From “Tear Down This Wall” to “Build That Wall”
Trump, Militarization, and the Return of the Confederacy
On June 12, 1987, standing at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, President Ronald Reagan delivered one of the most iconic Cold War soundbites in modern history:
“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
That wall, the Berlin Wall, stood as a symbol of repression, division, and authoritarianism. Reagan’s challenge was as much political theater as it was a call to action, but it resonated globally as a reaffirmation of the American myth: a defender of liberty, openness, and the free movement of people and ideas.
Fast forward nearly four decades.
Today, under Donald Trump’s renewed reign, the United States has reversed direction with stunning clarity and barbarity. The call is no longer to tear down walls but to build them higher, harder, and deeper, around borders, institutions, histories, and communities. The irony is searing, painful. The same country that once decried walls as tyrannical now celebrates them as patriotic.
But the story doesn’t stop at irony.
Over the past week, Los Angeles has become a microcosm of this walled vision of America. Thousands of residents took to the streets to protest federal ICE raids that swept up over 300 people, many of them longtime residents, workers, even pregnant women, in surprise operations across workplaces, homes, and churches.
Trump’s Department of Homeland Security called it a necessary surge for “immigration enforcement” and the protection of property and federal buildings. But in reality, it was a public performance of fear, escalation, provocation and domination. Police thugs and ICE henchmen, long waiting for the chance to engage in brutality against defenseless people, particularly immigrants, displayed their barbaric approach to “law enforcement” precisely so it could be televised and disseminated by friendly and critical media alike. A modernized, technofascist version of the roundups that authoritarian states have long deployed to control populations and suppress dissent.
As protests escalated, largely peaceful, though some marked by scuffles and defiant acts of resistance, Trump ordered the deployment of over 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 U.S. Marines into California.
Yes, Marines. On American streets. Against US citizens exercising their Constitutional rights to free speech, peaceful protest and public assembly. Full citizens labelled by Trump as “paid insurrectionists” who “hate America”. And he is also threatening US citizens and organizations preparing to demonstrate against his authoritarian display of power in Washington with “very heavy force” if they interrupt his fascist military parade to mark the 250th anniversary of the Army and his own birthday on Saturdady, June 14.
For the first time in decades, a sitting U.S. president has dispatched combat-trained, weapons-ready military forces into a state whose governor did not request or approve the action. Legal scholars agree: it violates the principle of posse comitatus, which bars federal troops from acting as domestic law enforcement. The whole point of the Trump presidency, however, is precisely to violate the US Constitution and restore Confederate symbols of power.
That’s why the Trump regime doesn’t care. The move to send the military against US citizens, to parade the army in Washington, to ignore courts and Constitution, all of it is a show of force, a loud, symbolic reminder that dissent will be surveilled, contained, and, if necessary, crushed. He is making clear that Confedeate technofascism is back in power.
Thus, while troops fan out across California cities, a quieter but equally dangerous cultural offensive is unfolding in the military bureaucracy.
Trump has ordered the restoration of seven U.S. military bases with Confederate-linked names reversing decisions made during the Biden administration to retire these tributes to treason and white supremacy.
The Trump regime insists the new base names are “historical corrections,” attributing them to alternate figures with the same surnames. But the symbolism is unmistakable: the Confederate spirit is being rehabilitated, renamed, and reloaded as part of a broader technofascist Trumpian restoration.
This is not simply a policy reversal. It’s a cultural and political project, a Confederate restoration under the guise of nationalism and populism. The wall Trump wants to build is not only the steel structure on the southern border. It is a wall against immigrants, against sanctuary states, and against the idea of shared humanity. It is a wall of troops, used to intimidate dissenters, immigrants, and citizens who remember and demand a different kind of USAmerica. And it is a wall of memory, where the Confederacy is not condemned but commemorated, not mourned but revived, and not rejected but worshipped. In this USA there is no room for “racist” DEI, for “woke” ideologies, for “radical” ideas about diversity, pluralism and democracy. Even these fairly common sense liberal ideas have now become deeply suspicious and legitimate targets of lawfare.
Trump is building a walled state, and he’s building it brick by brick through executive power, cultural rollback, military force, and symbolic violence.
In 1987, Reagan called for tearing down walls to liberate the people of East Germany and push further the nascent project of neoliberal globalization. In 2025, Trump is building new ones to contain, surveil, and repress both the very “globalist” enemies Reagan stood for and domestic populations, especially migrants, people of color, and dissenting citizens Trump wants to stand on and crush.
The language has changed. The walls remain.
But this is not merely a Trumpian deviation. It is the full expression of the American empire turning inward. A country that once claimed to export freedom and democracy thorugh institutions like the NED and USAid now imports the tools of authoritarianism and counter-insurgency against its own citizens: ICE raids, curfews, base renamings, and military deployments.
This is what it looks like when an empire fears its own people, calls them “the enemy within”, labels them “paid infiltrators” and “insurrectionists”.
The wall isn’t just at the border. It’s now in the very arquitecture of US institutions, its police forces, its school narratives, its universities, and its newly edited and cleansed history books. It’s in the return of Confederate nostalgia, a new Jim Crow, even a new civil war that’s already unfolding, and the silencing of immigrant voices. And it is being cemented with fear, apathy, and executive power.