There has been significant academic and political debate over whether Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States and current President-elect awaiting his inauguration as the 47th president, can be considered a fascist, especially during his 2024 presidential campaign.[a] Critics of Trump have drawn comparisons between him and fascist leaders over authoritarian actions and rhetoric. Many of Trump's former or current allies have compared him to classic fascist leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini. Others have argued that Trump is not fascist but an authoritarian populist, or have accused critics of using the term as an insult rather than making legitimate comparisons.
Since Trump was elected to office in 2016, many academics have compared Trump's politics to fascism. Several have pointed out that contrasts exist between historical fascism and Trump's politics. Many also argued that "fascist elements" have operated within and around Trump's movement. Following the January 6 attack, some voices within the academic community felt that things had changed and that Trump's politics and connections with fascism deserved greater scrutiny.[7][8]
According to an October 2024 poll held by ABC News and Ipsos, 49% of American registered voters considered Trump to be a fascist,[b] defined in the poll as "a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents", while 23% considered Kamala Harris to be a fascist.[1] Another YouGov survey from the same year reported that about 20% of Americans believed that Trump saw Hitler as completely bad; among Republican respondents, four in ten believed that Trump held such position. The same poll reported that nearly half of Trump voters would continue to support a political candidate even if he or she stated that Hitler had done some good things, a position that was held by a quarter of all respondents.[9]
Journalist Patrick Cockburn stated that Trump's politics risk turning the United States into an illiberal democracy similar to Turkey, Hungary, or Russia.[14] According to civil rights lawyer Burt Neuborne and political theorist William E. Connolly, Trump's rhetoric employs tropes similar to those used by fascists in Germany[15] to persuade citizens (at first a minority) to give up democracy, by using a barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, personal invective, threats, xenophobia, national-security scares, religious bigotry, white racism, exploitation of economic insecurity, and a never-ending search for scapegoats.[16] Some research has highlighted Trump's connections to neoliberalism and has argued that his policies represent an intensification of such policies as part of a "fascist creep" on American politics.[8]
During his 2024 campaign, Trump has made numerous authoritarian and antidemocratic statements.[17] Trump's previous comments, such as suggesting he can "terminate" the Constitution to reverse his election loss,[18][19] his claim that he would only be a dictator on "day one" of his presidency and not after,[c] his promise to use the Justice Department to go after his political enemies,[20] and his plan to use the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military in Democratic cities and states,[21][22] have raised concerns over Trump's rhetoric.[23]
During his tenure as president, Trump and his allies attempted to designate Antifa, an opposition movement, as a terrorist organization. Previous attempts at framing opponents of fascism as terrorists were also done by 1930s fascists.
Trump has stated that he would deploy the military on American soil to fight "the enemy from within", which he describes as "radical left lunatics" and Democratic politicians such as Adam Schiff.[23] His political rhetoric since 2016 has been based on a us vs them framework, with the in-group being defined as "real Americans" and the rival, out-groups including Muslims, leftists, intellectuals and immigrants. He has repeatedly encouraged weaponized chants at his rallies, including calls to imprison 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and has promoted the conspiracy theory that Jewish philanthropist George Soros was responsible for a large influx of illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States.[26][27][pageneeded]
Trump has repeatedly voiced support for outlawing political dissent and criticism he considers misleading or challenges his claims to power.[28][29] After General Mark Milley said that Trump would start persecuting his political opponents if he won the 2024 presidential election, Trump suggested that Milley should be executed for treason, with Republican representative Paul Gosar further stating that, in a better society, "sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung". Retired general Barry McCaffrey said, regarding Trump's statements, that "what we are seeing is a parallel to the 1930s in Nazi Germany".[30][31][32] Trump's formal policy plan for a second term, Agenda 47, has been characterized as fascist.[33][34][35] Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat stated that the similarities between the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 and Mussolini's "Laws for the Defense of the State", which transformed Italy into a repressive regime, are "striking", citing the elimination of judicial independence and the strengthening of executive authority.[36]
How Democracies Die author Daniel Ziblatt said that Trump's combined employment of false allegations against his political opponents and allusions of retribution by American patriots is similar to tactics used by Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and 1930s European fascists.[37] An analysis by NPR found that between 2022 and October 2024, "Trump has made more than 100 threats to investigate, prosecute, imprison or otherwise punish his perceived opponents."[38]
Political violence
Trump has repeatedly expressed support for violent actions by law enforcement and his supporters since the early days of his first presidential campaign in August 2015. He was reported to, during his presidency, have called for undocumented immigrants to be shot in the leg as a way of deterrence.[39][40] He suggested that his hecklers be "knocked the hell" out by his supporters and praised then-House candidate Greg Gianforte after he body-slammed The Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs while he was asking questions, stating that "any guy who can do a body slam is my kind of guy".[39][41][42] Trump said at a 2016 rally that "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters". He had previously joked about the topic of killing journalists several times prior, including when he said that he "would never kill them", before reconsidering: "Uh, let's see, uh? ... No I wouldn't. I would never kill them, but I do hate them. And some of them are such lying, disgusting people, it's true."[43][44] Some historians consider Trump's praise of violence against his critics, among other behaviors, as fitting a characteristic of fascism.[45]
In a Missouri rally that resulted in multiple fights and arrests, Trump complained, after being interrupted by protesters, that there were no longer any "consequences" for protesting and stated that "You know, part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore, right?" In a 2017 speech directed a law-enforcement officers, Trump encouraged them to be "rough" on suspects. Trump has described, in 2016, instances of violence at his rallies as "appropriate".[46]
He said during the 2016 election that "the Second Amendment people" could prevent the nomination of Democratic Supreme Court justices. In 2019, he stated that "I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump, I have the tough people, but they don't play it tough, until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad".[47] In a 2018 interview with Axios reporter Jim Vandehei, the interviewer asked: "when you're saying 'enemy of the people, enemy of the people', ... what happens if all of a sudden someone gets shot, somebody shoots one of these reporters?", to which Trump answered: "it is my only form of fighting back".[48] Trump has praised modern authoritarian leaders several times. In 2016, he expressed respect for Kim Jong Un for murdering his uncle, saying "It's incredible. He wiped out the uncle. He wiped out this one, that one." He has praised Vladimir Putin several times, and, in 2018, he spoke positively of Xi Jinping's ability to eliminate his term limits. About the Tiananmen Square protests, he said that "When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength."[49] Trump has often used negative terms to describe democratic leaders, calling Germany's Angela Merkel "stupid", Canada's Justin Trudeau "two-faced" and France's Emmanuel Macron "very, very nasty". He called Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi "my favorite dictator".[50]
During the George Floyd protests, Trump urged his general Mark Milley to take charge of dealing with the protesters. After Milley resisted, saying that the National Guard should be deployed instead, Trump told his staff "You are all losers!" and asked Mark Milley "Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?" Subsequently, Milley wrote a letter of resignation for Trump, which stated, referring to America's role in the Second World War, that "That generation, like every generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism... It's now obvious to me that you don't understand that world order. You don't understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against." He ultimately decided not to send the letter to Trump and stayed on his position.[50]
After general Milley refused to engage with George Floyd protesters, Trump staged a dramatic walk alongside him (in the green uniform at 0:17) and his other staff through Lafayette Square in order to take a picture holding a bible. Both Milley and defense secretary Mark Esper, who also participated in the walk, feared that this stunt would politicize the military. Milley then drafted a resignation letter stating that Trump betrayed the values of the American generation that "has fought against fascism".[50][51]
Protesters being dispersed by police ahead of Trump's arrival. Authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat said that "this was an authoritarian spectacle... A cocktail of all the elements authoritarians have used in history: a lawless ruler attacking protesters."[52]
Three Percenters at a Virginia rally, January 2020
Bob Dreyfuss, writing for The Nation, notes that Trump has been offered support and security by paramilitary groups including the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters, and Dreyfuss proposes a parallel to the civilian militias that Hitler and Mussolini engaged. He describes Mussolini's Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, which was established in the early 1920s as a decentralized street militia that would attack his political opponents, and Hitler's Sturmabteilung (SA), which provided protection to Hitler during his street events and engaged in violence against political opponents, violently taking control of the city of Coburg in November 1922.[53] Trump told the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by" in 2020, before the group participated in the January 6 attack, and during Trump's presidency, several of his armed supporters occupied several state capitols, organized around the Mexican border, and engaged in street fights with Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters.[53] After a Black protester was beaten by his supporters during a 2015 rally, Trump said that the man "should have been roughed up". Fascism scholar Steve Ross said that, although he did not believe that Trump was Hitler, "We had the same thing happening in Germany in the 1920s with people being roughed up by the Brownshirts and they deserved it because they were Jews and Marxists and radicals and dissidents and gypsies. That was what Hitler was saying."[45]
During the 2016 election, several fights broke between Trump supporters and those of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Both Clinton and Sanders distanced themselves from their violent supporters. Trump, conversely, has praised violent actions by his supporters several times and offered to pay their legal fees. In the same year, Trump accused Sanders of sending "his disruptors" to his events and tweeted "Be careful Bernie, or my supporters will go to yours!"
