Trump Grabs Credit for Ceasefire Abroad While Fomenting Fights at Home

Americans opposed to the Trump administration and its war on the working class will again return to the streets on Oct. 18.

By Bob Hennelly

President Trump is headed to the Mid-East to take a global victory lap for brokering a ceasefire in what devolved into a genocide against the Palestinian people after Hamas's Oct 7, terrorist attack on the Nova music festival in which some 1,200 people were killed.

Now, close to 70,000 Palestinians are dead and most of Gaza is leveled even as we celebrate the return of the Israeli hostages that were taken by Hamas.

This deal could have been reached months and months ago and Trump's initial plan back in February to have the U.S. annex Gaza and turn it into a golf resort helped to extend Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's reign of terror by several months.

Here at home, masked immigration agents working for Trump, the  'world's peacemaker',  are abducting off of our streets people of color suspected of being in the United States illegally. Last month, federal agents laid a military-type siege on a Chicago apartment building replete with agents in G.I. Joe gear rappelling from helicopters and breaking down doors indiscriminately rounding up people and pointing guns at women and children. 

"Shattered windows marked the apartment building as seen in photos from the aftermath of the raid," CNN reported. "Hallways were lined with debris and plastic bags while clothing, wall decor and lamps became piles of litter inside apartment units." 

CNN reported people were detained for hours irrespective of their status, citizen or not. 

We've seen similar tactics used in agricultural settings here in our country with military style raids on farms, restaurants and construction sites where people were working to feed their families. Back in July, Jamie Alanís, 57, became the first immigrant to die during a raid when he fell 30 feet to his death from a roof where he had been hiding from ICE agents.

"These violent and cruel federal actions terrorize American communities, disrupt the American food supply chain, threaten American communities, disrupt the American food supply, threaten lives and separate families," the United Farm Workers said in a statement.

So far, there've been 17 detainee deaths in ICE custody since the start of the Trump administration.

"It's alarming that within the first nine months of the Trump administration we are quickly approaching the total number of deaths that occurred under Biden," according to the Detention Watch network. El Pais reported that during all of the Biden administration's four years 26 detainees died in ICE custody.

By now, with President Trump ordering the Texas National Guard into Chicago Illinois, it should be clear his intent is to re-litigate the Civil War by using the blunt force trauma of the unitary executive to restore what he and his followers believe is a white Christian nation. Remember, it wasn't until the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, 160 years after the Civil War, that the  Confederate flag made its way into the U.S. Capitol carried there by a Trump acolyte. 

Even after the several hours of MAGA's occupation, the GOP House and several Republican Senators persisted in their attempt to overturn the will of the voters by siding with their mob to reject the results of the 2020 election. Now, they are finishing the job with the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 blueprint which seeks to undo several generations of labor rights going back to the New Deal.

After President Reagan summarily fired 13,000 striking air traffic controllers, who were rightly raising the very same workplace issues that plague that workforce today, we saw union density, the percentage of Americans in union drop from 20 percent to 10 percent. As union density dropped, we saw workers take-home pay flatline and even decline when adjusted for inflation even as we saw worker productivity soar thanks to technological innovation. 

That windfall in wealth went to the nation's wealthiest families and corporations as U.S. tax and budgetary policy favored and abetted larger and larger multinationals. In 2024, U.S. union density dropped below ten percent. In the private sector it fell below six percent, a record low. Just roughly a third of public workers are in a union.

Now, with the passage of the so-called "Big Beautiful" bill we see the cutting of healthcare for 15 million people and the ending of the support that held up the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare)—all to fund further tax cuts for those who already are sitting on vast fortunes that are used to dominate and own our politics.

At the same time, the Trump administration has ended the collective bargaining rights of a million federal workers while requiring hundreds of thousands of them to work without being paid, with President Trump suggesting they may not ever be paid after the government shutdown is over. Thirty percent of the federal civil service are veterans and it's well documented that both unions and the merit-based civil service have advanced economic security and helped to reduce the racial wage and wealth gaps that have long existed in this nation.

That's all antithetical to the Trump/MAGA ideology that believes whites are victims of what they call “wokeism.” 

The Trump junta has seen to it that the 20-foot portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee, with a slave guiding Lee's steed, has been reinstalled at West Point  “after a congressionally mandated commission ordered it removed,” in the aftermath of the George Floyd police murder, the New York Times reported. It has gone after DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion programs with a vengeance illegally canceling billions of dollars appropriated by a previous Congress and signed into law by previous presidents. It has dropped longstanding Department of Justice  efforts to ensure local police accountability for past racist practices and policies.  

Like it or not, the nation's foundation is framed by a genocide of the Indigenous People that lived here executed by people who were told by the Catholic Church that they had a kind of dominion over all they saw when they arrived here or any other place that was yet to be “discovered.”  This Doctrine of Christian Discovery helped also create the legal framework for the commercial slave trade upon which so many of our Founding Fathers built their fortunes. 

Anyone who paid granular attention to Trump 1.0 knew his essence as the Great Divider who could only retain power by mining and exploring the divide between the red and blue states, formerly sorted as the blue and gray. He used COVID, a mass death event, to tear asunder our union along the racial fault line that defined the battle lines of the Civil War from which the nation had never really healed.

His divide and prosper technique helped drive the pandemic death toll higher as tens of thousands of essential workers died. In addition to 3,600 nurses and healthcare workers who died in the first wave, add several hundred federal civil servants with the American Federation of Government Employees working in congregant care facilities, our nation's airports and in our meat packing plants where the Trump administration resisted union pleas for basic information, masks, masks mandates and contact tracing.

A case can be made that by this callous disregard for the lives of federal civil servants and the lives of their families, Trump helped proliferate the infectious disease by his lying about the underlying public health science driving the pandemic.

We knew what we were in for with Trump 2.0 when he pardoned the 1,200 insurrectionists who defiled the U.S. Capitol in hopes of derailing the peaceful transition of power, brutally assaulting the U.S. Capitol Police in the process. The abject failure of Congress, the corporate news media and our legal system to effectively hold Donald Trump accountable for his actions cleared the way for his junta swallowing the federal government whole.

Now, the only thing that stands in the way of an authoritarian takeover is We the People of the United States. On Saturday October 18th, in over 2,200 cities, millions of us will protest  because we are the guardrails.

(WBAI 99.5 FM and the Pacifica Affiliate Network will broadcast LIVE NO KINGS DAY OCT. 18th  events from Maine to Alaska from 11 AM. to 7 PM EST.)