It also helps to note inconsistencies between what people say they are worried about, and what they actually do. For example, it’s difficult to take climate alarmists seriously when they all arrive at their big conference in their personal private airplanes.
Likewise, it’s difficult to believe that the Dems truly thought “democracy was on the ballot” and then sent in a decrepit old man to “save” it.
1. a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime
2. exalts nation and often race above the individual,
3. associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader
4. characterized by severe economic and social regimentation
5. [characterized by] forcible suppression of opposition
Trump has often been called a populist, even by fervent supporters, I think it is obvious #1 applies
Trump does not exalt the nation; in fact he has often exalted foreign dictators. He has demonized (nonwhite) migrants from third world countries and called his political opposition vermin, scum and vows to take action against the former by rounding them up into camps and then expelling them from the country, the latter through some unspecified “retribution." By doing this he exalts the MAGA Americans as a race above the lower orders represented by migrants, sexual and woke deviants, and Democrats. I would score ½ point on #2.
We have had some bad presidents, yet none of them had multiple high-level officials in their own administrations claim they were unfit to be president, compare them to authoritarians or even fascists. Trump is unprecedented here; I don’t think one can just wave this away.
Trump has made false claims that Democratic presidents Obama and Biden were/are illegitimate presidents (the first because he was born in Kenya and the second because he gained the presidency in a fraudulent election). He has done this repeatedly extending over years. Claims of a ruler's illegitimacy is a common cause of civil war (e.g. Wars of the Roses, English Civil War, US Revolution, US Civil War, Chinese civil war), which Trump constantly invokes by making these false claims. Would be dictators often use episodes of political instability to seize power. Attempting to invoke a civil war looks a lot like seeking a crisis for this purpose. This supports #3.
That he did not express an authoritarian approach during his first admin, reflects the lack of loyal operatives who would do his bidding without need for the follow-up his indolence prevented. I have read that many of his staffers would simply wait a week before starting to act on anything Trump directed with which they disagreed to see if he would ask about it. In most cases he would have forgotten about it, and it never was implemented. The new team will be much more willing and able to do what he asks for. This is what things like Project 2025 are intended to address. They have surveyed loyalists from the previous Trump admin to distill down what MAGA means in terms of policy making and staffing and come up with a plan to make enacting the Trump agenda as smooth as possible, requiring as little involvement from Trump as possible, Ideally, leaving it up to Trump issuing a Picardian "make it so" for MAGA things to happen. This strengthens the case of #3
As far as I can tell, #4 does not apply.
Trump has many times vowed to go after his enemies, which if he is serious fits #5. Trump did claim to want to imprison his opponent in the 2016 election, but never did. My understanding is he did order an investigation of Clinton, that came up with nothing that would stick. Because Trump did not have loyalists who would do as he asked, he could not do (we are told) what he wanted to, he had to work through Republican officials who had served in previous administrations, many of whom would not break the law or otherwise support his program, some of whom gave the warnings I mentioned above. Hence he could not “lock her up” because he had disloyal people as he sees it.
After 2016 he has had 8 years to establish his control over the Republican party and purge it of those who are disloyal to the president. We can expect he has succeeded in doing this, Documents like Project 2025 show considerable effort has been made to draw up plans for how to retool the government to put more power directly in the hands of the president to make it easier for Trump to do want he wants to do. Just because he could not lock her up last time doesn’t mean he can’t this time. He certain has said he wants to, promises to do so, and given his indictments, feels more threatened and so has the motivation for doing so. Given all this, I think it is reasonably clear that #5 applies.
So 3½ out of 5 parts of the fascist definition seem to apply. Is 70% of fascist close enough to be a fascist? Maybe not a full-fledged Hitler wannabe, but being this close seems unsettling to me.
Also, the "lock her up" rhetoric was completely abandoned once he gained office the first time. Yes, it's disconcerting that perhaps he won in 2016 in part due to that rhetoric. But at no point do I remember him or his administration focusing around suppression of opposition. He has been reciprocating, to a degree, the suppressive forces FROM his opposition, which have been a constant force ever since he began to gain traction in the 2016 campaign.
Canidates do try to implement campaign promises, when feasible. I read here, but cannot recall which post, that Trump did make an attempt at lock he up by asking some of his subordinates to look into charges. They couldn't find anything that would stick, but they weren't true blue MAGA types so Trump might have thought they did not try hard enough. But now he is angry about people going after him for the sort of lawbreaking he used to do with impunity. So, he is likely to lash out.
