Is Donald Trump really a fascist? It’s a question that has been bubbling away since he first announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015 after a years-long campaign to brand Barack Obama an illegitimate occupant of the White House. Back then his questioning of Obama’s citizenship appeared overtly racist (“When I was 18, people called me Donald Trump. When he was 18 @BarackObama was Barry Soweto”). So were his comments about Mexican immigrants at his campaign launch: “They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Trump’s early indications that he would not accept the results of any election he did not win made him sound like an anti-democrat. And he told Hillary Clinton in their first presidential debate that if he became president, she would end up in jail, which is where he seemed to think his political opponents belonged. It was plenty. But was it fascism?
Before 2016, the closest the US had ever come to electing a fascist as president was in a work of fiction. Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, published in 2004, imagines an alternative history for the country in which Charles Lindbergh – real-life aviation hero and Nazi sympathiser – has defeated Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election on a promise to keep the US out of the second world war. In Roth’s telling, Lindbergh then initiates non-aggression pacts with Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan before embarking on a domestic programme of forced Jewish assimilation. Only when the popular radio host Walter Winchell announces he will stand against Lindbergh for the presidency and is shot dead at a campaign rally does the country come to its senses and drive Lindbergh out.
Roth died in 2018, aged 85, so he lived long enough to see Trump’s arrival in the White House. Towards the end of his life, Roth was asked whether he had intended his novel as a warning about the possibility of fascism in 21st-century America, and whether that warning had gone unheeded. No, was his answer. He hadn’t been thinking of a politician like Trump, though he knew his type well and his fiction is full of such characters: braggarts, charlatans, conmen, narcissistic whiners, sexually incontinent bullies. These men are everywhere in US business and haunt many US families. Something Roth hadn’t imagined – not even in his wildest fantasies – was that such a person might become president.
What Roth didn’t live to see is how Trump conducted himself after he lost the presidency. On 6 January 2021, two weeks before he was due to leave office, Trump encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol in a bid to prevent the congressional ratification of his election defeat. Though Trump claims he was not responsible for what happened next, the riot that followed – with his supporters storming government buildings and elected officials fleeing for their lives – echoed some of the darkest chapters of modern European history. This is how fascists behave when democracy stops working for them. It was monstrous. But it was also ridiculous. The mob seemed clueless what to do once they had breached the Capitol’s defences. They were dressed for a day trip, not an insurrection. Some – most notoriously the “QAnon shaman” in his horned raccoon headgear and patriotic face paint – looked as though they were headed for a kids’ fancy-dress party. If this was fascism, it was also a farce.
The question of whether a conman can also be a fascist – or a fascist also a conman – has become more pressing after Trump came within inches of becoming a martyr for the cause. On 13 July Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to assassinate Trump at a campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania, grazing the candidate’s ear with one shot and killing a member of the crowd with another. A few weeks earlier, the New Republic – a left-leaning magazine – had published a special issue devoted to the threat posed by Trump’s potential return to the White House. Its cover pictured him with a Hitler comb-over and toothbrush moustache (based on a 1932 Nazi campaign poster), with the tagline “American Fascism: What Would It Look Like”. The image went viral.
Plenty of Trump’s supporters were quick to link the two events. Chip Roy, a Republican congressman from Texas, tweeted an image of the New Republic cover after the assassination attempt with the words, “You bastards.” JD Vance, who had not yet been chosen as Trump’s running mate, wrote, “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” This despite the fact that in 2016 Vance had posted on Facebook, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump might be a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he might be America’s Hitler.”
Cynical asshole or fascist? Since 2016, Trump’s behaviour has made the question more acute without settling it. Robert O Paxton, an authority on the historical definition of fascism, argued in 2017 that, despite many overlaps, Trump did not ultimately fit the bill: he was too much of a poser, too lacking in a coherent political programme and too much of a plutocrat. Hitler expropriated the wealthy; Trump sucks up to them. But after the events of 6 January 2021, Paxton changed his mind. In Newsweek a few days afterwards he wrote, “Trump’s incitement of the invasion of the Capitol … removes my objection to the fascist label. His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line.” Trump’s time in office, by implication, had not revealed him to be a fascist (he had, after all, failed to deliver on his promise to jail his main political rival, as he had failed to deliver on many of his promises). It was the manner of his refusal to leave office that had moved the dial.
