Donald Trump, American Fascist

Trumpism is what a specifically American, twenty-first century version of fascism looks like. And in November, fascism is on the ballot.

credit: Mark Peterson / Redux

Donald Trump’s closing pitch to the American people is rage, intimidation, and vengeful violence. He is threatening – or promising, if you ask his supporters – fascism.

Here is a snapshot of what Trump has been up to over just the past three weeks. At a rally in Pennsylvania at the end of September, Trump said that “one really violent day” was all that was needed to stop crime in America – a fever dream of society-wide, state-sanctioned (or perhaps even state-sponsored) vigilante violence: “One rough hour and I mean real rough, the word would get out and it would end immediately.”

In an interview with Hugh Hewitt on October 7, Trump declared that America was being overrun bx genetically inferior murderous migrants: “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

During a speech in Aurora, Colorado, on October 11, Trump raged against the “enemy from within. All the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country.” He promised that as soon as he was back in charge, “elite squads of ICE, Border Patrol, and federal law enforcement officers” would “hunt down, arrest, and deport” all the “illegal alien gang members.” He also, to enthusiastic cheers from his crowd, called for “the death penalty for any migrant that kills an American citizen.”

That same day, Trump fabulated about freeing “OCCUPIED AMERICA” in a social media post and announced November 5, the day of the election, as “Liberation Day” on which he would “rescue every town that has been invaded and conquered – and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them the hell OUT OF OUR COUNTRY.” In another post, he added: “We will defend our territory. We will defend our families. We will defend our communities. We will defend our Civilization. We will not be conquered. We will not be invaded. We will reclaim our sovereignty. We will reclaim our nation – and I will give you back your freedom and your life.”

Finally, on October 13, Trump sat down for an interview with Fox News and was asked if he expected immigrants to cause chaos on election day: “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump replied. “We have some very bad people, some sick people, radical left lunatics…. And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”

It is true that the term “fascism” is overused colloquially and in the public discourse. Quite often, it is uttered as a casual slur. Or it is used strategically to stigmatize something or someone as the ultimate evil. But the fact that the term is also being used in careless ways that don’t hold up analytically must not keep us from acknowledging that it is diagnostically correct to call Donald Trump and his movement fascist. Trump is not “the new Hitler” and he is not “just like Mussolini” – such facile analogies are useless and silly. We are not facing an exact replica of the Ur-fascism that rose to power in Europe’s interwar period. Trumpism is a specifically American, specifically twenty-first century version of fascism. 

Debating fascism in America

The Fascism Debate has been raging since at least 2016. Academic observers, pundits from across the political spectrum, intellectuals, journalists, and politicians have all been weighing in on the question of whether or not it is helpful – intellectually, diagnostically, politically – to approach Trumpism as a form of fascism. Should it be situated in the broader historical and ideological tradition of fascism? Or is all this talk about fascism in America misguided and actually dangerous: An insidious form of liberal alarmism meant to distract us from the real problems?

The debate is complicated by the fact that there is no consensus definition of fascism – there are different definitions and approaches, plural. Fascism always had an idiosyncratic quality to it, and fascist politics also radicalized over time. Fascism scholars have presented many attempts to distill certain elements and conditions that define fascism: An ideological essence, maybe, or a certain style of politics, a form of exerting power; other approaches have focused on the specific economic, social, political circumstances that gave rise to fascism in the first place. Fascism is one of the most intensely studied political phenomena in world history – yet the resulting picture doesn’t easily lend itself to thumbs-up or thumbs-down votes on whether or not something / someone is fascist. Even if we set the political dimension of the debate aside for a moment (something that has rarely happened, unfortunately), “Is Trumpism fascism?” is, from an analytical standpoint, not a question that generates a quick Yes or No answer – it requires a conversation that clarifies terms, grapples with definitions, and weighs the empirical evidence accordingly.

