Trump 2.0: Is He Really a Fascist?

Written By Bret Devereaux

Firefighters work to extinguish the Reichstag Fire of 1933 (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Is Donald Trump a fascist? Ever since radio host Charlamagne tha God argued in an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris that Trump’s campaign “is about fascism,” the debate in the final days of this presidential campaign have turned to this question. Republicans argue that it is out of line to call Trump a fascist, while CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out that Trump himself regularly uses the term to describe his opponents. But far more important than questioning the propriety of the label is the question of whether the man seeking the highest office in the land is in fact espousing a fascist platform and ideology—and if so, how should voters approach the profoundly consequential decision of who ought to wield the executive power of the most powerful country in our time?

Now we ought to be clear at the outset: we are not asking if the Republican Party is fascist (I think, broadly speaking, it isn’t), and we are certainly not asking if you are fascist (I certainly hope not). But I want to employ the concept of fascism as an ideology with more precision than its normal use (“political thing I don’t like”) and in that context, ask if Donald Trump fits the definition of a fascist based on his own statements, and if he does, what that means. It is question of sufficient complexity to merit discussion in a longer-form context than slogans or tweets, because fascism as an ideology is nearly as complex as it is reprehensible.

“If you had asked in me in 2016 if Donald Trump was a fascist, I’d have said no. I’d have said no in October of 2020 too; authoritarian tendencies, perhaps, but not a fascist. Donald Trump’s rhetoric has changed, however, in a way that puts him firmly in this category, satisfying not just parts of the definition but every part of it.”

Now the response from some folks is going to be anger that I am even asking this question and demands for me to “stay in my lane.” To which I must remind them that the purpose of history and historians is, as Thucydides put it, to offer “an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human affairs must resemble if it does not reflect it” (Thuc. 1.22.4). This is my lane. Goodness knows, I’d much rather be discussing the historical implications of tax policy or long-term interstate strategy, but that isn’t the election we’re having. And if hearing about these events is unpleasant, well, Polybius offers the solution: “men have no more ready corrective of conduct than knowledge of the past” (Plb. 1.1.1). We must correct our conduct.

1933

The names of Mussolini and Hitler have become such bywords for evil in general conversation, peers to the Dark Lord Sauron or Frieza, that they need to be demystified to a significant degree to be useful for understanding human affairs and our momentum, because these men did not appear suddenly as the villains we now know them to be. There were plenty of signs of what these men might do once in power, before they had it, but they did not stride on to the stage dressed in spikes and black robes. These were men, not wizards with mind control powers, so it is worth asking why people were so foolish to entrust them with power—to the near universal ruin of everyone involved.

The politics of interwar Germany (that is, Weimar Germany) were complicated and unstable, and this isn’t the place for a full discussion of them. What I want to focus on are a few things. First, Hitler never commanded majority support. This is common for populist authoritarians—while they claim to speak for “the people,” they generally only speak for their own supporters, who are almost always a minority. The NSDAP (that is, the Nazis) won just 37 percent of the vote in July of 1932 and then fell to 33 percent in November. In both elections, the Nazi party’s share was fairly closely matched by the pro-Republican center parties (the SPD + Centre; 34 percent in July, 32.3 percent in November) and exceeded by the combined total for the left (SPD + KPD, though the KPD, following directives from Moscow, focused on undermining the SPD, rather than the Nazis). Even in March of 1933, when Nazi stormtroopers were in the streets attacking political opponents and shuttering opposition newspapers, the Nazis only managed 43.9 percent of the vote.[1]

Instead, Hitler gained power not because a majority of Germans agreed with his aims but because key leaders, most notably Franz von Papen, thought they could use Hitler to achieve their aims, that they could sand off all of the nasty rhetoric and instead employ Hitler as a cudgel (against the socialists). The Nazis encouraged this: in 1933 they initially moderated some of their rhetoric, particularly the anti-business rhetoric and Hitler negotiated early in ’33 with business leaders to clear the way for his appointment as chancellor. The antisemitic rhetoric never went away, but it was, for the convenience of the moment, deemphasized to make it easier for elements of Germany’s traditionalist, monarchist right (von Papen was no “liberal conservative,” but rather an anti-democratic opponent of republicanism) to go along.

