Let's Play ‘Secret Hitler’

Making Sense of Trump's Meeting with Fuentes and Kanye

A Popular Meme on Twitter

As you probably know already, last week Donald Trump had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Kanye West and Nicholas J. Fuentes, one of America’s premier White Nationalists and Holocaust deniers. Fuentes, who is 24, is probably best understood as the most significant contemporary successor to the alt-right movement of a few years ago: rooted in extremely online subcultures like “groypers” and incels, trying to pass off racism and antisemitism with a sardonic affect, and engaged in G.O.P. entryism. It’s not surprising that Milo Yiannopoulis’s name comes up in all of this.

Trump, of course, characteristically denies knowing who Fuentes, saying Kanye showed up with “a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about.” Of course, he definitely knows who Kanye West is and there’s no way he’s not aware of his antisemitic meltdown. Apparently, Trump got very angry when Kanye asked him to be the rapper’s vice presidential candidate, which I totally can believe.

What to make of all this?

First of all, part of my contention in the never-ending fascism debate was that from the very beginning of his political ascent, the extreme right and Trump have organically bonded to each other. When Trump showed up on the scene the entire fragmented neo-Nazi, Klan and militia world immediately got excited and said “this is our kind of thing, here’s our chance.” For his part, beginning with the David Duke imbroglio, Trump has been very reluctant to disavow and denounce this constituency. He understand that it’s part of his base. And it’s part of his base that he can even mobilize on his behalf beyond the ballot box: look at January 6th. Although I do believe Trump will meet with anybody who is sufficiently famous, this meeting is undoubtedly political: Trump appears to have been feeling out potential sources of support. Fuentes delivered an overtly political message: essentially, “We like you, but we feel like you don’t back us up enough anymore. We want to continue to support you, but you must support us.”

Will this finally sink Trump?

It’s very hard to say what Trump can survive and not survive. He’s clearly somewhat of a diminished figure after the election and its notable that even his outreach to core sections of support he gets a kind of conditional and equivocal response: Fuentes giving him a kind of ultimatum, and Kanye with this insane running mate demand. Trump may now just be among the principal figures of the far right, a major chieftain, but not Il Duce. I don’t see him adjusting well to that role. Will the G.O.P. establishment use this against him? Of course, but their track record trying to halt Trump has been pretty pathetic.

I think we also have to consider for a moment how deep the rot really goes: this groyper subculture, to one degree or another, has suffused the Conservative Movement and Republican party, especially among its younger members. Tucker Carlson’s show is now totally based on this sensibility and its writers certainly come from this milieu. In my experience, young staffers and journalists on the right have a keen awareness of what’s going on with their hyper-online far right flank: it’s where their language and ideas come from, even if they refer to it all half-jokingly. This may result in the Republicans having political problems with the general public, but the staff of the movement, especially those in their 20s and early 30s, is pretty groypy.

Is he or isn’t he?

One thing that it’s been difficult to get a bead on from the beginning is Trump’s actual politics. Did he opportunistically fall into a fascist-style of politics because he’s crude, it comes naturally to him and, he’ll accept anyone’s adulation and support, or has Trump always been a self-conscious Nazi, cunningly pushing the country towards fascist domination, a kind of Fourth Reich secret agent. That seems about as likely as him being a long-term Russian agent, an idea that some pundits seriously put forward a few years ago. Trump basically can’t keep his mouth shut about anything, so he’s not the best candidate for leading a sleeper cell. But with that being said, there are some creepy and uncanny moments that sometimes suggest a Plot Against America scenario. There’s Fred Trump’s alleged Klan escapades. Then there’s Ivana’s old story about Trump having Hitler’s speeches as his bedside reading. Trump evinces weird views about genetics. Trump whined to Chief of Staff John Kelly that his generals weren’t loyal to him like Hitler. He also allegedly said, “Hitler did a lot of good stuff.” My personal favorite piece of evidence in this paranoid litany is this old Trump Organization logo, which I like to believe barely hides a swastika:

Do I believe the sci-fi, comic book, pulp fiction “Trump is a secret Hitler” version of the past few years of politics? No, I am not that crazy. Praising Hitler as a genius is part of the general corpus of dumb guy sayings that Trump frequently calls on. But if I may engage in some amateur psychoanalysis, I believe as a myth and fantasy, this reflects a certain reality. Trump wants to identify with Hitler: that image represents the degree of power and prestige he believes he deserves. His Nazi and fascist supporters also want him to be a Hitler. Some people who won’t acknowledge to themselves that this is the core of their politics also secretly want him to fill a Hitler role. I dare say that some of his opponents also project this fantasy on to him. So the “secret Hitler” version is just politics playing out on the level of unconscious or barely conscious fantasy, an expression of our hopes and fears. (I think Kanye also wants to be Hitler now, but you’ll need a whole institute from Vienna to explain that one.) The upshot is this: Trump might not be Hitler, but a lot of people wish he was!

Who else is a Nazi?

