ANALYSIS | There are those who call Trump a fascist. What does that mean?

() – Fascism is a dirty word in American politics, so when former President Donald Trump’s former secretary general, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, says Trump fits the definition of “fascist,” it makes headlines. .

This places Trump’s name in the same ideological space as the most infamous fascists, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Trump has rejected the idea and called Kelly “degenerate.”

Asked at a town hall in the battleground state of Pennsylvania if she agreed with Kelly that Trump is a fascist, Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t hesitate.

“Yes, I am. Yes, I believe it,” he said.

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

“So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work best in terms of running the United States,” Kelly said.

Kelly added that Trump is in the “far-right zone” and “admires people who are dictators,” which in Kelly’s opinion places Trump in “the general definition of a fascist.”

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

Trump wanted to use the military to break up domestic protests when he was in office, something his top general at the time, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, reportedly rejected in 2021. Milley also compared in private Trump’s electoral denialism with Hitler’s “big lie.”

Even if he has no intention of using the military against Democrats, he has a history of trying to use the military to quell protests in the US, threatening to silence dissent.

Trump recently said he would fire special counsel Jack Smith “in less than two seconds” if he wins the election, which seems obvious since Smith has accused Trump in cases of election interference and mishandling of classified documents.

The election interference case has been postponed until after the election, and another judge dismissed the classified documents case, although Smith has already filed an appeal.

Trump has a history of firing officials who question him. He fired James Comey, the director of the FBI, when he was president. He fired his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, after not forgiving him for appointing a special prosecutor to investigate possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.

Trump and his allies have referred to special counsel Robert Mueller’s resulting report so many times as the “Russia hoax” that most Americans probably don’t remember that Mueller did not exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice in the report. Mueller identified multiple contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians in 2016, a time when the Russians were actively trying to help the Trump campaign. Mueller concluded that the contacts did not rise to the level of conspiracy.

Trump’s second attorney general, Bill Barr, delayed the release of Mueller’s report to dilute its impact. Barr would later leave the Trump administration after the 2020 election after refusing to support Trump’s unsupported conspiracy theories about election interference.

Democrats wonder who would be left to moderate Trump’s impulses if he is re-elected.

Purging the Government

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

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

All this points in favor of at least a thematic alignment with some elements of fascism, built around a strong leader and where dissidence in the Government is ruled out. However, there may also be more to fascism, such as complete control of the German economy and society. Trump has not suggested anything like that.

While Harris is only now beginning to label Trump a fascist, he has called her a Marxist throughout the presidential campaign, referring to her as “Comrade Kamala.” That is clearly not true, since Harris supports private property.

In June, Trump called the United States a “fascist state” while promoting the baseless conspiracy theory that President Joe Biden was behind his prosecution in New York for falsifying business records related to hush money payments paid on behalf of Trump to a porn star in 2016.

I delved into the definition of fascism and how it applied to Trump back in June, when he was using the term.

There are experts who see Trump as a fascist. Robert Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University who has written extensively about fascism in Europe, rejected the label for Trump until January 6, 2021, when the historian argued that the image of trump supporters storming the US Capitol “eliminates my objection to the fascist label.”

Trump has also repeatedly used language that may be related to Nazis, such as when he said immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country.

When ‘s Wolf Blitzer asked Ohio Sen. JD Vance in May about Trump’s claim that the US is a “fascist state,” Vance did not reject the idea, suggesting at least a tolerance for the term.

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

In June, I also spoke with Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, an assistant professor at Wesleyan University and editor of the book “Did it happen here? Perspectives on Fascism and the United States”which includes writings by Paxton, among many others.

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

“Concepts do not have timeless essences that we can simply map onto any phenomenon, but rather they change given the political context, given the power structures in society,” he said.

Today, he said, the term “fascism” is used “to mobilize people to overcome their divisions, to defeat an enemy that is much bigger than their own long-standing disputes.”

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

There are arguments for the comparison with fascism, but also arguments against it, particularly as there are echoes of Trump’s rise in populist and white nationalist movements closer to home in American history.

I returned to Steinmetz-Jenkins to ask if the comparisons have changed in the intervening months, and she noted that the debate over fascism died down over the summer, with Harris replacing Biden, and noted that for most of Harris’ campaign, a message of the politics of joy replaced the fear of fascism.

Now, as Democrats grow anxious about losing to Trump, the threat of fascism has returned to the forefront.

“What is needed is a plan to inspire people to vote Democratic, not scare tactics that can lead to a sense of fatalism that the world is being engulfed by fascism,” he said.

Enough American voters have heard the term “fascism” in the same sentence as Trump that if he wins in November, it will be clear that they are at least willing to tolerate him or not believe he will carry out what he says.