The Expediting Authoritarianism of Trump’s USA Has Taken Root in Australia

“Fascism and authoritarianism isn’t just in Trump’s USA,” insisted Greens Senator Dr Mehreen Faruqi in a social media post on Tuesday, the day after the New South Wales police attacked 20,000 pro-Palestinians demonstrators on Gadigal land at Sydney Town Hall. “It takes root here too,” she added.

The unbridled NSW police assault on civilians protesting the official visit of Israeli president Isaac Herzog occurred on Monday evening, 9 February 2026.

And further footage of the mass brutalisation posted by Faruqi is then overlaid with the lines, “Fascism in Minns’ NSW. Fascism in Albanese’s Australia.”

Statements about rising fascism in democracies are often charged with being sensationalist. Yet global shifts over the last 12 months have lent weight to such observations. The increasing slide into authoritarianism occurring under US president Donald Trump in the States is now hard to deny, whilst in this country there’s been a recent uptick in draconian policy- and law-making.

The tens of thousands present last Monday night for the demonstration against the visit of Herzog understood that what was transpiring on the Sydney streets was fascistic and authoritarian in nature.

Once NSW police had kettled in the crowd of tens of thousands, so it could not disperse, it then charged it with brute force, fists and horses, and this unbridled violence amounted to police officers acting with impunity because they’d been guaranteed it.

The Trump administration entered 2026 announcing via its actions that the authoritarian shift it had been progressing for that last 11 months has established itself. These actions involved the kidnapping of the Venezuelan president and the urban warfare that ICE agents have been waging against the civilians of Minnesota, which has included two unarmed civilians being shot dead by masked agents.

Australia has been reliant on the more powerful US over the post-World War II period, and its shift to the right was inevitably going to impact locally. However, Washington has been pressuring its allies to follow suit. And things have been shifting, subtlety at first, but then have accelerated into a deluge of harsh lawmaking post-Bondi, and this has all toppled over into the NSW police attack on the people.

Establishing authoritarian rule

The warnings about the far-right rising in the west have been prevalent over recent decades. Populist governments have increasingly been garnering larger percentages of the vote in national elections in Europe, and whilst the shift to the right in the US might have commenced prior to Trump, the onset of authoritarianism over the last 12 months had been dramatic and at accelerated pace.

Trump ran for US president on a populist vote with promises to run the biggest deportation drive of undocumented migrants in history, to make America great again, and to rollout Project 2025, which is a plan to conservatively reshape the US federal government developed by the Heritage Foundation. The understanding is this dramatic transformation has already been progressed halfway.

Trump’s fascism on the world stage has been in everyone’s face. The US president has broken 80 years of post-World War II diplomatic relations between the US and European nations. Trump has shrouded the atrocity that is Gaza in ridiculous redevelopment plans that conceal Israel’s continuation of the killings. And the US recently kidnapped the Venezuelan president on his own turf.

But to bring home the authoritarianism, Trump has deployed ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officials to a number of major US cities that don’t adhere to his far-right nationalist agenda, under the guise of carrying out the mass deportation drive. However, what has occurred is a full-scale attack on the citizenry once it reacts adversely, yet nonviolently, to these intrusions.

Ununiformed and masked ICE agents commenced disappearing undocumented migrants off US streets in April 2025, and this was soon heightened to these officers illegally detaining US citizens and even Native peoples.

But the toppling over into full scale authoritarian power appears to have been when two American citizens were shot dead by ICE on two separate occasions within two weeks. And the impunity that the ICE officers were provided by the president and vice president JD Vance in the wake of the killings spelt out to the US public that the type of rule they’re now subject to is far from democratic.

The increasing shift down under

The local political class have appeared to be caught unawares by this year’s extreme shift to the right in the States. Indeed, prime minister Anthony Albanese has continued to insist that it is his job to ensure that the relations between the United States and Australia remain strong, but in doing so, he and his government are simply refusing to admit that the international order is in free fall.

Since Trump was first elected back into the presidency and then took office, the Albanese government has, however, enacted two sets of extreme migration laws, which have facilitated the government in sending asylum seekers it deems too dangerous to live in Australia to reside on Nauru under guard of Finks outlaw motorcycle gang members. And Nauru is being paid for this honour.

A first wave of hate crime and antiprotest lawmaking took place at the federal level and in the state of NSW in February 2025. This saw mandatory minimum sentences being enacted nationally to cover a range of terrorism offences and hate crimes, whilst in NSW, a far-reaching incitement to racial hatred offence was passed, along with some laws limiting protests.

This first round of lawmaking responded to an “antisemitism crimewave” that law enforcement concluded was staged by organised criminal figures to convey a nonexistent crisis, while the second that’s occurred over the summer of 2025-26, has taken these developments to the nth degree, which has all been carried out in response to the 14 December 2025 Bondi Beach mass murder.

The onslaught of policy and law changes that have taken place over the summer can be labelled “combatting antisemitism” reforms, as they have overhauled all levels of government and institutions so that the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with prejudice towards Jews, applies, and it serves to supress critical expression about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The outbreak of the mass murder and starvation program that is the Gaza genocide and attempts to deny criticisms of it, really set the foundations for the Trump administration’s assault on democracy and the world order.

Fascist bully boys in blue take Sydney

NSW premier Chris Minns and his state Labor government have been condemning Sydney’s pro-Palestinian supporters ever since October 2023. Instead of these people being understood to be citizens and residents concerned about the most heinous crime in recent memory, they have been treated like they are terrorist supporters to the point that they warrant state violence.

The mounting laws enacted by NSW and federal Labor over summer have been criticised for being so broadly drafted that they likely cover broader behaviour than they were designed to capture, and in the rapidly shifting political environment of the present, these laws, which are being placed on the books, really leave it open for them to be weaponised by a future far-right government.

But the proof that these overreach laws are being drafted precisely because NSW ministers are itching for greater consolidation of power was laid out on the Sydney city streets on Monday night when the Minns government and the NSW Police Force agreed to a highly dangerous plan to kettle in and forcefully ejected the crowd from the vicinity of Town Hall, using fists if necessary.

And just as when the ICE officers unleashed deadly force upon US citizens, the US people understood that the powers that be were no longer on their side, the great mass of constituents that support the pro-Palestinian cause came to realise as they bore witness to the full scale bashing of those that oppose the Gaza genocide by NSW police, they’re now considered enemies of the state.