After a protestor was removed from his rally in 2016, Trump said "Try not to hurt him. If you do, I'll defend you in court. Don't worry about it." In the same year, he said "If you see someone getting ready to throw tomatoes knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. OK. Just knock the hell... I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees." He said "I love the old days, you know? You know what I hate? There's a guy totally disruptive, throwing punches. We're not allowed to punch back anymore. I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They'd be carried out on a stretcher, folks."[46][54] Trump said in the same year, about an anti-Trump protestor that was being removed from his rally, that "I'd like to punch him in the face".[56]
Anatomy of Fascism author Robert Paxton, a political scientist and historian specializing in the study of fascism, previously denied that Trump should be labeled a fascist but changed his views following the January 6 attack.[10][59] Paxton saw the attack on the capitol as similar to both Mussolini's 1922 march on Rome, in which his blackshirts successfully took over Italy's capital, and the 1934 far-right anti-parliamentary riot in Paris; however, he also believes that "the word fascism has been debased into epithet, making it a less and less useful tool for analyzing political movements of our times".[59] Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote that, just as Mussolini eventually pardoned the blackshirts who helped him ascend to power, Trump has also vowed to pardon his supporters who were convicted of crimes related to January 6.[36]
On April 30, 2020, less than a year prior to the January 6 attack and two weeks after Trump published social media posts urging his supporters to "liberate" the state of Michigan from COVID-19 policies, hundreds of Trump supporters, including militia members, gathered around the Michigan state capitol to prevent a public health measure from coming into effect. About 100 protesters entered the capitol, where they displayed nooses and carried confederate flags, as well as signs that read "Tyrants Get the Rope". During the incident, Trump endorsed the protesters and urged governor Gretchen Whitmer to negotiate with them, tweeting that "These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal with the protesters". The protesters successfully convinced Republican state senators to kill the measure.[60][61][62][63]
Trump's embrace of far-right extremism[64][65] and several statements and actions have been accused of echoing fascism, Nazi rhetoric, far-right ideology, antisemitism, and white supremacy.[66][67][68] In 2018, Dr. Mike Cole, emeritus professor in education and equality at Bishop Grosseteste University (UK)[69] stated that Trump's racist and fascistic rhetoric and accompanying agenda targeted at people of color in the US and elsewhere, and his use of Twitter promoted a public pedagogy of hate to add legitimacy to fascism. Cole highlighted neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin's connections to the alt-right to claim it is a new (neo-) fascist movement, but with links to older fringe white supremacist movements, rather than just a component of right-wing conservatism.[70]Mattias Gardell has argued that Trump's "key fascist vision of national rebirth" featured "banal nationalism, Americanism, nativism, white supremacy, manifest destiny, and racialized discourse and practice". Gardell argues that while most Trump voters were not fascist, his rhetoric featured a return to "fascist elements" of political nostalgia and that a "heterogenous milieu of white nationalists, radical traditionalists, alt-right identitarians, conspiracy exposers, militias, neo-confederates, and sovereign citizens" were knowingly catered to by Trump, which related to an important "affective dimension which fascism frequently caters to".[71]
Trump's comments comparing his political enemies to "vermin" who will be "rooted out" have been compared by several historians to fascistic rhetoric made by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.[72][73][74] During a rally in 2023, Trump stated:[75]
In honor of our great veterans 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; they'll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and to destroy the American Dream.
The comments were compared to comments made by Nazi politician Wilhelm Kube in February 1933 in a Nazi propaganda publication where he stated, "The Jews, like vermin, form a line from Potsdamerplatz until Anhalter Banhof ... The only way to smoke out the vermin is to expel them." They were also compared to Oswald Mosley's British fascists referring to Jews as "rats and vermin from the gutters of Whitechapel" and a 1934 Hitler interview where he stated "I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin!"[75]
Responding to critics, Trump's campaign later said that "their sad, miserable existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House", which was also criticized for echoing the rhetoric of authoritarian leaders, along with Trump's statement that "the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within."[76][77] According to The New York Times, scholars are undecided about whether Trump's more fascist-sounding language is to antagonize the left, an evolution in his beliefs, or the "dropping of a veil".[78] When a reporter asked Trump in 2015 about how his proposed national registry of Muslims would differ from Nazi Germany's persecution of Jews, Trump responded "you tell me".[45]
Since the fall of 2023,[79] Trump has repeatedly used racial hygiene rhetoric by stating that undocumented immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country", which has been compared to language echoing that of white supremacists and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.[80] He later claimed that immigrants who commit murder have "bad genes".[81][68] According to Politico, his rally speeches contain "what some experts in political rhetoric, fascism, and immigration say is a strong echo of authoritarians and Nazi ideology."[68] Other fascistic comments include statements that immigrants are the "enemy from within" who are ruining the "fabric" of the country.[68] Trump has stated that some immigrants are "not people",[82] "not humans",[83] and "animals".[84] At rallies, Trump has stated that undocumented immigrants will "rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill" American citizens,[85] that they are "stone-cold killers", "monsters", "vile animals", "savages", and "predators" that will "walk into your kitchen, they'll cut your throat"[86] and "grab young girls and slice them up right in front of their parents".[85] Donald Trump called for the "remigration" of undocumented immigrants in the United States during the 2024 election, a term that is commonly used by European white identitarian movements as a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.[87] On October 27, 2024, Trump held a rally in Madison Square Garden that featured speakers making various racist and dehumanizing remarks, including Tony Hinchcliffe's statement that Puerto Rico was an "island of garbage".[88][89] The event drew comparisons from media and politicians to the 1939 Nazi rally that took place in the same location.[90] In 2020, Trump told a nearly all-white crowd, "You have good genes ... The racehorse theory. You think we're so different?"[91]
The Trump administration family separation policy was compared to the use of internment camps by previous fascist regimes. In 2018, Trump instituted a "zero tolerance" policy which mandated the criminal prosecution of all adults who were accused of violating immigration laws by immigration authorities.[92][93][94] This policy directly led to the large-scale,[95][96] forcible separation of children and parents arriving at the United States-Mexico border,[97] including those who were seeking asylum from violence in their home countries.[98] Parents were arrested and put into criminal detention, while their children were taken away, classified as unaccompanied alien minors, to be put into child immigrant detention centers.[94][99]
Although Trump signed an executive order which ostensibly ended the family separation component of his administration's migrant detentions in June 2018, it continued under alternative justifications into 2019.[100]
By the end of 2018, the number of children being held had swelled to a high of nearly 15,000,[101][102] which by August 2019 had been reduced to less than 9,000.[103] In 2019, many experts, including Andrea Pitzer, the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, have acknowledged the designation of the detention centers as "concentration camps"[104] particularly given that the centers, previously cited by Texas officials for more than 150 health violations[105] and reported deaths in custody,[106] reflect a record typical of the history of deliberate substandard healthcare and nutrition in concentration camps.[107] There has been significant disagreement as to whether or not to label these facilities "concentration camps".[108][109][110]
In 2023, Current Affairs profiled how Trump in his 2024 campaign likewise pledged to build internment camps, warning that Trump's plan was to "build huge camps and put millions of people in them without any semblance of due process", which might include political opponents and critics.[111]
Connections to self-identified fascists
Former KKK leader and Louisiana representative David Duke endorsed Trump in 2016, pledged to "fulfill the promises of Donald Trump" at a neo-Nazi rally in 2017 and endorsed Trump again in 2020. Trump disavowed Duke in August 2015, refused to disavow him in a January 2016 interview and disavowed Duke again later that month. Duke decided not to support Trump in 2024 due to his "subservience to Israel".
