“The twentieth century was excellent proof evil was alive and well, and this has reinforced the positions of modern Manichaeans. They saw a world that could be temporarily abandoned by God, but not by Satan.”
—Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis
Donald Trump’s presidency has sparked a heated debate about the past, particularly over whether the Trump administration should be judged on a continuum with fascist regimes whose “protean origins” reach back to the beginnings of the modern nation-state, but which a number of contemporary thinkers believe are “still with us.”1 This is a compelling argument, one that combines the resources of historical memory with analyses of the distinctive temper of the current historical moment in the United States. For instance, an increasing number of critics across the ideological spectrum have identified Trump as a fascist or neo-fascist whose administration echoes some of the key messages of an earlier period of fascist politics. On the left/liberal side of politics, this includes writers such as Chris Hedges, Robert Reich, Cornel West, Drucilla Cornel, Peter Dreier, and John Bellamy Foster.2 Similar arguments have been made on the conservative side by writers such as Robert Kagan, Jet Heer, Meg Whitman, and Charles Sykes.3
Historians of fascism such as Timothy Snyder and Robert O. Paxton have argued that Trumpism is not comparable to Nazism, but that there are sufficient similarities between them to warrant some concerns about surviving elements of a totalitarian past crystalizing into new forms in the United States.4 Paxton, in particular, argues that the Trump regime is closer to a plutocracy than to fascism. I think Paxton’s analysis overplays the differences between fascism and the kind of far-right political formations currently taking shape under the influence of Donald Trump.5 If Trump has his way, traditional state power will succumb to the influence of wealthy individuals and corporations. We have already seen that the social cleansing and state violence inherent in totalitarianism have been amplified under Trump.
Both Hannah Arendt and Sheldon Wolin, the great historians of totalitarianism, argued that the dangerous conditions that produce totalitarianism are still with us. Wolin, in particular, insisted that the United States was evolving into an authoritarian society.6 In contrast, other historians and pundits have downplayed or simply denied the association of totalitarianism with the United States. With respect to Trump, they argue he is either a sham, a right-wing populist, or simply a reactionary. Three notable examples of the latter position include cultural critic Neal Gabler, Corey Robin, and Victoria de Grazia. Gabler argues that Trump is mostly a self-promoting con artist and pretender president whose greatest crime is to elevate pretentiousness, self-promotion, and appearance over substance, all of which proves that he lacks the capacity and will to govern.7 Corey Robin argues that Trump bears no relationship to Hitler or the policies of the Third Reich, and in doing so not only dismisses the threat that Trump poses to the values and institutions of democracy, but plays down the growing threat of authoritarianism in the United States. For Robin, Trump has failed to institute many of his policies and hence is just a weak politician with little actual power. Not only does Robin focus too much on the person of Trump, but he is relatively silent about the forces that produced him and the danger these proto-fascist social formations now pose to those who are the objects of the administration’s racist, sexist, and xenophobic taunts and policies. Trump and his Vichyesque collaborators have put in place a culture of fear and cruelty that evokes a distinctly authoritarian regime and cannot be dismissed by simply focusing on Trump as some sort of reckless clown.8
As Robin D.G. Kelley pointed out to me in a personal correspondence, Corey Robin “falls into the trap of confusing the president’s behavior with what his administration is doing and what political and cultural changes are taking place all around us.” By focusing exclusively on Trump the failed politician, Robin both normalizes the conditions that produced Trump and the varied forces at work in producing an emerging if not actually existing authoritarianism. Under the Trump administration, life is stripped of all transcendent values and is reduced to those vile discourses, policies, and values that reproduce nativistic, white supremacist politics and a society inhabited by a ruling elite whose life, borrowing a phrase from Byung-Chul Han, “equals that of the undead. They are too alive to die and too dead to live.”9
Those arguments suggesting we have to choose between whether Trump is just a twittering clown or a Hitler in the making miss the point of how dangerous the current historical moment is and the degree to which Trump is a symptom of the rise of illiberal democracy in many other countries and a political party at home that embraces distinctly American authoritarian impulses and elements of fascism.10
An extended version of this argument can be found in the work of historian Victoria de Grazia, who has argued that Trump bears little direct resemblance to either Hitler or Mussolini and is just a reactionary conservative.11 Trump is not Hitler in that he has not created concentration camps, shut down the critical media, or rounded up dissidents; moreover, the United States at the current historical moment is not the Weimar Republic. But it would be irresponsible to consider him a clown or aberration, given his hold on power and the ideologues who support him.
