Trump is a fascist, according to White House

ALSO INSIDE: Arizonan flees country after being detained by ICE for months

Sep 26, 2025

Cam here 👋 bringing you your daily dose of what people are doing – good, bad, and otherwise – in the world of politics. We’re diving into the stories you won’t see anywhere else. And remember, you can also keep up with me over on TikTok and Bluesky.

Since day one of Trump’s political career, people have desperately attempted to normalize his absurd abuses of power and blatant corruption – and 10 years later, much of corporate media remains a victim of their own attempts to return to a sense of normalcy.

It’s time to stop sane-washing the insanity.

What Happened

The White House on Monday essentially identified President Donald Trump as a fascist, and ordered law enforcement to treat any person or entity opposed to fascism as domestic terrorists.

Trump signed two sweeping orders this week that target political opponents: an executive order that designates anyone opposed to fascism as a domestic terrorist and a memorandum that orders the US Treasury and federal law enforcement to investigate the finances of any person or entity whose goals are not aligned with his administration. Both orders identify their targets as “antifa,” an umbrella term used by the administration to include anyone it deems its opposition.

The concession marks a tonal shift among Trump and his supporters, who for years have tiptoed around the descriptor. Until this week, conservatives had adopted nationalism, corporatism, and authoritarianism — all core tenets of fascism — but largely avoided the all-encompassing moniker. But now, White House-aligned media personality Alex Jones has proudly adopted the fashion of Adolf Hitler, and Trump confidante and top White House official Stephen Miller has adopted Nazi Party chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ language.

In a press release attempting to justify the executive actions, the White House published a poorly sourced list of examples of anti-fascist behavior as a way to justify the order. This list includes criminal charges — most of which did not end in convictions — for alleged actions of people from all across the political spectrum, as well as incidents that weren’t politically motivated — or even violent — at all.

“President Donald J. Trump is right: the violence problem is on the Left,” the release incorrectly explains. “That’s why he just designated Antifa — a network of Radical Left terrorists that aim to overthrow the government through violence and agitation — as a domestic terrorist organization.”

But the executive order actually doesn’t mention political leanings at all. Even though Trump and his team publicly say the executive order is targeted towards “radical Left terrorists,” it could apply to anyone. While the press release attributes every incident outlined as a politically motivated attack from the Left, it identifies only one criteria the White House uses to designate someone an anti-fascist: being anti-Trump.

The most glaring example the White House gives of what they consider anti-fascist behavior is near the bottom of their list, right between “Luigi Mangione supporters” and “people who sent vials of blood to the RNC.”

“In 2024, President Trump was shot in an attempted assassination at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Six weeks later, President Trump was targeted in a second assassination attempt in Palm Beach, Florida.”

There is only one thing that connects both assassination attempts. It’s not their political ideology, they weren’t working together, there was no outside funding involved, and neither of them had coherent goals they wanted to accomplish. The only thing the two would-be Trump assassins the White House has labeled anti-fascist have in common is that they opposed Trump.

The language in the executive order reinforces the idea that anti-fascism is synonymous with anti-Trump. The president has often referred to himself as the embodiment of the law and the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, two institutions his order says are under attack by anti-fascists.

“Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise,” the order claims, “that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.”

While the order itself has little legal standing, it attempts to give law enforcement the authority to “investigate, disrupt, and dismantle” anyone the administration believes fits its definition of an anti-fascist.

Attempts to Sanewash

Far-Right Spin

It’s easy for individual members of Congress to get overlooked by national outlets as they quietly skate to reelection again, and again, and again. The following is an overview of different congressional representatives you may not have heard of, with fun facts about their origin stories they’ve tried to keep out of the public narrative.

US Rep. Brad Finstad, Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District

Since taking office in 2022, Rep. Finstad has:

Seen his net worth decrease from $7 million to $4 million
Sponsored 49 bills, none of which have been signed into law
Held exactly zero in-person town halls
Voted against the expulsion of disgraced US Rep. George Santos from Congress
Threatened an ethics investigation into Democratic US Rep. Angie Craig for holding town halls in his district
Released a bipartisan joint statement condemning the politically-motivated shooting in Minnesota

Fun Facts

One of the first bills Rep. Finstad introduced was the Audit and Return It Act, which would have created a system for the government to take back misused COVID relief funds to pay off the federal deficit. The proposal included an audit of Paycheck Protect Program (PPP) loans, which Finstad has an interesting history with.

Shortly after PPP loans became available, the staff of Finstad’s private company tripled from 11 employees to 33, for which he was loaned $160,000. The next year, he received a $155,000 PPP loan for his seemingly pandemic-proof business’ growing staff of 43 employees. Both loans were forgiven, and his company has since reduced its workforce back down to 11 employees.

One of his major accomplishments in the Minnesota Legislature was securing public funding for a Major League Baseball field. The deal was largely funded by taxpayer dollars, saving Carl Pohlad, billionaire owner of the Minnesota Twins, over $350 million.

After 25 years in Arizona, he was detained by ICE and forced to leave the US

Excerpts from a report by Sahara Sajjadi, political correspondent for COURIER’s The Copper Courier in Arizona

In his 25 years of living in Arizona, Brandon Gonzalez always tried to live as a model citizen, knowing that the slightest transgression could expose his undocumented status and potentially rip him away from the only home he’d ever known.

His parents came to the US in 1999 in pursuit of a better life, after struggling to raise a family in Mexico due to low wages. The family settled in downtown Tucson, where Gonzalez was raised and went to school, before he moved to Phoenix in December 2024.

But this year, Gonzalez and his girlfriend, Ivy Bonilla, lived in fear as the Trump administration began to carry out the president’s mass deportation agenda, targeting undocumented immigrants regardless of whether they’d committed a crime.

That fear was justified, as the couple learned on July 14.

What started as a traffic stop in Scottsdale turned into a degrading monthslong detention in ICE custody.

The center was overfilled and crowded, said Gonzalez. The staff took two months to change his bedsheets instead of doing it weekly, dietary restrictions were ignored, and staff members were hostile. Bonilla described one instance that Gonzalez told him about, where part of Gonzalez’s lunch, a boiled egg, fell on the floor. According to Gonzalez’s account, a detention center worker allegedly stepped on the egg before putting it back on his tray and instructing him to eat it.

“You have security guards who get a power trip and would yell all the time at them,” Bonilla said. “They just don’t care in there and enjoy yelling at people and making them feel less.”

Bonilla also said Gonzalez told her the officers on duty were often uninformed and unable to answer basic questions from detainees.

A spokesperson for ICE called the allegations “baseless” and “a one-sided sob story without truth.”

“These allegations are laughable and offensive to the hard-working officers and facility staff providing top-notch care to all detainees,” the spokesperson said. “The Florence Service Processing Center continually passes all inspections. Therefore, suggesting that the facility lacks proper sanitation or that it takes months for detainees to receive a set of clean sheets is utterly absurd.”

In his months spent at the facility, Gonzalez remained in frequent communication with his girlfriend and often talked about the mundanity of detention. Every day felt the same, the fluorescent lights caused headaches, and the conditions felt too much to bear.

It’s why he signed papers to voluntarily depart the US.

Despite his roots in Arizona, Gonzalez decided it just wasn’t worth the fight anymore. He could leave for Mexico, live with his grandmother for a few years, and hopefully return to the US one day.

Read Sajjadi’s full story here.

Advertise in this newsletter

Do you or your company want to support COURIER’s mission and showcase your products or services to an aligned audience of 190,000+ subscribers at the same time? Contact advertising@couriernewsroom.com for more information.