I’ve been warning about the dangers of Donald Trump’s fascism since he announced his first bid for president in June of 2015. Few people took that warning, or my escalating concern about the fascist features of Trump’s politics throughout his presidency, seriously. Even after January 6, people said my warnings were exaggerated or even hysterical.
Now, calling Trump a fascist and talking about the threat of fascism is commonplace. But it still understates the danger. For fascism is no longer a threat. It’s here. Fascism is a major force in our politics.
Fascism is a set of ideas that are entirely contrary to the foundations of the American Republic, which is why it is dangerous. It’s also a set of political practices that is already found in our country and threaten to destroy it.
That Trump and Trumpism embrace fascist ideas is so obvious that it is striking there has even been a debate about this. Like the fascists of the 1930s, Trumpism presents itself as a nationalist movement, one that seeks to restore or “lift up” our nation by calling on us to “Put America First” and “Make America Great Again.” Like the fascists of the 1930s, Trumpism insists, against all evidence, that our nation is in both economic and moral decline and is under attack. Like the fascists of the 1930s, Trumpism seeks to raise up the common people against the elites who are said to have betrayed our traditional ideals. Like the fascists of the 1930s, Trumpism blames the influence of minority groups, who he refers to as sick, sub-human, or “vermin,” for undermining those ideals and weakening our country. Like the fascists of the 1930s, Trumpism seeks to divide citizens and voters into those who support his cause and those who oppose it. He calls them “internal enemies.” Like the fascists of the 1930s Trumpism embraces repeated lies—like the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. And like the fascists of the 1930s, Trumpism seeks to rally people behind a strong leader who pledges to overcome the divisions and corruption of the politicians, even if that means breaking with long-established political practice and constitutional norms.
Most of these ideas can be found in Trump’s earliest campaign speeches. But he has become more strident in his expression of them throughout his political life. For a time, he used code to express his bigotry. Now it is on full display. For a time, he sought to appeal broadly to Americans. Now he makes every effort to divide us and turn his supporters against his opponents. He describes the candidates he is running against and their supporters in harsh and increasingly vulgar terms.
The nature of Trump’s appeal in 2015 was clear to those who were paying attention. I initially thought he would win the Republican nomination because he was the only candidate running on extreme ideas, while the other Republican ideological lanes had multiple candidates. That was exactly what happened.
But I also expected that he would drive away 10% to 15% of the Republican vote, as Barry Goldwater did in 1964, and Clinton would win easily in November 2016. Obviously, I was wrong. While one can point to some failures of the Clinton campaign, which led to Trump’s victory, the willingness of so many Republicans to overlook Trump’s record of sexist and racist comments and actions was a major source of his success, and one too many of us did not expect.
That Republicans were willing to ignore Trump’s bad character shows that the Republican Party had already been pulled from its traditionally moderate center–right ideals in part by its expanding base among white voters in the South and Southwest, and also by Newt Gingrich’s aggressive efforts to attack not only Democrats but moderate Republicans.
In the years since his victory, Trump’s extreme rhetoric has been increasingly drawn from the fascist playbook. Even worse, he has embraced critical elements of fascist political practice.
Central to fascist political practice is building a highly mobilized popular base that embraces radical and extreme ideas. Trump’s nasty and bigoted rhetoric has given his supporters permission to mimic him and go even further. Racism, sexism, and bigotry against not just immigrants but both Republican moderates and Democrats is now the lingua franca of the Trump movement. Extreme, harsh, and angry rhetoric is a sign of leaders’ and followers’ devotion to the cause. It is central to the effort of Trump and his supporters to stoke up anger and fury among his base in an effort to turn people out at the polls. And the not entirely unintended outcome of that effort is a rash of armed and unarmed attacks on Jews, Black people, and others over the last eight years.
Nasty and brutish speech is not the only result of Trump’s mobilization of his angry supporters. The January 6th insurrection was a direct product of resentment and fury on the Right, carried out not just by random Trump followers but also by the organized movements of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other extremists whose leaders met with Trump’s lieutenants before and during the attack on the Capitol.
A popular movement’s embracing of fascist ideas is the defining feature of fascist political practice. And it leads to two other political practices that are increasingly evident in our politics.
One is the corruption of political leaders in the Republican Party. We have seen Republicans who have criticized or opposed Trump either turn 180 degrees and embrace him—as Kevin McCarthy, Lindsay Graham, and others have done. Others drew back from following their opposition to the logical conclusion, as Mitch McConnell and others who criticized Trump’s role in January 6 did when they refused to vote to impeach or convict him after the insurrection.
These political leaders genuflected to Trump out of opportunism and cowardice. They sought Trump’s support and feared that his mobilized supporters would vote against them in Republican primaries as even long-entrenched Republican members of Congress who opposed Trump, such as Liz Cheney, found out.
