It’s shameful to call US presidents like Trump fascist
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If it is Tuesday, a prominent American politician must be accusing another of being a fascist. In a recent meeting with donors, Donald Trump accused Biden of “running a Gestapo administration” and later said that Biden is “surrounded by fascists around the Oval Office.”
It’s usually Trump accused of being a fascist – or at least a “semi-fascist.” In 2018, former US Secretary of state Madeleine Albright wrote an anti-Trump tract entitled Fascism: A Warning. Countless Democratic commentators and some Republicans have ritually compared Trump to Hitler. At a Democratic fundraiser in 2022, President Joe Biden said: “What we’re seeing now is the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy. It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the – I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism.”
On the face of it, it is absurd to compare any politician in the US or any western democracy to a fascist dictator – the head of a disciplined paramilitary party who rules through the army and secret police. One trick to make this crude smear seem more plausible is to compare perfectly ordinary things – like political rallies where supporters cheer candidates for office – to sinister fascist corollaries.
In the same way, internment camps for illegal immigrants under Trump (but not Biden) become Nazi-style concentration camps. Likewise the limited fencing along the Southwestern border, voted for by then-Senators Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Senator Joe Biden in 2006, was compared to the Berlin Wall under Trump (but not under Biden). The philosopher Leo Strauss, a German-Jewish refugee from the Nazis, dismissed what he called the argumentum ad Hitlerum as a cheap debating trick: “A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler.”
Another cynical technique involves taking quotes out of context to make them seem scary and fascistic. Trump has been a victim of this particular tactic since 2015. At a New Hampshire rally in 2023, Trump, running for a second term as president, told his supporters, “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.” The Washington Post headline: “Trump calls political enemies vermin, echoing dictators Hitler, Mussolini.” So Trump is a fascist because he uses the term vermin to describe…fascists?
The most shameless use of selective quotation by Trump-baiting American journalists occurred after the former president spoke at a rally in Ohio on March 16. The full quote made it clear that Trump was talking about a commercial bloodbath in the US automobile industry if Chinese automobiles were imported: “We’re going to put a 100 per cent tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those guys if I get elected. Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole – that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it.”
In their usual role as dishonest propagandists for the Democratic party, mainstream journalists claimed that Trump was promising a national “bloodbath” if he lost the election. NBC News screeched: “Trump says there will be a ‘bloodbath’ if he loses the election.”
The Biden administration quickly issued a press release: “Tonight Donald Trump said there would be a ‘bloodbath’ if he wasn’t elected and that if he lost, there would be no more election. This is who Donald Trump is: a loser who gets beat by over 7 million votes and then, instead of appealing to a wider mainstream audience, doubles down on his threats of political violence.” In a speech in Philadelphia, President Biden declared: “Donald Trump’s vision is one of anger, hate, revenge and retribution… and he calls for another bloodbath when he loses again.”
Ironically, Biden has kept many of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports and has added new ones – to avert a bloodbath in American automobile manufacturing, perhaps?
For their part, American conservatives have preferred to smear liberal opponents as socialists or communists, but some on the American Right have deployed the fascist slur as well. In 2022, the Right-wing pundit Glenn Beck published a book entitled The Great Reset: Joe Biden and the Rise of Twenty-First-Century Fascism. Back in 2009 another conservative pundit, Jonah Goldberg, published Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change. Even earlier in 1976, Ronald Reagan, during his failed first run for the Republican presidential nomination, described the Humphrey-Hawkins Act, which mandated pro-employment interest rate policies by the Federal Reserve: “If ever there was a design for fascism that’s it.”
In 1964, Republican Representative William E. Miller went further, comparing Democratic president Lyndon Johnson’s administration to Hitler’s dictatorship. In the same year, at the Left end of the political spectrum, this headline appeared in Jet magazine: “Barry Goldwater’s Rise is Compared to Rise of Hitler.” LBJ, Goldwater, Hitler. Whatever.
Needless to say, there is little or no connection between such invective and the phenomenon of fascism in Europe between the world wars. Indeed, some scholars deny that generic fascism ever existed, given the differences among Mussolini’s Italian Fascism, Hitler’s German National Socialism, and Franco’s Spanish Catholic monarchism.
Along with fascism, Left-leaning professors and journalists have ruined the political science term “authoritarianism” by turning it into a term of abuse flung at those whom they dislike. For example, the Harvard political scientist Pippa Norris defines authoritarianism as “belief in a strong leader, in a strong state, and in robust law and order.”
By her definition, Presidents Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were “authoritarians.” Norris goes on to equate authoritarianism with “traditional values like the family, home, religion” – a definition that would make “authoritarians” of most centrists and moderates, to say nothing of traditional conservatives, even if they oppose the idea of a police state.
The pseudo-scholarly academic literature that seeks to stigmatise perfectly normal centrist and conservative values as “authoritarian” dates back to The Authoritarian Personality (1950), written by the German Marxist émigré Theodor Adorno, among others. According to Adorno’s California F Scale, with F standing for fascism, you could tell that Americans were fascists if they adhered “to conventional, middle-class values.” In 2001 in The Journal of Political Psychology John Levi Martin wrote: “The Authoritarian Personality is probably the most deeply flawed work of prominence in political psychology.”
Why does this nonsense persist? The answer is that pretending that this or that contemporary Western democracy is the equivalent of the Weimar Republic just before the Nazi takeover makes the relatively low stakes of democratic electoral politics seem to be greater than they actually are. For this reason Trump’s opponents pompously dub themselves the “Resistance.” You know – the French Resistance to the German occupiers!
In earlier eras, with the same motive of dramatising their petty struggles for office while posing as heroes in great struggles, politicians in Europe and America used the imagery of the last days of the Roman Republic. Politicians of the other party were tyrannical potential Caesars or Catilines, while your politicians were noble Catos and Ciceros, fighting to save the republic and the rule of law. The melodramatic make-believe is essentially the same, even though Roman togas have been exchanged for Nazi uniforms and swastika armbands for the other side and French Resistance outfits for our side.
In his essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946), George Orwell observed, “The word Fascism now has no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.” In the 1944 essay, “What is Fascism?” Orwell wrote: “It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless… I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”
Eighty years after Orwell’s essay, the use of fascism in contemporary Western politics remains “almost entirely meaningless” except as an insult that long ago lost its power to shock.
