We Were Right

The savvy scolds said lefties were overreacting to Trump a year ago, and calling him "fascist" was crazy. How's that looking now?

Official White House photo by Daniel Torok

We were right. It’s not something you’re supposed to say out loud — “I told you so” is considered uncouth. But it’s true and it needs to be said.

For the last few years — since Donald Trump made clear he was running for president again, through the end of the 2024 campaign — some of us spilled a great number of words explaining why he posed a unique and unprecedented threat to the nation and to our democracy. For that, we got all kinds of scolding, particularly when we argued that Trump was, in every meaningful way, a fascist.

Don’t be ridiculous, they said. “Trump isn't Mussolini. Virtue signaling about fascism shows liberals' ignorance,” read the headline of one October 2024 piece in USA Today. In the days before the election, the Wall Street Journal editorial board mocked “progressive panic” over what Trump might do in office, insisting that “most Americans simply don’t believe the fascist meme, and for good reasons.”

From other corners of the Washington establishment it wouldn’t be phrased quite so clearly, but the message was not too different: Let’s not exaggerate here. Joe Biden’s attempt to make the election a referendum on democracy is falling flat. You lefties are getting too worked up. Nobody thinks a second Trump presidency won’t be full of excesses, even some dangerous actions. But fascism? Come on.

Yet here we are. There can no longer be any denying that those who were ringing the alarm bells a year ago were, if anything, underestimating the danger Trump posed.

He is sending troops into cities run by politicians from the opposition party. He has created an in-house Trump militia of masked goons and sent them rampaging through the country. He has waged a war on higher education, strong-arming universities to suppress ideas and people the right doesn’t like. He has shipped immigrants off to foreign countries to be tortured, and begun revoking legal status for others with the wrong opinions. He has dismantled much of government’s capacity to do almost anything worthwhile, down to crippling cancer research, which is apparently too “woke.” He is rewriting history across the government, including banishing mentions of slavery from national parks, banning books about racism from government-run schools, and reviving tributes to the treason against America that was the Confederacy.

He has undertaken wave after wave of purges across the federal government, meant to remove any capacity for oversight or accountability and expel anyone who will not pledge fealty to “the president’s priorities.” He has turned the Department of Justice into his personal protector and a weapon against his opponents. He is forcing private businesses to hand over portions of their stock and revenue to him. He has gone on a corruption spree orders of magnitude greater than anything seen before in American history, on the (apparently correct) theory that if he openly solicits and receives what can only be described as bribes to him and his family, no one will get too worked up over it.

And now, with the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk as the justification, he has embarked on a new campaign to crush dissent and punish those who criticize him. His aides are still working out the details, but they have announced that they will be targeting liberal organizations in a crackdown on the political opposition. News organizations have been put on notice that if they need anything from the federal government — like approval for a merger — or merely if they want to avoid the administration’s wrath, they must either pay extortion money or change their own business decisions to his liking.

That includes firing high-profile media figures who are too critical of him, which is what is happening with ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, who has long been a thorn in Trump’s side. After Kimmel made an almost tame joke about Trump and his people caring more about their own political advantage (and in Trump’s case, his new White House ballroom) than about Kirk, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission — a cultist so devoted that he wears a tiny golden bust of Trump’s head on his lapel — issued an unambiguous threat. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said on a right-wing podcast. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

And so they did. Kimmel’s show has been taken off the air.

You don’t want to call this fascism? Then what would you call it?

Perhaps I’m sensitive because I remember so clearly how we’ve been here before. In 2002 and 2003, all the Very Serious People in both parties and in the news media knew that the Bush administration had presented an iron-clad case that if we did not invade Iraq then Saddam Hussein would unleash his fearsome arsenal of weapons of mass destruction upon us, so we had no choice. Those of us who said the administration was waging a propaganda campaign full of lies and distortions were dismissed as naïve, foolish, even unpatriotic.

But we were right. Just as we were when we insisted that conservatives were lying when they said they cared about “free speech” and abhorred “cancel culture” on principle. We were right.

I don’t expect your average bigshot political reporter or Democratic Party “strategist” to come out and say “You know what? Those lefties were right all along.” It’s not in their nature. What is in their nature is bending over backward to assume the best of Republicans — and that’s why they were wrong and we were right.

In the case of Iraq, it was because we didn’t assume that Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the gang were operating in good faith and telling the truth. We actually looked at the evidence, which pointed inexorably toward the conclusion that they were lying.

When it came to Trump, once again we didn’t assume the best of him. In that case it meant taking him both seriously and literally, understanding that his statements and promises can simultaneously be for show and deadly serious. So when he said he wanted to be a dictator, we concluded that he wanted to be a dictator. We looked clearly at all the ways it would be easier for him to do so in his second term than in his first, and we came to the correct conclusion.

Perhaps now, even those who were wrong before can open their eyes and see the truth: Trump and the extremist movement he leads are more authoritarian, more brutal, more dishonest, more lawless, and more corrupt than anyone in the “mainstream” was willing to admit.

And he’s only been in office for eight months. When the same people who were right before are saying that it’s going to get worse, consider that we might be right about that, too.

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