In the 2016 United States presidential election, Trump was supported by multiple self-described Nazi or fascist groups, including the National Socialist Movement and Ku Klux Klan. These groups engaged in voter intimidation by monitoring polling locations in 2016, claiming to have done so both "informally" and "through the Trump campaign".[115] In 2016, Trump was endorsed by self-identified Nazis such as David Duke,[116]alt-right activist Richard Spencer and Nazi activist Andrew Anglin. Trump disavowed Duke in August 2015, refused to disavow him in a January 2016 interview, and wrote a tweet disavowing the former KKK leader shortly afterwards. Trump has shared social media content linked to neo-Nazi websites, refused to condemn antisemitic attacks on Jewish journalists, and, after winning the election, appointed Steve Bannon, an admirer of Mussolini, as his chief of staff. During the Charlottesville protests in Virginia, Trump stated that there were good people on both sides.[117][113] Duke endorsed Trump once again during the 2020 presidential election[118] and criticized him in 2024.[119] In September 2024, CNN reported that Mark Robinson, whom Trump endorsed in the 2024 North Carolina gubernatorial election, had previously identified himself as a "Black Nazi".[120] Trump's Inaugural Address was written by alt-right activists Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon.[121]
Stormfront founder Don Black supported Trump for, he said, fighting against white demoralization and building a long-term movement that would outlast him. Trump was described by alt-right activist and millionaire donor William Regnery II as someone who helped white nationalism go "from being conversation you could hold in a bathroom, to the front parlor". American Nazi Party chairman Rocky Suhayda said that Trump provided a "real opportunity" for his cause. White Nationalist Jared Taylor supported Trump for "talking about policies that would slow the dispossession of whites" and said that "all of his policies, at least those pertaining to immigration, align very nicely with the sorts of things we've been saying for many year".[122] Anglin, who founded The Daily Stormer, had multiple pro-Trump articles published on his website and said that "virtually every Alt-Right Nazi I know is volunteering for the Trump campaign". In November 2016, Spencer shouted "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!" during a speech at a National Policy Institute convention. By November 2017, and throughout 2018, many alt-right activists expressed disappointment at Trump after he started supporting Muslims in Saudi Arabia and Jews in Israel. Trump's decision to remove Bannon from the National Security Council also impacted their impression about him.[122]
Following Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election, Blood Tribe leader Christopher Pohlhaus celebrated by thanking Trump that "cheaper gas will make it easier to spread White Power across the whole country". Far-right activist Lauren Witzke thanked "men, especially white men, who turned out in force to put women back in their place". Turning Point USA ambassador Evan Kilgore said in his 100,000-followers X account: "Women, back to the kitchen; Abortions, illegal; Gays, back in the closet; Interracial marriage, banned; Illegals, pack your bags; trannies, back to the asylums; Jesus, back in our schools".[123] In November, an investigation by Politico found that a Pennsylvania-based field staffer hired by the Republican Party to work at the Trump campaign was a co-host alongside Richard Spencer at a white nationalist podcast. The podcast host, Luke Meyer, confirmed to the news organization that he was indeed a worker for the Trump campaign and was fired shortly afterwards. In his podcast, he stated "Why can't we make New York, for example, white again? Why can't we clear out and reclaim Miami?... A return to 80%, 90% white would probably be, probably the best we could hope for, to some degree". He also told Politico that "in a few years, one of those groypers might even quietly bring me back in, with a stern warning for me to 'be more careful next time'."[124]
In 1990, Ivana Trump, Donald Trump's former wife, stated that he kept a copy of My New Order, a collection of speeches written by Adolf Hitler, by his bedside.[125] According to Vanity Fair reporter Marie Brenner, Trump told her in a 1990s interview that it was "my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he's a Jew". When Brenner asked Davis if he had given the book to Trump, he said that "it was My New Order, Hitler's speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I'm not Jewish". Trump further told Brenner that "if I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them". After saying that illegal immigrants were "poisoning the blood of our country" in 2023, Trump said "they said Hitler said that". He further stated that Hitler used those words in a different way and said "it's true. They're destroying the blood of the country, they're destroying the fabric of our country, and we're going to have to get them out".[126][50]John F. Kelly, Trump's former chief of staff, stated in October 2024 that Trump spoke positively of Hitler during his tenure as president, including by saying that "Hitler did some good things" such as rebuilding the economy.[127][128][129] Kelly also stated that Trump had told him that he desired military generals similar to the generals who served Hitler.[128][130][131] Kelly's statements came after Trump's statements about Hitler and his generals were reported by several books a few years prior.[50]
In early 2016, Trump tweeted Mussolini's quote that "it is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep", attributed to social media account @ilduce2016 (Il Duce was Mussolini's honorific), an anonymous account secretly set-up by Gawker that posted #MakeAmericaGreatAgain tweets alongside Mussolini-related content and whose profile picture featured Mussolini's face with Trump's hair edited over it. When Trump was asked about the social media post in an interview with Chuck Todd, he said "Chuck, it's OK to know it's Mussolini. Look, Mussolini was Mussolini... it's a very good quote, it's a very interesting quote, and I know it... and I know who said it. But what difference does it make whether it's Mussolini or somebody else? It's certainly a very interesting quote".[50][132][133] In the same year, Trump shared a Twitter post from neo-Nazi account @WhiteGenocideTM and, three weeks after, he retweeted the same account again. Two days after, he retweeted another account with the handle @EustaceFash, whose profile banner included the words "white genocide". Trump's second retweet of @WhiteGenocideTM was shortly deleted. Andrew Anglin, from The Daily Stormer, said that Trump was "giving us the old wink-wink" and that "it isn't statistically possible" that Trump could have retweeted the two accounts "back to back" by accident.[134] Also in 2016, Trump posted an image that showed the Star of David with the words "most corrupt candidate ever" written on it, juxtaposed with the face of Hillary Clinton in front of a pile of money. The image was later deleted and replaced with another version that featured a circle instead of the Star of David.[135]
According to NPR, Trump's golf club in Bedminster twice held speeches by Nazi sympathizer Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who had previously said that "Hitler should have finished the job".[136][50] In 2022, Trump was visited by Kanye West and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago. West said shortly after the diner that "I like Hitler".[50][137] Trump said after the incident that he did not know who Fuentes was.[137]
The idea of modern America being analogous to Weimar Germany before Hitler's seizure of power was brought up by New York Times reporter Roger Cohen and journalist Andrew Sullivan in 2015.[139] American professor John Russo stated in 1995 that public concerns over job loss would lead to a resurgence of fascism in the United States in the future. (The U.S. had previously seen a rise in fascist movements during the 1930s, partly due to the Great Depression, with Leon Milton Birkhead identifying 800 Nazi-friendly organizations in 1938.) In a 1995 interview with Dale Maharidge, Russo predicted the emergence of a new American leader similar to Donald Trump, a prediction on which he doubled down in the 2020s.[138]
Jonathan Chait stated that the decision by American conservatives of embracing Trump is analogous to that of German conservatives of supporting Hitler with the hope that they could "tame" him. The same argument was made by historians Nathan Stoltzfus and Eric Weitz. Paul Robin Krugman, in a 2016 article titled How Republics End, stated that "it takes willful blindness not to see the parallels between the rise of fascism and our current political nightmare". Geoff Eley, despite believing that Trump was not Hitler, also drew parallels between societal fears regarding globalization and immigration in contemporary America and in the 1930s.[139] American historian Timothy Ryback, author of Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power, wrote in 2024 that "our republic appears to be plagued by the myriad ills that doomed Weimar: political fragmentation, social polarization, hate-filled demagoguery, a legislature gridlocked by partisan posturing, and structural anomalies in voting processes".[140]
American vice-president Mike Pence posing with a police officer (left) wearing a QAnon badge, November 2018
Conspiracy theorist have been a central factor in the emergence of fascist movements. Hannah Arendt wrote in 1951 that "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exists." In Germany, Nazi activist employed conspiracy theories including that of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to portray Jews as attempting to take over the world, an idea that Hitler defended in Mein Kampf. In the 21st century, QAnon became one of the most prominent conspiracy theories among the pro-Trump movement, alleging that Trump has been involved with a years-long fight with the "deep state". Its believers have included House members Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. The conspiracy theory that white people were being deliberately ethnically replaced by immigrants also became prominent and was promoted by Fox News' Tucker Carlson. A 2022 survey involving 1500 respondents reported that 70% of Republicans believed such theory.[27][pageneeded]
In Weimar Germany, Hitler scapegoated the Jews as one of the causes of the Great Depression. During the 1930s, public support for centrist parties diminished and political infighting broke among leftist parties, which resulted in there being no unified opposition to the NSDAP. Time writer Christine Adams said that although the current political state of the United States may seem analogous to that of Weimar Germany, the presence of a cross-ideological opposition to Trump is a factor that makes America different from Germany in the 1930s.[141]
David Dyzenhaus wrote that although the government of the United States, including conservative judges and vice-president Mike Pence, managed to reject Trump's attempts of overturning election results, the state of democracy in Weimar Germany was also "similarly salvageable" until late 1932, for which reason the analogy between Weimar Germany and 2024 America is, he stated, strong. In that year, the Staatsgerichtshof, the court responsible for settling constitutional disputes related to the federal government and the states, upheld the constitutionality of the right-wing German government's decision to change the government of Prussia under an emergency clause of the Weimar Constitution, a decision that is regarded as a precursor to Hitler's rise to power in the following year. Dyzenhaus stated that the decisions of the mostly conservative U.S. Supreme Court during Trump's post-2024 tenure as president will affect the future of American democracy analogously to how the Staatsgerichtshof's decisions affected German politics in the 1930s. Trump has stated that he would, if re-elected in 2024, use the Insurrection Act to suppress dissident protesters.[142]
Historian Christopher Browning wrote that just as German conservatives, including Paul von Hindenburg (pictured), were complicit with Hitler's "big lie", the Republican Party is also going along with Trump's "big lie" about "the criminals of 2020".