Michael Tomasky, editor of the New Republic, wrote in his introduction to the magazine’s American fascism issue, “We at the New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, ‘He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.’” The articles that followed laid out what life in the US under a second Trump term might be like. They imagined far greater repression of minorities, a violent clampdown on illegal immigration, co-option of the US military by Trump, infiltration of the US state by hardline ideologues, the hollowing out of democratic institutions and curtailment of civil liberties. It would certainly look a lot like fascism.
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What it would not look like is his first term, when his bark was far worse than his bite. His most significant achievement during his time in office was putting on the supreme court three conservative justices (Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Barrett) who have since allowed the court to pursue an agenda that is highly congenial to their former sponsor. This has included granting Trump partial immunity for any criminal acts committed during his presidency. Yet it would be hard to paint this as fascism. Skewing the court their way is what all modern presidents have attempted to do when the chance has arisen, even if few got as many chances as Trump. He was ruthless but also lucky. Moreover, it was what he was elected to do. Many of his supporters in 2016 swallowed their doubts about his toxic personality to get a court that might overturn Roe v Wade. Whatever you think about the results, the means are not outside the normal bounds of US democracy.
Why, then, does the question of Trump’s possible fascist leanings loom so much larger now? When The New Republic published its story, Joe Biden was still the candidate. After his disastrous debate performance, he seemed on the path to near certain defeat, and though his replacement by Kamala Harris has dissipated some of the dread of Trump’s inevitable return to office, the race remains a toss-up, even after Trump’s own debate meltdown last week. Now a second apparent assassination attempt at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club has made an unstable situation even more unstable. But what hasn’t changed are the factors that make the prospect of Trump 2.0 far more frightening than his first foray into office.
The events of 6 January seem to indicate a far greater willingness than previously seen to summon up violent opposition to democratic process and the rule of law. His rhetoric – lambasting the mainstream media, scorning the democratic process, promising a vote for him means not having to vote again (he told a Christian audience in Florida in late July, “In four years you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not gonna have to vote”) – is as incendiary as ever. But perhaps more significantly, many Trump acolytes have spent the Biden presidency coming up with far more coherent and ruthless programmes for government than those on offer first time around. Prime among these is Project 2025, an initiative produced by the Heritage Foundation, a leading Conservative thinktank once associated with Ronald Reagan, now fully on board with Trump’s version of Republicanism. Among its proposals is a plan to take partisan control of government agencies in order to root out liberal policies, expand presidential powers, enforce an anti-abortion agenda, impose a sharp crackdown on illegal immigration, tear up net zero initiatives and abolish many federal agencies, including the Department of Education. In the words of one of its directors, Project 2025 is about “systematically preparing to march into office … a new army of aligned, trained and weaponised conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state”. Trump has hummed and hawed about whether he supports this agenda (he has described himself as knowing “nothing” about Project 2025 and his campaign manager called it “a pain in the ass”). But one of the points of Project 2025 is not to be so dependent on Trump’s personal prevarications this time round.
In Paxton’s 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism, he identified a willingness to summon up the violence of the streets to intimidate and if necessary overpower established institutions as a defining characteristic. It is what distinguishes fascism from other kinds of authoritarianism. Illiberal authoritarians invariably want to control government institutions but they aim to do so from the inside by bending them to their will. They are wary of conjuring up an independent source of power in violent paramilitaries and other kinds of street politics. True fascists such as Mussolini and Hitler have no such compunction. Their political authority was built on establishing parallel party structures – from the Blackshirts to the SS – willing to bypass the institutions of the state whenever necessary and answerable to the leader personally. It is what marked them out from other dictators of the period. Stalin in the Soviet Union simply replaced state institutions with their Bolshevik equivalents, which monopolised all political coercion. Franco in Spain worked with existing state institutions – and the Catholic church – to keep a lid on political chaos. Hitler and Mussolini called up the chaos of untamed violence when it suited them.
In that respect, Project 2025 is not a fascist document. It has a lot more in common with the governing philosophy of illiberal authoritarians such as Victor Orbán in Hungary, including in its strong embrace of traditional Christian values. Its approach is more consistent with the goal of getting sympathetic judges on the courts than a private militia into gear. The Heritage Foundation sees itself in the business of training an army of like-minded bureaucrats, not an actual street mob. What, though, of the violence of 6 January and Trump’s part in it? Trump has never been shy of invoking violence against his enemies, real and perceived. During the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, he tweeted, “Please just deploy the military and take control of these animals who are ruining our cities!” He has said he is fine with the “roughing up” of hecklers at his rallies. In 2016 he told his supporters at a campaign event, “If you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. OK? Just knock the hell. I promise you I will pay for the legal fees. I promise.”
