Republicans’ nativist populism is more than a ploy to scare up votes, it is underwriting a fascist project in America.
The 2024 Republican Party presidential campaign led by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance is a fascist campaign.
The courting of political violence, the contempt for American democracy, and a platform that made massive ethnic purges the centerpiece of their campaign contributes to the accuracy of the fascist label. We are far from the first to acknowledge this difficult but unignorable reality. Many have warned and debated the issue for years, but the 2024 Trump/Vance campaign has put fascism on the November ballot.
The assessment from former General Mark Milley, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, that Trump is “fascist to the core” created a permission structure for others to affirm his sober-minded conclusion. In a post at Bluesky, Darin Self, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University, commented that “regardless of whether you think it was appropriate for a uniformed officer to say this, it should be absolutely major (stop the presses level) news that the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says the guy running for president is the most dangerous person in the country and a fascist.”
On Monday, retired U.S. National Guard Major General Randy Manner said the campaign was “absolutely supporting fascism.” The day before, former House Republican Chair Liz Cheney agreed with Milley’s fascist label. As did Hillary Clinton, who wrote, “Let’s be absolutely clear so that no one is confused. Trump’s rhetoric has become blatantly fascist.”
The significance of this pale, white-haired crowd at the highest echelons of American political life fingering the Trump campaign as fascist is hard to overstate. They join the shared analysis held by the broad consensus of the domestic and international academic community. Scholars of fascism and authoritarianism and writers like Jamelle Bouie have been highlighting the warning signs of Trump’s fascist tendencies since he came onto the scene in 2015. In March of 2016, political historian Kathleen Frydl wrote a column titled “Sorry Folks: It’s Fascism”. Trump’s subsequent actions in later years only convinced more that he was leading a fascist movement, like notable fascist scholar Robert O. Paxton, who wrote “I’ve Hesitated to Call Donald Trump a Fascist. Until Now” in the wake of the Jan. 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol. And as historian Thomas Zimmer noted earlier this week in Democracy Americana:
“While we are undoubtedly confronted with something that is distinct from the historical examples or Ur-fascism, many of the elements that most of the widely cited scholarship lists as fascism’s defining features are present: A specifically American, specifically twenty-first-century version of fascism.”
Just this last week, numerous political commentators have joined in the call, writing about the need to apply the fascist label to the Trump campaign.
- Robert Reich wrote a piece titled “Trump’s closing argument: full-throated fascism” where he recounts numerous examples to defend the description, concluding that “America’s mainstream media is by now comfortable talking and writing about Trump’s authoritarianism. But in describing what Trump is seeking to impose on America, the media should be using the term ‘fascism.’”
- In a piece titled: “Yes, Donald Trump Is a Fascist There’s no longer any point in mincing words” Paul Waldman writes, “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.”
- Last Friday on CNN, Brian Stelter said, “Everyone who paid attention in high school history class knows that Trump’s anti-immigration language is the language of fascists and white supremacists throughout history.”
- On Sunday, Heather Cox Richardson wrote on her blog Letters from an American, “Trump has used increasingly fascist rhetoric.” Writing that “Trump’s behavior is Authoritarianism 101.”
- Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, published a piece on Saturday titled “Donald Went Full-On Fascist” writing, “Over the last nine years, his hateful rhetoric has become more extreme, more violent, and in some cases more detached from reality.”
- In the lede from Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling in the New Republic, about Trump’s Colorado rally last Friday, she writes, “Donald Trump has once again evoked Nazi rhetoric.”
The xenophobic vitriol of Trump’s ethnic nationalism has been the constant in the chaos from the moment he descended that escalator nearly a decade ago. But the steady escalation of his nativist populism over the years has transported Trump squarely into this new camp. The dehumanization of immigrants as the existential threat to safety and democracy that must be urgently purged from the nation, with “bloody” violence if necessary, makes Trump’s campaign a fascist one.
However, Trump’s campaign does not operate in a vacuum. The internal resistance that slowed some of the worst excesses in years past are no longer to be found. Either pushed out or converted, those left in positions of leadership are bought into the project, providing the climate that allows Trump’s fascist campaign to operate. As we noted last week, there is over a billion dollars being spent to traffic the sort of fearmongering and disinformation that demonizes immigrant communities. That massive investment underwrites Trump’s fascist project even as most of it may not share his explicit extremism. It creates a climate for that nativist extremism to find a receptive audience. It is the full backing from the institutions of the Republican Party and the American right that have allowed Trump’s fascism to flower. Trump didn’t just place fascism at the top of your ballot, but it is marked in all the way down.