Holocaust historian Christopher R. Browning wrote in 2022 that a hypothetical emergence of a minority-ruled, authoritarian government in the United States led by Donald Trump and his Republican allies would resemble more an illiberal democracy than a Nazi-like dictatorship. Browning stated that the appointment of election deniers to key positions in state governments in the United States was an "ominous warning", and that the patterns of behavior of the Republican Party amounted to an attempt at a "legal revolution", a term coined by German historian Karl Dietrich Bracher to describe the legal pathways that the Nazi Party undertook in order to seize power following Hitler's unsuccessful 1923 coup attempt.[143]
After Hitler lost his 1932 run for presidency by a margin of 6 million voters, he claimed voter fraud and went to court in order to overturn the election results. According to Hitler, his party had actually gotten 2 million more votes than what was recorded. His case was ultimately dismissed, with a judge stating that the high margin by which Hitler lost precluded the possibility of any significant fraud. At that time, the New York Times published an article titled Hitler to Contest Validity of Election.[144][145]
Invocations of the comparison
A protestor with a sign describing Donald Trump as a fascist.
Invocations before the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack
Trump was described as a fascist by philosophers such as Judith Butler,[146] and Noam Chomsky.[147] In 2017, Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder published On Tyranny, warning about the danger signs of fascism in the Trump era.[148] Political theorist William E. Connolly analyzed Trump's rhetorical appeal to the working class, exploring its affinities with fascist rhetoric.[149] In her 2018 book Fascism: A Warning, former US Secretary of State and then Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service Madeleine Albright referenced Donald Trump several times; she refused to directly define Trump as a fascist, while comparing his rhetoric and methods with fascist leaders, and characterizing him as the first modern antidemocratic U.S. president.[150] In 2018, American-Canadian cultural critic Henry Giroux wrote an essay linking the subjects of fascism, right-wing populism, Trump, white nationalism, education, and politics.[151] In 2018, Ewan McGaughey in British Journal of American Legal Studies denied that Trump's movement was truly fascist as it was "too hostile to insider welfare", and instead highlighted the Supreme Court's decisions in Citizens United and Buckley v. Valeo as an assault on democracy and long-term trend towards fascism. McGaughey stated the Court's decisions led to the election of Trump but that Trump's politics were too weak to be fascist, instead calling them "fascism-lite".[152] In How Fascism Works (2018), Jason Stanley wrote that Trump employed "fascist techniques to excite his base and erode liberal democratic institutions".[153]Douglas Kellner, author of American Nightmare: Donald Trump, Media Spectacle, and Authoritarian Populism, wrote that Trump resembled Mussolini more than Hitler.[154]
In 2016, JD Vance said that "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon... or that he's America's Hitler".
After Trump called for a Muslim travel ban in late 2015, he was described as a fascist by some Democratic and Republican figures, including Conservative activists Max Boot, Robert Kagan, Bret Stephens, John Noonan, former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, and Libertarian politician Gary Johnson. Republican former governor Christine Todd Whitman referred to Trump's 2015 calls for the travel ban as "the kind of rhetoric that allowed Hitler to move forward".[156] Conservative commentator Glenn Beck compared Trump with Hitler in 2016, calling him "dangerous" and stating that "we all look at Adolf Hitler in 1940. We should look at Adolf Hitler in 1929... He was a kind of a funny kind of a character who said the things that people are thinking... Where Donald Trump takes it, I have absolutely no idea".[157] Former Republican governor of Virginia Jim Gilmore said that Trump's plans of creating a "deportation force" was "fascist talk".[45]JD Vance said in 2016 that he saw Trump as either a politician like Richard Nixon or "America's Hitler", also calling him "reprehensible". Despite this, he went on to run alongside Trump in his 2024 presidential campaign.[155][158] Fascist scholar Federico Finchelstein said about Trump that "Fascism sometimes becomes an attribute to describe someone that is intolerant or totalitarian or even racist... When dealing with an important part of the nation such as Hispanics, I think he definitely fits those categories."[45]
Kennedy speaking at a Trump rally in August 2024
American politician Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has compared Trump to both Hitler and Mussolini, described him as a "threat to democracy" in April 2024 and endorsed the suggestion that some of Trump's base supporters were "outright Nazis". He said in December 2016 that Trump was different from Hitler in at least one way, that being that "Hitler was interested in policy". Kennedy has also compared Trump to Father Coughlin, an American Nazi sympathizer radio host from the 1930s. In 2024, Kennedy endorsed Trump for president, who then nominated him for Secretary of Health and Human Services.[159][160][161]
Anne Frank's stepsister Eva Schloss said in 2016 that Trump was "acting like another Hitler".[162] In 2020, American journalist Rich Benjamin stated that Trump's political movement is "shot through with fascism".[163] Professor Nicholas de Genova described Trump as the leader of a "white supremacist fascist movement" and examined Trump's birtherism, racist rhetoric, voter fraud falsehoods, anti-immigration policies, terrorist and white supremacist events that happened during his presidency, plus Republican capitulation to Trumpism, signaling the whole as the birth of a civil war ethos, in which "everything is permitted."[164]
Invocations after the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack
Following the January 6 Capitol attack, Robert Paxton, who had initially resisted calling Trump a fascist, announced that the label now seemed necessary.[165]Mattias Gardell argued that Trump's MAGA campaign centered fascist visions of a national rebirth and that Hitler and Mussolini were also dismissed as "egomaniacs, big-mouths, and buffoons" by commentators at the time. David Renton has said that figures such as Hitler, Mussolini, and Mosley became fascists over time and that January 6 served as a warning to America about how vulnerable it is to authoritarianism. Maria Bucur has argued that the "surfacing of fascist sympathies" were facilitated by Trump. Brian Hughes has called for further study of Trumpism and Trump's fascist merits through Lacanian terms, arguing that Trump "not only meets the criteria of charismatic strongman" but "he exceeds them".[166]
Ruth Wodak has said that while Trump's rhetoric applies "salient discursive practices of fascism", it is not useful to lose oneself in "terminological debates", and instead encouraged greater study on Trumpism's socio-political, historical and situative contexts, along with the ideological positions of his close advisors such as Steve Bannon. Raul Cârstocea argues that Trump has "adopted fascist ideological or stylistic trappings without embracing fascism's revolutionary impetus" and that whether or not Trump is a fascist is less relevant, as "Trump did radicalize the Republican Party considerably and he did mobilize actual fascists to seek a violent overthrow of the establishment" and that Trump may or may not represent a "2.0 version of analogue fascism for our digital post-fascist present".[167]
In Fascism in America, a book published after the January 6 attacks, Ruth Ben-Ghiat stated that "Trump can be called a fascist because he differed from any previous American president in having the explicit goal of destroying democracy at home, disengaging America from democratic international networks, and allying with the autocrats he admires, like Putin".[168] Ben-Ghiat further stated that she "started writing about Trump in 2015 because everything about him seemed familiar to me as someone who had studied fascism for decades: the rallies, the attacks on the press, the lying, the loyalty oaths, the declarations of violent intent, the need to dominate and humiliate".[169]
Trump's former advisor Steve Bannon (center-right, blue shirt) said that he thought "that's Hitler" when he saw Trump descend from the Trump Tower elevator in 2015.
