Resisting American Christofascism

Resisting American Christofascism

Trump's return to power promises something far more dangerous than his first term—a marriage of chaos and calculation. Though he maintains strategic distance from Project 2025's blueprint for authoritarian reform, his incoming administration stands ready to implement its vision with unprecedented precision. This won't be the scattered authoritarianism of his first term, but something more refined: a Christofascism that wears both a smile and a snarl.

As a transgender woman watching this unfold, I recognize what German liberation theologian Dorothee Sölle named decades ago. Christofascism merges authoritarian politics with religious language, stripping Christianity of its liberatory message and fashioning it into a framework for domination. Trump's incoming regime, fortified by lessons from his first term and supported by a network of strategically placed allies, represents this project's full flowering. For its architects, our lives—especially lives that defy narrow gender norms—aren't just inconvenient; we're a threat to their imagined order, a reminder that humanity remains stubbornly diverse and resilient.

Theocracy #1 by Chris Wieland

We must abandon the comforting illusion that our political system simply needs more strategic engagement or cleverer tactics. The system isn't broken—it's functioning exactly as designed. Continuing to pull the few levers offered to us will never result in the change we desire. We need to start pulling different levers. Unconventional levers. Uncomfortable levers. Quite likely illegal ones.

Machinery of Control

Unlike his tumultuous first term, Trump's second administration is positioned to master the machinery of control from day one. Through Schedule F, Trump plans to rapidly replace career civil servants with loyalists, creating what observers call a "loyal state." This isn't mere patronage—it's a calculated move to eliminate institutional memory and continuity, ensuring that only the most ideologically aligned remain in power.

Trump's approach to Congress has evolved since his first term. With a body more aligned with his agenda and emboldened by his previous term, he faces minimal resistance. Immigration policies, trans rights, and even potential escalations in Gaza—his administration knows it will face little meaningful opposition. Democratic silence on key issues has already signaled room to push forward with impunity.

His executive orders will be enacted with unprecedented speed and boldness—not the easily challenged directives of his first term, but carefully crafted measures supported by a fully cooperative bureaucracy eager to interpret them in the most extreme terms. This administration no longer fears institutional checks. Instead, it actively removes them, replacing dissenting voices with those willing to execute its vision without question.

Yet Trump's engagement with Project 2025 remains strategically ambiguous, providing him plausible deniability while allowing supporters to downplay its implications even as they press the limits of power. This calculated ambiguity is a hallmark of his strategy—pushing boundaries while leaving space to retreat, ensuring his intentions remain just blurry enough to diffuse criticism and galvanize support.

Manufacturing Enemies

With minimal resistance from Congress and a fortified network of loyalists, Trump's team is poised to take repressive policies to new extremes. Mass deportations, once a campaign promise, are now a calculated strategy to appease the base while safeguarding industries that rely on immigrant labor. Deportations will be staggered so as not to disrupt economic interests, creating a cycle where deportations serve as public performance, reinforcing Trump's "law and order" stance while maintaining the exploitative labor practices that benefit his corporate allies.

Immigration policy serves as a primary site for examining what Achille Mbembe terms "necropolitics"—the deployment of sovereign power to determine who may live and who must die. The proposed intensification of deportation mechanisms, coupled with attempts to denaturalize citizens, creates a system where entire communities live in perpetual precarity. This isn't just about removing people from the country—it's about creating a permanent underclass of workers and residents who can never feel secure, who must constantly prove their right to exist.

The administration is exploring the revocation of citizenship for naturalized individuals convicted of even minor crimes. This tactic doesn't just punish individuals; it creates a pervasive atmosphere of fear in immigrant communities, making people constantly question the permanence of their status. The goal is to ensure that even legal residents and citizens feel perpetually temporary, permanently deportable. This constant threat serves multiple purposes: it suppresses political organizing, ensures a compliant workforce, and maintains a state of psychological terror that makes resistance feel impossible.

