For the last decade, there has been a debate among people who don’t like Donald Trump about whether he is a fascist.
The argument that he isn’t has often hinged on two claims. First, when Trump first came to power, he lacked a street-fighting force like Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts, even if he was able to muster a violent rabble on Jan. 6. “Trump didn’t proceed to unleash an army of paramilitary supporters in an American Kristallnacht or take dramatic action to remake the American state in his image,” wrote Daniel Bessner and Ben Burgis in “Did It Happen Here?,” a 2024 anthology examining the fascism question.
Second, Trump did not pursue campaigns of imperial expansion, which some scholars view as intrinsic to fascism. “For all of Trump’s hostility towards countries he perceives as enemies of the US, notably Iran, there is no indication that he sought a war with any foreign power, still less that he has been consumed by a desire for foreign conquest and the creation of an American empire,” wrote the historian Richard J Evans in his 2021 essay “Why Trump Isn’t a Fascist.”
It is striking how much these arguments have deteriorated in just the first few days of this year, as the country has plunged to new depths of national madness.
Now that America has removed Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela and announced that it will help itself to the country’s oil, other nations are adjusting to a reality in which the US looks less like an ally than a predator. European governments are contemplating increased military deployments in Greenland to protect it from Washington. An Economist headline recently proclaimed, “Canada’s Armed Forces Are Planning for Threats From America.”
At home, Trump’s paramilitary forces have killed a citizen in Minneapolis and now appear to be using her death to threaten other activists. “You did not learn from what just happened?” one masked gunman reportedly barked at an observer. Videos show armed men in camouflage demanding proof of citizenship, firing tear gas into crowded streets, and sometimes attacking those who try to film them. Meanwhile, a new ICE recruiting advertisement declares, “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” a phrase that happens to echo a white nationalist anthem.
Both the occupation of Minneapolis and Trump’s threatened seizure of Greenland are part of the same story: an increasingly unpopular regime radicalizing rapidly and testing how far it can move toward autocracy. Had anyone predicted in 2024 what Trump’s return to the White House would look like, they would likely have been dismissed as suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. But the most alarmed voices in the Resistance have long understood Trump better than those who prided themselves on cool detachment. As the writer Leighton Woodhouse put it on X, “The hysterical pussy hats were right.”
They were. From the moment Trump descended the golden escalator, the emotional core of his movement has been recognizably fascist. In “The Anatomy of Fascism,” the historian Robert O. Paxton described the “mobilizing passions” that define the phenomenon: a sense of overwhelming crisis rendering traditional solutions obsolete; a belief that one’s group has been victimized and is therefore justified in almost any act of redress; dread of national decline under the corrosive effects of liberalism and alien influences; and a longing for a strong male leader whose instincts transcend “abstract and universal reason.”
If Trump failed to act on some of his most authoritarian impulses during his first term, it was largely because he was constrained by the people around him. His former defense secretary, Mark Esper, has said Trump repeatedly floated the idea of bombing Mexico. In 2019, Trump cancelled a meeting with Denmark’s prime minister after she refused to discuss selling Greenland. His appetite for political violence has never been hidden, and it was laid bare on Jan. 6 — the event that led a once-skeptical Paxton to conclude that the label “fascist” applied.
None of this means that the US is destined to become a fully fascist state. For now, the country exists in a liminal space between the liberal democracy many Americans grew up in and the belligerent authoritarian system this administration appears determined to impose. What matters most is not the label we apply, but our ability to see events clearly and understand where they are likely to lead.
The New York Times