In Jeremy W. Peters's 2022 book Insurgency, former Trump staffer Steve Bannon was repeatedly quoted comparing Trump to Hitler. Bannon said that Trump's aides showing him misleading polling data during the 2020 election was "like showing Hitler fake armor divisions when the Reichstag is burning down". According to the book, Bannon said that the sight of Trump descending from an elevator in New York made a Triumph of the Will scene in which Hitler exits his aircraft to an adoring crowd "flash" through his mind. According to the book, Bannon told Peters that he thought "that's Hitler", meaning it as a compliment to Trump.[50][171][172][173]
Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying author Henk de Berg said that there are "massive differences" between Trump and Hitler, but also that both politicians shared similar rhetorical patterns. He stated that "most of their electorate are dissatisfied with the status quo for a variety of reasons (globalization, automation) so they want to change the system and here you have an anti-establishment candidate who is not politically correct".[174]
Mike Godwin, the creator of Godwin's Law, stated in 2023 that "Trump's opening himself up to the Hitler comparison". He also said that "You could say the 'vermin' remark or the 'poisoning the blood' remark, maybe one of them would be a coincidence. But both of them pretty much make it clear that there's something thematic going on, and I can't believe it's accidental."[175]
Comparisons between Trump and fascism drawn by mainstream media increased substantially in 2023 and 2024,[176] and during his 2024 presidential campaign, a growing number of scholars, historians, commentators, politicians, former Trump officials, and generals described Trump as a fascist.[a]
Former Trump staff members John F. Kelly (left) and Mark Milley (right) have both described Trump as a fascist.
Voice of America coverage of comparisons drawn between Trump and fascism by former Trump staff[177]
Trump was described as a fascist in October 2024 by John F. Kelly, Trump's former chief of staff during his presidential tenure. Referring to the definition of fascism as a far-right authoritarian ideology with elements of ultranationalism and a dictatorial leader, Kelly stated that Trump "certainly" meets the definition of a fascist,[127][178] making it the first time a president has been called a fascist by a former hand-picked top adviser.[179] Following the statements by Kelly, Karine Jean-Pierre stated that United States President Joe Biden agreed with the assertion that Trump is a fascist.[180]Kamala Harris, Biden's vice president and Trump's opponent in the 2024 election, also stated that she considers Trump to be a fascist.[181][182] Thirteen former Trump officials signed an open letter agreeing with Kelly's statements.[183]Mark Esper, Secretary of Defense under Trump, also agreed with Kelly, saying Trump meets the definition of a fascist and has fascist instincts.[184]
Cornel West has described Trump as a fascist.[186] Professor and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has openly defined Trump as a fascist.[187][188][189]The Economist said it was reasonable to describe Trump as a modern iteration of fascism.[190]Howard French agrees that Trump is a fascist but wonders whether it is the best message for Democrats to win the 2024 election.[191]Peter Baker described Trump as the president who most aggressively discredited democracy at home while embracing autocrats abroad.[179]
Criticism of the comparison
International Critical Thought stated in 2017 that the Trump's administration was not hegemonic nor fascist, but that it signaled the rise of a right-wing nationalist movement.[192]Benjamin R. Teitelbaum has stated he "unequivocally reject[s] using the term" fascist to describe Trump on epistemological and pedagogical grounds, viewing it as "an end of inquiry".[193] In a Guardian column, Jan Werner-Müller argued, that rejecting the label can be done while acknowledging the dangers Trump creates to democracy.[194] Geoff Boucher, writing for The Conversation, argues Trump represents instead a 'new authoritarianism' that relies on administration instead of paramilitaries to subvert democracy,[195] a definition seconded by The Herald.[196] Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, a historian at Wesleyan University, in an interview with Historian Joshua Zeitz, stated while she thought Trump had an authoritarian and illiberal vision, she was unsure if Trump was a fascist, but that by "not framing him this way, it does not at all mean that he is not a threat".[197]Jacob Sullum argues in Reason that Trump's reckless (and in his view, disqualifying) authoritarian impulses are guided only by self-interest and that he is not ideological enough to be labeled a fascist.[198]Roger Griffin also argued that Trump displayed some but not all traits of fascism, and that his actions on January 6 were not those of a fascist leader but of an "ochlocrat".[199]
Historian Richard J. Evans has rejected comparisons to fascism. In 2018 he wrote a negative review of both Albright and Snyder's books as having a "vague and confused" view of what defines fascism.[200][201]
In 2020, Vox contacted a group of experts on fascism for their view, with most rejecting the comparison but expressing concern about Trump's authoritarian and violent tendencies.[202]
Homans 2024: "No major American presidential candidate has talked like he now does at his rallies—not Richard Nixon, not George Wallace, not even Donald Trump himself."
Ward 2024: "It's a stark escalation over the last month of what some experts in political rhetoric, fascism, and immigration say is a strong echo of authoritarians and Nazi ideology."
Applebaum 2024: "In the 2024 campaign, that line has been crossed. ... The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the 'bloodbath' that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn't win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics. But neither has this rhetoric been tried in modern American politics."
Brooks 2024: "Trump, however, has also used the term fascist to describe Harris as he has doubled down on his insults against Harris and ratcheted up the intensity of his own rhetoric against political opponents. 'She's a marxist, communist, fascist, socialist', Trump said at a rally in Arizona in September. Johnson and McConnell made no mention of Trump's rhetoric in their statement, keeping the focus on their political rival."
1 2 From a poll of 2,392 registered voters, including 44% that describe "only Trump" as fascist and 5% that describe both Trump and Harris as fascists.
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy. Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism, fascism is at the far right of the traditional left–right spectrum.
Neo-fascism is a post-World War II far-right ideology that includes significant elements of fascism. Neo-fascism usually includes ultranationalism, ultraconservatism, racial supremacy, right-wing populism, authoritarianism, nativism, xenophobia, and anti-immigration sentiment, sometimes with economic liberal issues, as well as opposition to social democracy, parliamentarianism, Marxism, capitalism, communism, and socialism. As with classical fascism, it occasionally proposes a Third Position as an alternative to market capitalism.
It Can't Happen Here is a 1935 dystopian political novel by the American author Sinclair Lewis. Set in a fictionalized version of the 1930s United States, it follows an American politician, Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, who quickly rises to power to become the country's first outright dictator, and Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor who sees Windrip's fascist policies for what they are ahead of time and who becomes Windrip's most ardent critic. The novel was adapted into a play by Lewis and John C. Moffitt in 1936.
Fascist has been used as a pejorative or insult against a wide range of people, political movements, governments, and institutions since the emergence of fascism in Europe in the 1920s. Political commentators on both the Left and the Right accused their opponents of being fascists, starting in the years before World War II. In 1928, the Communist International labeled their social democratic opponents as social fascists, while the social democrats themselves as well as some parties on the political right accused the Communists of having become fascist under Joseph Stalin's leadership. In light of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, The New York Times declared on 18 September 1939 that "Hitlerism is brown communism, Stalinism is red fascism." Later, in 1944, the anti-fascist and socialist writer George Orwell commented on Tribune that fascism had been rendered almost meaningless by its common use as an insult against various people, and argued that in England the word fascist had become a synonym for bully.
The history of fascist ideology is long and it draws on many sources. Fascists took inspiration from sources as ancient as the Spartans for their focus on racial purity and their emphasis on rule by an élite minority. Researchers have also seen links between fascism and the ideals of Plato, though there are key differences between the two. Italian Fascism styled itself as the ideological successor to Ancient Rome, particularly the Roman Empire. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's view on the absolute authority of the state also strongly influenced fascist thinking. The 1789 French Revolution was a major influence insofar as the Nazis saw themselves as fighting back against many of the ideas which it brought to prominence, especially liberalism, liberal democracy and racial equality, whereas on the other hand, fascism drew heavily on the revolutionary ideal of nationalism. The prejudice of a "high and noble" Aryan culture as opposed to a "parasitic" Semitic culture was core to Nazi racial views, while other early forms of fascism concerned themselves with non-racialized conceptions of their respective nations.
"Islamofascism" is a term that is a portmanteau of the ideologies of fascism and Islamism or Islamic fundamentalism, which advocates authoritarianism and violent extremism to establish an Islamic state, in addition to promoting offensive Jihad. For example, Qutbism has been characterized as an Islamofascist and Islamic terrorist ideology.
