Ever since Donald Trump’s former Chief of Staff and retired Marine general, John Kelly, gave a series of interviews in October 2024 describing Trump as “meeting the general definition of a fascist” who prefers “the dictator approach”[i], the debate has been ongoing. Is Trump really a fascist? And if so, what does this actually mean?
In the brilliant 1980 post-Watergate movie, “Hopscotch”, a CIA agent claims he is dealing with a national security emergency. Another character famously replies, “national security is a term that has lost a good deal of its meaning these days.” Unfortunately, the same could be said today of a whole host of terms that once had a very specific connotation. Terms like “communist”, “socialist,” “racist” and “Nazi” are frequently thrown about in political discourse to discredit opponents, with little concern for their actual meaning. Some are becoming so commonplace that they have lost almost all ability to shock.
Nevertheless the use of the term “fascist” to describe the 47th president of the United States should not be taken lightly. This is a hugely concerning accusation that merits thoughtful and detailed consideration. To begin with, we need to examine the generally accepted meaning of the term. There is widespread consensus among political philosophers and historians as to the fundamental elements of fascism, although they also agree that there are a number of specific characteristics adopted by individual fascist leaders that may vary or differ, some of which may even seem contradictory.[ii] (A classic recent example of such contradictions can be found in Vladimir Putin of Russia, who most agree is a fascist in communist’s clothing.)
In general terms, then, fascism is considered to be a far-right, authoritarian and ultranationalist political ideology and/or movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, and forcible suppression of all opposition including an independent media and judiciary. It also is strongly opposed to liberalism, pluralism and egalitarianism. Fascist leaders typically rail against real or imagined external threats or internal enemies to unite citizens through fear. Often they employ what is commonly known as “The Big Lie”, for example by blaming immigrants, or minority communities such as Jews, for economic or other crises. These leaders also expect unswerving loyalty from their staff and supporters. As political philosopher Walter Benjamin once pointed out, fascism also “replaces reasoned debate with theatrics,” a point reinforced by noted sociologist Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi in her most recent work, Fascist Spectacle. [iii]
Certainly Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party can be seen to have employed theatrics, from his MAGA slogan and hats to the conversion of his mugshot into wildly popular Tshirts purchased by his supporters, to name but a few of the most obvious examples. But this is merely the tip of the iceberg. As internationally acclaimed historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has demonstrated in her most recent work, Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, Donald Trump has adopted many of the successful slogans, images and terminology of the most well-known earlier fascist leaders. [iv]
At a rally during the 2024 federal election, for example, Trump actually used language employed by Adolph Hitler to dehumanize his opponents, whom he describes as “enemies within” the state. Trump told followers at a New Hampshire rally “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” He also praised Victor Orban, Hungary’s strongman leader who is a virtual pariah in the international community. “The head of Hungary – very tough, strong guy… He didn’t allow millions of people to invade his country.” And he used other Hitlerian language to describe immigrants and asylum seekers, declaring “They’re poisoning the blood of our country.” [v] And of course in Trump’s case the Big Lie was that he had won the 2020 election but it was “stolen” from him.
Trump has also weaponized language by attacking institutions such as the Department of Justice, the CIA and the FBI as partisan and corrupt. Similarly he declared the Democratic Party is undemocratic and elitist, and he has named many individual Democrats, bureaucrats and even moderate Republicans as internal “enemies” and “traitors”. Trump himself indicated that, once elected, he would be a dictator, but “only for the first day.” [vi]
Meanwhile the results of his earlier attacks on the independent judiciary played out throughout the electoral campaign, as one by one the various criminal charges against him were delayed, dismissed or set aside, often by judges who were appointed by him. This culminated, of course, in the extraordinary and widely criticized decision of the Trump-led Supreme Court to determine that presidential immunity to prosecution is practically all-encompassing.[vii]
Since winning the election Trump has doubled down on various plans and threats he made during the campaign, all of which reinforce his classification as a fascist leader. He has provided presidential pardons for some 1500 participants in the January 6th insurrection on the Capital, portraying them as patriots and suggesting violence is sometimes necessary in a democracy. He has threatened the use of military force to take over the Panama Canal and Greenland. (As General Kelly pointed out in his interview, Trump also opined (mistakenly) that he wished his generals were as loyal as Hitler’s.) Moreover he has drawn up an enemies list and vowed to use the system to exact vengeance against those he has identified. In addition he has cancelled or retroactively eliminated virtually every federal affirmative action and EDI program, and demanded corporations with government contracts follow suit.
