Not that some of us didn’t see it coming…
Over the past few years people have argued over whether or not Trump and his movement were fascist. (I came down on the side of yes, quite some time ago..) But others made the point that the word has a specific meaning and Trump didn’t necessarily fit it perfectly. Tom Nichols, Never Trump conservative, was one of those people.
In this piece he correctly describes him as a lazy, narcissistic, gadfly who doesn’t really care about anything but himself. He points out that he “had only two consistent issues: hatred of immigrants and love for foreign autocrats.” He writes:
“Trump, as a person and as a public figure, is just so obviously ridiculous; fascists, by contrast, are dangerously serious people, and in many circumstances, their leaders have been unnervingly tough and courageous. Trump—whiny, childish, unmanly—hardly fits that bill”
He warned that the indiscriminate use of the word word could blind us to the time when it might actually become accurate. He says that time has come:
For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric. Early last month, he echoed the vile and obsessively germophobic language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” His address in Claremont, New Hampshire, on Saturday was the usual hot mess of random thoughts, but near the end, it took a more sinister turn. (It’s almost impossible to follow, but you can try to read the full text here.) In one passage in particular, Trump melded religious and political rhetoric to aim not at foreign nations or immigrants, but at his fellow citizens. This is when he crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism:
We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country … On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream
It’s not just the vermin thing. It’s the threat to “drive out” the people he calls communists, Marxists, fascists and radical left thugs, all of which he has used to describe the people who oppose him. That’s us, folks.
As the New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat later pointed out to The Washington Post, Trump is populating this list of imaginary villains (which she sees as a form of projection) in order “to set himself up as the deliverer of freedom. Mussolini promised freedom to his people too and then declared dictatorship.”
Add the language in these speeches to all of the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office—establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans.
[…]
It is possible, I suppose, that Trump really has little idea of what he’s saying. (We’re under threat from “communists” and “Marxists” and “fascists?” Uh, okay.) But he has reportedly expressed admiration of Hitler (and envy of Hitler’s grip on the Nazi military), so when the Republican front-runner uses terms like vermin and expressions like poisoning the blood of our country, we are not required to spend a lot of time generously parsing what he may have meant.
More to the point, the people around Trump certainly know what he’s saying. Indeed, Trump’s limited vocabulary might not have allowed him to cough up a word like vermin. We do not know if it was in his prepared text, but when asked to clarify Trump’s remarks, his campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, told The Washington Postthat “those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”
What?
Cheung later clarified his clarification: He meant to say their “sad, miserable existence” instead of their “entire existence,” as if that was somehow better. If that’s not a fascist faux pas, nothing is.
But here I want to caution my fellow citizens. Trump, whether from intention or stupidity or fear, has identified himself as a fascist under almost any reasonable definition of the word. But although he leads the angry and resentful GOP, he has not created a coherent, disciplined, and effective movement. (Consider his party’s entropic behavior in Congress.) He is also constrained by circumstance: The country is not in disarray, or at war, or in an economic collapse. Although some of Trump’s most ardent voters support his blood-and-soil rhetoric, millions of others have no connection to that agenda. Some are unaware; others are in denial. And many of those voters are receptive to his message only because they have been bludgeoned by right-wing propaganda into irrationality and panic. Even many officials in the current GOP, that supine and useless husk of an institution, do not share Trump’s ambitions.
I have long argued for confronting Trump’s voters with his offenses against our government and our Constitution. The contest between an aspiring fascist and a coalition of prodemocracy forces is even clearer now. But deploy the word fascist with care; many of our fellow Americans, despite their morally abysmal choice to support Trump, are not fascists.
As for Trump, he has abandoned any democratic pretenses, and lost any benefit of the doubt about who and what he is.
Nichols thinks that people who were premature anti-fascist (where have we heard that before?) in response to Trump have caused a problem because now nobody will believe it since he’s now actually a fascist. I don’t think I agree with that. He was always a fascist, he’s just too ignorant to know what he is. Before he didn’t have enough people around him to bring a full program into fruition and the Republican Party was too confused to help him. (They still are to some degree, fortunately.)
He is naturally gifted at propaganda since he’s a pathological liar and he’s demonstrated amazing power with his Big Lie. Others have noticed and see the potential of using him for fascistic purposes. It’s here whether we call it by its name or not.