Historians and other scholars disagree on the question of whether a specifically fascist type of economic policy can be said to exist. David Baker argues that there is an identifiable economic system in fascism that is distinct from those advocated by other ideologies, comprising essential characteristics that fascist nations shared. Payne, Paxton, Sternhell et al. argue that while fascist economies share some similarities, there is no distinctive form of fascist economic organization. Gerald Feldman and Timothy Mason argue that fascism is distinguished by an absence of coherent economic ideology and an absence of serious economic thinking. They state that the decisions taken by fascist leaders cannot be explained within a logical economic framework.
Italian fascism, also classical fascism and Fascism, is the original fascist ideology, which Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini developed in Italy. The ideology of Italian Fascism is associated with a series of political parties led by Mussolini: the National Fascist Party (PNF), which governed the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 until 1943, and the Republican Fascist Party (PFR), which governed the Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945. Italian fascism also is associated with the post–war Italian Social Movement (MSI) and later Italian neo-fascist political organisations.
What constitutes a definition of fascism and fascist governments has been a complicated and highly disputed subject concerning the exact nature of fascism and its core tenets debated amongst historians, political scientists, and other scholars ever since Benito Mussolini first used the term in 1915. Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that "trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly to the wall".
Timothy David Snyder is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
Fascist movements in Europe were the set of various fascist ideologies which were practiced by governments and political organizations in Europe during the 20th century. Fascism was born in Italy following World War I, and other fascist movements, influenced by Italian Fascism, subsequently emerged across Europe. Among the political doctrines which are identified as ideological origins of fascism in Europe are the combining of a traditional national unity and revolutionary anti-democratic rhetoric which was espoused by the integral nationalist Charles Maurras and the revolutionary syndicalist Georges Sorel.
Fascism has a long history in North America, with the earliest movements appearing shortly after the rise of fascism in Europe.
Criticism of fascism has come from diverse groups, including many political ideologies, academic disciplines, survivors of fascist governments, and other observers.
Anti-fascism is a political movement in opposition to fascist ideologies, groups and individuals. Beginning in European countries in the 1920s, it was at its most significant shortly before and during World War II, where the Axis powers were opposed by many countries forming the Allies of World War II and dozens of resistance movements worldwide. Anti-fascism has been an element of movements across the political spectrum and holding many different political positions such as anarchism, communism, pacifism, republicanism, social democracy, socialism and syndicalism as well as centrist, conservative, liberal and nationalist viewpoints.
Trumpism is a political movement in the United States that comprises the political ideologies associated with Donald Trump and his political base. It incorporates ideologies such as right-wing populism, right-wing antiglobalism, national conservatism and neo-nationalism, and features significant illiberal and authoritarian beliefs. Trumpists and Trumpians are terms that refer to individuals exhibiting its characteristics. There is significant academic debate over the prevalence of neo-fascist elements of Trumpism.
Fascism: A Warning is a 2018 book about fascism by Madeleine Albright, published by HarperCollins.
Death of a Nation: Can We Save America a Second Time? is a 2018 American political documentary film by Dinesh D'Souza, a US conservative provocateur. In the film D'Souza presents a revisionist history comparing the political climate surrounding the 45th President of the United States Donald Trump to that of the 16th President, Abraham Lincoln. The film argues that the Democratic Party from both eras was critical of the presidents of the time and that the Democrats have similarities to fascist regimes, including the Nazi Party. The film was written and directed by Dinesh D'Souza and Bruce Schooley, and produced by Gerald R. Molen. It was produced on a budget of $6 million.
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them is a 2018 nonfiction book by Jason Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Stanley, whose parents were refugees of Nazi Germany, describes strategies employed by fascist regimes, which includes normalizing the "intolerable". Features of this are already evident, according to Stanley, in the politics of the United States, the Philippines, Brazil, Russia, and Hungary. The book was reissued in 2020 with a new preface in which Stanley describes how global events have substantiated his concern that fascist rhetoric is showing up in politics and policies around the world.
The rhetoric of Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States and current President-elect, is widely recognized for its unique populist, nationalistic, and confrontational style, which has been the subject of extensive analysis by linguists, political scientists, and communication experts. Known for its direct and unfiltered approach, Trump's rhetoric emphasizes themes of crisis, division, and loyalty, often casting himself as an outsider fighting against a corrupt political establishment. Central to his communication strategy are emotional appeals that resonate with voter insecurity, promises of restoring past national "greatness," and the use of simple, repetitive language that amplifies his message to broad audiences.
↑ Bump, Philip (November 2024b). "For nearly half of Trump voters, overt appreciation of Hitler is acceptable". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on November 5, 2024. Retrieved November 20, 2024. ... poll respondents were asked what they would do if a candidate they supported said that Hitler had done some good things.... Among those who said they plan to vote for Trump this year, just under half said they would vote for the candidate anyway.... On the other hand, only a fifth of Americans think that Trump sees Hitler as completely bad — a percentage that's pushed up by the just under 4 in 10 Republicans who believe that's his position.
↑ Ibrahim, Nur (December 5, 2022). "Did Trump Say Election Fraud Allows for 'Termination' of US Constitution?". Snopes. Archived from the original on May 31, 2023. Retrieved December 9, 2023. In sum, Trump posted on Truth Social that, what he believed to be, election fraud in the 2020 presidential election allows "for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution." For that reason, we rated this claim "Correct Attribution."
↑ Smith, Evan (June 6, 2020). "Today's Antifa-obsessed hard right politicians are rehashing the ideas of 1930s fascists". The Independent. Archived from the original on May 2, 2023. Retrieved November 14, 2024. The characterisation of opposition to fascism as terrorism is not new. It was a regular feature of fascist rhetoric in the 1930s. Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists routinely referred to anti-fascist actions against them as "red terrorism" while portraying themselves as the defenders of free speech. A 1936 edition of the BUF's Blackshirt newspaper... proclaimed: "In two years, the Blackshirt spirit has triumphed. In two short years Red Terrorism and its Jew and Soviet inspired gangs have lost their dominion of the streets of East London... Fascism won the freedom of the streets."
↑ DeVega, Chauncey (July 14, 2023). "Be very afraid: Trump's "Agenda 47" is no joke. This is not a joke or funny: You should be very afraid of Trump's fascist Agenda 47 plan". Salon.com. Archived from the original on April 2, 2024. Retrieved November 3, 2024. (...) In many ways, Agenda 47 is a continuation of the fascist and other authoritarian policies Trump put in place during his first regime but now made even more extreme and cruel. (...) But nothing about Agenda 47 is childish, innocent, or funny. Fascism in its various forms is a revolutionary project that draws inspiration from a fictive past and "golden age" in order to destroy the current order and replace with some type of ideal society based upon the authoritarian leader and the movement. Trump's Agenda 47 fits that model almost perfectly. (...)
↑ Baba, Ahmed (December 6, 2023). "Trump is telling us exactly what he'll do and we should believe him". The Independent. Archived from the original on May 15, 2024. Retrieved November 3, 2024. (...) Let's talk about what he'll actually do on day one if he wins, according to his plans outlined in Agenda 47, the comprehensive plans outlined by his allies working on Project 2025, and media reporting sourced directly from people in his campaign. (...) All of this can only be characterized as the agenda of a wannabe dictator. That's not hyperbole. Countless authoritarian experts have raised alarms, comparing Trump's rhetoric and plans to those of 20th-century fascists. (...)
↑ Polychroniou, C. J. (July 28, 2024). "With Project 2025 and Agenda 47, the USA's Coups Come Home to Roost". Common Dreams. Archived from the original on September 14, 2024. Retrieved November 3, 2024. (...) More important, while Trump and his campaign staff have pointed out that Agenda 47 is their official policy platform for the 2024 presidential election, Project 2025 and Agenda 47 have a lot of overlap in terms of ideas and policy plans. They both contain plans for the reshaping of U.S. government and civil society that can only be described as "fascist." They both assert that the mission they serve is to rescue the country from the influence of the radical left. (...)
1 2 Morini 2020: "The president described right-wing extremists as "very fine people" (Jacobs & Laughland, 2017), encouraged supporters to "knock the crap out of protestors" (White, 2016), and endorsed attacks on the press by his party's congressional representatives (BBC News, 2018). And he has a history of calling for violent acts against those who protest at his events that goes back until at least August 2015, those of the very early days of his presidential campaign."
1 2 Zerofsky, Elisabeth (October 23, 2024). "Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind". The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 13, 2024. Retrieved October 25, 2024. Paxton, who is 92, is one of the foremost American experts on fascism and perhaps the greatest living American scholar of mid-20th-century European history.
