A Malignant Presidency of Donald Trump

Trump's thirst for vengeance, his hunger for power, his obsession with personal loyalty and his pretensions to monarchy produce a volatile psychological instability that borders on the criminally insane. Just consider one of his more recent posts on social media. In it, Trump generated a meme that depicts him in military fatigues and a crossed-rifle infantry hat with an explosion of flames behind him, five military helicopters flanking his right side and the skyline of Chicago under ominous skies in the background. This chilling meme is aimed at Chicago. It reads Chipocalypse Now, a depraved reference to the 1979 film Apocalypse Now set in Vietnam and Cambodia, a film that depicts the Vietnam War as a descent into madness devoid of morality and reason.

Trump's accompanying message amplified his deranged impulses: “I love the smell of deportations in the morning” and “Chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of WAR.” This is a twisted warning from a U.S. president descending into menacing and destructive madness. Three images of helicopters punctuate the unambiguous message. When asked about the posted meme by a reporter at the White House, Trump called the question “fake news” and told the reporter to “be quiet.” The denial of reality and the consequences of his maniacal musings are disturbing and deadly. The recent extrajudicial executions of alleged “drug runners,” summarily murdered in international waters without evidence and without a trial, illustrates how contemptuous Trump is of the law and human life.

Cities across America are in the sights of the Trump administration. No other American president has undertaken extra-constitutional occupation of cities across the nation. And, of course, this attack on American cities is part of theTrump's administration's assault on immigrants. Not since the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII has a president run immigration enforcement as a gestapo-like operation. Today, masked ICE agents disappear immigrants and move them from one detention facility to another, interfering with legal representation and causing suffering and loss in families.

The so-called border czar Tom Homan is thug-like. He warns undocumented immigrants that “We will hunt you down.” His violent rhetoric reflects the administration's contempt for judicial processes and its disdain for human rights. As it rounded up, shackled and flew alleged gang members to El Salvador's notorious CECOT prison, the administration clearly violated the fundamental constitutional right of individuals to prove their innocence in a court of law. In response to legal rejection of Trump's summary deportations, Homan said, “I don't care what the judges think. I don't care what the Left thinks. We're coming.”

All of this vitriol and violence targeting immigrants and cities is driven by a belief shared by Trump and a core of his appointees that people of a darker shade of skin will dilute the blood of white people of European descent. This belief is called the “Great Replacement,” a conspiratorial fabrication of white supremacists. Its adherents believe that non-whites will “poison the blood” of whites and ultimately outnumber them. Thus, the struggle against people of color is an existential one. All non-whites and those who speak a non-western language and share a non-western culture are considered mortal enemies of white-majority nations and western civilization itself. Senior presidential adviser Stephen Miller is the most aggressive proponent of these baseless and degenerate ideas.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Miller declared, “America is for Americans and Americans only.” And, in May 2025, he described the Trump administration's embrace of white South African immigrants as “a textbook definition for why the refugee program was created.” Miller and Trump claim, despite lack of evidence, that white South Africans (Afrikaners) endure government-sponsored race-based persecution. So, in January, the administration suspended the US Refugee Admissions Program that, in 2024, admitted more than 100,000 refugees from mostly war-torn and impoverished countries. Then, in February, Trump signed an executive order that “opened the refugee pathway exclusively to Afrikaners,” as reported by the BBC.

Trump's racist views and policies echo the white nationalism that rose in parts of Europe between WWI and WWII. Today, opponents of these ascendant and malicious forces must not stand by as the present American administration attacks immigrants, rips apart families and deports children. It is time for a new political vision that embraces the best of Americans' intentions, that welcomes immigrants fleeing violence, persecution and poverty, that offers universal healthcare and other broad social guarantees to all people living in this country, ridding our country of the plague of racism, turning back the advance of white nationalism and resisting the malignancy of Trump's presidency.