At best, Trump and his deeply bigoted advisors speak to the social, cultural, and economic anxieties of many working-class Americans, particularly white Americans. Their efforts to consolidate power, repress dissent, thwart investigation, and engage in a politics of fabrication increasingly pose a national security crisis that resembles aspects of the fascism that emerged in the 1930s. On the other hand, Trumpism is a unique product of our times, our commercial culture, and the media. Before his death in 1975, Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini suggested that commercialism could lead to new, non-traditional forms of fascism. “I consider consumerism to be a Fascism worse than the classical one,” Pasolini said, “because clerical Fascism didn’t really transform Italians, didn’t enter into them. It was a totalitarian state but not a totalizing one.”12 Corporate commercialism today is totalizing. The result is an advertising-saturated culture that permits a rich con artist like Donald Trump to abandon any pretense of civility, accountability, or integrity and simply play by the rules of celebrity and advertising to hype, scam, and market his way to power.
Decontextualizing Trump’s rise to power and personalizing his presidency are more than ahistorical fantasies, they also underestimate the ways in which neoliberalism has devalued and waged a full-scale assault on the ideologies, values, institutions, and modes of solidarity necessary for a functioning democracy. As Wendy Brown observes:
On the one hand, I would argue that only when democracies have already been devalued, weakened, and diminished in meaning—as they have been under neoliberalism—could a full-scale assault on democracy from the right take place as we see today. So this authoritarian—I’m wary of using the term “populist”—contempt for liberal democratic institutions and values we see sweeping across the Euro-Atlantic world has a lot to do with three decades of devaluing and diminishing democracy. . . . So this is not a radical break from neoliberalism. . . . Trump was certainly not able to mobilize conservatives and Evangelicals to vote for him because we’ve suddenly become “overrun” with immigrants from the South. The ground for Trump’s rise was tilled not just by neoliberalism’s destruction of viable lives and futures for working and middle-class populations through the global outsourcing of jobs, the race to the bottom in wages and taxes, and the destruction of public goods, including education. This ground was also tilled by neoliberalism’s valorization of markets and morals and its devaluation of democracy and politics, Constitutionalism and social justice.13
Trump’s ability to attract followers was based in part on his call to “drain the swamp,” suggesting he would address the corrupt merger of politics, money, and corporate power in Washington. Rather than drain the swamp, he has expanded it and elevated corporate power and privilege to new and almost unprecedented levels. Not only has he initiated tax reforms that egregiously benefit corporations and the ultra-rich, he has also given new life to Pasolini’s insights about the deadening force of consumerism. For example, Trump has pushed legislation that would overturn “a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule that permits class-action lawsuits against banks and credit unions.”14 Senator Elizabeth Warren called the bill “a giant wet kiss to Wall Street.”15 It is hard to make this stuff up. It gets worse. What appears indisputable is that the Trump family’s occupation of the White House not only furthers the interests of the Trump family business, it furthers decades of effort from the larger financial elite to undermine the democratic institutions that seek to hold them accountable to the same laws of the land that average Americans must live by. The threat of authoritarianism has become the crisis of our times.16 Democracy, openness, and accountability are under attack.
History, once again, offers us a context in which a global constellation of forces is coming together in ways that speak to tensions and contradictions animating everyday lives. Little coherent and critical language is in use to address these forces. Fear, angst, paranoia, and incendiary passion escalate as a result. It would be wise to revisit one of the key questions that emerges from the work of Hannah Arendt: Are the events of our time are leading us to become a totalitarian society?