It was a lie, of course.

The moment a convenient excuse arose—the February Reichstag fire, an arson attack that did not kill or injure anyone, did not disrupt the function of government (as the parliament was not present at the time)—Hitler first persuaded President Paul von Hindenburg to pass the Reichstag Fire Decree, enabling Hitler to suppress political opposition by suspending key political liberties, which he used to jail many of the deputies of the KPD (Communist) and SPD (Social Democrat) parties. Hitler then proposed the Enabling Act of 1933 in March; with much of the political opposition jailed, he only needed the Catholic Centre Party to get the necessary votes. He got them by promising to let the Centre Party continue to exist, to protect Catholic religious liberties, to retain their civil servants, and that the powers of the Enabling Act would be temporary.

It was a lie, of course.

Within three months, all political parties—including the Centre Party, which had received those assurances—were banned. Hitler wasted even less time setting up the first concentration camps, which were established in March of 1933. Of course, the “temporary” measures all became permanent, and when Hitler was done purging his enemies, he set about purging his allies. While Mussolini’s road to power a decade earlier differed in many ways, it shared some key elements. Mussolini’s fascists were not electorally successful before he seized power: the combined Blocco Nazionale of which Mussolini’s Fasci Italiani were just one party, got just 19 percent of the vote in 1921. Instead, in October of 1922, Mussolini marched on the capital with 30,000 fascist thugs to demand the dissolution of the government; the actual elected government asked the king (Italy was still a constitutional monarchy at the time) to give assent to allow them to disperse the march, but the king, Victor Emmanuel III, refused, believing that the fascists could be controlled, could be useful in restoring order and clamping down on the socialists. He then invited Mussolini to form a government.

Mussolini in turn demanded the legislature pass a law giving him dictatorial powers—term limited, just a year, he promises. Meanwhile, in power, Mussolini turned a blind eye to the violence of his own fascist thugs, the Squadristi; when Giacomo Matteotti denounced the violence, he was murdered. Mussolini’s support for the blackshirts ensured they knew they could inflict violence on the opposition without fear; when three of Matteotti’s murderers were convicted, Mussolini ensured they were promptly pardoned by Victor Emmanuel III.[2] Aided by the violence and intimidation, the following month Mussolini passed the Acerbo Law, rewriting Italy’s electoral system to guarantee his party an overwhelming majority, employing a wave of intimidation to secure victory. By December 1925, Mussolini had effectively dismantled Italy’s democratic systems, both concentrating power in his position and making it effectively impossible for him to be removed.

What I want to note here are two key commonalities: First, fascists were only able to take power because of the gullibility of those who thought they could “use” the fascists against some other enemy (usually communists). Traditional conservative politicians (your Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham types) and conservative business leaders (your Elon Musks) fooled themselves into believing that, because the would-be tyrant seemed foolish, buffoonish, and uneducated that such an individual could be controlled to their ends, shaped in more productive, more “moderate,” more “business friendly” directions. They were wrong; many of them paid for their foolish error with their lives (Victor Emmanuel III paid for it with his crown). Mussolini and Hitler would not be “shaped,”—they would be exactly the violent, tyrannical dictators they had promised to be—to the total and utter ruin of their countries.

Note that these men were not exactly subtle about what they wanted to do. Mein Kampf is not a subtle book. But they both knew how to promise violence to their followers while prevaricating to their temporary allies; be wary of the fascist who promises violence in his rally speeches but assures you that if you just give him power, he won’t hurt anyone (except the people you don’t like)—because it is a lie, of course.

Second: once these fascist leaders were in power, it was already too late to stop them. Precisely because fascists had no respect for democratic processes and the rule of law—things they had declared openly when seeking power—once in power, they were unconstrained by them and swiftly set about converting all of the powers of the government into a machine to keep them in power. And the conversion from democracy to dictatorship was remarkably swift; in Italy, Mussolini marched in October of 1922, rewrote the election rules in November of ’23, and by December of ’24 had effectively dropped even the pretense of democracy—just two years. Hitler was faster: appointed chancellor in January 1933, by March of that year he had suspended constitutional protections and ruled by fiat—just three months.

