Is Donald Trump a fascist? General Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, thinks so. He warned that Trump is “extremely fascistic.”
Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly agrees. His rival in this year’s presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris, also does the same.
But political commentators with a deep grasp of history are not so convinced.
Writing in The Guardian, Sidney Blumenthal called Trump “Hitlerian” and his rallies “Nazisque”, but stopped short of calling them fascists.
The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky understands the objections, but he is tired of debating the difference between “fascist” and outright “fascist.” “He’s close enough,” Tomasky writes, “and we’d better fight.”
I understand this argument. This is why Harris uses the word “fascist” to describe Trump – “for sending 911 calls to the American people”. But there is a problem.
I have spent the last six years researching right-wing, authoritarian political communication in America. I can say with confidence how bad these types of labels can be. He could very easily be portrayed as a liberal fanatic, playing right into the hands of the far right.
Trump’s admiration for Putin is a matter of public record. For alt-right thinkers who are influential with Trump, such as Steve Bannon, Putin provides a blueprint for how the new authoritarianism should work.
Authoritarians like Putin must rule through the state, not through the people, because, as social psychologist Bob Altemeyer points out, they ultimately represent a small minority of the population.
Military dictatorship rules through the armed forces. The fascist regimes of 20th century Europe were ultimately police states. They relied on converting paramilitary death squads into secret police (like the Gestapo) and state security (like the SS in Nazi Germany).
However, the new authoritarians rule by converting the civil services into their own personal political machines.
This is why Trump is obsessed with the “Deep State,” by which he means the way democratic institutions have built-in legal safeguards to circumvent civil servants who can potentially circumvent executive orders. The new authoritarian strategy is to appoint a group of political loyalists to key positions in their administration, who can escape institutional scrutiny. But this is not an easy thing.
If Trump is elected, he has vowed to “crush the deep state”, for example, by purging thousands of non-political civil service employees. As part of this, he has promised to establish a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to punish those he believes have opposed him in the past.
Trump has been pursuing this new authoritarian strategy for almost his entire political career. He is taking these three steps to lay the foundation of authoritarian rule:
1) Undermining election integrity
The first key to the new authoritarianism: destroying democracy by undermining electoral integrity. Acid test here? Authoritarians do not accept election results when the opposition wins. As Trump has so clearly stated, “I’m very proud to be denied the election”.
Trump’s initial move in this regard was to capture the Republican Party. To do this he used electoral denialism, while simultaneously marginalizing any liberal who opposed him.
The Trump Republican Party is now a minority party, focused on white grievance, resentment of immigrants, and the undemocratic idea that a country should be run like a company.
Its only hope of winning government as a minority party is to try to suppress the votes of its opponents. To do this, pro-Trump Republican states have passed several laws since 2020 to make voting more difficult.
These states have also aggressively removed people from the voting rolls. Texas alone has removed one million voters from its rolls since 2021, only 6,500 of whom were considered non-citizens.
If Trump wins, he’ll likely make it even more difficult for people to vote. Civil rights groups fear he could introduce a citizenship question on the census, use the Justice Department to mass purge voter rolls and launch criminal investigations of election officials.
As a backup, Trump will likely revive the “Election Integrity Commission” established in 2017 to justify his claims of alleged voter fraud in the 2016 election and support his election denialism narrative.
2) Weakening the legislative and judicial branches
The second key to the new authoritarianism: bypassing the checks and balances function of the legislative branch of government. The goal here is to rule by executive order or through an overwhelming legislative majority.
The new authoritarians often rule through executive orders, including the use of emergency powers. For example, Trump has envisioned a scenario in which a Republican Congress would enact emergency powers empowering the president to overturn state governors’ ability to fire their own prosecutors and the authority to use the National Guard for law enforcement. Can apply.
Such a development would depend on several factors, including the complicity of the judiciary. This is why the new authoritarians also try to fill the judiciary with loyalists.
In his first term, Trump not only appointed three Supreme Court justices, but he also appointed judges to federal appeals courts, district courts, and circuit courts.
3) Attack their enemies
This leads to the third pillar of the new authoritarianism: the decapitation of political opposition and the suppression of dissent.
Trump’s threats to investigate and prosecute his enemies, including prominent people in the Democratic Party, should be taken very seriously. His calls to target the “enemy from within” were apparently directed at what he considered “radical leftist lunatics”.
Journalists and news media will also likely be targeted. For example, Trump’s statement that the national networks’ broadcast licenses should be revoked needs to be understood in the context of his pledge to dismantle federal regulatory agencies if elected.
This matters, because the next step for the new authoritarians in consolidating their power is to suppress dissent. Trump has proposed using the military in civilian contexts to target criminals and stop illegal immigration. He has reportedly even questioned why the army can’t “just shoot” the protesters.
It is important to understand how this differs from fascism, as it is central to Trump’s ability to maintain electoral support.
Classical fascism under dictators such as Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini was based on street fighting, paramilitary movements that used violence to intimidate and crush the opposition. Its counterparts today are right-wing militias like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.
Trump places one foot on the edge of this camp. But alt-right people like Bannon understand that swastika flags and paramilitary uniforms are a political liability. His preference is for a new authoritarianism capable of furthering right-wing extremist agendas by reducing democracy to sham elections rather than openly establishing an authoritarian regime.
Thus, Trump can avoid accusations of being a “fascist” by telling the Proud Boys to “stand down” while spreading false narratives about the January 6 Capitol insurrection. It can distance itself from the kind of paramilitary violence that is reminiscent of classical fascism.
It’s time to call things by their real names. Trump has the undemocratic tendencies of a new authoritarian – and, as his opponents have pointed out, it seems likely that if he is elected a second time he will put his words into action.
Here are two reasons it’s important to call Trump what he is.
Calling Trump a fascist, and then immediately adding, “or close enough,” plays directly into the hands of the far right. “Look?” They can say. “Whenever a liberal steps outside the consensus, he is labeled a fascist. This is how political correctness silences dissent.”
Trump’s authoritarianism is based on ambiguity about what kind of right-wing populist he is. Its success depends on the fact that “fascist” is the only name we currently have for authoritarian politics.
In my view, Trump is not a fascist. Rather, he is part of a “new authoritarianism” that destroys democracy from within and consolidates power through administrative rather than paramilitary means.
Why is the label ‘fascism’ useless?
This brand of new totalitarianism is apparently hidden because it doesn’t have a name yet. It resembles something else – for example, right-wing populism which is anti-liberal, but not yet anti-democracy. And then suddenly, it shows itself as undemocratic extremism, as Trump did in refusing to accept the 2020 election results and encouraging the storming of the Capitol.
This moment clearly exposed Trump as the new authoritarian. The supplementary debate about whether Trump is like Adolf Hitler risks becoming redundant. But the problem is that fascism is the only name we have now for anti-democratic extremism.
All fascists are authoritarians. But not all authoritarians are fascists. It is important to understand that there are other types of authoritarianism – and how they differ.
This is important not only to stop Trump from trying to destroy American democracy. It is also important to prevent Trump imitators who will now emerge in other democracies. If there is still no name for what they are other than “fascist,” they too will thrive on ambiguity.
What is the ‘new totalitarianism’?
I suggest we focus on what Trump really is – an undemocratic, “new authoritarian” – and understand what that means and how he is using right-wing populism to garner broad support.
For example, new authoritarians do not necessarily attack a country’s institutions by abolishing elections. Rather, they hollow out democracy from within, so that it becomes a facade of a one-party state.
Today we have many examples of such rulers: Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Belarus’ Alexander Lukashenko, Tunisia’s Kais Saied and, of course, the poster-figure of the new authoritarians, Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