But this isn’t fascism either. Trump’s style is to lash out against anyone he gets affronted by and to express his personal grievances in the language of the mob. It’s dangerous and it’s demeaning. But it’s not a political strategy. Trump has done almost nothing to organise his own shock troops. He simply asks whoever feels the way he does to let rip. If any cops want to mishandle the people in the back of their cars – as he encouraged them to do in a speech to police officers in 2017 – then he’s going to look the other way. But this is a long way from finding people to do the beating up if the cops won’t. Trump’s rhetoric of violence is essentially reactive – it’s all about how he’s feeling. He is limited by his inability to see beyond the situation he finds himself in. That was true on 6 January as well – he wanted something so badly, he thought any means were justified in trying to get it. But he really didn’t know how to get what he wanted. The result was a menace and a sham. Trump is an enabler, not an originator of political violence. He is too passive to be truly fascist.
Trump is also limited by the fact that he doesn’t have his own political party. Fascism was a movement designed to take on, and ideally destroy, the established political parties. Trump had no means of becoming president except by becoming the Republican candidate first. Though he has brought the party over to his side, he still has to rely on its institutions and curry its favour. Fascism proper operates through brutal purges to ensure that only the true believers and their henchmen remain. The Republican party, for all its Trumpification, remains a relatively broad church, at least compared with the Nazi party after the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, when Hitler had his leading internal rivals murdered. Trump tries to control candidate selection by proffering or withholding his personal endorsement. If he doesn’t like you, he will take you apart on his social media accounts. But he won’t actually have you butchered.
Much of Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric has echoes of its fascist forerunners. His willingness to suggest a vast conspiracy against him – involving the “lying media” (suggestive of the Nazi trope of “Lügenpresse”), foreigners, Marxists, un-American infiltrators and, occasionally, Jews – is redolent of the paranoid and poisonous propaganda of the Nazi era. So, too, is his readiness to conjure up a permanent sense of crisis to justify his vicious politics. From his 2017 inaugural address, which described a state of “American carnage” in a “tombstone” nation, to his speech accepting the Republican nomination in July, where he described a world on the brink of collapse, Trump has never knowingly undersold the chaos. At the Republican National Convention he told his audience, “There is an international crisis, the likes of which the world has seldom been part of. Nobody can believe what’s happening. War is now raging in Europe and the Middle East, a growing spectre of conflict … hangs over all of Asia, and our planet is teetering on the edge of world war three, and this will be a war like no other war because of the weaponry.” He sure makes it sound like the 1930s.
The difference, though, is that 1930s fascism went out of its way to create international conflict in order to maintain the crisis conditions under which it flourished. It was a doctrine built on military aggression and territorial expansion. Trump wants the US out of these conflicts. In that respect, he is more like Lindbergh and his original America First movement of isolationists and neutralists. Trump’s willingness to stand back from and if necessary endorse the Russian invasion of Ukraine is another instance of his enabling role when it comes to the erosion of the rule of law. Yet he has shown little appetite for the kind of deliberate confrontation and mass mobilisation on which fascism depends. In Mein Kampf Hitler made clear that his goal was the eradication of the enemy. In Trump’s equivalent early account of his core beliefs – Trump: The Art of the Deal – he emphasised the necessity to “fight back very hard” when someone crosses you, especially if they are trying to stiff you in a real estate deal. But that is not the same as being ready to start world war three.
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Unquestionably there are those around Trump who are prepared to go much further. Steve Bannon, who played a leading role in Trump’s election victory in 2016, has long endorsed the view that the “Judeo-Christian” world is engaged in a war to the death with global Islam. Bannon is plugged into a network of white supremacists who hover around websites such as Breitbart News. One of Bannon’s acolytes has spent years trying to establish a “gladiator school” in Italy – the Academy for the Judeo-Christian West – in order to prepare warriors for the fight. That said, the academy has yet to open its doors, having got bogged down in a series of intractable lawsuits. Meanwhile, Bannon himself is serving jail time for refusing to obey a subpoena requiring him to appear before the US House select committee on the 6 January attack. If world war three begins, it won’t be Bannon who starts it either.
Trump is too fickle and essentially reactive to be a fascist. At the same time, the would-be fascists who have made him their cause are no nearer to running the show than they were in 2016. If anything, it is the illiberal authoritarians circling around Trump who carry the greater clout. Yet Trump is also too volatile and too haphazard to pass as a plausible authoritarian. He lacks the necessary discipline, which is why the project for some backers of Trump 2.0 has been to use him as a vehicle back into executive power, then sideline him. It is reminiscent of what some of the illiberal conservative elements in German politics believed about Hitler in 1933. We know how that worked out.
