Trump is Not a Fascist — He’s Worse
"President Trump and the First Lady in India" by The White House is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.
Opinion
Founding member Hank Thayer has some choice words for and about former president Trump and his friends. And a warning.
In the popular imagination, there is almost nothing worse than fascism. Unfortunately, the sloppy use of the word fascist has caused it to lose almost all meaning. It has largely become the go-to accusation used by many on the political left for just about anyone on the right they don’t like.
That’s especially the case with Trump, who is routinely accused of being a fascist. But it’s not true. Trump is a bad guy, but he is not a fascist.
He is something worse.
The following disquisition is based on my own observations over the last six years, as well as the books Agent in Italy by a S.K., German spying for the Allies in Italy in the early days of WWII; The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor; and, most importantly, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt.
I strongly recommend the Arendt book. It is a long, hard read but worth the time. If you can’t bring yourself to wade through all 479 pages of its dense, thought-provoking prose, go to the library some Sunday afternoon and just read the last chapter. It sums things up pretty well.
As nightmarish as it is, fascism is a defined approach to government. It advocates a corporate state which pulls in all the elements of a society to serve it: industry, education, agriculture, religion, the media and all other institutions. As Mussolini said, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state.”
But as bad as it is, it is not the worst thing possible. In Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Pinochet’s Chile and even Mussolini’s Italy, if you minded your own business, did your job, followed the overbearing rules and didn’t complain, you would probably be okay.
This is not the system Trump offers. Trump offers no system. And this lack of any system is part of the danger he represents.
You see, much like Mussolini’s Italy, Nazi Germany is often called fascist. Yet it was not truly fascist. The USSR under the Bolsheviks is also sometimes called fascist rather than communist. It was neither.
Nazi Germany and the USSR under the Bolsheviks were something worse. They were totalitarian states in which the rules constantly changed, the secret police were always searching for and inventing new enemies, and today’s hero could be tomorrow’s purge victim. They did not have a defined goal for society, only perpetual revolution and movement. That is what made them so dangerous.
There have only been a few such states in history: Nazi Germany, the USSR under Stalin (and Lenin before him), the PRC under Mao, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, North Korea, Libya under Qaddafi, and arguably Iraq under Sadam. All of them could be classified under Hitchens’ term “Republic of Fear.” For such a state, keeping the populace in constant terror is one of the principle aims of the government.
There are plenty of people around Trump -- supporters, minions, fellow travelers -- who are also routinely called fascists. But the Claremont Institute, Hillsdale College, the Federalist Society and the like are not really fascists any more than most left-wing academics are communists. They are really sort of the right-wing equivalent of “pinkos,” Fascist Fellow Travelers, the armchair revolutionaries of the right. They could probably best be described with Spiro Agnew’s immortal phrase, “An effete corps of impudent snobs.” (Many Charismatic Christian sects are likewise sympathizers or Fellow Travelers of Fascism, but not inherently fascist themselves.)
What these “right-wing pinkos” want is to make everyone obey a strict set of laws and guidelines. They want them to go to church (the church approved by the state), they want to control the economy, and they don’t want any back talk.
But that is not what Trump wants. He doesn’t care about any of that stuff. He doesn’t care about anything. He simply has an insatiable greed for money, power, and adulation. And it is the insatiability which makes him more like the totalitarians than the fascists. There is no end state with Trump. It is all constant chaos to feed his insatiable ego.
Further, his tactics resemble the totalitarians more than the fascists. All governments lie to some extent, usually in pursuit of policy goals. Tyrannical governments lie more because they have to cover failures and exaggerate successes.
But totalitarians lie in order to obliterate the very idea of truth. They lie brazenly and constantly in order to make it impossible for people to even know what is true.
Trump himself said it directly to a reporter early in his presidency. When asked why he says so many things that are simply not true, he replied, “I do it to discredit you people.”
And he’s not the only one. Even before the January 6 Committee convened, Steve Bannon had bragged how he and the other elements of the right-wing media would “flood the zone with shit” to protect Trump’s legacy among his supporters. Lenin (who Bannon admires) could not have said it better.
The obliteration of the truth is not just an intellectual exercise. It has real consequences. When the COVID pandemic was raging, Trump and his gang told people it was all a ploy to control them. They disparaged wearing masks and social distancing. The opinions of experts meant nothing to Trump’s supporters, because truth no longer mattered. All that mattered was which side you were on. Thousands died for no reason other than their loyalty to Trump.
Trump himself seemed virtually unconcerned about the deaths. If anything, he appeared to almost love the suicidal display of loyalty. People were willing to die just to show their devotion to him.
We can add pathological narcissism to the list of Trump's vices.
Totalitarians have objective enemies; people who are enemies by their very existence. And often the most effective technique is to make the category of enemy both broad and ill defined. The Deep State, the Swamp, and the Woke Left, are perfect examples.
There is no working definition of any of these terms. They basically mean whatever Trump wants them to mean, and his followers go along.
