![]() ![]() States that were once pluralistic democracies with at least some chance of a transfer of power are coming to resemble one-party regimes directed by a minority of the population. The MAGA Republican Party of his making has openly explored ways to transform states where they control all branches of government. In a second term, however, a newly emboldened Trump could well attack democracy itself. The United States experienced democratic backsliding but not democratic collapse. ![]() The institutions of the federal government remained relatively intact, and civil servants largely secure and uncorrupted. Until the final weeks of Trump’s term, the guardrails of American democracy seemed to hold firm. Everything-whether the state of the economy or the chocolate cake served to China’s Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago-had to be extolled as “the greatest ever.” The main focus of the Trump presidency was less plans and programs and more the theatrics of satisfying his constant, insatiable need for attention and adulation. Thankfully, also, Trump himself was too lazy, inexperienced, and unprepared to set about systematically constructing a true dictatorship. But the Trump presidency lacked any warlike, expansionist interest, and that made it decisively unlike 20th-century fascism. And Trumpism did exhibit distinct elements of the fascist style of politics: the inflammatory rallies the incessant mongering of fear, grievance, and victimization the casual endorsement of violence the pervasive embrace of conspiracy theories the performative cruelty the feral instinct for targeting marginalized and vulnerable minorities and the cult of personality. No question, Trump inflicted grave damage on our country’s political culture, stoking toxic polarization and reveling in dishonesty. Browning: How Hitler’s enablers undid democracy in Germany (That Chinese President Xi Jinping would construe the simultaneous abandonment of Ukraine and dismissal of Taiwan as anything other than a green light to invade the latter seems improbable.)Ĭhristopher R. He has disparaged Taiwan as a predator nation that stole microchip manufacturing from the U.S. He has railed against “globalists.” He has promised to settle the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in 24 hours by cutting off aid to Kyiv if President Volodymyr Zelensky does not reach an immediate settlement with Moscow-that is, capitulate to Putin. Trump has continued in the same isolationist vein in recent interviews and speeches. treaty obligations to NATO and South Korean allies that he deemed to be “delinquent” and getting a “free ride.” to withdrawal from Afghanistan, and petulantly sought to downgrade U.S. ![]() In his first term, he shamelessly abased himself before Russian President Vladimir Putin, exchanged “love letters” with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, signed the Doha Agreement with the Taliban committing the U.S. Trump has shown little ambition to pursue such aims. War was the crucible in which the new fascist man was to be forged territorial expansion was both the means and the end of fascist power and triumph. They were ardent militarists and imperialists. And in one very important respect, Trump differed sharply from the European fascists of the interwar period. I argued instead that Trump was more like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan than Hitler or Mussolini, and should be categorized as an “illiberal populist” rather than a fascist. Placing Trumpism in the same category seemed to me trivializing and misleading. These regimes combined totalitarian dictatorship, wars of imperial conquest, and outright genocide in the case of Hitler (of Jews, Slavs, Roma) or ethnic mass murder in Mussolini’s case (of Libyans, Ethiopians, Slovenes). I still deny that Trump’s presidency was fascist-but I’m concerned that if he wins another trip to the White House, he could earn the label.įascism was most fully exemplified by the regimes of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. I thought it had long been abused by casual, imprecise applications, and as a historian of Nazi Germany, I did not think Trumpism was anywhere close to crossing the threshold of that comparison. ![]() I was one of those who resisted using that term. For some years, a variety of news commentators and academics have called Donald Trump a fascist. ![]()
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