Back in the spring, I wrote a two-part series diving deep into the Fascism Debate. Part I offered an attempt to clarify the stakes, provide an overview of the key arguments that have been advanced by different camps, and outline my own interpretation. Part II focused on how prominent leftwing intellectuals are allowing their singular, disdain-driven focus on (neo-) liberalism as the *real* enemy to completely distort their perspective on the Right. I do not want to repeat everything I was going through in these more detailed dissections. But as we are rapidly approaching the election and running out of time to grapple with the nature of the anti-democratic threat on the Right before it is too late, I do want to repeat and emphasize the case for applying the fascism concept to Trump/Trumpism.

Donald Trump, American fascist

Donald Trump, let’s start here, has a fascistic way of describing the problem – and offers a fascistic solution. According to Trump and those who support him, the country is in decline. It is threatened by outsiders – immigrants, invaders who are “poisoning the blood” of the nation and bringing in “bad genes,” as Trump has put it. The nation is also threatened by the “enemy within”: Un-American forces of radical leftism and globalist elites, even more acutely dangerous than the invaders from without. If Trump is to be believed, in order to restore this declining nation to former glory, to Make it Great Again, it has as to be “purified” – the enemies have to be purged. Trump has repeatedly promised to round up and deport 15, 20, maybe 25 million people – a deportation operation of unprecedented scale, explicitly targeting non-white immigrants, necessitating the creation of a federal deportation force unlike anything that currently exists. “Palingenetic ultranationalism,” the political theorist Roger Griffin has argued, forms a core myth of fascism – “palingenesis” means re-birth or re-creation, a movement or ideology desiring the rebirth of the nation through revolutionary change.

According to Trump and his supporters, only one man, one providential leader can guide the nation to its re-birth and former glory – “Only I,” Trump likes to say. And this leader comes from outside the conservative establishment. Trump rose to domination within the Republican Party because of a base that developed a fierce personal loyalty to him, bound to him by a cult of personality. Trump delivers the kind of charismatic leadership and radicalizing mass base that reactionary elites have not been able to inspire – but have, for decades, sought (and failed) to harness.

Trumpism regards any opposition to this project of national purification and re-birth as fundamentally illegitimate. It is dogma among Trump’s supporters that he as their leader embodies the will of the true people, the Volk. Trump is the tribune of “real America.” Anyone who dares to object has therefore forfeited the right to be considered “American” in any meaningful sense. How should “real America” deal with those elements who stand in the way of making the nation great again? Trump has consistently embraced, condoned, and invoked vigilante as well as state violence as part of the solution – “one really violent day,” or many violent days and bloody purges. Whatever it takes.

While we are undoubtedly confronted with something that is distinct from the historical examples or Ur-fascism, many of the elements that most of the widely cited scholarship lists as fascism’s defining features are present: A specifically American, specifically twenty-first-century version of fascism.

The evidence is piling up

I wrote my pieces on the fascism debate in late April / early May. I don’t believe it was still an open question back then, half a year ago, whether or not Trumpism was adequately described as fascism. But if anyone thought more evidence was needed, the Trumpists have certainly provided it.

Since the spring, the rhetoric and planning surrounding the racial purge of the nation has ramped up considerably. This is the central promise of Trump’s election campaign: to conduct an unprecedented mass deportation. To do this, Trump and white nationalist purge-planner-in-chief Stephen Miller envision the creation of a deportation force larger than the U.S. military, sweeping the country, rounding up anyone they can get their hands on. This isn’t empty campaign theater either: Russell Vought, the guy who is chiefly responsible for Project 2025’s “180-day Playbook,” has proudly admitted that he has been preparing the executive orders to turn those mass deportation fantasies into reality as quickly as possible.