The increased law enforcement funding targets marginalized groups, funneling police power toward "quality of life" offenses, a tactic historically weaponized to criminalize poverty and nonconformity.

Fracturing Resistance

Trans rights aren't just under attack; they're being strategically weaponized as a wedge issue to fracture progressive coalitions. By aligning with anti-trans factions within feminism, Trump's administration aims to peel off support from traditionally progressive allies. This strategy allows the administration to attack reproductive rights while building alliances with gender-critical "feminists" who view trans identities as threats.

Furthermore, Trump is threatening to cut funding for schools that recognize transgender students. His campaign spent tens of millions of dollars on branding the trans community as a "threat to public safety and decency." This represents more than mere political maneuvering—it's a calculated escalation of strategies already proven effective at the state level. As legislatures continue passing increasingly restrictive anti-trans laws, Trump's administration sees an opportunity to nationalize these "successful" local approaches, transforming scattered state-level attacks into coordinated federal policy.

The targeting of trans communities and reproductive rights exemplifies how gender itself becomes regulated through state power. The strategic deployment of trans rights as a wedge issue demonstrates how fear and disgust can be manipulated to achieve political ends. By positioning trans people—especially trans youth—as threats to public safety and traditional values, the administration creates a moral panic that justifies increasingly aggressive policies of exclusion and control.

A similar tactic is being used to bolster white supremacy. In the past few years, dozens of bills have been introduced to limit DEI in higher education, school districts have banned books that teach about BIPOC lives. Trump has promised to intensify these efforts by revoking funding to schools that teach Critical Race Theory (a term whose precise meaning has been twisted in order to become a rhetorical “catch all” for teaching anything that makes white children aware of the existence of racism in the past or present), to initiate civil rights investigations into schools that use race in admissions, and reinstate his 1776 Commission, which seeks to “promote fair and patriotic civics education.”

The Architecture of Oppression

Domestically, the Trump administration has expanded the IRS's role to target dissenting voices. Nonprofits, activists, and organizations advocating for trans rights and immigrant support are now facing increased audits and investigations. Under the guise of tax regulation, the IRS serves as a financial weapon to drain the resources of those who oppose Trump's regime. This tactic isn't unprecedented; during his first term, Trump reportedly suggested using the IRS to investigate political adversaries, including former FBI officials James Comey and Andrew McCabe. Both faced intensive IRS audits, raising concerns about the agency's use for political retribution.

Such actions transform the IRS from a tax collection agency into a tool of repression, reminding dissenters that financial ruin is the potential cost of opposition. This weaponization of federal agencies represents a particularly insidious threat because it operates under the veneer of legitimate oversight while selectively targeting opposition groups with resource-draining investigations. The message is clear: resistance comes at a price, and that price can be carefully calculated to break not just individuals but entire movements.

The military's potential role in domestic repression poses an even graver threat. While Trump advocated for employing the military to stifle dissent during his first term, he largely refrained from acting on these impulses. Now, with fewer guardrails in place and the genocide in Gaza having laid the groundwork for suppressing dissenting voices, the stakes are dramatically higher. It serves his interests to escalate and maintain violence in Palestine, using it as both distraction and precedent for domestic repression.

Global Laboratory of Violence

Trump's domestic policies find their mirror in his international stance, particularly regarding Palestine. His support for Israeli settlement expansion signals an acceptance—even an endorsement—of displacement as a legitimate political tool. In Gaza and the West Bank, we see a foreshadowing of Trump's approach to "undesirable" populations within the U.S., with Israel's actions serving as a test case for his own authoritarian ambitions.

He has openly threatened to crush pro-Palestine protests and given his past and continued rhetoric of deploying troops to support police action, he has unprecedented unchecked power to act much more aggressively than in the past. Whether he attempts to follow through on his threat to deport "violent radicals" on college campuses or to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807's unchecked powers to use the military against protesters, Trump now operates from a position where loyalists are more willing to follow his orders and where he's immune from prosecution for what happens when they do.

