 1973. Inevitably, the impulses of the Court’s ultra-conservative majority were turbocharged by Trump’s return to power.
Starting with decisions on “gender” and abortion rights, on June 18, the Court, in ruling on the case United States v. Skermetty, validated the state of Tennessee‘s decision to ban health care services for transgender children and adolescents. The Russian-born trans intellectual Masha Geshen, in an opinion piece for the New York Times, underscores how this “fear-driven” decision buried the jurisprudence established by the same Court in 2020, according to which discrimination based on sex applies to discrimination based on gender identity.
Erin Reid, meanwhile, examined the ploy by conservative judges to circumvent the argument presented by Tennessee health care advocates that there is discrimination if hormone blockers that are otherwise available to adolescents are prohibited for transgender children and adolescents. According to her, this contortion opens the door to abolishing constitutional scrutiny in cases of discrimination against transgender people in general. And, indeed, the Court is returning trans rights cases to lower courts for reconsideration in light of the Skermetty decision. Coupled with the “anti-mutilation” executive order, this ruling is inevitably sparking waves of panic.
A few days before the Skermetty ruling, in a Maryland case, the Court upheld the right of parents to prevent their children from being “exposed” to LGBTQIA+ content in schools. According to Chris Geidner, read together, the two decisions reveal that for the conservative majority of the Court, views contrary to LGBTQIA+ rights are legitimate, but LGBTQIA+ people, especially trans children and adolescents, are not worthy of protection. And Human Rights Watch underlined that the decision will incite more discrimination and negatively affect all children.
As said, on June 26, Planned Parenthood of America (PPA) was defeated in a lawsuit against South Carolina, as the Court recognized the right of the state government to refuse Medicaid funding for the network’s services. According to the Kayser Foundation bulletin, this is a first step toward a widespread suspension of Medicaid funding for PPA and other abortion providers.
The debris of rights being abolished, in line with the executive branch, is not limited to issues related to gender and abortion. Above all, it is adding fuel to the fire of anti-immigrant fury. On June 21, a first ruling granted the Executive Branch the right to deport people to third countries, as had already happened in the case of Venezuelans taken to CECOT in El Salvador. According to Nick Turse, when the decision was made, the State Department was “negotiating” with 53 other countries the possibility of agreements similar to the one signed with the Central American country.
Five days later, in a decision regarded as a colossal victory for Trump, lower court judges were denied the power to suspend the effects of the executive order that abolished the automatic right to citizenship for children of illegal migrants born in the US. Trump celebrated the verdict saying that it would now be possible to radically change migration and citizenship policy. However, for legal experts on different sides of the political spectrum, in abolishing the right to citizenship by birth known as jus terris that was enshrined in the 14th Amendment of 1868, the decision flagrantly violates the Constitution.
In May, retired judge J. Michael Luttig, a renowned conservative jurist, published an article denouncing Trump’s “total disregard” for the rule of law. Then, in response to the June 25 decision on birth rights — and what he considers to be an unacceptable complicity on the part of the Court—Luttig published a “manifesto” that revives principles from the Declaration of Independence. The new text firmly calls for the restoration of fundamental rights and freedoms for minorities, migrants, and political dissidents. It also states that the people are not the enemy of the government, but rather “the government that considers the people its enemy is itself the enemy of the people.”
Reexisting
In 2017, José Celso Martinez, the iconoclastic Brazilian theater director, who died tragically two years ago (in English), declared that we were already living in an era in which resisting was not sufficient because we were challenged to re-exist. This imagination, which became a sort of compass guiding us through the Bolsonaro years, can also be a valuable frame for mapping resistances underway that confront the dire scenario described in previous sessions. Radically altered circumstances require renewed angles of interpretation and creative approaches to politics.
Until recently, resistance to the de-democratization unleashed by Trump II was hardly visible. Among other reasons, because there were no immediate large demonstrations such as the colossal women’s march of 2017 that even extended to other countries. Furthermore the responses of most key institutions, starting with the Democratic Party leadership, have not been particularly vigorous. According to Senator Chris Murphy, in an interview in February, the party´s response to the scenario of destruction was based on a conventional political logic that would not contain the ongoing rise of neo-fascism.
Additionally, in April, an editorial in the NYT called on universities and law firms attacked by the government not to capitulate to these pressures. It must be said, however, that except for a few editorials and opinion pieces, the newspaper’s editorial policy itself was also predominantly normalizing the misrule. The alignment of The Washington Post, which has been “purged” by Jeff Bezos since 2024, with the Executive is also evident, wile the capitulation to Trump is even more pronounced in the case of TV networks.