Whether or not Trump is a fascist in the manner of earlier totalitarian leaders somewhat misses the point. Though the legacies of past authoritarian regimes persist in contemporary politics, there is no exact blueprint for fascism. As Adam Gopnik observes:
To call [Trump] a fascist of some variety is simply to use a historical label that fits. The arguments about whether he meets every point in some static fascism matrix show a misunderstanding of what that ideology involves. It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form—an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and romantic. It took forms still crazier and more feverishly sinister, if one can imagine, in Romania, whereas under Oswald Mosley, in England, its manner was predictably paternalistic and aristocratic. It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter’s come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy’s.17
The fact is that Trumpism fetishizes the Andrew Jackson presidency, a gateway to normalizing historical social intolerance and violent white supremacy as forms of official national heritage. Taken with nationalist appeals, these forces coalesce into contemporary manifestations of a pro-fascist system, an increasingly militarized, top-down order in which what the supreme leader says goes, irrespective with how closely it comports with fact, consensus, law, or the common good. Historian Timothy Snyder also suggests that the real issue is not whether Trump is a literal model of other fascist leaders but whether his approach to governing and the new political order he is producing are fascistic. He writes:
I don’t want to dodge your question about whether Trump is a fascist or not. As I see it, there are certainly elements of his approach which are fascistic. The straight-on confrontation with the truth is at the center of the fascist worldview. The attempt to undo the Enlightenment as a way to undo institutions, that is fascism. Whether he realizes it or not is a different question, but that’s what fascists did. They said, “Don’t worry about the facts, don’t worry about logic, think instead in terms of mystical unities and direct connections between the mystical leader and the people.” That’s fascism. Whether we see it or not, whether we like it or not, whether we forget, that is fascism. Another thing that’s clearly fascist about Trump were the rallies. The way that he used the language, the blunt repetitions, the naming of the enemies, the physical removal of opponents from rallies, that was really, without exaggeration, just like the 1920s and the 1930s.18
To date, the ascendency of Trumpism has been compared to the discrete emergence of deeply reactionary nationalisms in Italy, Germany, France, and elsewhere. Broadening the lens with which we view events happening in the United States allows for a deeper historical understanding of the international scope and interplay of forces that characterize globalization. We are currently seeing socially grounded responses and authoritarian responses (of which ultra-nationalism is one) to the intensifying impact of neoliberal capitalism. Such impact includes catastrophic climate change, technological disruption, acute inequities in wealth and power, mass migrations, permanent warfare, and the increasing possibility of a nuclear war. In the United States, indications of authoritarianism are present in Trump’s eroding of civil liberties, the undermining of the separation of church and state, health care policies that reveal an egregious indifference to life and death, and attempts to shape the political realm through a process of chronic fabrication and intolerance, if not, as Snyder insists, tyranny itself.19
History not only grounds us in the past by showing how democratic institutions rise and fall, it is also replete with memories and narratives of resistance that pose a dangerous threat for any fascist system. This is particularly true today given the ideological features and legacies of fascism that are deeply woven into Trumpism’s rhetoric of retribution, intolerance, and demonization; its mix of shlock pageantry, coercion, violence, and impunity; and the constant stoking of ultra-nationalism and racial agitation.
Keeping historical memory alive is a form of resistance because it questions everything and complicates one’s relationship to power, oneself, others, and the larger community. It also functions “to give witness to the truth of the past so that the politics of today is vibrantly democratic.”20 Historical memory matters because it offers a form of moral witnessing, and serves as a crucial asset in preventing new forms of fascism from becoming normalized. The conditions leading to fascism do not exist outside of history in some ethereal space in which everything is measured against the degree of distraction it promises. Historical memory is a prerequisite to the political and moral awakening necessary to successfully counter authoritarianism in the United States today.
The echoes of fascism in Trump’s actions have been well documented, but what has been overlooked is a sustained analysis of his abuse and disparagement of historical memory, particularly in light of his relationships with a range of extreme right-wing networks at home, and dictators and political demagogues across the globe. Trump’s ignorance of history was on full display in his misinformed comments about former U.S. president Andrew Jackson and nineteenth-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Trump’s comments about Jackson having strong views on the Civil War were widely ridiculed given that Jackson died sixteen years before the war took place. Trump was also criticized for comments he made during Black History Month when he spoke about Frederick Douglass as if he were still alive, though he died 120 years ago. For the mainstream press, these historical missteps largely reflect Trump’s ignorance of American history.