This time around, having learned some lessons from his first term in office, he has also selected a team of cabinet members and advisers whose first, and in some cases only, qualification is unswerving loyalty to him as leader. Similarly he has intimidated elected Republicans in Congress, who appear set to approve all but one of his nominated candidates despite the fact that many of these loyalist picks are highly problematic and some are probably fortunate to have avoided criminal prosecution. [viii]
Perhaps even more ominous are some of his Day One presidential directives. His move to eliminate birthright citizenship, for example, has already been blocked by a federal judge who described it as “blatantly unconstitutional.” But other recent crucial judicial decisions suggest this may well be overruled at a higher level by Trump appointed justices. Similarly, one of his first acts on Day One was to instruct the Justice Department NOT to enforce a ban on TikTok, despite the fact this ban was imposed by an act of Congress and, exceptionally, was upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court.
In addition Trump has heightened his attacks on mainstream media. Not content with establishing his own alternative media outlet in Truth Social, he has seduced both Elon Musk of X and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook with promises of an unregulated internet if they bend the knee. He has even exacted a $15 million fealty fee from ABC News to “settle” a defamation lawsuit he had launched against them, one which many considered the network was likely to win if they had gone to court.[ix]
Trump’s ability to influence public opinion has also been greatly enabled (albeit inadvertently) by the longstanding media principle of equivalency, a benchmark that has increasingly been abused and often stood on its head by various groups and spokespersons on the far right. As American historian and professor of Holocaust Studies Deborah Lipstadt describes in her award-winning book, History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier, media efforts to have her participate in a televised debate with Holocaust denier David Irvine were dangerously misguided. If she had agreed to participate, she points out, she would have been giving credence to his arguments as if there were two sides to the story. “The Holocaust happened. There is no issue here to debate.”
Yet the balance principle is exactly the reason why various groups whose views would earlier have been dismissed, as too outrageously extreme or erroneous to be given air time, are now routinely seen and heard on mainstream media. They are also the reason why Donald Trump was able to capture so much media attention as a presidential candidate the first time around. As one longtime media correspondent pointed out, “What are we supposed to do? There are only two parties in the race, and he is leading one of them.”
Trump himself has employed the concept of equivalency quite effectively to provide moral cover for his own extreme views. Referring to the violent antisemitic rally of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, for example, he told reporters “You had some very bad people in that group, (the white supremacists) but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” Clearly this attempt to play down the importance of the event through ‘balance’ essentially assigns moral justification to both sides of the ‘issue.’ Senator (and fellow Republican) John McCain recognized the threat this tactic posed and immediately responded, “There is no moral equivalency between racists and Americans standing up to defy hate and bigotry.” But McCain was a voice in the wilderness then, as the defenders of Haitian immigrants and human rights are today.
So yes, by virtually any textbook description Donald Trump is clearly a fascist. The next obvious question is “What are the likely consequences?” As some of his critics have already pointed out, given that this extraordinary new president has almost unlimited power, because the traditional guardrails of the American “check and balance” system –Congress, the Supreme Court and the media – all seem to be dismantled, it appears they could be extremely serious indeed.
The consequences could be even more significant because the other key element of resistance to a fascist regime – public opinion – does not seem to be a deterring or moderating factor here either, startling as this may be. This point is made decisively by noted historian Timothy Snyder in a scathing analysis of Trump’s character and behaviour for The New Yorker.[x] Taking as a given that Trump is in fact a fascist, Snyder zeroes in on one of the key features of this new era which he considers to be pivotal to Trump’s success, namely the presence of the internet and social media. “Trump takes the tools of dictators and adapts them for the Internet. We should expect him to try to cling to power until death, and create a cult of January 6th martyrs.”