Yet, as Rebecca Solnit points out, resistance is not always or necessarily expressive and dramatic. Beyond the paralysis and normalization prevailing on the institutional proscenium, re-existence was fermenting. From very early on, platforms such as GitHub and Terra Justa began to identify and report on resistance initiatives. But these efforts to raise awareness rightly diminished as signs of political repression intensified. This does not mean, however, that resistance has not continued in defense of migrants’ rights, university autonomy, abortion rights, transgender rights, or simply civil and political rights.
The agility, persistence, and consistency of the reaction from lower courts have been as crucial as the not so visible resistance of social movements. Examples include the cases of Kilmar Abrego and Mahmoud Khalid, the decisions that have contained Trump’s wrath against Harvard, and the verdict of a Boston judge suspending the rule that requires transgender people to have their birth names on their passports[5]. This dynamic turns on its head the more or less widespread perception that the guarantee of rights is an attribute of the higher courts.
The Trump Administration Litigation Tracker platform reflects the scale and vigor of the judicial resistance underway at these lower levels. It accounts for thousands of lawsuits that did not fall from the sky but were brought by civil society forces and some institutional actors. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been, for example, a crucial player in this equation, including in defending the rights of transgender people. However, fundamental judicial action has also been moved by institutions and officials affected by the DOGE’s demolition machine, including state governments and local authorities. Moreover, many state courts have been exemplary in their efforts to safeguard rights and uphold constitutional principles.
Not without reason, the lower courts are now priority targets of the executive branch and now also of the Supreme Court. In late April, in Wisconsin, Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested by the FBI on charges of helping a migrant evade an ICE operation (the state court later released her). The June 18 decision on birth rights directly targeted decisions from these lower circuits, de-legitimizing the judges who delivered them. Judge Luttig’s manifesto not only denounces the violation of the 14th Amendment implicit in the decision. It also vigorously defends the right to litigation and the decisions that overturned Executive measures based on solid constitutional principles.
Nor should the arduous resistance that has been exerted in the Supreme Court itself since 2022 by Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown be minimized. This tenacity is illustrated in an article in The New Republic that analyzes Brown’s lone dissenting vote in a decision on environmental regulation. According to the author, the black judge has done everything possible and impossible to save the Court from itself.
No less important, although signs of resistance from the core of the Democratic Party remain weak, many governors, mayors, and the party’s grassroots have been mobilizing. The speed and efficiency with which the police in Minnesota, a state governed by Tim Waltz—Kamala Harris’s running mate—identified and arrested Senator Horton’s killer and her husband was exemplary. And in early July, the California Superintendent of Public Instruction rejected the rule imposed by the federal government requiring the banning of transgender women from college sports[6].
In the communication camp, beyond the editorial capitulation of mainstream media, thousands of outlets have been deploying a colossal amount of critical information about the ongoing disasters such as Wired, Mother Jones, The Nation, ReWired, Erin in the Morning, Them, The New Republic, hundreds of blogs, podcasts, and monitoring platforms, many of which were key sources for this bulletin.
These not always visible rhizomes of resistance would erupt into dramatic, performative, and positively political expressions of resistance exactly when the government completed 180 days in office. First came the drastically repressed protests in Los Angeles. There, we saw Senator Alex Padilla being handcuffed at a public hearing with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, while the deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles, California, without the governor’s authorization was challenged in court. Next, the massive No King demonstrations took over the country while Trump basked in the military parade on his birthday.” Soon after, Zohran Mamdani of the Democratic Socialists was chosen as a candidate for mayor in the New York primaries. He defeated former governor Andrew Cuomo — who resigned from the New York state government in 2021 amid allegations of sexual harassment —, the financial oligarchies that supported him, and the “politics of more of the same” long pursued by the Democratic Party.
This sequence suggests that a cycle of re-emergence is taking shape in the US political fabric. On the other hand, it is critical to recall that de-democratization and neo-fascism are everywhere, catalyzed and fed by the flood unleashed from Washington. As such, all forms of resistance to other far-right regimes that collude with what is happening in the US must also be looked at closely.
For example, in Argentina, in February, following Trump’s inauguration, an unexpected LGBTQIA+ march was called, not for internal reasons, but to respond to yet another round of anti-woke vitriol uttered by Milei at the Davos Forum. Demonstrations took place in hundreds of Argentine cities and even some other countries. Though called by feminist, gender, and sexuality dissident movements, the protests were highly intersectional, involving retirees, researchers, academics, and popular sectors (check out the compilation).