IT’S THE VIOLENCE
From nearly the time that he descended the golden escalators of Trump Tower in June 2015 to malign Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, Trump has used relentless and lurid lies to stoke a climate of potential violence and intimidation that threatens both immigrants and U.S.-born Americans alike. When two Trump supporters beat and urinated on an unhoused Latino man in Boston in August 2015, Trump described them as “passionate.”
But Trump’s violent threats and dehumanization have only become more explicit – and expansive – heading into the final months of the 2024 presidential election. During a March rally in Ohio, Trump said it would be a “bloodbath” if he weren’t elected, a statement he quickly attempted to walk back following public pushback. But following a rally in Pennsylvania last month, that hedging was gone after he made one of his most explicit endorsements of political violence of his political career, calling for a “violent day” akin to the horror movie “The Purge” where police (and more than likely armed right-wing vigilantes) could be completely unfettered by law to enact political violence on the immigrant communities Trump and his allies dehumanize.
“One rough hour — and I mean real rough — the word will get out and it will end immediately, you know?” Trump stated. “It will end immediately.” The comments echoed another recent pledge that his unsparing mass deportations “will be a bloody story.”
But it’s not just immigrants who are being targeted by the full specter of Trump-aligned violence. The New York Times’ Miriam Jordan reported last month that a Springfield, Ohio, businessman and lifelong Republican who simply spoke out in defense of his Haitian workers following the Trump-Vance ticket’s racist fiction about pet-eating was inundated with death threats from white supremacists. “They came by the hundreds — phone calls, emails and letters from white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other people they had never met,” Jordan wrote. “‘The owner of McGregor Metal can take a bullet to the skull and that would be 100 percent justified,’ said one message left on the company voice mail.”
Trump’s escalating violent rhetoric comes alongside more intense forms of dehumanization like the racist blood and soil nationalism about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the nation with “genes” that make them inherently murderous. Or claiming at the bilingual Univision town hall earlier this week, as he does at almost all his rallies, that non-white immigrants, particularly those who don’t “speak the language,” are “destroying the nation.”
This bigoted existential threat narrative is nowhere more acute than the complete adoption of the white nationalist and antisemitic replacement theory by Trump and the Republican Party. Trump has been amplifying the bigoted conspiracy that there is a literal military-style invasion on migrants at the southern border for years. This year, the white nationalist “invasion” rhetoric is the standard lexicon for describing migration, not just for Trump but for nearly all Republicans. A conspiracy theory that has already inspired a pattern of deadly terrorist attacks by white nationalists since 2017.
The dehumanization that seeks to create a foreign Other urgently threatening the nation as part of some grand conspiracy that creates a climate for state and vigilante violence is a core element of Trump’s 21st-century American fascism.
UNDERMINING DEMOCRACY
The goal of those bigoted conspiracies and its downstream political violence is to undermine our democracy.
We all watched the violent assault on the US Capitol following Trump’s last election as he sought to wage a coup to overturn the Democratic results of the 2020 election. Trump and his allies pushed the Big Lie, hoping to convince a segment of the MAGA base to abandon belief in American democracy.
But despite all of us witnessing the chaos and violence of that day on our televisions, computers, and smartphones, J.D. Vance has attempted to downplay and outright erase the insurrection even as his running mate has pledged to pardon the cop beaters who tried to block the constitutionally mandated electoral count. During the debate against Gov. Tim Walz, Vance made the absurd argument that Trump, who goaded his supporters to descend on the Capitol and subsequently refused to return to the scene of the crimes to attend President Biden’s inauguration, “peacefully gave over power on January the 20th.”
This peaceful transfer of power, alleged by Vance, resulted in injuries to 140 officers and the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War. Trump has promised to pardon those involved and has continued to defend the insurrectionists, sending a powerful message to his supporters that violence towards his authoritarian ends will be rewarded.
While keeping the election lies of 2020 alive, the full apparatus of the American right has constructed a 360-degree, 24-hour sound booth around their supporters to blast the Big Lie 2.0 at full volume. Priming an even larger segment of the MAGA base to believe the lie that liberal elites are “importing” and manipulating non-white immigrants to cast fraudulent votes to steal the election.
