Yes, Donald Trump Is a Fascist

There's no longer any point in mincing words.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

When Donald Trump first ran for president in 2016, some asked whether he was a fascist. The expert consensus at the time was that though he might have authoritarian impulses, it would be going too far to put him in the same basket as Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco. Ugly as his beliefs and rhetoric might have been, they were too scattered and his ignorance too genuine for it all to add up to a coherent philosophy.

But we’ve come a long way since then. We saw how he acted in his first term — though much of what he attempted to do, and the way he was reigned in by those around him, only became clear later on. We saw how he tried to stay in power after losing the 2020 election, through attempted fraud and ultimately through violence. And we’ve seen how in the 2024 campaign he has become more hateful and contemptuous of all the foundations of American democracy, while his allies prepare for an unprecedented assault on our system of government should he take power. 

In short, eight or even four years ago, it was reasonable to say that for all his odiousness, Donald Trump was not really a fascist. But that is no longer tenable. At this moment, with just three weeks to go before election day, there is no better or more useful term to describe him and the threat he presents. 

Whatever a “fascist” is, Trump is that

There is no single definition of fascism, though certain features are central to the ideology. Fascist movements center on a charismatic leader, around whom a cult-like atmosphere is built. They are intensely nationalistic. They seek a racial, ethnic, and religious purification of their societies, and scapegoat minority groups as the source of all the nation’s problems. They have contempt for democratic processes. They are consumed with ideas of strength and weakness. They valorize violence as noble and righteous. They define dissent as unpatriotic and seek to crush it wherever it emerges. They claim to be the guardians of tradition even as they enact radical change to the country’s systems. They wage information warfare, attacking unfriendly media organizations and convincing their supporters to believe in wild conspiracy theories and abandon any conception of objective truth. And they are highly theatrical, focused on the power of spectacle, imagery, and aesthetics.

Not only do all of those components describe Trump well, in every case they describe him better today than they did in 2016 or even 2020. As he campaigns to recapture the White House he has become more racist and xenophobic; now he employs the kind of rhetoric that has characterized pre-genocidal periods, talking about disfavored groups as “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our country” because they have “bad genes.” He has taken to describing ordinary criticism of him and those he has appointed (especially the Supreme Court) as “totally illegal,” which raises the question of how he would punish this illegality if he had the power. Even more explicitly, he has threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of networks that are insufficiently favorable to him. And he now talks about deploying the military against his political opponents; as he said this weekend, “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” especially “radical left lunatics.” And what should be done? “It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”

We are no longer hearing “echoes” of fascism. The sound we’re hearing is not far away, bouncing down through the decades in muffled form. We’re hearing the actual thing, shouting from right next to us.

What’s different this time

Let’s take as an example the centerpiece of Trump’s campaign, his anti-immigrant appeal. No longer is he promising to build a wall to keep immigrants out; now he wants to carry out a mass deportation of up to 20 million people, a scale literally unprecedented in human history.

Few voters seem to comprehend just what an extraordinary expansion of coercive government power that would be, and the violence that would inevitably accompany it. In addition, Trump has abandoned the position Republicans traditionally took, that they were in favor of legal immigration but wanted to stop illegal immigration. Trump and his running mate JD Vance are getting closer and closer to proclaiming that all immigration is illegal. Speaking of the Haitian immigrants in Ohio he has slandered by falsely accusing them of kidnapping and eating people’s pets, Vance has said that he doesn’t care that they have Temporary Protected Status. “If Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien,” he says. Trump has pledged to revoke TPS; about those immigrants from Haiti, he said “They may have done it through a certain little trick, but they are illegal immigrants as far as I’m concerned.” Trump also wants to end birthright citizenship, and Vance is a cosponsor of legislation to do the same thing. Vance has also articulated an explicit blood-and-soil conception of American identity that rejects the centrality of democratic ideals in favor of something much more like ethnic purity.

That’s only the beginning. Trump has threatened to use government power against specific companies if they displease him. He says he will withhold disaster relief from blue states if they disagree with him on unrelated policies. He wants to give police officers blanket immunity from prosecution for abuses against the citizenry, and dreams of “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day” in which police would be able to do whatever they want to suspects, which he says would end crime. 

Some might say, “Well, he said a lot of crazy stuff in 2016 but we didn’t get fascism.” He was saying that crazy stuff not just in public but in private; according to Rolling Stone, during his first term he was obsessed with the idea of staging public executions of gang members and drug dealers. “‘Fucking kill them all,’ Trump would say. ‘An eye for an eye.’ Other times he’d snap at his staff: ‘You just got to kill these people.’ Invoking the brutality of dictatorial regimes that Trump wanted to emulate, he’d add, ‘Other countries do it all the time.’”

But we should understand why we didn’t get that last time. The first and most important reason is that for all that Trump’s administration was stocked with grifters and far-right loons, we were somewhat protected by both civil servants and appointees whose devotion wavered when he came to demand of them that they break the law or compromise basic ethical standards. 

For instance, there is a widespread misconception that for all the “Lock her up!” chants, Trump didn’t actually use the Department of Justice to prosecute his enemies,  including Hillary Clinton, and therefore we don’t need to take his promises to deploy the DoJ as his personal vendetta force all that seriously. The truth is that he tried, but his efforts were rebuffed by people in the department, including those he had appointed, and they never came to fruition. But next time there will be a very different group of officials running the department, people who have been chosen precisely because they are committed to turning it into a weapon for him to deploy at his whim. And thanks to the Supreme Court, Trump and his aides now know that he can’t be prosecuted for crimes he commits while in office. 

Unfortunately, a good portion of the public is supporting Trump precisely because fascism sounds great to them; it’s just what they’ve been waiting for. Another sizable section of Americans aren’t cheering for it today, but won’t really object when it happens. And most of that latter group seems to believe that Trump isn’t all that much of a threat to the basic shape of American freedoms.

I’m not sure how best to persuade them to see Trump and his movement for what they are, especially in the next two weeks. But one thing we can do is to stop hedging in our language. Until someone comes up with a term that better encapsulates what Trump believes and intends to do, one that acts as both descriptor and warning, “fascism” it is.