And corrupt Republican officials have not just offered Trump verbal support. In every state of this country, they are seeking to undermine fair elections by changing rules to make it harder for Democrats to vote or have their votes counted. Polling places have been shut down in Democratic areas. Lines at the polls in those communities have gotten longer. Registration lists have been purged of legitimate voters. Deadlines have been tightened as have rules for mail ballots.
The second is that fascist political practice is the breakdown of the rule of law, which enables the fascist leader to secure political support by promising to use public policy to reward his friends and hurt his enemies, no matter what the law requires.
During his presidency, we saw Trump violate the rule of law, mainly to enrich himself and his family. The constitutional barrier against foreign emoluments was violated as other countries made deals with the Trump organization and its representatives—as well as many American lobbyists—who made sure to stay at Trump-owned hotels or visit Mar-a-Lago hoping to meet with him. And Trump’s support of the Saudi regime led to a massive infusion of capital in his son-in-law’s finance company immediately after his term ended.
In the last year, Trump has repeatedly promised far worse. He has threatened to violate the law to use the armed forces to round up undocumented immigrants and jail his political enemies. And he has met with one industry after another—vaping, crypto, tobacco, marijuana, TikTok, and Elon Musk’s multiple interests—promising to reward those who give him campaign contributions.
Trump’s explicit promise to reward friends and harm enemies has so scared business people that many who have opposed him in the past, including the chair of JP Morgan Chase Jamie Dimon, have become afraid to make their political views known. And even worse, we have seen major newspapers The Washington Post and the LA Times withhold endorsements of Kamala Harris largely, it appears, because their owners fear Trump’s retribution against their other business interests.
I can understand the fear of these people and many others, though many of us are saddened by their cowardice. Trump has promised a very different second term, one in which his appointees would be chosen primarily for their loyalty—not to the Constitution but to him. Without the guardrails of the experienced, knowledgeable, and responsible cabinet and executive branch officials who blocked or stalled Trump’s illegal and immoral use of political power during his presidency, he would no doubt carry out his threats of retribution against those who oppose him and reward those who support him.
This fascist–corporatist practice, together with the corruption of election officials, is exactly how the reality of democratic government ends even if institutions like elections and law-making in Congress continue. As strongmen Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin have shown, democracy collapses when election rules tilt against the opponents and those with something to lose are afraid to speak out, organize, or devote their resources to opposing dictators because they fear economic losses, jail time, or worse. Even if opposition to the dictator continues, it become impossible to remove them from power. Elections become showcases of support for the dictator rather than a means of choosing political leaders.
This is exactly the kind of government Trump is promising during his current campaign. And it’s exactly the reason that more and more business people are refraining from opposing Trump publicly.
In addition to these threats to the rule of law, there is one more profoundly disturbing—the Supreme Court ruling that protects presidents from indictment after their term of office for violating the law in their official acts. That this ruling violates the fundamental precept of our government is obvious to everyone who understands what the rule of law and checks and balances mean. The rule of law means that government can only act by passing a law and that the law applies to everyone. When the president acts without legal authority or acts contrary to the law, he violates this principle. And when he cannot be held accountable for doing so, our Constitution is violated. With checks and balances each power of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—is divided among the three branches of government—the presidency, the Congress, and the courts. And the main purpose of checks and balances is to give two branches of government the power to limit the excesses of a third, and especially those excesses that violate the rule of law.
Under this principle, I believe that presidents should always be subject to criminal investigation if they violate the law, whether they are in or out of office and whether their actions are official or private. Indeed, official actions are especially worthy of investigation because it is those actions with which a president can violate the rule of law. Perhaps there are instances when giving the courts power to try presidents for violation of the law during their administration could interfere with their ability to carry out the duties of the office. But there are absolutely no grounds for failing to hold presidents responsible for what they do in office once they leave it.
It is hard to understand how the US Supreme Court made this ruling. Could they, too, be afraid of Trump’s mob? Or maybe the majority is already part of the mob, so caught up in the furious, partisan Trump movement that they care little about constitutional and legal reasoning or their historical reputations. At any rate, this decision, and the free rein it will give Trump should he be returned to office, is horribly frightening.
The conclusion is simple: fascism is not a distant threat. It’s not even a threat we have to worry about if Trump wins. It’s already here, influencing our political life.
The question in this election is not whether we become a fascist country. To a frightening extent, we already are. The question is what we do now. Do we fully embrace fascism and allow Trump and his mob to totally overturn our republic? Or do we begin to move away from it and rebuild a sense of unity among our people, returning political division to the moderate, respectful, and peaceful form it took before Trump (and Newt Gingrich) entered our lives.
NOTE: This piece has been posted on the Pennsylvania Policy Center Facebook page. Our usual practice is to delete comments that are hateful, bigoted, rude, crude, or obnoxious and block those who make those comments. We are not going to do that with this post for a simple reason. Nothing would confirm our political analysis more than if the responses to this post echo the hundreds we have removed in the last six months.