Trump did not talk about aggressively going after the Left during the 2016 campaign, When Trump was president, these things happened:
1. Trump wanted shots to be fired at White House protesters.
Now Trump IS promising retribution on his enemies and (ideological) enemies of MAGA. He refers to these people as scum and vermin, which is the kind of dehumanizing language used by authoritarians to depress empathy for those on whom the force will be used. There is good reason to believe there will be more desire to deploy force (he is promising mass arrests of millions of people.
What makes me worry more is the sheer number of conservatives who served in his administration who are issuing warnings. What makes me worry less is the fact that Trump was not indicted in 2021, but in 2023.
On #3, I would push back on the whole Project 2025 being some sort of plug and play agenda. He's publicly denounced it and the campaign has tried to distance themselves. Yes, I know that the Heritage foundation is replete with former Trump staffers. That doesn't mean that they have a spot or a say in his administration if he were to be elected.
"Centralized autocratic government" seems quite contrary to Trump's rhetoric around de-regulation and decreasing the amount of influence the federal government has.
I perused parts of Project 2025, and parts of the America First Institute, which is a low-profile source of what MAGA is about. Both are pretty much the same sort of thing. They appear to be an effort by people in the Trump team to translate the things Trump seems to care about as observed by those who worked for him into some sort of action plan.
What else can you use to get an idea of what he is about, the incoherent mess he calls "the Weave" he talks about? Even if you try to pull out nuggets out of that morass, does that even mean anything? Trumps lies all the time and so is an unreliable source of information.
I don't pay much attention to what the candidates say anyway. The president is only one person, their administration is defined by the hundreds of appointees they bring in with them, over which they preside. In the distant past, parties had platforms that were meaningful, more recently, candidates wrote books and campaigns created detailed issue documents. Trump has written no book, his party did not even issue a platform in 2020, acknowledging that was passe and his campaign issues information said little of substance. Documents like Project 2025 can give you a better idea of what the Trump administration will try to do than any other publicly available information.
William, this is the kind of writing I am on Substack for. Balanced and well argued. You won’t find work like this anywhere else.
I don’t have anything to add to this discussion as I tend not to engage directly in politics on this platform, but this is well worth the read.
:) thank you so much for the kind words, sir
It also helps to note inconsistencies between what people say they are worried about, and what they actually do. For example, it’s difficult to take climate alarmists seriously when they all arrive at their big conference in their personal private airplanes.
Likewise, it’s difficult to believe that the Dems truly thought “democracy was on the ballot” and then sent in a decrepit old man to “save” it.
Fascism is
1. a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime
2. exalts nation and often race above the individual,
3. associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader
4. characterized by severe economic and social regimentation
5. [characterized by] forcible suppression of opposition
Trump has often been called a populist, even by fervent supporters, I think it is obvious #1 applies
Trump does not exalt the nation; in fact he has often exalted foreign dictators. He has demonized (nonwhite) migrants from third world countries and called his political opposition vermin, scum and vows to take action against the former by rounding them up into camps and then expelling them from the country, the latter through some unspecified “retribution." By doing this he exalts the MAGA Americans as a race above the lower orders represented by migrants, sexual and woke deviants, and Democrats. I would score ½ point on #2.
We have had some bad presidents, yet none of them had multiple high-level officials in their own administrations claim they were unfit to be president, compare them to authoritarians or even fascists. Trump is unprecedented here; I don’t think one can just wave this away.
Trump has made false claims that Democratic presidents Obama and Biden were/are illegitimate presidents (the first because he was born in Kenya and the second because he gained the presidency in a fraudulent election). He has done this repeatedly extending over years. Claims of a ruler's illegitimacy is a common cause of civil war (e.g. Wars of the Roses, English Civil War, US Revolution, US Civil War, Chinese civil war), which Trump constantly invokes by making these false claims. Would be dictators often use episodes of political instability to seize power. Attempting to invoke a civil war looks a lot like seeking a crisis for this purpose. This supports #3.
That he did not express an authoritarian approach during his first admin, reflects the lack of loyal operatives who would do his bidding without need for the follow-up his indolence prevented. I have read that many of his staffers would simply wait a week before starting to act on anything Trump directed with which they disagreed to see if he would ask about it. In most cases he would have forgotten about it, and it never was implemented. The new team will be much more willing and able to do what he asks for. This is what things like Project 2025 are intended to address. They have surveyed loyalists from the previous Trump admin to distill down what MAGA means in terms of policy making and staffing and come up with a plan to make enacting the Trump agenda as smooth as possible, requiring as little involvement from Trump as possible, Ideally, leaving it up to Trump issuing a Picardian "make it so" for MAGA things to happen. This strengthens the case of #3
As far as I can tell, #4 does not apply.