The time to stop an authoritarian takeover of a democratic system is before the authoritarian is in office, because once they are in power, they will use that power to stay in power, and it becomes almost impossible to remove them without considerable violence (and is difficult to do even with considerable violence).

That, however, creates a tricky situation. With most political ideologies, voters can adopt a strategy of judging by outputs: “if you don’t like the current government’s policies, let these other fellows here have a go at it and see if they do better. If not, you can always vote them out next time.” But with fascists and other authoritarians there may not be a next time, and this strategy fails: by the time the actions of the fascists make it clear they are dangerous, it is too late to vote them out.

This is why it is important to listen carefully to what fascists say and what they promise and, most importantly, to take their threats of political violence and authoritarianism seriously.

Which is not to say that everything on the right is fascism (just as not everything on the left is its own authoritarian variant, communism). Ronald Reagan was not a fascist, nor was George H. W. Bush or George W. Bush or John McCain or Mitt Romney. They were conservatives within the liberal tradition (again, “liberal” here in the old Jefferson-Locke-and-Washington sense). Most Republicans today are not fascists, although a distressing number appear ready to repeat Franz von Papen’s mistake of assuming they can achieve their goals through an alliance with fascists. Only the devil wins such a devil’s bargain.

How is one to tell the difference? Listen to the things they promise to do and understand that they make speak out of both sides of their mouth: promising violence to one audience and then toning down their rhetoric to another. But politicians speaking from within the tradition of liberty don’t need to speak that way, because they don’t promise violence in the first place.

Listen for the promises of violence, the promises to suspend press freedoms, the promises to persecute political adversaries, and when you hear them, believe them.

All of which brings us to the main question: what is Donald Trump promising, and is he a fascist?

Is Donald Trump a Fascist?

There are a few ways of answering this question.

One option, of course, would be to simply look at what the former President’s closest advisors think. John Kelly, Donald Trump’s longest serving Chief of Staff (and a retired USMC general), a man who worked from 2017 to 2019 to see Trump’s policies enacted and who presumably agrees with many of them, says that Donald Trump is a fascist and “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government,”a position echoed by other former Trump aides and endorsed by Donald Trump’s own former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, though Bolton has added he thinks Trump is too stupid to be truly a fascist (the same was said by cleverer men about Mussolini and Hitler). James Mattis (also a retired USMC general), who served as Trump’s handpicked Secretary of Defense from 2017 to 2019, described him as “mak[ing] a mockery of our Constitution.” His next Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, agrees, saying that if one looked up the definition of a fascist, “it’s hard to say he [Trump] doesn’t” fit that definition. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump described him as “fascist to the core.” Trump’s handpicked former Vice President refuses to endorse him, in part due to “differences on our constitutional duties that I exercises on Jan. 6,” which is a polite way of saying Trump demanded Pence steal an election and Pence refused.

Indeed, an unprecedented number of Donald Trump’s closest, handpicked aides and advisors have refused to endorse him, many warning publicly that Trump is a danger to democracy. It is rare for any advisor or official so close to the president to refuse to endorse them; nearly half of Trump’s have so refused.

But sure, let’s say you don’t believe any of those fellows, handpicked men who worked with Donald Trump closely. Let’s say you won’t believe anyone except for Donald Trump himself and maybe his handpicked running mate J. D. Vance. On that standard is Donald Trump a fascist?

First, we need a definition; for this exercise to have any use, fascism has to be a lot more specific than “politics I don’t like.” There are quite a few, but we can start with a simple dictionary definition, this one from Merriam-Webster:

a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.

So, we can assess Trump’s rhetoric and his promises against these points:

Is Donald Trump a fascist? By his own words, yes. Donald Trump is telling you that Donald Trump is a fascist and on this point—and almost no other—I think you should believe Donald Trump. I feel I should note, if you had asked in me in 2016 if Donald Trump was a fascist, I’d have said no. I’d have said no in October of 2020 too; authoritarian tendencies, perhaps, but not a fascist.[5] Donald Trump’s rhetoric has changed, however, in a way that puts him firmly in this category, satisfying not just parts of the definition but every part of it. He has become a fascist and when he tells us that about himself—we should believe him.

