The Trump administration’s actions at home and support for horrors abroad raise the question: is America becoming a fascist police state?

There is much to be thankful for this year if you are one of the academic bosses who run the University of Toronto. You might especially appreciate the return of Donald Trump to the White House, even as he has threatened to annex your country and make it America’s 51st state.

In March, it was revealed that three superstar academics and specialists on fascism at Yale — the historians and couple Marci Shore and Timothy Snyder, and the philosopher Jason Stanley — have taken up senior positions at the premier university in my hometown in an act of self-exile.

In an emotional interview with The New York Times titled, “We study fascism, and we’re leaving the US”, the trio said: “The lesson of 1933 is you get out sooner rather than later. My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, ‘We have checks and balances …

“And I thought my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship. Our ship can’t sink. And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”

Shore is the author of The Taste of Ashes and translator of Michał Głowinski’s Holocaust memoir, The Black Seasons. Snyder wrote such bestsellers as Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, and The Road to Unfreedom. Stanley wrote the influential How Propaganda Works as well as How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. In How Fascism Works, Stanley wrote: “What normalisation does is transform the morally extraordinary into the ordinary. It makes us able to tolerate what was once intolerable by making it seem as if this is the way things have always been.”

Richard Cullen, a friend and law lecturer at the University of Hong Kong, has reached a similar conclusion about America. Writing in an Australian publication, he warned: “Washington is savagely attacking its own leading universities to shut down basic operating freedoms; rounding up and heavily punishing — and imprisoning — students for expressing their views over the Gaza genocide and related matters; drawing up plans to cancel valid student visas en masse on political grounds; and organising mass deportations, with enthusiastic violence and scant or zero due process.”

That also means, I may add, going after people with green cards and even those who have been naturalised as full citizens, so long as they are considered disagreeable to some Washington agenda.

Cullen continues: “Washington has become eagerly, comprehensively and criminally complicit, with massive weapons and logistical support, in Israel’s horrifying, never-ending Gaza genocide; strong-armed its wretched Global West, limpet allies into supporting this vast, homicidal Zionist project; and secretly conspired with Israel to bomb Iran jointly and massively after treacherously misleading Tehran into thinking it was committed to negotiations.”

Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill”, now law, increases the budget for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement from US$3.5 billion to US$48.5 billion. That means hiring 10,000 new agents and expanding daily detentions to 116,000. Meanwhile, millions of Americans will lose access to health insurance and nutrition programs.

ICE has been instrumental in deporting people to South Sudan, which Washington previously accused of committing “extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, torture and cases of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment”. It has deported at least 200 migrants to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT mega-prison, considered among the most brutal and inhumane facilities of its kind by international human rights organisations.

The Trump administration now routinely ignores court orders; encourages the domestic brutalisation of undocumented migrants and citizens; threatens foreign friends and foes alike; subverts international law by sanctioning its institutional representatives; and enables ally Israel’s genocide in Palestine and aggression across the Middle East.

This is how a fascist police state operates, at home and abroad.

Republished from The South China Morning Post, 11 July 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.