Too flaky to be an actual fascist and too erratic to be a credible authoritarian. What, then, is he? Tomasky argues it is possible to spend so much time bogged down in the impossible conundrum of Trump’s essential political personality that the basic threat he poses gets overlooked. He is a real and present danger to the American republic and the wider world. Under those circumstances, isn’t “fascist” a useful shorthand for what he represents? But that depends on what the goal is. If it is to mobilise resistance against Trump, then it is far from clear that calling him a fascist does much good. To his supporters it sounds like an exaggeration – because that is what it is. For his opponents it is probably unnecessary – they don’t need to compare him to Hitler to know what it is about him they don’t like. For now, at least, the Harris-Tim Walz ticket seems to have achieved greater purchase among the few undecideds who are left by describing the Trump-Vance ticket as “weird”. In many ways it is the more accurate description.
On the other hand, if the aim is to characterise what makes Trump so dangerous, then the spectre of fascism seems like a distraction. The threat of him in the White House comes less from his core beliefs than from his essential flakiness under a political system that gives the president extraordinary, unchecked power. He might well start world war three by accident, simply because the occupant of the Oval Office gets to call the shots in foreign affairs. He is the one brokering the deals – and breaking them. He gets final say on the deployment of nuclear weapons. The imperial phase of the presidency long predates Trump and originated in the accumulation of executive power during the cold war. The real risk lies in putting a man with so little impulse control and such a strong sense of personal grievance at the head of the world’s most powerful military machine. The world survived four years of Trump in the White House – but that was almost certainly luck rather than judgment. Another four years would be pushing our collective luck.
The president has less licence to create havoc in domestic matters. Nonetheless, decades of relative gridlock in Washington have seen a big expansion in the use of executive orders to bypass Congress. Trump’s economic policies – protectionist, autarchic, interventionist – have some family resemblance to the ones pushed through by the Nazis but they also echo ideas found in all sorts of other settings, including on some parts of the US left. There is still some overlap between erstwhile Bernie Sanders’ supporters and Trump’s voting base of disaffected young men (about 10% of Sanders’ voters are thought to have gone for Trump rather than Clinton in 2016). Bernie bros may be many things but they are not fascists. Hence it’s not the genealogy of Trump’s policy ideas that makes them hazardous. It is simply that a politician with no real sense of fiscal responsibility or financial accountability might get to play games with the US economy. It is America’s system of government that makes Trump dangerous as much as it is Trump who is a danger to America’s system of government.
Calling a 21st-century politician a fascist is so damning – so much worse than any other label – because actual fascist regimes are very rare. One reason for that is none of them ever lasted. They were catastrophic failures – catastrophes not only for their friends and enemies but for the wider world – undone by their own appetite for relentless crisis and confrontation. Fascism was a product of a period of acute difficulty for western democracies. It arose in the aftermath of a world war, in the ruins of defeat, in places with weak democratic systems, in nations populated by very large numbers of angry young men (many of them traumatised by their experience of war), in a time of high unemployment, in the face of global economic collapse and in the shadow of Bolshevism. None of that is true of the US today. Making sense of the phenomenon of Trumpism means looking at a different set of circumstances – an ageing population, a social media revolution, de-industrialisation, educational divisions, increased competition from China, a backlash against feminism and growing resentment about illegal immigration. That is more than enough to destabilise US politics. But it is not the breeding ground for fascism.
Still fascism could return. The 21st century has a long way to run and a combination of climate crisis, mass migration and technological upheaval, plus the possibility of bigger, nastier wars, may well create the conditions for a new version of the politics of permanent crisis, violently confrontational, racially motivated and catastrophic for everyone. Fixating on Trump as a symptom of this kind of politics is a mistake. Defeating him in November does nothing to guarantee the defeat of 21st-century fascism, because that depends on how governments around the world handle the crises to come. The more that goes wrong, the more fascism will find its footing again. But a victory for Trump could nevertheless be a cause of 21st-century fascism. Not because he is a fascist, but because he doesn’t know how to govern and good government is the only guarantee against the worst form of politics returning. Trump is not and never has been a genuine exponent of fascism. In the end, he is too much of a cynical asshole. But for that reason he could yet be one of its enablers.