But a dictionary definition is thin gruel, you might say. Surely there is a more careful and detailed definition, of the sort an academic might use, against which we could assess Trumpism as an ideology to ask if it is fascist, right?

Is Trumpism a Form of Fascism?

And indeed, there is. The most common taxonomy of fascism you will see in most academic circles is that advanced by Umberto Eco in his essay “Ur-Fascism,” copies of which you may easily find online. As with most things academics like, it is complex and a bit fuzzy. Eco notes that precisely because fascism tends to be anti-intellectual and fundamentally emotive (rather than rational), it is “fuzzy” set and defies easy classification. As Eco notes, fascism as a set is somewhat like the series of “abc bcd cde def” in which all of the elements are clearly a family and yet in freely remixing core elements, it is hard to identify a single set of necessary components. 

Now, dear reader, if you are already revolting against such a fuzzy definition, remember, you need merely scroll up to see Trump’s rhetoric assessed against a much more fixed definition.

Thus instead of a single definition, Eco proposes a taxonomy of fourteen points that collectively make up the “type group” of fascism. An ideology doesn’t need to have every point in order to qualify as fascism, but the more criteria it satisfies, the more firmly it fits into the definition. Likewise, individual points can also be fuzzy or borderline—it is the cumulative fit that matters—after all, most ideologies have effectively none of these attributes, so an ideology that clearly has many and sort of has a few more actually fits the mold quite well. We could quibble about where to draw the fascism/not-fascism line, but let’s walk through the criteria first, for reasons that will become clear.

Now we should be clear that we’ve changed what we are focusing on: not just “Trump” himself (that’s above), but Trumpism, the ideology that has emerged around him, his movement. Trump himself may not be very ideological, but no one rules alone—he will have to staff an administration (and he certainly won’t be staffing it with establishment Republicans again!) and those folks are ideological. In essence, we’re asking about the ideology that animates Trump and his allies, the sort of worldview that, say, Heritage was hunting for when vetting thousands of resumes. Once again, my goal here is to classify Trumpism not based on how outsiders see it but based on what Trump and his close (current) allies say about themselves. I am taking them in their own words.

  1. The Cult of Tradition, particularly a syncretic traditionalism that latches on to various iterations of an idealized past, even mutually incompatible ones. Trumpism’s core slogan, “Make America Great Again,” certainly qualifies as both nostalgic but also syncretic—it doesn’t specify when America was great or how to return to it, so the listener can insert for themselves whatever out-group they want purged or changes they want reversed.[6] Was the wrong turn globalization and wokeness (as per Tucker Carlson) or the loss of America’s “Christian Identity” (as per many Christian nationalists) or perhaps women’s suffrage (as per J. D. Vance’s funder, Peter Thiel) or childless cat ladies (as per J. D. Vance himself) or actually the ideas of the declaration of independence (as per Trumpist intellectual Patrick Deneen). That syncretic structure is, as Eco notes, normal for fascism (whereas other traditionalist ideologies are often less syncretic and more particular about what tradition they hearken to). Check.

  2. The Rejection of Modernism, specifically, in Eco’s mind, a rejection of “the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason […] seen as the beginning of modern depravity.” Here we could easily reuse a number of our examples from the above paragraph, bemoaning women’s suffrage, modern international trade, and modern culture (be that “wokeism” or simply the existence childless, unmarried women). But I think this rejection of modernity is clearest in the “anti-liberal” or “post-liberal” move in Trumpism’s intellectual wing—thinkers like Adrian Vermeule, Curtis Yarvin (noted by J. D. Vance as influences; Vance has described himself as “postliberal”) and the already-mentioned Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher (currently living in self-imposed exile in postliberal Hungary; Dreher describes J. D. Vance, positively as representing “American Orbánism,” referring to the openly illiberal ruler of Hungary). For these thinkers, the point at which the American experiment went wrong is not FDR’s New Deal or Obama’s presidency, but the founding and indeed even before the founding: the problem was liberalism itself, the ideal of individual freedom advanced by John Locke and coded into our founding documents. Naturally, this sort of ideological argument doesn’t get a lot of time in Trump’s stump speeches, but the selection of J. D. Vance—who does see himself as an intellectual and has been openly postliberal—as a running mate speaks to the importance of this element in the ideology of Trumpism. Check.