But there is more at stake than simply ignorance. Trump’s comments provide a window into his ongoing practice of stepping outside of history so as to deny its relevance for understanding both the economic and political forces that brought him to power, and the historical lessons to be drawn in light of his embrace of authoritarian elements. His alleged ignorance is also a cover for enabling a “post-truth” culture in which dissent is reduced to fake news, the press is dismissed as the enemy of the people, and a mode of totalitarian education is enabled whose purpose, as Hannah Arendt has written, is “not to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”21
Trump’s disrespect for journalists appears to have found a home in the wider culture of control and violence. For instance, Peter Maass notes that “journalists physically [are] prevented from asking questions of officials, arrested when trying to do so, and in a now-infamous example from Montana, body-slammed to the ground by a Republican candidate who didn’t want to discuss his party’s position on health care. [This] is most likely a prelude” to more ominous forms of repression.22 Maass argues that Trump’s targets in the future will be “government officials who provide us with the news for our stories.”23
Robert Reich sees a broader potential reach of such repression, arguing that Trump has supplemented his attack on the press and government officials with huge budget cuts that roll back civil rights enforcement. For instance, he states that the Trump administration has initiated massive cuts in the investigative arm of the Civil Right Division, the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance, “which investigates discrimination by companies with federal contracts, [and] the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights—charged with investigating discrimination in America’s schools.”24 He has also called for eliminating “the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice program—which combats higher rates of pollution in communities of color.”25 Instead of fighting the out-of-control opioid crisis in the United States, Trump and Sessions have decided to enforce pot prohibition and force states to recriminalize marijuana possession and distribution.26 In spite of how difficult it may be for Sessions to wage this war, it does signal his willingness to criminalize harmless behaviors as part of a broader attempt to expand the reach of the carceral state.
Donald Trump’s supportive relationships with dictators and demagogues around the world also speaks volumes. As the New York Times editorial board stated on November 13, 2017:
Authoritarian leaders exercise a strange and powerful attraction for President Trump. As his trip to Asia reminds us, a man who loves to bully people turns to mush—fawning smiles, effusive rhetoric—in the company of strongmen like Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines. Perhaps he sees in them a reflection of the person he would like to be. Whatever the reason, there’s been nothing quite like Mr. Trump’s love affair with one-man rule since Spiro Agnew returned from a world tour in 1971 singing the praises of thuggish dictators like Lee Kuan Yew, Haile Selassie, Jomo Kenyatta, Mobutu Sese Seko and Gen. Francisco Franco.27
Mutual endorsements of and by a range of international dictators include Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, the Egyptian president; Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Vladimir Putin, president of Russia; Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines, and the unsuccessful French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen. All of these politicians have been condemned by a number of human rights groups including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Freedom House.28 Less has been said about the support Trump has received from controversial right-wing bigots and politicians from around the world such as Nigel Farage, the former leader of the right-wing UK Independence Party; Matteo Salvini, the right-wing Italian politician who heads the North League; Geert Wilders, the founder of the Dutch Party for Freedom; and Viktor Orban, the reactionary prime minister of Hungary. All of these politicians share a mix of ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and hatred of Muslim immigrants. While the mainstream press and others have expressed moral outrage over these associations, they have refused to examine these relationships within a broader historical context. Trump’s affinity for indulging right-wing demagogues is part of the formative culture for enforcing hierarchy intolerance, exclusion, and cruelty.