Early in the year, Trump said he wanted to deport 15 million people, then 20 million … the number keeps escalating. The exact number is not important, but the magnitude is: The estimated number of undocumented people in the country is far lower, and the rightwingers know it. What they are planning is a purge of the nation that will not be confined to undocumented people. Miller has been talking about “denaturalization” for a long time. And rightwing thinkers openly fabulate about the need to go much further. In an infamous essay titled “Conservatism is no longer enough,” published in Claremont’s online magazine in the spring of 2021, Glen Ellmers outlined a vision of redrawing the boundaries of citizenship and excluding over half the population: Anyone who is not an “authentic American,” as he put it – literally every single Democratic voter. In his view, people who voted for Joe Biden and his “progressive project of narcotizing the American people and turning us into a nation of slaves” were simply not worthy of inclusion in the body politic.

Such extreme ideas are fully in line with the type of blood-and-soil nationalism that has taken over the Republican Party and has emerged as the Right’s defining political project. The elevation of J.D. Vance captures this perfectly. At the Republican Convention in July, Vance introduced himself to the nation. What, to J.D. Vance, is America? “America is not just an idea,” he declared: “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” America is the “homeland,” as Vance called it repeatedly, for those who are bound to it by ancestry, across many generations, whose blood and bones, quite literally, are tied to the soil. And according to J.D. Vance, they alone have a right to decide who gets to come to this nation, who gets to belong in America. While he was speaking, Vance was greeted by an audience of delegates waving hundreds of “Mass Deportation Now!” signs. Those were official signs, printed and handed out by the RNC – a message enthusiastically embraced by those on the Convention floor.

This is the Higher Truth of Trumpism: The allegiance to the “real American” homeland overrides all else, and those who undermine it must not be tolerated. Legal status is irrelevant, citizenship is always conditional. There is an enemy within – the globalist elites, the “woke” ruling class, the radical Left – that is responsible for the assault on the homeland. This enemy is aiding America’s foes abroad, in cahoots with China, and undermining the strength of the nation by “flood(ing) this country with millions of illegal aliens,” as J.D. Vance claimed in his Convention speech. Propagating Great Replacement, all the way down. For the homeland to be made safe for “real Americans,” the enemy within must be purged too.

There is a direct line from J.D. Vance’s “homeland” speech at the Republican Convention to Trump and Vance trying to incite a pogrom against Haitian migrants in Springfield Ohio in September. Trump has never shied away from admitting – from promising – that his mass deportation “will be a bloody story.” And the leaders on the Right have been doing their best to ensure that there will be blood long before the election. On September 9, Vance used his social media to spread lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield eating the pets of “real” American citizens. He was leaning into a long-established racist trope and focusing on an immigrant community that has been targeted by Neo-Nazi groups for quite some time. As soon as Vance gave them a target, leading Republicans echoed his baseless claims, and the rightwing activist sphere went all in.

Vance even admitted on television that his claims did not stand up to scrutiny. And yet, he felt completely justified in spreading vile lies. In a CNN interview, he said: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people then that’s what I’m going to do.” Vance does not feel bound by facts – his allegiance is to a Higher Truth, one defined by the blood-and-soil project: The homeland is under siege, overrun with enemies who “poison the blood.” This tale of decline and peril overrides petty facts and superficial reality.

Donald Trump swiftly joined Vance in trying to incite a pogrom, raging against the Haitian migrants who “have descended upon a town of 58,000 people destroying their way of life.” Trump easily integrated the Springfield lie into his broader story about America under siege from inferior, but acutely dangerous hordes of “Others.” He was “angry about young American girls being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage alien criminals,” Trump declared. And in a speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan on September 17, backed up by a bunch of law enforcement officers, Trump said about immigrants in America: “The democrats say ‘please don't call them animals; they’re humans.’ I said no, they’re not humans, they’re not humans; they’re animals.”

This vile propaganda quickly had its desired effect. Already on September 12, City Hall, schools, and the DMV in Springfield had to be evacuated because of bomb threats from people raging against the Haitian immigrants. Acts of vandalism against the Haitian community followed. More threats against elementary and middle schools as well as against public officials on September 13. On September 14 and 15, hospitals had to be evacuated – so did universities, as someone threatened to shoot members of the Haitian community on campus. Ohio State Troopers started sweeping every building in every school in Springfield Ohio, every morning before the start of classes, looking for explosives, because the bomb threats kept coming. Meanwhile, neo-Nazis were marching through town – the Proud Boys, and a group called Blood Tribe.

