Fascism: People call Trump a fascist. What does that mean?

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Fascism is a dirty word in US politics. So when former President Donald Trump's former chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, says Trump meets the definition of “fascist,” that's news.

It places Trump's name in the same ideological space as the most notorious fascists, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Trump rejected the idea and called Kelly a “degenerate.”

When asked at a CNN town hall in the battleground state of Pennsylvania whether she agreed with Kelly that Trump is a fascist, Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris didn't hesitate.

“Yes, I do. Yes, I do,” she said.

Kelly pointed the New York Times to a definition of fascism: “It is a far-right authoritarian, ultra-nationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, violent suppression of opposition and belief in a natural social hierarchy is.”

“In my experience, those are certainly the things that he believes would work better in terms of running America,” Kelly said.

Kelly added that Trump is in the “extreme right wing” and “admires people who are dictators,” which Kelly said puts Trump “into the general definition of fascism.”

There are current arguments supporting Kelly. Trump's suggestion that he could use the military against an “enemy from within,” which he says includes Democrats like Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff of California, certainly sounds fascist. His Republican defenders argue it's just an exaggeration.

Trump wanted to use the military to quell domestic protests during his time in office, something his top general at the time, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley, rejected, according to reports in 2021. Milley also privately compared Trump's approach to election denial to Hitler's “big lie.”

While he has no intention of using the military against Democrats, he has in the past attempted to use the military to quell protests in the U.S. by threatening to silence dissent.

Trump recently said he would fire special counsel Jack Smith “in two seconds” if he wins the election, which seems obvious since Smith has indicted Trump in cases of election interference and misuse of secret documents.

The election interference case will be delayed until after the election, and another judge dismissed the secret documents case, although Smith has appealed.

Trump has fired officials who questioned him in the past. He fired James Comey, the FBI director, when he was president. He fired his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, after never forgiving Sessions for appointing a special counsel to investigate possible collusion between Trump's campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller's resulting report has been called the “Russia hoax” so often by Trump and his allies that most Americans probably don't remember that Mueller specifically did not exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice in the report. Mueller identified multiple contacts between Trump's campaign and Russians in 2016, when the Russians were actively trying to support Trump's campaign. Mueller concluded that the contacts did not rise to the level of a conspiracy.

Trump's second attorney general, Bill Barr, released Mueller's report slowly in order to blunt its impact. Barr later left Trump's administration after the 2020 election after refusing to support Trump's unsupported conspiracy theories about election interference.

Democrats are wondering who would be left to curb Trump's drive if he were re-elected.

If he wins the election, Trump has promised to do more to go to war against what he calls a “deep state” of bureaucrats at the Justice Department, FBI and Pentagon.

He has also suggested he would use the justice system to prosecute election officials.

All of this argues for at least thematic alignment with some elements of fascism, based on a strong leader and in which dissent is rejected in government. But fascism can also be more, such as complete control over the German economy and society. Trump didn't suggest anything like that.

While Harris has just moved on to calling Trump a fascist, throughout the presidential campaign he has referred to her as a Marxist and referred to her as “Comrade Kamala.” This is clearly not true as Harris supports private property.

In June, Trump said the US was a “fascist state” as he spread the baseless conspiracy theory that President Joe Biden was behind his indictment in New York on charges of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments made in Trump's name to a porn star in 2016 were paid.

I looked at the definition of fascism and its application to Trump back in June when he used the term.

There are experts who consider Trump to be fascist. Robert Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University who has written extensively about fascism in Europe, had rejected the label for Trump until January 6, 2021, when the historian argued that the image of Trump supporters leading the U.S -Storming the Capitol, “removed my objection to it.” Fascist label.”

Trump has also repeatedly used language that can be traced back to Nazis, such as when he said immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country.

When CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked Ohio Senator JD Vance in May about Trump's claim that the US is a “fascist state”, Vance did not reject the idea and at least hinted at a tolerance for the term.

“I don’t care what you call it, but this is not the America I know and love,” Vance, who was not yet Trump’s vice presidential running mate, said in a tense exchange.

In June, I also spoke with Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, an assistant professor at Wesleyan University and editor of the book “Did It Happen Here?” Perspectives on Fascism and America, which includes Paxton's writings, among many others.

“This model of historical comparison, where we look at what happened in Germany in the 1930s and then use it as a kind of navigation device or map to understand what happened today, is quite common,” said he, although there are arguments for a flawed comparison.

“Concepts do not have timeless essences that we can simply map onto arbitrary phenomena, but they change depending on the political context and power structures in society,” he said.

Today, he said, the term “fascism” is used “to mobilize people to overcome their divides and defeat an enemy far greater than their own long-standing disputes.”

Steinmetz-Jenkins argued that there is a long history, dating back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, of Americans on both sides of the political spectrum trying to label their opponents “fascist,” and there are also examples of American lawmakers threatened their opponents with investigations.

There are arguments in favor of the fascism comparison, but also arguments against it – especially since there are echoes of Trump's rise in populist and white nationalist movements closer to his home in American history.

I reached out to Steinmetz-Jenkins again to ask if the comparisons had changed in recent months, and he noted that the fascism debate stalled over the summer when Harris replaced Biden – and he asked noted that this was a message for most of Harris' campaign that the politics of joy had replaced the fear of fascism.

Now, with Democrats fearful of losing to Trump, the threat of fascism has returned to the forefront.

“What is needed is a plan that inspires people to vote for Democrats and not fear tactics that could lead to the fatalistic feeling that the world is being consumed by fascism,” he said.

Enough American voters have heard the term “fascism” in the same breath as Trump that if he wins in November, it will be clear that they will at least want to tolerate him or not believe he will follow through on his statements.