Kathryn Joyce has a very detailed piece in Salon about the brewing conservative civil war and the future of the post-liberal right. You should read it and not just because I’m quoted in it. The picture that emerges is pretty creepy. This and the recent election also leads me to conclude that the fascism stuff and the reactionary turn more broadly is becoming more of an elite project than one with genuine mass support. You can see this with Peter Thiel’s extra-curricular efforts to astro-turf a reactionary cultural movement and also in Elon Musk’s and David Sacks’ expressed sympathy for the hard right with his twitter takeover and rejiggering. I actually want to return to an earlier take of mine and say, yes, it does appear that something like the class consciousness among the most reactionary fraction of tech capital is crystallizing in the form of a technocratic-fascism. With the defeat of Blake Masters, the most obvious electoral creature of this tendency, it’s likely that this political project will be played out in publications and on platforms for the time being. I think you can expect to see more antisemitism wielded as a political weapon here.

I just want to point out one other thing that appears in Joyce’s piece: the gradual inching of extreme views towards more acceptable discursive positions. For instance, one of the Red Scare podcast’s hosts being interviewed by what is a barely crypto-fascist “literary journal” The Asylum. To give an idea of the general vibe there, another piece in that same issue is a serious reconsideration of whether or not the blood libel myth might have something to it. I predict overt antisemitism is also going attract more not-so-talented bohemian types looking for a new way to épater les normies.

What else?

A little while ago a writer named David Polansky wrote a terribly pretentious piece for UnHerd entitled “Stop talking about American ‘fascism’”,” replete with references Alexander Kojeve and Aristotle. I meant to respond when it came out but got distracted with other stuff. Here is the main thrust:

By treating fascism as kind of eternally recurring political tendency, rather than a historically distinctive phenomenon, we have elevated it into an Aristotelian taxonomy of political life, but without anything like Aristotle’s philosophical rigour. The result is that our political understanding is reduced to a sliding scale with democracy in the middle, and communism and fascism at either end, serving as permanent tendencies against which we require constant warning from the great and good among us. This account is both too small and too big: on the one hand, this represents an impoverishment of our political imagination; but on the other, it needlessly introduces external ideological categories in lieu of a serious analysis of the political tendencies distinctive to democracies themselves.

One problem with this is how do you deal on this account with the fascists who also think they are fascist and are advancing a fascist politics: are they just delusional? Maybe. But politics is always a project of the imagination to a great degree and delusions of grandeur is a part of fascist politics in particular. The ideological categories are not really “external.” They are often self-consciously held by the actors themselves. And let’s look at what we are discussing in the contemporary U.S.A.: political antisemitism, a former leader that tried to overthrow the government with the help of militias, right-wing hysteria about supposed decadence and sexual depravity that’s leading to violence. Doesn’t it sound like there’s some set of historical experiences that may be relevant context here? Also, in point of fact, fascism is a “political [tendency] distinctive to democracies themselves”—it arose first in the democracies of Western Europe. What is he even talking about?

As for thinking about fascism “[representing] an impoverishment of our political imagination,” I think this is basically exactly wrong. What the strange and delirious politics of the past few years tells us, is that our political imagination was impoverished without consideration of this history. Is it exactly like it? Is history repeating itself? Of course not, but having a broader range of references is crucial to understanding what’s going on. Also, as I pointed out above, as much as we might like it not to be, fascism is still a fantasy that structures our political behavior. And, as I like to point out ad nauseaum, even the crudest, most paranoid “It’s fascism!” believer could envision something like January 6th happening, while so many of its critics thought that such a thing was impossible, absurd to even contemplate. That seems to me really stupid and unimaginative. You gotta hand it to ’em, the hysterics were kinda right this time.

Since I am apparently in a psychoanalytic mood this morning, maybe we should consider whether or not there is something about hysteria itself that’s capable of grasping the contemporary situation when more sane and stable views fail to imagine its possibilities. As Slavoj Zizek writes:

…the subject cannot ever fully and immediately identify with his symbolic mask or title; the subject's questioning of his symbolic title is what hysteria [4] is about: "Why am I what you're saying that I am?" Or, to quote Shakespeare's Juliet: "Why am I that name?" There is a truth in the wordplay between "hysteria" and "historia": the subject's symbolic identity is always historically determined, dependent upon a specific ideological constellation. We are dealing here with what Louis Althusser called "ideological interpellation": the symbolic identity conferred on us is the result of the way the ruling ideology "interpellates" us – as citizens, democrats or Christians. Hysteria emerges when a subject starts to question or to feel discomfort in his or her symbolic identity: "You say I am your beloved – what is there in me that makes me that? What do you see in me that causes you to desire me in that way?"

The “hysterics” in this situation are basically saying: “you say we live in a stable, post-historical ‘liberal democracy,’ that this a permanent condition, all of these crazy labels and fantasies about the past are nonsense, but what if we don’t, what if they aren’t? What if it’s actually a much more fragile and tenuous thing than you suppose? What if they are actually Nazis running around?” Not for nothing does Lacan say that the discourse of the hysteric is the one that can create new knowledge. Anyway, you can take that or leave it, just thought it was interesting. Y’all have a great week now!