This lie is a central cornerstone of the Trump/Vance campaign as it is their ‘Plan B’ if all the fearmongering and scapegoating of immigrants fails to deliver enough votes in the right places. American democracy is at serious risk of malfunctioning when one of the two major parties is bought into the proposition that either they win or immigrants stole the election.
PURGING OF ENEMIES AND DISFAVORED MINORITIES
The third leg of the Trump/Vance campaign fascist stool is their mass deportation agenda. We, and many, many, many others, have been warning of the devastating threat posed by their signature campaign issue. It’s a detailed plan with eager allies ready to execute an agenda that would oversee the creation of a show-me-your-papers force made up of the military and local police to conduct neighborhood raids rounding up what they promise to be tens of millions for detention camps for rapid deportations with scant oversight that will likely ensnare US citizens and immigrants currently with status.
As Maribel Hastings wrote in her powerfully evocative column this week, translated into English, “The huge mistake of thinking that Trump’s attacks are not aimed at you.” Hastings concludes “So think long and hard before minimizing Trump’s insults and attacks as something ‘innocuous’ and ‘entertaining.’ If he is back at the White House, you never know when you will be the victim of his extreme policies, even if you are a citizen.”
At a recent rally, Vice President Kamala Harris expanded this point further as she shocked her supporters by exposing them to the rhetoric of her opponent. “I have said for a while now, watch his rallies, listen to his words, he tells us who he is and he tells us what he would do if he is elected president. So, here tonight, I will show you one example of Donald Trump’s worldview and intentions.”
Vice President Harris plays a montage of Trump calling to deploy the military on Americans who don’t support him: “A second Trump term is a huge risk for America. He is increasingly unstable and unhinged. And he is out for unchecked power and control over your lives” pic.twitter.com/BtnTTfiMT4
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 15, 2024
“‘Please roll the clip,’ Harris said, drawing gasps from the crowd,” Yahoo reported “A montage of Trump fearmongering about the “enemies from within” and ranting that he may use the military to handle ‘radical left lunatics’ if he wins back the White House then played.”
Trump’s rhetoric has always been laced with racism and xenophobia. What’s different now is that there are specific plans in addition to the dehumanizing rhetoric. And, all these actions check the boxes of a trademark fascistic campaign.
WHY THE FASCIST LABEL MATTERS
The point of using the fascist label for Trump isn’t a purely academic exercise. Nor is it just meant as a harsher term for asserting that Trump is bad. Instead, it’s a description that indicates that we are confronted with a different sort of threat. In turn, our political behavior needs to adjust to this hard reality. As Thomas Zimmer notes:
“It is true that the term ‘fascism’ is overused colloquially and in the public discourse. Quite often, it is uttered as a casual slur. Or it is used strategically to stigmatize something or someone as the ultimate evil. But the fact that the term is also being used in careless ways that don’t hold up analytically must not keep us from acknowledging that it is diagnostically correct to call Donald Trump and his movement fascist. Trump is not ‘the new Hitler’ and he is not ‘just like Mussolini’ – such facile analogies are useless and silly. We are not facing an exact replica of the Ur-fascism that rose to power in Europe’s interwar period. Trumpism is a specifically American, specifically twenty-first century version of fascism.”
Trump’s fascist campaign doesn’t present the same set of choices. It’s not a contest fought over policy and priority differences but whether or not we will get to have a say in choices in the future. It is a choice made under the threat of political violence and the promise to pursue political enemies, both real and imagined, with the full weight of the state.
Umberto Eco, an Italian intellectual who grew up in fascist Italy, wrote about the ideas and social structures that could germinate into a Fascist state, what he called “ur-fascism.” Eco wrote:
“Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plain clothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, ‘I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.’ Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world.”
The Trump/Vance 2024 campaign urgently requires this duty from those of us who want to fight fascism here in this country.
Trump’s fascist campaign has never been about winning over the majority of the American public. He hopes to leverage the anti-majoritarian institutions to take power to wage the devastation of a fascist agenda across America. Or, if he is unsuccessful, use the same conspiratorial lies about immigrants to wage another violent assault on American democracy. Nothing about this is easy. Nor will the threat be vanquished at the ballot box this November. But nor is Trump’s fascist campaign inevitable, far from it. There are still several weeks and tens of millions of votes to be cast, and a mass of regular working Americans can again deliver another blow to fascism as they have done so repeatedly in the past.