  3. The Cult of Action for Action’s Sake, which for Eco is really a rejection of intellectualism, thinking, or consideration; a despising of experts, intellectuals, and universities: don’t think, just do, and hate the thinkers. Here, of course, we can see claims by Trump that he trusts his “gut” more than his advisors, “more than anybody else’s brain,” as well as his habit of sparring with his own experts during a pandemic. But equally it is J. D. Vance declaring that “the universities are the enemy.” Check.

  4. Disagreement is Treason. This is easy to see in the way the movement treats otherwise doctrinaire conservatives who reject Donald Trump on personal grounds, figures like Charlie Sykes, Mitt Romney, David French, Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol, Adam Kinzinger and so on, who end up driven out of the party or out of conservative publications (like National Review) because Trumpism cannot tolerate dissent in the ranks.[7] At this point Mike Pence gets a warmer regard at Harris rallies than at Trump rallies, despite remaining a very conservative republican and not endorsing either candidate. Liz Cheney can sit on stage opposite Harris and note they have considerable disagreements, while Trump won’t campaign with Nikki Haley, despite the latter endorsing him. Check.

  5. Fear of Difference. This is a movement that began with false claims that Barack Obama was foreign born, advanced with promises of a “Muslim ban,” and has proceeded to lies about Haitian immigrants and claims that immigration is “poisoning the blood of our nation.” It is also a movement that is deeply hostile to non-traditional gender expression, something of course expanded by Vance’s commitment to the idea that more Americans’ family patterns should look like his. Check.

  6. Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class. This may be the single best-documented part of the entire movement. Indeed as studies have tended to show, Trump and Trumpism’s core of support is not necessarily the poorest Americans, but rather from “the elite of the left-behind […] who were doing well within a region that was not,” voters who fear a loss of status, rather than a lack of it, a truth expressed in his boat parades and other expensive shows of political devotion. J. D. Vance, “a populist and proud of it” is fairly explicit about this appeal, arguing that the source of that Middle Class’s frustrations are free trade and immigration.[8] Check.

  7. The Obsession with a Plot. Another easy one, given both the prominence of Q-Anon in Trump’s early rise and its replacement with baseless conspiracy theories about the “stolen” 2020 election—claims that are openly peddled by Trump and the sine qua non of being in his inner circle. Such conspiratorial thinking also surrounded the baseless claim that Hillary Clinton’s emails were on a secret server in Ukraine and of course, going all the way back to the birther conspiracy about Obama’s citizenship. Sometimes these conspiracies are openly promoted by Trump, sometimes they congeal around him, but they are ever present to the point of producing a “crank realignment” where even previously left-coded conspiracies are drifting into Trump’s ideological camp. Check.

  8. The Deceptively Strong/Weak Eternal Opponent. This one is complicated, but fascism conjures an “enemy” who is at once too strong (thus requiring the power of the fascist strongman to defeat and whose continued existence can justify continued mobilization and authoritarianism) and yet also degenerate and weak: thus the Nazi view that Jews were racially inferior, weak and cowardly, but also that they secretly controlled all of the world’s most powerful countries. For Trumpism, the clearest version of this is the “deep state” (sometimes “the swamp”), which is both so powerful as to require Trump to dispel and yet not powerful enough to prevent his election. Alternately it might be “wokeism” and the “radical Left” often identified as a mixture of government workers, academia, and journalists (Curtis Yarvin—an acknowledged influence for J. D. Vance, see above—labels this “the Cathedral” and defines it as journalists plus academia).[9] For the conspiratorially minded, this deceptively strong-and-weak enemy is often just a nebulous “they.” And sometimes the conjured enemy is […] just actually the Jews. Check.