Yet this scenario is in stark contrast to the longstanding belief that public opinion would be the ultimate bulwark against Trump’s steady stream of misinformation. Ever since the behavioural studies approach to political science became an accepted subfield of the discipline in the mid-1960’s, largely through the work of the Chicago School and scholars such as Almond and Verba, David Easton and Daniel Elazar,[xi] the political culture of the United States has widely been considered one of the most stable and well-grounded in terms of citizen commitment to liberal democratic values. This in turn was considered to be largely due to the solid underpinnings of their educational system, which provided extensive exposure to such values through compulsory civics courses, and produced citizens knowledgeable about democracy and an active civil society. (One famous study during the height of the Cold War, for example, demonstrated that an overwhelming majority of secondary school-level participants, when faced with a hypothetical situation in which Russia was attacking their country with nuclear weapons, nevertheless firmly rejected the suggestion that the Joint Chiefs of Staff should take over from the president to better handle the crisis.)
But it appears that this informed public opinion scenario is no longer the case. Far from it. As several recent academic studies have demonstrated, Americans’ knowledge of and commitment to democratic principles has been in decline for some time. One reason for this decline appears to be the deterioration in public education, but another, even more significant, explanation is the advent of more highly partisan and polarizing political discourse on the part of political actors.
In 2017 American political scientist and historian Robert Paxton thought the term ‘fascist’ was essentially ‘overkill’ when used about Trump,[xii] but he has since changed his mind. Trump, he more recently concluded, is indeed a fascist. Worse still, he declared, is the fact that Hitler and Mussolini required a measure of luck and outside help to come to power but “The Trump phenomenon looks like it has a much more solid social base that neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have had.”[xiii]
Paxton’s views were reinforced by the empirical findings of two Yale scholars, Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik, who concluded in a recent study: “We find the U.S. public’s viability as a democratic check to be strikingly limited: only a small fraction of Americans prioritize democratic principles in their electoral choices, and their tendency to do so is decreasing in several measures of polarization, including the strength of partisanship, policy extremism, and candidate platform divergence. Our findings echo classic arguments about the importance of political moderation and cross-cutting cleavages for democratic stability and highlight the dangers that polarization represents for democracy. [xiv]
In short, there are potentially game changing consequences of a second Trump term, given his fascist proclivities. Put another way, his impact will be about far more than policy choices, however regressive or far-fetched they may be. With Trump having neutered or discredited most of the institutions of democratic governance, and ordinary Americans increasingly unable to distinguish between democratic and illiberal, fascist behaviour, the fabric of American political culture is in grave risk of collapse over the next four years. As Joseph Stiglitz has argued, it may take decades for the United States to recover from a second Trump administration, and this new era may well come to be known historically as “the end of progress.”[xv]
[i] https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/22/politics/video/donald-trump-fascism-john-kelly-audio-nyt-cohen-ac360-digvid Includes major interviews in New York Times and The Atlantic
[ii] See for example Larsen, Hagtvet and Mykelbust (1984), Paxton (2004), Turner (1975) and Griffin (1995).
[iii] https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.5973175
[iv] Ben-Ghiat, Ruth (2020). Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present. New York: W. W. Norton & Company and
[v] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-says-immigrants-are-poisoning-blood-country-biden-campaign-liken-rcna130141
[vi] https://apnews.com/article/trump-hannity-dictator-authoritarian-presidential-election-f27e7e9d7c13fabbe3ae7dd7f1235c72
[vii] https://www.democracynow.org/2024/7/2/supreme_court_immunity_donald_trump
[viii] For more detail see https://brookejeffrey.ca/the-american-senate-the-last-remaining-guardrail-of-democracy-or-weak-kneed-sellout/
[ix] https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/16/media/george-stephanopoulos-trump-settlement-abc/index.html
[x] Timothy Snyder. “What Does it Mean That Trump is a Fascist?” The New Yorker. Nov. 18, 2024.
[xi] https://www.hilltimes.com/story/2025/01/13/trump-overdoses-on-unlimited-power/447043/
[xii] https://harpers.org/archive/2017/05/american-duce/
[xiii] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/magazine/robert-paxton-facism.html
[xiv] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/abs/democracy-in-america-partisanship-polarization-and-the-robustness-of-support-for-democracy-in-the-united-states/C7C72745B1AD1FF9E363BBFBA9E18867
[xv] https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-end-of-progess-the-dire-consequences-of-trumps-return