↑ Baker, Peter (December 1, 2022). "Trump Embraces Extremism as He Seeks to Reclaim Office". The New York Times. ISSN0362-4331. Archived from the original on April 16, 2024. Retrieved July 13, 2024. Analysts and strategists see Mr. Trump's pivot toward the far right as a tactic to re-create political momentum ... Mr. Trump has long flirted with the fringes of American society as no other modern president has, openly appealing to prejudice based on race, religion, national origin and sexual orientation, among others ... Mr. Trump's expanding embrace of extremism has left Republicans once again struggling to figure out how to distance themselves from him.(subscription required)
↑ Swenson, Ali; Kunzelman, Michael (November 18, 2023). "Fears of political violence are growing as the 2024 campaign heats up and conspiracy theories evolve". Associated Press. Archived from the original on May 11, 2024. Retrieved July 13, 2024. Trump has amplified social media accounts that promote QAnon, which grew from the far-right fringes of the internet to become a fixture of mainstream Republican politics ... In his 2024 campaign, Trump has ramped up his combative rhetoric with talk of retribution against his enemies. He recently joked about the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi and suggested that retired Gen. Mark Milley, a former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, should be executed for treason.
↑ Cole, Mike (October 10, 2018). Trump, the Alt-Right and Public Pedagogies of Hate and for Fascism. What is to be Done?. London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780429467141. ISBN9780429467141. FROM ABSTRACT: Beginning with an examination of the history of traditional fascism in the twentieth century, the book looks at the similarities and differences between the Trump regime and traditional Western post-war fascism. Cole goes on to consider the alt-right movement, the reasons for its rise, and the significance of the internet being harnessed as a tool with which to promote a fascistic public pedagogy. Finally, the book examines the resistance against these discourses and addresses the question of: what is to be done? [The webpage provides abstracts for the Introduction and each one of the 6 chapters.]
↑ Layne, Nathan; Slattery, Gram; Reid, Tim (April 3, 2024). "Trump calls migrants 'animals,' intensifying focus on illegal immigration". Reuters. Archived from the original on June 17, 2024. Retrieved April 3, 2024. While speaking of Laken Riley – a 22-year-old nursing student from Georgia allegedly murdered by a Venezuelan immigrant in the country illegally – Trump said some immigrants were sub-human. "The Democrats say, 'Please don't call them animals. They're humans.' I said, 'No, they're not humans, they're not humans, they're animals,'" said Trump, president from 2017 to 2021.
↑ Harris, Lindsay Muir (November 14, 2018), "Learning in 'Baby Jail': Lessons from Law Student Engagement in Family Detention Centers", Clinical Law Review, SSRN3120367
↑ Connolly, William E. (January 2017). "Trump, the Working Class, and Fascist Rhetoric". Theory and Event. 20 (1): 23–37. (...) My agenda today is to drill down into how the Trumpian politics of persuasion is joined to shock politics. First, to think more closely about the rhetorical power of the Trump phenomenon, second, to explore counter-rhetorical skills needed today and, third, to ask how to fold a larger section of the white working class once again into pluralizing, egalitarian movements that have largely forsaken them. Radicals, liberals and democrats have recently ceded large sections of that class to Trump. I treat it as axiomatic that counter movements of today must oppose exploitative race and class hierarchies with demands for sharp reductions in inequality, must counter the aggressive white territorial nationalism of Trump with the politics of pluralism and pluralization, and must counter the aggressive leadership principle that has been pursued (in different ways) by Trump, Putin, Hitler and Lenin with multi-tiered horizontal communications, charismatic democratic leadership, care for the earth, and concerted efforts to address class, race and gender hierarchies. (...) Perhaps we can gain preliminary bearings by listening to things Hitler said about the potent mixture he pursued of leadership, propaganda, and violence in Mein Kampf, a two-part book published in 1926 and 1927 when the Nazi movement was consolidating itself. I consult this text not because Trump is on a course that must end in death camps, or because the scapegoats he identifies are the same as those marked by Hitler, or because the institutional restraints against Trumpism are definitely as weak as those were against Hitlerism, or because Hitler launched a world war and Trump will necessarily lead us to a nuclear winter. The latter is indeed possible. But real differences between the two circumstances and drives must be kept in mind as we explore affinities in style and organization between them. (...)
Fattal 2018: "(...) Albright (...) acknowledged that fascism is hard to define. She pointed to a few signifiers: identification with a tribe or group and discrimination against those who aren't members; a lack of attention to democratic institutions; the use of propaganda and rallies where political opponents are vilified; and the encouragement of violence. (...) Goldberg pointed out that Albright indirectly references President Trump several times in her book; she mentions, for example, that one of Benito Mussolini's mottos was "drain the swamp." Goldberg asked Albright directly: Is Donald Trump a fascist? "He is not a fascist," she responded. "I do think he is the least democratic president of modern history." Trump, it seems, contributes to the petri dish: "His instincts are not democratic," Albright argued, pointing to his attacks on the press, "how he treats the judiciary," and his tendency to create "us-versus-them" divisions in his rhetoric. These are "tendencies that make me very nervous," she said. (...) Some readers of Albright's book had hoped she'd take a harder line in identifying the difference between a fascist and an almost-fascist. Asked by Goldberg what her "red line" is—at what point she'd turn to unequivocally calling someone a fascist—Albright gave a few metrics. She said that it depended on how much violence is involved, on the leader's attempts to undermine democratic institutions, and on a sense the leader has that he or she is above the law. (That last one is a threat she suggested Americans should worry about, if Trump were to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein or Special Counsel Robert Mueller.) (...)"
Wright 2018: "(...) The future of American politics is the subtext of Albright's book. "The elephant rampaging through these pages is, of course, Donald Trump," she writes. He won the Presidency "because he convinced enough voters in the right states that he was a teller of blunt truths, a masterful negotiator, and an effective champion of American interests. That he is none of those things should disturb our sleep, but there is a larger cause for unease. Trump is the first antidemocratic president in modern U.S. history." There are other worrying signs. The Economist's index—which factors in due process, individual freedoms, and space for civil society—reduced the United States' ranking from a full democracy to a "flawed democracy." In the early nineteen-sixties, more than seventy per cent of Americans told Pew researchers that they had faith in government "most of the time" or "just about always." In 2016, faith had sunk below twenty per cent. American politics is increasingly defined by contempt rather than a sense of common good. "We are becoming disconnected from the ideals that have long inspired and united us," Albright warns. "It doesn't take much imagination to conceive of circumstances—another major recession, a corruption scandal, racial unrest, more terror incidents, assassination, a series of natural disasters, or a sudden plunge into an unexpected war—that might trigger a demand for answers that our Constitution, democracy's manual, is too slow to provide.""
Wagner 2018: "(...) Albright, who served during the administration of President Bill Clinton, appeared on the BBC's "Andrew Marr Show," where she was asked about her book "Fascism: A Warning" and whether she considers Trump to be a fascist. "I do not think he is a fascist," Albright said. "I do think he is the most undemocratic president in modern American history, and that troubles me." (...) "Fascism is hard to define, by the way," she told Marr, "but a fascist leader is somebody who identifies himself with one group, tribal of some kind, in order to really isolate and insulate the people that are disagreed with. Ultimately a fascist leader is somebody who uses violence to achieve what he wants." "So I do not think that Trump is a fascist leader," Albright continued, "but I think his attitude towards freedom of speech and the role of the media and his disregard for institutions worries me.""
Rawnsley 2018: "(...) She agrees that we ought to be careful not to casually throw around the F-word lest we drain the potency from what should be a powerful term. "I'm not calling Trump a fascist," she says. Yet she seems to be doing all but that when she puts him in the same company as historical fascists in a book that seeks to sound "an alarm bell" about a fascist revival. She frequently nudges the reader to make connections between the president of the United States and past dictatorships. She reminds us who first coined the Trumpian phrase "drain the swamp". It was drenare la palude in the original, Mussolini Italian. She quotes Hitler talking about the secret of his success: "I will tell you what has carried me to the position I have reached. Our political problems appeared complicated. The German people could make nothing of them... I...reduced them to the simplest terms. The masses realised this and followed me." Sound familiar? I suggest to her that the book struggles to offer a satisfactory definition of fascism. "Defining fascism is difficult," she responds. "First of all, I don't think fascism is an ideology. I think it is a method, it's a system." It is in his methods that Trump can be compared with, if not precisely likened to, the dictators of the 1930s. Fascists are typically masters of political theatre. They feed on and inflame grievances by setting "the people" against their "enemies". Fascists tell their supporters that there are simple fixes for complex problems. They present as national saviours and conflate themselves with the state. They seek to subvert, discredit and eliminate liberal institutions. She reminds us that they have often ascended to power through the ballot box and then undermined democracy from within. She is especially fond of a Mussolini quote about "plucking a chicken feather by feather" so that people will not notice the loss of their freedoms until it is too late. In her book, Trump is one nasty plucker. She labels him "the first anti-democratic president in modern US history". (...)"