  9. Life is Permanent Warfare, as Eco puts it, “there is no struggle for life, but rather, life is lived for struggle.” This is harder to pin down, especially because Trumpism is not focused on external conquest (hardly disqualifying, note Salazar and Franco), but the motif is evoked quite obviously in Trump’s, “we’re going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning, and you’ll say please, ‘it’s too much winning, we can’t take it anymore’ […] and I’ll say ‘no it isn’t, we have to keep winning, we have to win more.’ ” More broadly, Trump’s victory in 2016 and four years as president aren’t pointed to as having resolved any of the issues it was supposed to address; after all, in 2020 the wall wasn’t built, the swamp wasn’t drained, but this wasn’t a sign of failure, but a sign of the need to fight more. And certainly Trump’s rhetoric—“We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”—frames politics as a fighting struggle, though of course a lot of political rhetoric does this (to my annoyance). More broadly, Trumpism’s positioning as battling essentially against the forces of modernity and pluralist society in a staggeringly diverse country effectively requires constant struggle against the nebulous “them.” Check.

  10. Contempt for the Weak. Donald Trump doesn’t like disabled reporters, he doesn’t like soldiers who get captured, he doesn’t like soldiers who get injured; his speeches instead stress the need to show strength while attacking his opponents as weak; likewise Trump’s insistence that he is very smart (“mentally strong,” we might say), while his opponents are supposedly “low IQ” (“mentally weak”). Mirroring this, his supporters have produced a veritable flood of artwork showing the elderly and somewhat obese Trump as a literal strongman, far fitter and trimmer than he actually is. More broadly this fits into a fascist disdain for pity—the weak are to be culled, not aided—that extends through the treatment of refugees, a belief that foreign aid is “stupid,” and a generally transactional vision of foreign policy where the United States does not aid countries because they might deserve well of it, but only because the United States (or Donald Trump) receives concrete benefits in return. Check.

  11. The Cult of Heroism. This is perhaps the least developed element of the fourteen points, but here too we are not without examples. The elevation of Kyle Rittenhouse to a heroic figure, including a meeting with the former President and a speaking tour for Turning-Point USA, a youth-oriented conservative/trumpist organization, seems a clear example. But the far stronger example is the mythology that has built up around the January 6 “political prisoners,” with Trump praising Ashli Babbitt, shot storming a barrier inside the Capitol building and describing those arrested and charged with crimes as “warriors” “political prisoners,” and “unbelievable patriots.” He even recorded a rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” with the “J6 Prison Choir,” called “Justice for All,” which he’s used to open some of his rallies. I am reminded of the way that the failed Nazi coup of 1923, the “Beer Hall Putsch” became itself a sacred event in Nazi mythology, with new recruits required to touch the flag, the Blutfahne, carried at the putsch. Check.

  12. Machismo, which as Eco notes, encompasses both “disdain for women” and “condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits.” Machismo is a constant element of Trump’s persona, from the infamous Access Hollywood recording (“grab ’em by the […]”), a long list of objectifying comments about women, and of course a long history of sexual harassment and assault. But it’s more than Trump’s behavior, it is part of the ideology: Tucker Carlson just recently characterized Trump returning to power as a “Dad […] and he’s pissed,” coming home to say “you’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now,” which is simply this trope played straight (notice how the upside of a Trump presidency isn’t that he will do good things, but merely that he will wield violence against those Carlson thinks deserve it); Carlson has been on this beat for a while, as with his 2022 “End of Men” documentary. Likewise Vance’s repeated comments about childless women (and childness people in general)—that people without children are “more sociopathic” “most deranged and most psychotic,” that the “whole purpose of the postmenopausal female” is to help raise grandchildren (a statement Vance did not say himself but agreed to) and so on. Check.

