By Sasha Abramsky
With President Donald Trump’s pardoning of more than 1,500 people charged with offenses relating to the January 6 insurrection, and his description of them as “hostages” rather than as insurrectionists, paramilitarism is now firmly back on the national agenda.
Trump’s actions in freeing these men and women and lionizing their actions in 2021 was made all the more shocking by the fact that, with a few exceptions, Republican members of Congress — many of whom themselves had to flee the mob on January 6 — largely responded without criticism. Instead, leading Republicans any discussion of Trump’s choice. “The president’s made his decision,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said. “I don’t second-guess those.” Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio brushed off a question on NBC’s “Today Show” due to his new position: “I’m going to be working on foreign policy issues, and you want to revisit these issues that are going on in domestic politics,” Rubio said. “It’s not going to happen.”
That silence in the face of a relentless attack on the judicial system speaks volumes, suggesting that it has become a policy goal of the GOP to historically rehabilitate the perpetrators of that shameful attack four years ago — and those who egged them on — and to normalize the truly ghastly idea of a paramilitary praetorian guard standing ready to do the “Great Leader’s” dirty work.
Make no mistake, paramilitarism is always at odds with true democracy. Nearly 2,400 years ago, It’s been a scourge ever since. When parties embrace streetfighters as allies, and when strongmen can activate paramilitary units to intimidate opponents — or, worse, to “neutralize” those deemed enemies — a Rubicon has been crossed. Such was the case in the antebellum South when paramilitary fugitive roamed the land, as well as in the post-Civil War South when the KKK, in alliance with many white political leaders, inflicted racial terror on Black communities. Such was also the case in late Weimar Germany, when political parties activated their troops to beat, torture and kill those they regarded as their enemies. It was accelerated under the Nazis, whose uniformed Sturmabteilung launched a reign of terror against socialists, trade unionists, journalists, academics who refused to toe the line, and, of course, Jews.
Such was the case, too, in 1970s and 1980s Central and South America, where one country after the next saw the activation of death squads working hand in hand with U.S.-backed hard right political leaders and their military allies. And in Ferdinand Marcos’s Philippines. And in Suharto’s Indonesia. It was the de facto law of the land in apartheid South Africa — and it remains in force in countries such as Sudan and Niger.
In Haiti, paramilitaries have filled the vacuum of a collapsing state by inflicting huge levels of bloodshed. And in Israel, paramilitary settler groups routinely destroy Palestinian property in the West Bank, often killing Palestinians as well.
The list goes on. By any measure, paramilitarism is one of the great horrors of the modern era.
Trump has long been enamored of the sort of strongman politics that brooks no dissent and metes out bloody retribution on enemies. According to several members of his inner circle from 2017-2021, . He also made no secret of against those at the wrong end of state power, urging cops to beat suspects and promising they wouldn’t be punished for breaking the law. It’s no accident that one of the first acts of Trump’s Justice Department this past week was to announce a complete cessation of all civil rights work and an end to oversight agreements with local police departments that have a particularly egregious record of racism and brutality.
When strongmen can activate paramilitary units to intimidate opponents — or, worse, to “neutralize” those deemed enemies — a Rubicon has been crossed.
To be clear, when the police are explicitly given permission to violate the law, the line between law enforcement agencies and paramilitaries blurs, for that permission is premised on the understanding that at some point favors will be called in. Trump’s transactionalism is all about this kind of arrangement, one that is void of core moral principles. In such a world, the ends always justify the means.
But Trump doesn’t only want to remove all accountability mechanisms from law enforcement. He remains enamored of extralegal outfits, perhaps . In fact, before and during his first presidency, the MAGA leader repeatedly flirted with far right paramilitarism: When, in the 2016 campaign, Trump received an endorsement from , he only reluctantly — and extremely half-heartedly — rejected the endorsement. When a neo-Nazi mob ran rampant through the college town of Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, Trump concluded that many of them were When he was explicitly asked, during a presidential debate in 2020, to repudiate the Proud Boys and other far right street fighters, he instead urged them to When those street fighters came to D.C. for what against his election loss and Congress’s certification of the Electoral College vote, Trump urged them to and then he himself stood back and stood by while the mob that he had inspired ransacked the halls of Congress and hunted for Trump’s political opponents — and his own vice president — so that they could hang them.
Now, with Trump running roughshod over his political opposition, and the full force of the federal government being mobilized to rewrite the history of January 6 and lionize its perpetrators, not-very-subtle signals are being sent that Trumpism welcomes violence — just so long as it is violence carried out on its behalf.
These moves will likely also encourage , and essentially give and the military a green light to expand their influence even further.
By pardoning the January 6 insurrectionists, the president has effectively condoned those who commit violence on his behalf — making it that much more likely that MAGA goon squads, responding to the unstated but clear desires of a president-cum-despot, will target their political enemies in the years to come.
This article originally appeared in TruthOut on February 5th, 2025
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