Tennis 2018: "(...) "When I've gone around to talk to people they really do see that there is an elite group in the United States, that there are people that don't have jobs. And this is the part that really does worry me, if you have a leader who then blames it on somebody else, because part of the whole fascist aspect is you always have to find a scapegoat." In the United States, she added, President Trump portrays America as a victim, while scapegoating foreigners and immigrants. However, Albright would not call Donald Trump a fascist. Instead, she described him as the most un-democratic leader that the United States has ever seen. (...) [Includes link to video Fascism: A conversation with Madeleine Albright and Strobe Talbott, Friday Sep 07, 2018]"
↑ Giroux, Henry A. (December 29, 2018). "Trump and the legacy of a menacing past". Cultural Studies. 33 (4): 711–739. doi:10.1080/09502386.2018.1557725. Archived from the original on November 13, 2024. Retrieved October 30, 2024. ABSTRACT: The inability to learn from the past takes on a new meaning as a growing number of authoritarian regimes emerge across the globe. This essay argues that central to understanding the rise of a fascist politics in the United States is the necessity to address the power of language and the intersection of the social media and the public spectacle as central elements in the rise of a formative culture that produces the ideologies and agents necessary for an American-style fascism. In this project, education is central to politics, which demands understanding and critically interrogating, in particular, the role of the conservative media in suppressing history, normalizing a discourse of racial hatred, and advancing the most poisonous elements of neoliberalism. The essay calls for a comprehensive notion of politics and education that draws from history, imagines a present that does not imitate the future, and employs a language of critique and hope in the service of building a new broad-based political formation. If fascism begins with language so does the possibility of a radical social imaginary in which to envision a democratic socialist order that both challenges the menacing momentum of a fascist politics and the savagery of neoliberal capitalism.
↑ De Genova, Nicholas (2020). ""Everything is Permitted": Trump, White Supremacy, Fascism". American Anthropologist. 122 (1). Archived from the original on November 13, 2024. Retrieved October 30, 2024. (...) Whereas fascism has historically tended to be ushered into state power only following the gestation of a fascist social movement organized on the basis of paramilitary violence, the ethos of civil war that has come to more or less universally animate Republican politics in the United States has delivered a populist opportunist into power, and now, only in the aftermath of that cataclysmic systemic backfire, in the aura and orbit of that nonstop demagogical spectacle, a white supremacist fascist movement—albeit in convulsive fits and starts—is gathering its forces. (...)
↑ Reich, Robert (June 17, 2023). "Trump and the Republican party exemplify these five elements of fascism". The Guardian. Retrieved November 3, 2024. (...) How do we describe what Trump wants for America? "Authoritarianism" isn't adequate. It is fascism. Fascism stands for a coherent set of ideas different from – and more dangerous than – authoritarianism. To fight those ideas, it's necessary to be aware of what they are and how they fit together. Borrowing from the cultural theorist Umberto Eco, the historians Emilio Gentile and Ian Kershaw, the political scientist Roger Griffin, and the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, I offer five elements that distinguish fascism from authoritarianism. (...)
↑ Harris, Jerry; Davidson, Carl; Fletcher, Bill; Harris, Paul (December 14, 2017). "Trump and American Fascism". International Critical Thought. 7 (4): 476–492. doi:10.1080/21598282.2017.1357491. Archived from the original on March 30, 2024. Retrieved October 30, 2024. ABSTRACT: The election of Donald Trump reflects the rise of a Right-wing nationalist movement. Central to Trump's appeal has been his advocacy of anti-immigrant, racist, and misogynist ideas. At its core, his ruling power bloc consists of neo-liberal fundamentalists, the religious Right, and white nationalists. There are similarities between the new power bloc and fascism, and there are many who see Trump's administration as such. Nevertheless, the new president's authoritarian power bloc is neither hegemonic nor fascist, but such a definition can send oppositional strategy in the wrong direction.
↑ McGeoghegan, Mark (November 1, 2024). "Trump's no fascist, but he is just as dangerous to democracy". The Herald. Archived from the original on November 13, 2024. Retrieved November 3, 2024. (...) The MAGA Republicans are what David Renton, historian of the British fascist and anti-fascist movements of the 1930s and 1940s, calls the New Authoritarians. Their politics start out looking like radical, but democratic right-wing populism. It is not until push comes to shove that they are revealed as anti-democratic extremists, as President Trump was when he encouraged the January 6 insurrection. (...) The New Authoritarians, however, hollow out democratic institutions from within. They pack the judiciary with loyalists, purge and disempower the legislature, undermine the integrity of elections, and transform the professional civil service into a personal, political vehicle. (...)
↑ Zeitz, Joshua; Steinmetz-Jenkins, Daniel (October 29, 2024). "Trump and Fascism: A Pair of Historians Tackle the Big Question. The debate is more complicated than you think". Politico. Archived from the original on November 10, 2024. Retrieved November 4, 2024. (...) This is where it's hard to parse, because the last thing the Democratic Party wants to do is to tell swing voters that they're potentially fascist. What they're trying to say is that the candidate is fascist, therefore don't vote for him. This is why it's risky, because it seems to be suggesting that maybe the people themselves who are voting for him are fascist, or if they are even thinking about voting for him, they are knowingly and willingly voting for a monster. And that can be alienating, I think, to voters. (...) I teach at a liberal arts school, everyone I know is terrified about what's happening. They do not want Donald Trump to be president of the United States. It's just how we go about managing to defeat him and the way that we do it, I think that is the issue. And as a historian who's trained in these areas, there's also a professional obligation. So I just want to make that point, that by not framing him this way, it does not at all mean that he is not a threat. (...)
Browning, Christopher R. (July 25, 2023). "A New Kind of Fascism". The Atlantic. Washington, D.C.: Laurene Powell Jobs. Archived from the original on September 26, 2024. Retrieved December 8, 2023.
Robinson, William I. (March 2019). "Global Capitalist Crisis and Twenty-First Century Fascism: Beyond the Trump Hype". Science & Society. 83 (2): 155–183. doi:10.1521/siso.2019.83.2.155. ABSTRACT: Global capitalism faces an organic crisis involving a structural dimension, that of overaccumulation and a political dimension of legitimacy or hegemony that is approaching a general crisis of capitalist rule. Fascism, whether in 20th-century or 21st-century forms, is a particular response to capitalist crisis. Trumpism in the US, BREXIT in the UK, Bolsonarism in Brazil, the increasing influence of neo-fascist and authoritarian parties and movements around the world, represent far-right responses to the crisis of global capitalism. There are similarities but also important differences between fascist projects of the 20th and 21st centuries. The former involved the fusion of reactionary political power with national capital, whereas the latter involves the fusion of transnational capital with reactionary and repressive political power — an expression of the dictatorship of transnational capital. A fightback against the global police state and 21st-century fascism must involve broad anti-fascist alliances led by popular and working-class forces.
Colasacco, Brett (2018). "Before Trump: On Comparing Fascism and Trumpism". Journal for the Study of Radicalism. 12 (1): 27–53. doi:10.14321/jstudradi.12.1.0027. JSTOR10.14321/jstudradi.12.1.0027. I have been contemplating a photograph of Donald J. Trump - businessman, bestselling author, and reality television star – shaking hands with Barack Obama in the Oval Office of the While House, one day after being declared president-elect of the United State. I fully confess that I was one of those who thought this image, and this moment, would never come: that Trump would not, could not, win the presidency. (...)
Love, Nancy S. (April 14, 2017). "Back to the Future: Trendy Fascism, the Trump Effect, and the Alt-Right". New Political Science. 39 (2): 263–268. doi:10.1080/07393148.2017.1301321. I started writing Trendy Fascism: White Power Music and the Future of Democracy following the 2008 election of Barack Obama, the first African American President of the United States, and I finished it in 2015 shortly after Dylann Roof murdered nine Black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In a police interview, Roof said that he wanted to start a race war and that the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and racist skinheads were not doing enough. Fast forward to 2016. When Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, many pollsters and pundits expressed surprise and, in some cases, also dismay. Pre-election polling proved stunningly inaccurate, and it increasingly appears that the alt-right contributed significantly to Trump's victory. (...)
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