There it is, the ugly face of American fascism. It is not new. It has a long domestic tradition. But it has never been so fully in charge of a major party.

“It must not be fascism!”

I doubt any of this will faze the people who have built their public standing – and staked their reputation – on denying that Trumpism could possibly be fascism, who have spent years ridiculing everyone making such arguments. There is, for instance, a specific camp of leftwing intellectual “skeptics” stubbornly refusing to engage seriously with the fascism argument and the radicalizing tendencies on the Right. They remain devoted to the political struggle against what they believe is the real enemy: The (neo-) liberal elites. In their view, Liberals are using the “fascism” bogeyman as a way to distract from their own culpability; to discipline the Left into accepting a popular front under liberal leadership; to reinvigorate the (neo-) liberal project by conjuring fears of the ultimate evil. To these “skeptics,” the fascism talk is intended to make people flock to the liberal cause; to expand power by using tyrannophobia as a way of entrenching liberal rule. It’s all just liberal dishonesty, self-exculpation, and self-aggrandizement that needs to be opposed aggressively. Their devotion to this anti-liberal struggle has led them to propagating positions that are increasingly untethered from what is happening on the Right – sophistry in defense of a premise that is more and more at odds with empirical evidence.

On the center-right, there is a bunch of prominent pundits who have been so obsessed with scolding the crazy Libs for being “alarmist” – and thereby demonstrating their supposedly superior rationality and clarity – that they haven’t noticed (or simply don’t care) that the overwhelming consensus among academic observers has entirely passed them by, that democracy scholars across the globe share a position they have been deriding as a manifestation of liberal hysteria.

(Although it is quite interesting that some of the worst offenders of this arrogant ahistorical scolding are now, all of a sudden, calling Trump a fascist, something they said was utterly ridiculous just a short while ago. Some public introspection might be in order?)

And lest we forget, when I say overwhelming consensus among scholars, that doesn’t mean there aren’t still those who, like David Runciman, former professor of political science at the University of Cambridge and through his very successful work as an author and podcaster one of the more prominent political commentators in the world, cling to the idea that Donald Trump is “too fickle” and “too flaky to be an actual fascist and too erratic to be a credible authoritarian.” Fascists, Runciman seems to believe, must be focused, disciplined, serious, and strong – an ahistorical image of fascism fully in line with the fascists’ self-mythologizing or, if we want to put it more charitably, too focused on Hitler and Mussolini *in power* as the sole models of fascism, when there actually have been quite a few rather unsuccessful, floundering fascistic movements in history.

Finally, there is mainstream media’s eternal insistence on obscuring the nature of the Trumpist threat by applying the normalization and legitimization filter that will present plans for an unprecedented ethnic cleansing as a “housing proposal.”

The idea that it is somehow ridiculous, alarmist, or otherwise beyond the pale to call Trump a fascist almost always relies on a rather cursory, abstract view of Trump, Trumpism, and the Right that seemingly hasn’t been updated in quite a while.

Fascism can only rise under certain indispensable conditions, and it can’t be fascism because there is no strong communist movement or party, no acute leftist threat, in the United States today? Well, that’s certainly not how anyone of significance on the Right sees it: The idea that radical leftist forces are laying siege to America and have taken over most major institutions, that a “counter-revolution” is needed to save the nation, forms the core of rightwing political identity and the permission structure that governs conservative politics.

There are no fascistic mass organization? Certainly not anything of the quality or on the scale of Nazi Germany or Mussolini Italy, that is true. But the position of extremists within the Right and in relation to the power centers of the GOP has shifted rather dramatically; they now see themselves, and are viewed by Trump and his supporters, as part of a new rightwing coalition.