  13. Selective Populism: fascism claims to speak for “the People,” but in reality, only some of the people and not through democratic, majority-rules systems; rather, the Leader channels the Common Will, which is taken as the Voice of the People, even when it contradicts the actual votes of the people. Donald Trump, of course, claims repeatedly to speak for the majority—often borrowing Nixon’s phrase the “silent majority”—of Americans, stresses his crowd sizes, and has not yet won the popular vote or even ever come particularly close to doing so. Having lost the 2020 election by 74 electoral votes and 4.5 percent of the popular vote, he claimed “frankly, we did win this election.” He continued to claim that, and indeed, still claims it now, because in the fascist ideological frame, it is the Leader who speaks for the People, not the voters. Of course for this to work, all sorts of people must be written out of The People as not “real Americans” and Trump is all too ready, claiming illegal immigrants are voting, a claim echoed by the Trump-aligned Heritage Foundation (which is without merit) and of course by framing political opposition not as “real Patriots” but as the “enemy within.” Check.

  14. Newspeak, which Eco identifies both in changing the meaning of words, often inverting them, but more broadly, I think Eco is getting at here what Orwell sums up in his famous line, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” Thus the January 6 rioters become “political prisoners,” the riot itself—in which 174 police officers were injured—was a “day of love,” an election Trump clearly lost becomes the “stolen election” while his narrow victory over Hillary Clinton (in which he lost the popular vote) he describes as a “landslide.” A modest inauguration crowd becomes the largest ever—and official photos are edited to conform. An incorrect statement about the path of Hurricane Dorian (that it would hit Alabama) had to be “made true” via some sharpie-induced edits to the map. Check.

Fourteen out of fourteen; some are clearer and stronger fits than others, but every element is present to a significant degree. Keep in mind, this is the sort of taxonomy where a regime that, say, satisfied ten or twelve out of the fourteen would still be generally regarded as fascist and the ideology we might call “Trumpism” fits all fourteen.

So, yes, this is an ideology fairly defined as fascist, not in the sense of “things I don’t like,” but in the sense of identifying where it belongs on the political spectrum as a factual matter.

1932

So Donald Trump is a fascist; he is promising to do fascist things, like the violent suppression of opposition. The ideological movement he leads, which we’ve termed “Trumpism” here, is quite clearly a species of fascism, fitting every point in the most common taxonomy of the ideology.

Where does that leave us? Well, first it is important to note that it is not the case that the entire Republican Party is fascist or that every one of Trump’s supporters are fascists. I know too many of both and many have a wide range of reasons why they might be considering “holding their nose” and voting for Trump despite concerns about his character. But nearly all of those concerns assume that this won’t be the last round and that in four years, they’ll get a chance to trade Trump out for some other Republican who doesn’t have these problems, this baggage. They’re thinking in terms of being positioned for the next election in terms of policy, tax rates and so on.

And I want to caution against that thinking here, because, as we’ve seen, that’s not how fascism works—and as we’ve shown, Donald Trump is a fascist leader, leading a fascist movement. In his first term, Trump’s administration was shaped and constrained by many of the fellows I quoted above now who are trying desperately to warn the republic about his true nature—they will not be in a second term. Instead, the Heritage Foundation, part of the Trumpist fascist movement, has spent the last four years preparing up with a plan to fire huge portions of the federal civil service (who are not political, at-will appointees) and vetting thousands of resumes to find cadres of modern American brownshirts to fill the jobs so that Trump’s impulses are not so constrained.

And what then? As President, Trump could do as he has promised and pardon the January 6 insurrectionists, putting his violent street soldiers back on the streets. He could turn the Department of Justice, staffed with his pre-vetted brownshirts, against “opposition” media—as he has threatened—while favoring platform whose owners support him politically. He could turn a blind eye while his loyalists (who he has promised to pardon) use violence to intimidate his political rivals, while his government sets up massive detention camps for illegal immigrants—and maybe “accidentally-on-purpose” groups that favor his political opponents.

There is an irony that in “Ur-Fascism,” as Umberto Eco cautions, “it would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, ‘I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.’ Life is not that simple.” But in practice, Trumpism is that simple, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. But I know it’s hard to hear; one doesn’t want to believe it.

Do I think this effort will inevitably succeed should Donald Trump be reelected? No. The American system is a fair bit more resilient to this sort of takeover than the Weimar Republic or the Kingdom of Italy, but resilient is not immune—such an effort could succeed and even if it failed could do tremendous damage. Fascists, after all, rarely leave power without violence—this one didn’t leave office non-violently last time, you will recall. And please believe me when I say I do not want this to come to violence, by anyone, at any point. As I’ve said before, attempting to “win the stasis”—the Greek word for political violence—by out-violence-ing the opposition is a losing game that just tears apart the social fabric.

