Donald Trump and fascism
[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, xenophobia, national-security scares, religious bigotry, white racism, exploitation of economic insecurity, and a never-ending search for scapegoats.
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.
[38] 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.
"[51] 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".
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.
[58] The attack on the United States Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump on January 6, 2021, has been compared by some academics to the Beer Hall Putsch,[59] a failed coup attempt in Germany by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler against the Weimar government in 1923.
[10][61] 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".
[68][69][70] In 2018, Dr. Mike Cole, emeritus professor in education and equality at Bishop Grosseteste University (UK)[71] 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.
[74][75][76] During a rally in 2023, Trump stated:[77] 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 Bahnhof ...
[47] Since the fall of 2023,[81] 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.
[87] 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.
[89] 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".
[94][95][96] This policy directly led to the large-scale,[97][98] forcible separation of children and parents arriving at the United States-Mexico border,[99] including those who were seeking asylum from violence in their home countries.
[113] 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.
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.
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".
[125] 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.
[127] 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".
[136] 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.
[139] 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.
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".
[141] 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".
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.
[150] 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.
[159] 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.
[162] 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.
[173] 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.
[174] 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.
[176] 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".
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.
