Donald J. Trump called America a fascist country. First, he does not know what he is talking about; fascism is just a word he likes to the sound of. Second, this is just more projecting his own ideas onto the country. None of this makes him any less dangerous to America.
See, the fascists are feeling their oats, Trump gives them hope.
What Makes People Join Hate Groups?
Those who study human behavior attribute hate speech more to deep personality issues than a diagnosable mental illness. But they're also intrigued by how the white supremacy movement is rebranding itself for the 21st century. The well-known racist symbols of white robes and hoods or shaved heads and torches have given way to a clean-cut subtlety for the millennial generation. With heightened tensions on all sides, there's a renewed interest in explaining how minds turn to hate.
"I felt power where I felt powerless. I felt a sense of belonging where I felt invisible," McAleer, 49, said of the pull of the white nationalism that lured him to spend 15 years as a skinhead recruiter and an organizer for the White Aryan Resistance.
"I was beaten at an all-boys Catholic school on a regular basis at 10 or 11," said McAleer, a middle-class kid from Canada, which left him with "an unhealthy sense of identity."
King, 42, who grew up in rural South Florida, said she turned to white nationalism as a child, first learning racial slurs from her parents. Growing up, she questioned her sexual identity and didn't fit in. At 12, she said, a school bully ripped her shirt open, exposing her bra and humiliating her in front of her classmates.
I suppose these people see strength, an avenger for their own powerlessness in Donald J. Trump, a billionaire angry at his own victimization.
The New Republic can get a little long-winded, but considering American ignorance about politics, The Permanent Counterrevolution: On politics and government in a fascist America may be the right length. Let me point out the passages that struck me the hardest.
During his 21 years in power, 18 of them as dictator, Il Duce framed fascism as a revolution of reaction against the left, against liberal democracy, and against any group that threatened the survival of white Christian civilization. Carrying out a violent destabilization of society in the name of a return to social order and national tradition, fascism pioneered the autocratic formula in use today of disenfranchising and repressing the many to allow the few to exploit the workforce, women’s bodies, the environment, and the economy.
Trumpism is in this tradition. It started in 2015 as a movement fueled by conservative alarm and white rural rage at a multiracial and progressive America. It continued as an authoritarian presidency envisioned as “a shock to the system” that unleashed waves of hate crimes against nonwhites and non-Christians. It culminated in the January 6 assault on the Capitol, which was a counterrevolutionary operation in the spirit of fascism. Its goal in deploying violence was not just to keep Donald Trump in office, but to prevent the representatives of social and racial progress from taking power.
Nothing in those paragraphs I disagree with, only I wonder how many people think they will not lose by supporting Trump. Probably about as many as the Italians who cheered on Mussolini. Let us hope we avoid paying the same cost those Italians paid for supporting Il Duce. Because, to stay in power, Trump (or any other dictator) must root out not only actual but also potential oppostion.
Mussolini kicked off his counterrevolutionary police state in the 1920s with new “public security” laws that justified the arrest of anyone deemed a security threat—meaning anyone who opposed fascism from a liberal democratic or leftist point of view. Trump’s assertion a century later that “people within our country” pose “the greatest threat” to the United States, and his desire to “root [them] out,” could translate into counterterror and counterinsurgency operations. These would require a recasting or expansion of existing federal and state security agencies—for example, if the National Guard is federalized or the promised mass deportations of undocumented immigrants come into being.
Sooner or later, the dictator turns on their supporters for not being pure enough. Check out these links, if the names do not ring a bell: the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, the Night of the Long Knives, the Moscow Show Trials, and the Cultural Revolution. You Trumpers are no safer than those who fear and hate. Only the Leader is safe from himself.
Authoritarianism is a political system in which the executive branch of government is able to exercise disproportionate or total power over the legislature and the judiciary. This gives the leader the ability to minimize or abolish restrictions on his behavior and also avoid accountability for his corrupt and violent actions. Maintaining that culture of impunity is why strongmen go after the press, prosecutors, opposition politicians, and judges, all of whom can expose their crimes or send them to jail, and why their personality cults present them as victims of “witch hunts” meant to stop them from saving the nation. Project 2025 takes an openly autocratic stance in asserting an “existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch” in America, as though the nation would fail if the democratic system, which is built on checks to presidential authority, were to continue.
Trump has worked hard since 2015 to condition the public to see the strongman brand of leadership as the only choice for America. To that end, he has repeatedly sung the praises of authoritarians around the world. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is a muse of Trump, the GOP, and the Heritage Foundation for his success at a brand of authoritarian governance that Trump’s first administration introduced to America and his second administration would seek to consolidate: personalist rule.
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For the personalist ruler, the party exists to defend, avenge, and enrich him. The GOP has filled these roles in conspiring to help Trump overthrow the government, and in elevating Trump’s personal legal and financial struggles to the forefront of party business. So it should be no surprise that daughter-in-law Lara Trump has been tasked with optimizing the Republican National Committee for the ends of personalist rule. The RNC has long been a Trump tool: It continued to pay Trump’s legal expenses long after he left office. Now Lara Trump has vowed that “every single penny” of RNC money will be spent on getting her father-in-law back into office. Soon the RNC could well become Trump’s private bank, bereft of any political purpose, and then its transformation into an autocratic instrument will be complete.
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