But it is not yet 1933. It is still 1932: the train has not left the station yet. It is possible for the fascist’s path to power to be blocked without violence, just with votes. And then in four years we can be certain that we’ll have new a chance for new leadership—almost certainly new conservative leadership, given the way political opinion shifts in the United States. For conservatives, appalled by what your party has become, I understand if you cannot vote for Kamala Harris, with whom you disagree so strongly, though I would note fellow citizens every bit as conservative as you have found it in them to do so simply to take a stand against what Trump has become, and while Trump has promised to use the military against his political opponents, Harris has promised to put Republicans in her cabinet. But if you absolutely cannot stand to vote for a Democrat, write in a name, leave the top of the ballot blank. But do not sign your name to this.

Because from this point forward, you may choose to look the other way, but you can never again say that you did not know.[10] And while right now you may have many reasons and many concerns, if you sign your name to this fascist and a fascist government takes power as a result, your many reasons will no longer matter. No one really cares what Franz von Papen or Victor Emmanuel III or NSDAP or Blocco Nazionale voters were concerned about or their pet issues. It no longer mattered. Once a fascist government took power—they were fascists.

And that was all that ever mattered.

Do not let that be all that matters about you. Show the world that we have learned something in the last century and need not endlessly repeat the mistakes of the past.


Endnotes

[1] Of course, in parliamentary systems, outright majorities can be rare. But given that the Nazis were going to outlaw all the other parties by November of 1933, it seems notable that at no point did a majority support this course. And yet it happened.

[2] As an aside, this is normally where the “whataboutists,” realizing the parallel, will insist that Donald Trump’s promises to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists are somehow matched by Democrats being unwilling to prosecute violence during the George Floyd Protest. The problem with this argument is that it isn’t at all true: Biden denounced the violence when it happened and the Biden administration didn’t drop prosecutions of violent Floyd protestors and continued to investigate and convict them, as did blue-state governments. The Biden-Harris administration has shown itself quite willing to prosecute its political allies when they break laws, including the Democratic mayor of New York, Senator Bob Menendez, Representative Henry Cuellar and, oh, yes, the President’s son, Hunter Biden. So the equivalence here collapses in the face of the evidence: one candidate promises to pardon their supporters for crimes, the other candidate promises to prosecute the law equally.

[3] It is worth noting that Trump often claims that immigrants are causing violent crime, but in the United States immigrants commit violent crimes at rates far lower than the native born population. As with Nazi blood libels against Jews, the racism is based on lies.

[4] Note that for convicted foreign national criminals, he wouldn’t need the Alien Enemies Act—the entire point of invoking that is to be able to imprison and deport without trial.

[5] I do not believe that any major party presidential candidate in my lifetime except Donald Trump qualifies as either a fascist or a communist. Bush was not Hitler (though his foreign policy was not always good), Obama was not Stalin. I am not, nor have I ever been. the sort of person who tosses these things around lightly.

[6] Indeed, anyone on social media for any amount of time will encounter this with Trump-supporting rightwing accounts that cannot agree if the idealized past was ancient Rome or the Crusades or the 1950s or the 1980s or the 1990s. What they agree on is that it isn’t right now.

[7] Contrast the continued, robust presence of leftists, liberals, and even conservative NeverTrumpers in the Democratic coalition who have sharp criticisms of Harris and Biden.

[8] A point on which few economists would agree.

[9] For a precis on Yarvin’s ideology, this podcast will serve.

[10] William Wilberforce, in a speech to the House of Commons.

Bret Devereaux

Dr. Bret. C. Devereaux is a teaching assistant professor in the Department of History at North Carolina State University, specializing in ancient and military history.  He also writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, a popular weekly history blog that uses popular culture as a gateway to discuss the past.  You can find him on social media on Twitter as @BretDevereaux and Bluesky as@bretdevereaux.bsky.social.

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