Trump has many times vowed to go after his enemies, which if he is serious fits #5. Trump did claim to want to imprison his opponent in the 2016 election, but never did. My understanding is he did order an investigation of Clinton, that came up with nothing that would stick. Because Trump did not have loyalists who would do as he asked, he could not do (we are told) what he wanted to, he had to work through Republican officials who had served in previous administrations, many of whom would not break the law or otherwise support his program, some of whom gave the warnings I mentioned above. Hence he could not “lock her up” because he had disloyal people as he sees it.
After 2016 he has had 8 years to establish his control over the Republican party and purge it of those who are disloyal to the president. We can expect he has succeeded in doing this, Documents like Project 2025 show considerable effort has been made to draw up plans for how to retool the government to put more power directly in the hands of the president to make it easier for Trump to do want he wants to do. Just because he could not lock her up last time doesn’t mean he can’t this time. He certain has said he wants to, promises to do so, and given his indictments, feels more threatened and so has the motivation for doing so. Given all this, I think it is reasonably clear that #5 applies.
So 3½ out of 5 parts of the fascist definition seem to apply. Is 70% of fascist close enough to be a fascist? Maybe not a full-fledged Hitler wannabe, but being this close seems unsettling to me.
Also, the "lock her up" rhetoric was completely abandoned once he gained office the first time. Yes, it's disconcerting that perhaps he won in 2016 in part due to that rhetoric. But at no point do I remember him or his administration focusing around suppression of opposition. He has been reciprocating, to a degree, the suppressive forces FROM his opposition, which have been a constant force ever since he began to gain traction in the 2016 campaign.
Canidates do try to implement campaign promises, when feasible. I read here, but cannot recall which post, that Trump did make an attempt at lock he up by asking some of his subordinates to look into charges. They couldn't find anything that would stick, but they weren't true blue MAGA types so Trump might have thought they did not try hard enough. But now he is angry about people going after him for the sort of lawbreaking he used to do with impunity. So, he is likely to lash out.
Trump did not talk about aggressively going after the Left during the 2016 campaign, When Trump was president, these things happened:
1. Trump wanted shots to be fired at White House protesters.
https://www.axios.com/2022/05/02/mark-esper-book-trump-protesters
2. Trump wanted to deploy 10K troops to quell 2020 protests but was stopped.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-george-floyd-protests-wanted-to-deploy-troops-rifles-bayonets-2021-11
Now Trump IS promising retribution on his enemies and (ideological) enemies of MAGA. He refers to these people as scum and vermin, which is the kind of dehumanizing language used by authoritarians to depress empathy for those on whom the force will be used. There is good reason to believe there will be more desire to deploy force (he is promising mass arrests of millions of people.
What makes me worry more is the sheer number of conservatives who served in his administration who are issuing warnings. What makes me worry less is the fact that Trump was not indicted in 2021, but in 2023.
You make some strong points here.
On #3, I would push back on the whole Project 2025 being some sort of plug and play agenda. He's publicly denounced it and the campaign has tried to distance themselves. Yes, I know that the Heritage foundation is replete with former Trump staffers. That doesn't mean that they have a spot or a say in his administration if he were to be elected.
"Centralized autocratic government" seems quite contrary to Trump's rhetoric around de-regulation and decreasing the amount of influence the federal government has.
I perused parts of Project 2025, and parts of the America First Institute, which is a low-profile source of what MAGA is about. Both are pretty much the same sort of thing. They appear to be an effort by people in the Trump team to translate the things Trump seems to care about as observed by those who worked for him into some sort of action plan.
What else can you use to get an idea of what he is about, the incoherent mess he calls "the Weave" he talks about? Even if you try to pull out nuggets out of that morass, does that even mean anything? Trumps lies all the time and so is an unreliable source of information.
I don't pay much attention to what the candidates say anyway. The president is only one person, their administration is defined by the hundreds of appointees they bring in with them, over which they preside. In the distant past, parties had platforms that were meaningful, more recently, candidates wrote books and campaigns created detailed issue documents. Trump has written no book, his party did not even issue a platform in 2020, acknowledging that was passe and his campaign issues information said little of substance. Documents like Project 2025 can give you a better idea of what the Trump administration will try to do than any other publicly available information.