In the summer of 2020, his administration portrayed the police as the heroes who were protecting us from the rioting of the Woke Left. But since Jan. 6, 2021, his supporters buy the line that law enforcement, particularly the Capitol Police, are part of a Deep State out to get Trump. And since the search of Mar-a-Lago, his supporters chant “defund the FBI” . . . apparently without irony.
All of which would be bad enough, and as many have pointed out, Trump is too undisciplined to lead a serious movement. And that’s true, as far as it goes. Trump is all impulse without defined goals. Even his chief supporters, people like Alex Jones and Steve Bannon, have no real program aside from stirring up trouble for profit. They, on their own, are little threat.
The trouble is, they are not alone. They have the “pinkos” in the right wing think tanks on their side.
Anyone who has read anything from the Claremont Institute, John Eastman, Dennis Prager, Dinesh D’Souza or Victor Davis Hanson knows these members of Agnew’s “effete corps of impudent snobs” could not move the country in their preferred direction on their own. They have all the charisma and appeal of a half full bag of dirty laundry.
But just like mixing glycerin and nitric acid is the first step to creating explosive nitroglycerin, they become much more dangerous when combined with something else. That something else also becomes much more dangerous when combined with them.
Trump’s claims of election fraud would have been laughable without the legal and media machinations of Eastman and the rest. It was the Eastman memo which laid out the plan for stalling and then overturning the election. It was the Claremont Institute, the Federalist Society, Hillsdale College, and the absurdly named Prager U who crafted the message of supposed irregularities and election fraud. They gave it all a veneer of academic gravitas which was enthusiastically exploited by Fox News and other right wing media outlets.
While they provided the intellectual structure, it was Trump who rallied the crowd, inflamed their sense of grievance, flattered their self-image as patriots and sent them on a rampage against the Capitol. He had already shown his lack of concern for following the law or the rules when, according to one of his own aides, he had told the Department of Justice, "Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen."
With a grievance as a starting point, Trump would supply the violence.
That is the danger Trump poses; he knows how to play on peoples’ grievances. He senses there is a great deal of unfocused resentment in the country. He may not know what causes it, he may not truly understand it or sympathize with the people who feel it, and he certainly does not care -- but he knows how to use it.
Of course, all politicians know how to manipulate people; they do so to further their policy agenda. LBJ manipulated people in pursuit of the Great Society. Reagan manipulated people in his quest to destroy communism.
Trump is different. He has no agenda beyond his own aggrandizement. His control of the Republicans in Congress, and even the Republican Party, is not in service of any real political philosophy. He does not want them to support his policies. He wants them to be loyal to him personally. And as we have seen, he is extremely skilled at coercing personal loyalty.
And because he has no end state, we have not seen the worst of him. As long as he remains a player in American politics, he will keep getting crazier and more destructive. There is no true foundation to Trumpism, only a constant demand for loyalty to an ever more unhinged movement. And many people, including many politicians who must know better, are going along with it.
This is the reason Trump is worse than a fascist, and Trumpism is worse than fascism. It is a movement without purpose which will consume and destroy everything around it, including our Republic, if we let it.
I am not suggesting we are only a few years away from living in a Soviet-style totalitarian state. We are a long way from such a condition, and there are many institutions currently functioning well enough to keep us out of that horror. But there are any number of terrible things we can see go wrong in the near term.
For one, at least if he gets the opportunity, Trump wants to regain the presidency. The damage he has already done to the United States is significant. What he could do next time, in terms of corrupting the courts, law enforcement, the military and other government agencies, is frightful.
For example, at the end of his last term he issued an executive order which, if instituted, could strip civil service protection from a significant number of government employees, allowing him to install loyalists in their place. President Biden rescinded the order, but Trump could re-invoke it just as easily.
And there is documented proof Trump wants military generals who are personally loyal to him rather than to the Constitution. Will he find them? Unknown. But he surely has his staff looking for them.
Even if Trump were to run in the 2024 election and lose, he would surely claim he had won anyway, and we would see more political violence. We might even see it before the election, as he tries to sow chaos so he can claim voter fraud later.
The willingness of his sympathizers to believe anything he says, and take any action he wants, is a matter of record. Trump’s willingness to see violence committed in his name is likewise a matter of record. As his mob stormed the Capitol, Trump sat watching the events unfold on TV for four hours and did nothing.
The grim fact is that as long as Trump remains at large, there is a higher likelihood of political violence in America in the near term. There is a lot we can do to prevent long term violence. And there are things we can do to minimize the short term violence. But we are looking at a couple of bad years at least.
Our purpose as a People should be to limit the immediate damage as much as possible, and make a future Trump less likely to emerge.
Hank Thayer received his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts, and holds both a B.S. and a Masters in Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. After serving as a U.S. Army Infantry Officer in the late 1980s, he has spent most of his professional life working in manufacturing. In addition to being an amateur historian he is a fair-to-middling shade tree mechanic.
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Opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Institute or its members.
