Why Donald Trump might – or might not – be a fascist

His defeated Democrat rival for the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris, certainly believes he is one. Asked at a campaign event in October whether she thought her opponent was the F word, she replied: “Yes, I do.”

Even members of his previous administration agree. In an interview shortly before the presidential election, Anthony Scaramucci, who was briefly White House director of communications in 2017, said: “It’s incredible, but one of the people running for the most important job in the world is a fascist. He’s talking about non-white immigrants the way the National Socialists talked about Jews. He’s dehumanising them. So anybody that is standing with him is supporting a racist Nazi.”

Dictionary definition

John Kelly, Trump’s former Chief of Staff, has said his former boss “fitted the general definition of a fascist” and that, if re-elected, he would rule as a dictator. Kelly has said that, during his first term in power, Trump even praised Adolf Hitler’s achievements and bemoaned the fact he did not have generals who were loyal to him in the way that German military commanders were loyal to the Nazi leader.

When Trump held a rally in Madison Square Garden, New York, in the latter stages of the election campaign, his opponents were quick to draw comparisons with a 1939 gathering of the American Nazi Party at the same venue.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines fascism as “an authoritarian and nationalist right-wing system of government and social organisation”. There is no doubt Trump, with his “America First” mantra, can be described as authoritarian and nationalistic. He admires “strongman” leaders, making no secret of his respect for people like Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Slow to condemn Capitol attack

He also has an alarming attitude towards the democratic process. In a sense, the emphatic nature of Trump’s victory in November is welcome because it obviates the possibility of a repeat of 2020, when he shamefully tried to persuade fellow Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” more than 11,000 votes to overturn the Georgia’s presidential election results.

Equally shameful was his slowness to condemn his supporters who attacked the Capitol Building in Washington DC on January 6, 2021. President Joe Biden’s decision to go back on his word by pardoning his wayward son Hunter in the last days of his administration sets a very regrettable precedent that Trump may well cite in doing likewise for those of his followers who were convicted following the Capitol riot.

According to Trump, “tariffs” is “the best word in the English language” and he brandishes them like a weapon. A report by the Resolution Foundation think tank this week warned his threatened tariffs could hit UK trade with the US as badly as Brexit affected trade with the EU.

In all these ways and more, Trump displays traits that can clearly be described as authoritarian, bullying and egotistical. They could also be seen in figures such as Hitler or Benito Mussolini – and no one doubts their fascist credentials.

Trump’s Democrat defectors

But if being an authoritarian, egotistical bully is all it takes to be a fascist, then the term can be so widely applied as to be almost meaningless. You probably work with a few, or have one or two in your family. Is Trump right wing enough to fit the fascist definition? What do left and right even mean any more in these “culture war” times?

He has flip-flopped between the Republicans and the Democrats since at least the 1980s and has appointed recent prominent defectors from the other side of the aisle to his top team, such as Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F Kennedy Jnr.

His emphatic win in the November 5 election confirms and cements a historic realignment of US politics. It is now the Republicans who are the party of the working class, while the Democrats are perceived as a cloistered coastal elite that has lost touch with ordinary Americans and their views and concerns.

Not so long ago, the defence of free speech was widely regarded as impeccably left wing. But, with the ubiquity of social media, many on the Democrat side now appear to believe it is something with which the lumpen proletariat of flyover country cannot be trusted. Their reflex appears to be to silence rather than engage with dissent, much like any self-respecting fascist.

Milton and Orwell on free speech and fascism

In contrast, their Republican opponents invoke the First Amendment and side with the poet John Milton’s view on truth in the battlefield of free expression: “Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

Difficulty in defining fascism is almost as old as the word itself. George Orwell wrestled with the same conundrum in his 1944 essay “What is fascism?”

Orwell lists groups of people to whom the term has been liberally applied: conservatives, socialists, communists, Trotskyists, Catholics, war resisters, supporters of the war, and nationalists. “The word ‘Fascism’,” he concludes, “is almost meaningless.”

“I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”

The best we seem able to come up with, both then and now, is that it is something vaguely undemocratic, bullying and authoritarian. Orwell suggests we use the word “with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword”.

Maybe there’s a little bit of fascism in more Americans than we like to believe.