What's In a Word

A Canned Post

Today is my birthday, so I’m gonna phone it in today — this is a column I wrote for a newspaper, which then decided they didn’t want it. Enjoy!

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It may seem strange or even vaguely ridiculous to try to affix the label “fascist” or even “semi-fascist” to Donald Trump. He hardly seems to deserve the epithet. He favors a blue business suit rather than a khaki uniform. Delivering pizzas to firemen in New York or buying Chick-fil-A in Atlanta, he just looks like a familiar, corny American retail pol. He has no jackbooted and uniformed ranks marching in calm, steady step behind him. On trial in New York, he feel asleep during the proceedings. Then there’s the matter of what he was convicted for: pay offs to a porn star and deals with a tabloid; everyday sleaze rather than an attempted coup d’etat. Surely, this con man is more quasi-gangster than semi-fascist, a student of the Roy Cohn school of government rather than that of Joseph Goebbels? And yet, since the start of Trump’s candidacy in 2015, there’s been a seemingly endless, passionate debate about whether or not Trump is the harbinger of a new fascist threat.

For opponents of the idea that Trump has anything to do with fascism, the suggestion is simply a piece of liberal hysteria, or, a cynical effort to frighten voters, or, grist for the mill of middle-brow political pamphleteers. Yet, there are many good reasons to look back to the history of fascism when we think about Trump.

Let’s begin at the beginning. From the start of Trump as a serious political force in the 2010s, he has always attacked the very citizenship of Americans who do not look, believe, or act in the way he or his followers think they ought to. He became a major figure on the right through his advocacy of Birtherism, the racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama’s was not born in the United States. This denial of the citizenship rights of one’s enemies — the insistence that some Americans are not really Americans — remains the central animating myth of Trump’s politics. This attack on citizenship is behind his threats to do away with the Birthright Citizenship enshrined in the 14th Amendment by executive order. It is behind his administration’s decision to set up a Department of Justice task force to denaturalize American citizens, the first effort of its kind since the McCarthy era. And most crucially perhaps, it is what’s at stake in Trump’s promulgation of “Stolen Election” propaganda. What that dangerous lie says in essence is that the majority of Americans votes don’t really count, they are not really the electorate or the real citizens.

Like the fascists before him, in Trump’s rhetorical universe it is the nation’s internal enemies sapping the strength of the nation that are the primary threat. “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within,” as Trump put it one speech. Now his rhetoric has gone from attacking the citizenship rights of his opponents to questioning their very humanity, calling them “not people,” “vermin” and saying “they are poisoning the blood” of the country.

In considering the question of Trump’s fascist tendencies, we should also consider the structure of his movement and the role he plays within it. “Fascist regimes functioned like an epoxy: an amalgam of two very different agents, fascist dynamism and conservative order, bonded by shared enmity toward liberalism and the Left,” writes the scholar Robert Paxton in his The Anatomy of Fascism. Trump formed a rousing, populist attack that galvanized a grassroots disillusioned with the conservative establishment. As with historical fascism, the cowed conservative elite worked in uneasy alliance with Trump, realizing that he still provides the only popular punch they can hope to muster. He remains the only politician their constituents have any enthusiasm about and loyalty to and so they are stuck with him — even as he openly menaces them. Now Republican politicians, even those who once defied Trump, behave as if he’s an embodiment of the real American people who cannot be brought to account in any way without violating that people’s will — even though he’s been twice rejected by the popular vote.

This brings us to Trump’s charismatic leadership. He presents himself as a providential figure whose leadership is the only thing can reverse the terminal decline of a wounded country, a “crippled America,” as his book called it, proclaiming “I am the only one that can save this nation.” Like Mussolini before him, he offers his supporters “a privileged relation with history,” in the words of the historian Adrian Lyttelton, telling them on January 6th that they were part of “the greatest political movement in the history of our country.” And now some of supporters cast him in a literally messianic role, calling him a “caretaker” sent from God or claiming that he’s been “anointed” to rule.

If all this is not convincing, don’t take my word for it: look at the neo-Nazis and White Supremacists who enthusiastically greeted Trump’s candidacy as a hopeful sign for the cause. It seems forgotten that David Duke enthusiastically endorsed Trump in both 2016 and 2020. Or how the movement once known as the alt-right rallied to his side, recognizing immediately that Trump represented a major “ice breaker” for their views, in the words of Richard Spencer. “If The Donald gets the nomination, he will almost certainly beat Hillary, as White men such as you and I go out and vote for the first time in our lives for the one man who actually represents our interests,” the Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin wrote on his “Daily Stormer” website in 2016. Even if Trump was not the perfect vessel, America’s extreme right understood that Trump’s type of politics represented a breakthrough for their movement.

Even beyond the farthest reaches of the fringe, Trump’s more intellectual supporters, viewing the nation as hopelessly decadent and corrupt, envision Trump as an “American Caesar” who will restore national greatness with an emergency dictatorial regime. These are not the statements of isolated cranks either: Michael Anton, a fellow at the Claremont Institute and former advisor to the Trump administration, has aired such views publicly.

The way Trump talks about governing gives them reason for hope. In 2022, he called for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution. Trump has threatened to sic the Justice Department on his political opponents. Trump has talked about invoking the Insurrection Act on Day One, which deputizes the military as a domestic police force, to deal with any protests that may arise. Trump has also spoken of rounding up millions of immigrants and placing them in system of camps prior to their deportation.

At this point, these are all threats and Trump may lack either the will or power to carry them out. But we should also consider what he has already attempted to do. Those who entertained “the fascism thesis,” even if its most hyperbolic and alarmist versions, maintained that Trump would most probably attempt, with the assistance of loyal paramilitary formations, some kind of illegal seizure of power. On January 6th, he did just did that. The fact that it failed is immaterial: It revealed the essence of the Trump phenomenon. He means to overthrow democracy in this country and replace it with his personal rule.

This brings me to the most salient argument for viewing Trump as a fascist. The strength of theories lies in their predictive power. The theory of Trump as a fascist is not a perfect description of reality: there are many differences between Trump and the “classical fascisms” of Europe. But viewing Trump as something like a fascist leader foresaw the violence of January 6th as a live possibility, while its critics mocked the notion as mere hysteria. Whatever its shortcomings, “Trump as fascist” remains the best guide to what Trump will try to do next — even if he lacks the power to accomplish it.