At the end of March, infected by Trump´s policies, the Hungarian Parliament, not without protests, approved a constitutional amendment abolishing LGBTQIA+ Pride Parades and imposing a fine of €500 on anyone who violated the new legal norm. On June 28, the date of Stonewall, 200,000 people took to the streets of Budapest in what may have been the largest demonstration for LGBTTQIA+ rights ever held in Europe. The whole world celebrated while Orbán squirmed to explain the insurgency and the regime’s incompetence in curbing it. In their article for the website Autostraddle, Julie Dorf and Jessica Stern recounted the long history of Hungarian resistance, seeking inspiration to continue nurturing re-existing in the United States. One of their conclusions is that “people in Hungary have understood that LGBTQIA+ rights are inseparable from the broader struggle against authoritarianism. Resistance is about fighting corruption, democracy and equality—not just queer rights.
Art & Reexistence
In October 2018, this bulletin republished the essay Shibboleth: Lethal Cracks, by Sonia Corrêa, which was inspired by Doris Salcedo’s intervention in the hall of the Tate Modern Gallery. Salcedo´s work conjures up the biblical myth of the Ephraimites massacred at a border for not knowing how to pronounce the word shibboleth correctly. Dying at borders or at the limits of the political is what we are fully witnessing today.
In January 2017, Shibboleth evoked the nefarious justification of protecting gender equality and LGBTQIA+ rights to close borders that had been rampant in Europe for some time and had just been included in one of Trump I’s first executive orders. In 2018, the metaphor expressed the potential lethality of the institutionalized polarization implicit in Bolsonaro’s victory. In June 2025, it may conjure up imaginaries on how to resist lethal borders and the eradication of those who speak a language other than that of neo-fascism.
Art as Premonition
In May 2017, the website DesignMantic published works by 20 artists who had already viewed Trump’s first term as an “atrocious regime”, three of them openly associate Trump with Nazi-fascism or tyranny.
Humor and resistance
The imaginations conjured up by Shibbolet has many faces, including humor. Examples include the hundreds of memes created to celebrate Mandami’s victory in the New York primaries. The memes were the subject of a Hyperallergenic article entitled Zohran Mandami’s memes remind us that good things can still happen.
250 years of independence and other dark moments
In 2026, the American Declaration of Independence, now read as a text of resistance and insurgency, will be 250 years old. Across the country, history museums are collecting birthday wishes. Written on walls and virtual platforms, the messages reveal a radically divided but desperately hopeful country. Some institutions are also exhibiting memories of other moments of arbitrariness and persecution of dissent. At the New York Historical Museum, the exhibition Blacklisted: An American Story recovers the tragic memory of the “red scare,” instigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1940s, which persecuted and imprisoned Hollywood screenwriters, directors, actors, and actresses.
The insurgency of the drag queens
In June, when Donald Trump attended the show Les Misérables at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Drag queens Tara Hoot, Ricky Rosé, Vagenesis, and Mari Con Carne did also go the show. Fully dressed in their regalia they were warmly applauded. In [5] an interview with The Advocate, Mari Con Carne declared:
“As drag queens, we wanted to make it clear that they can stop us from performing on stage, but they can’t erase us if we’re in their presence. As an immigrant, I affirm that we will remain here and face them with courage.”
We recommend
Trump administration’s roadmap 2.0 follows autocrats’ playbook, but also ‘inspires’ allies abroad
How Trump’s return could lead to the collapse of US democracy – Folha de São Paulo
Pasión por la destrucción – Nueva Sociedad
The War on the Liberal Class – Social Europe
How Trump Happened – James K. Galbraith – Project Syndicate
The Trump Crackdown on Elected Officials – New Yorker
Donald Trump’s Dictator Cosplay – New Yorker
One hundred days of autocracy – New Statesman
ESSAY: Billionaire do-gooding is out. Naked oligarchy is in – Anand Giridharadas – The Ink
Trump’s Washington Is a Technofascist Fantasy—With or Without Musk – Mother Jones
Resources
6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties – Wired
From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide
Check it out
Taller · Periodismo internacional. Caja de herramientas – Le Monde Diplomatique
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[1] See https://periodicos.ufpel.edu.br/index.php/caduc/article/view/27547/20695
[2] See the Kaleidoscope report available at: https://kaleidoscopetrust.com/tag/usaid/
[3] The main references are Giorgio Agaben in Homo Sacer and Judith Butler in Precarious Lives and States of Exception. Carla Rodrigues and Isabela Pinto discussed these ideas in a text published in 2020. See: https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/remate/article/view/8658069/22520
[4] Total restrictions: Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. Partial restrictions: Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan.
[5] In early July, Erin Reid reported that the first passports with social names had already been issued.
[6] Although a few months earlier, Governor Newsom had made statements in favor of such exclusion.