This pipeline of violence flows both ways. The militarization of police forces, the normalization of extreme force against protesters, and the criminalization of dissent at home reinforce and legitimize similar actions abroad. Meanwhile, the tactics used in Gaza—from surveillance technology to crowd control methods—are being adapted for domestic use. This circular flow of repressive techniques creates what scholars call a "security-industrial complex," where the tools and tactics of oppression are refined and exchanged between domestic and international contexts.

The only real deterrent from him doing such things is us. And at a time when most activists and agitators I know are exhausted.

Building Sacred Resistance

In the face of such comprehensive plans to reshape society through Christofascism, our resistance must be equally comprehensive. We need to study successful resistance movements, build strong local organizations while maintaining broader networks, develop multiple backup plans, and create sustainable support systems that can endure long-term pressure.

Don't settle for anything less than collective liberation. Nurture your hope for a better world. But you have to help build it. We need to start from the ground up as we build communities strong enough to hold our hopes. Hope isn't passive; it's a practice. For Sölle, hope wasn't about waiting for change but living in ways that create a world resistant to fascism. In a time when authoritarianism seeks to eradicate us, our hope is a refusal to accept their vision of inevitability.

The authors of Project 2025 want us to believe that their vision is inevitable – that they can reshape society to eliminate people like me. But history is full of examples of people resisting seemingly unstoppable forces. The Underground Railroad helped thousands escape slavery. The Danish Resistance helped most of their Jewish population survive the Nazi occupation. ACT UP forced society to address the AIDS crisis. These weren't just spontaneous acts of resistance – they were carefully organized networks of mutual support and strategic action.

The road ahead requires understanding and transforming the systems that create and sustain oppression. We must build networks of mutual support and resistance that operate outside government control. If healthcare access becomes criminalized, we will need underground support to ensure survival. If public spaces become hostile, we will create our own spaces, networks of solidarity that can withstand persecution.

Plan for the worst. But don't sacrifice your compassion along the way. Solidarity is tangible, material. Don't settle for sentiment. Act. Share. Give. Subvert. Resistance isn't theoretical. Revolution cannot stay an abstraction. Don't be a spectator. Fuck neutrality.

Community isn't a luxury; it's necessary for survival. But it's more than about mere survival – it's about creating spaces where everyone can flourish, where the margins become centers of transformation. In the face of their vision of control and conformity, we offer a vision of liberation and love. In response to their theology of domination, we practice a spirituality of resistance and celebration.

There is going to be a temptation to let your own fears cause you to look away from the most vulnerable among you. Make sure your community is one of deepening solidarity, a community that gives attention to the most vulnerable. Don't talk to cops. Normalize creative illegality. Save your vulnerability for those you can trust.

Dancing with the Revolution

These are bleak times. Things will get worse before they get better. The machinery of oppression grows more sophisticated, and the weight of resistance feels heavier with each passing day. But we must pursue joy with the same fierce determination that we resist Christofascism.

Joy isn't a distraction from the struggle—it's essential sustenance for the long fight ahead. Every laugh shared in solidarity, every moment of pleasure stolen from their regime of control, every celebration of life and love and liberation becomes an act of defiance. Their power depends on our despair; our resistance requires both rage and revelry.

In the vulnerable places of trusted community, feel your grief. Hold one another's grief. Resist despair. Rest when you need it. The world needs you to stick around for a while.

Soak up glimpses of joy. Dance. Sing. Savor delight. Remember Emma Goldman's words about dancing and revolution. As she wrote in her autobiography:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal...should demand the denial of life and joy.

Let joy be as much a part of your resistance as determination. Resist, not just out of anger, but in celebration of a world where love and liberation can thrive. Embrace the possibilities they want us to forget. Together, we are building something they can't imagine and can't prevent – a future where love and liberation thrive not as abstract ideals but as lived reality. The path ahead is challenging, but we don't walk it alone. Every time we support each other, every time we create spaces of authentic community, every time we resist the logic of domination, we demonstrate that another world is possible.

This is our sacred task – not just to survive their vision of the future, but to create our own.