Trump is not using violence systematically? Well, all strands of the Right – Republican elected officials, the media machine, the reactionary intellectual sphere, the conservative base – are openly and aggressively embracing rightwing vigilante violence. Leading Republicans are sending the message that lethal violence against their ideological enemy is fine, and they are encouraging white militants to use whatever force they please to “fight back” against anything and anyone associated with “the Left” by protecting and glorifying those who have engaged in vigilante violence. And the threat of violence is not some future possibility, theoretical abstraction, or empty Trumpian promise. The percentage of people on the Right who see political violence as necessary has drastically increased. The reality in America today is that anyone who opposes Trump – politicians, judges, election officials, FEMA workers trying to handle a natural disaster, anyone – faces an avalanche of violent threat. We saw glimpses of this during his presidency, but nothing of this quality. Imagine what it would be like with Trump back in power.

Fascism in idea and practice

One point the fascism “skeptics” (those skeptical of the idea that Trump could be a fascist) from across the political spectrum have consistently brought up – and often presented as the supposed be-all and end-all in this debate – is the fact that Trumpism does not have a coherent ideology. Granted, this particular wannabe-leader himself is not sitting down to dictate his manifesto. But if you pay attention to what has been happening on the Right more broadly, this argument quickly loses plausibility. The most overtly Trumpist part of the reactionary intellectual sphere, for instance, which has found an institutional home at and around the Claremont Institute, is explicitly and aggressively engaged in providing a kind of ideological basis and justification for the fascist “counter-revolution” they hope Trump will unleash.

That does not mean that everything that is happening on the radical Right is best described as fascism. Those who support and put their hopes in Trump display a variety of ideas and ideologies ranging from more traditionalist to full-on revolutionary extremism. There are the “post-liberal” thinkers and religious authoritarians, many of them Catholic integralists like Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, or Rod Dreher. They have organized and mobilized behind the idea of “National Conservatism”; this is the part of the Right that is obsessed with Orbánism in Hungary as a model. There is a lot of overlap between this group and the Christian nationalists – people like Russell Vought, who represents the camp of committed ideologues in Trump’s immediate inner circle. Vought is one of the key architects of “Project 2025,” served as policy director for the RNC platform committee, and is the favorite to become Trump’s Chief of Staff. He is also the founder of the openly and aggressively Christian nationalist Center for Renewing America. There is further the monarchist strand of rightwing thinking, led by Curtis Yarvin, one of the key influences on JD Vance. Although “monarchism” really doesn’t do justice to what Yarvin wants. He desires an American “Caesar” to come in and wipe what he argues is a deeply deficient, unnatural democratic system away. Yarvin believes that people – races! – are fundamentally unequal, some superior and some inferior, and seeks to install an aristocracy of people like him under the guidance of an absolute monarch. Society, Yarvin claims, should be ordered like a tech company, with a kind of CEO-monarch at the top. This type of Caesarism is, finally, very attractive to techno-fascists like Peter Thiel, who has been funding Yarvin’s work for many years.

Diagnostically, it is not helpful to just subsume all of these different ideas and intellectual strands under the “fascism” label. They are not all the same. They all share certain characteristics, however: They are staunchly anti-liberal and opposed to democracy. They are obsessed with restoring dominance over the forces of “woke” social justice activism and curtailing the influence of democratizing ideas and practices. They are all embracing increasingly radical forms of authoritarian rule to reach their goals. And, crucially, they provide the kind of intellectual ferment and justification that helps Trumpist extremism thrive and legitimizes it, often retroactively. And in that way, the situation is not so different from the rightwing intellectual landscape that accompanied the rise of Ur-fascism in Europe.

As fascism scholars have emphasized, fascist movements are rarely displaying an intellectually coherent ideology, a masterplan that they then put into practice. There has always been an idiosyncratic quality to fascism. But it was centered around a core message: That liberalism and democracy needed to be wiped away and replaced by a better, stronger, authoritarian order as a superior way of organizing modern mass society. Even though fascism’s key thinkers and intellectual enablers came from different ideological backgrounds, this is what appealed to them, what ultimately united them behind the fascist leader.

The rightwing coalition, led by a fascist

The argument is not that every institution of establishment conservatism has been replaced by fascist structures. The Right is best approached as a coalition of forces, ideas, people who struggle over how to respond to what they see as the existential threat of egalitarian democracy, with more extreme voices always trying to pull the coalition towards a more radical politics. And as of right now, the radicals are firmly in charge of that alliance.

In the radical Right’s quest for power, a figure like Trump plays a key role. For decades, the most radical thinkers on the Right have been frustrated with the conservative establishment, have searched for ways to bring down the system and the liberal cabal of elites that is supposedly propping it up – “the Cathedral” of academics, intellectuals, and media institutions, as Curtis Yarvin calls it. A strategy of radical “right-wing populism” was the only way forward, argued self-declared paleo-libertarian Murray Rothbard in “A strategy for the Right” in the early 1990s. Rothbard’s influence on today’s radicals can hardly be overestimated. The liberal elites were the enemy, and the Right needed to bypass them and mobilize the masses against the system. In Rothbard’s estimation, only a “populist” leader of the extreme Right could pull this off: “we need a dynamic, charismatic leader who has the ability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly.” There was nothing “conservative” about this strategy, Rothbard gleefully admitted, since there was nothing worthwhile left to conserve. It was radical, “exciting, dynamic, tough, and confrontational.” Most of all, it was conceived as a “counter-revolution” aiming to “repeal the twentieth century.” Nothing less.

Who is that radical “charismatic leader” (Rothbard) who can bring democracy down, who is the Caesar (Yarvin) capable of wiping the system away? In today’s America, the extremists on the Right believe it is Donald Trump.

Trumpism is not an aberration from a “noble” conservative tradition. It is in line with long-standing anti-democratic tendencies and impulses that have always defined modern conservatism as a political project. And fascism is not something foreign to American society: There is a domestic tradition of violent extremism and, yes, fascism. In this sense, Trumpism stands in continuity with some very old ideas and movements – and in continuity with the often violent counter-mobilization that has accompanied every real or even just perceived progress towards egalitarian democracy in U.S. history. At the same time, the status of these extremist forces within the Right has changed. They have moved to the power centers of conservative politics, and as a result, the Right has radicalized dramatically.

The superficial institutional continuity of the two-party system has obscured this process. If they don’t know (or don’t want to acknowledge) much about American politics, it may be easy for people to see the same Republican Party, the same conflict, Democrats vs Republicans, and allow themselves to think: How bad could it possibly be? What if America had a multi-party system, though, and Trump had emerged as a political leader of a new rightwing party that united what was formerly the rightwing flank of the GOP with the extremist factions of the Right far beyond the political mainstream? The America First party, the MAGA party. Would anyone look at such a party and hesitate to call it extremist, call its leaders fascistic? I doubt it. It’s the deceptive sheen of continuous Republicanism – and the fact that so much of the political discourse in this country runs on the idea that the two parties are the same – that keeps influential people who should know better from acknowledging what is staring us right in the face. It would be easier, probably, if Trump had his own party. But we are, in fact, in a much more dangerous situation precisely because Trumpism is operating within a major party and has managed to fully control it, meaning it is inherently close to taking power.

Trump is the fascistic leader of a rightwing coalition that unites all shades of reaction and is entirely dominated by extremism. No more plausible deniability for anyone who refuses to see the threat. Should Trump emerge victorious from the election, America will not become a fascist dictatorship on day one. That’s not how that works. And politics will not stop overnight. But the Trumpist Right will try. Conversely, the problem won’t be solved by just defeating Trump in November, just as voting him out of office in 2020 was not enough. Even as a best-case scenario, it will be a long, sustained struggle to move the country forward towards the kind of stable, truly egalitarian democracy it has never yet been. But if Trump is not defeated, things will get worse. Much worse.