Historical memory suggests that a better template for understanding Trump’s embrace of rogue states, dictators, and neo-fascist politicians can be found in the history of collaboration between individuals and governments, and between the fascist regimes of Italy and Germany before and during the Second World War. For instance, one of the darkest periods in French history took place under Marshall Philippe Pétain, the head of the Vichy regime, who collaborated with the Nazi regime between 1940 and 1944. The Vichy regime was responsible for “about 76,000 Jews [being] deported from France, only 3,000 of whom returned from the concentration camps. . . . Twenty-six percent of France’s pre-war Jewish population died in the Holocaust.”29 For years, France refused to examine and condemn this shameful period in its history by claiming that the Vichy regime was an aberration, a position that was taken up in the 2016 French presidential election by Marine Le Pen, the neo-fascist National Front Party leader. Not only did Le Pen deny the French government’s responsibility for the roundup of Jews sent to concentration camps between 1940 and 1944, but she also used a totalitarian script from the past by appealing to economic nationalism in order “to cover up her fascist principles.”30
The deeply horrifying acts of collaboration with twentieth-century fascism were not limited to France, but included collaborators in Belgium, Croatia, the Irish Republican Army, Greece, Holland, and other countries. At the same time that millions of people were being killed by the Nazis, many businesses collaborated with them in order to profit from the fascist machinery of death. Businesses that collaborated with the Nazis included Kodak, which used enslaved laborers in Germany. Hugo Boss manufactured clothes for the Nazis. IBM created the punch cards and sorting system used for identifying Jews and others in order to send them to the gas chambers. BMW and chemical manufacturer IG Farben utilized forced labor in Germany, along with another car company, Audi, which “used thousands of forced laborers from the concentration camps . . . to work in their plant.”31
The political and moral stain of collaboration with the Nazis was also evident in the United States in both FDR’s and the American business community’s initial supportive views of Mussolini. Moreover, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out,
In 1937 the State Department described Hitler as a kind of moderate who was holding off the dangerous forces of the left, meaning of the Bolsheviks, the labor movement . . . and that of the right, namely the extremist Nazis. [They believed] Hitler was kind of in the middle and therefore we should kind of support him.32
One telling manifestation of America’s deeply rooted affinity with fascistic principles was the America First movement of the 1930s. America First was the motto used by Americans friendly to Nazi ideology and Hitler’s Germany. Its most famous spokespersons were Charles Lindbergh and William Randolph Hearst. The movement had a long history of anti-Semitism, made apparent in Lindbergh’s claim that American Jews were pushing America into war. Historian Susan Dunn has argued that the phrase “America First,” which was appropriated and used by Donald Trump before and after his election, is a “toxic phrase with a putrid history.”33
The awareness of these historical correspondences functions to deepen our understanding of Trump’s current associations with right-wing demagogues, and should serve as a warning that offers up a glimpse of both the contemporary recurrence of fascist overtones from the past and our current immersion in what Richard Falk has called “a pre-fascist moment.”34 Trump’s endorsements of right-wing demagogues such as Duterte, Le Pen, and Erdogan are more than an aberration for a U.S. president: they suggest an ominous disregard for human rights and human suffering, and the imminent suppression of dissent including the very principles of democracy itself. As Michael Brenner observes, “authoritarian movements and ideology with fascist overtones are back—in America and in Europe. Not just as a political expletive thrown at opponents, but as a doctrine, as a movement, and—above all—as a set of feelings.”35
It is against this historical backdrop of collaboration that Trump’s association with various dictators should be analyzed. Trump’s infatuation with Rodrigo Duterte is particularly telling. Duterte is a ruthless dictator who has savagely imposed a campaign of terror on the people of his country. He has been condemned by U.N. officials and human rights organizations across the globe for conducting a brutal anti-drug campaign. According to Felipe Villamor of the New York Times, “Mr. Duterte has led a campaign against drug abuse in which he has encouraged the police and others to kill people they suspect of using or selling drugs.”36
Duterte’s brutality does not seem to concern Trump, and warning signs of his own authoritarian proclivities abound in his invitation to Rodrigo Duterte to visit the White House. A leaked transcript of Trump’s call inviting him to the White House revealed that Trump offered Duterte full support for his savagely bloody war on drugs—a war in which the police and vigilantes have killed thousands of people, most of whom are from the economic underclass.37 According to the leaked transcript published by the Intercept, Trump said, quote, “I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem. Many countries have the problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you are doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that.”38 Villamor quotes Duterte stating that “Donald J. Trump had endorsed his brutal antidrug campaign, telling Mr. Duterte that the Philippines was conducting it ‘the right way.’ Mr. Duterte, who spoke with Mr. Trump by telephone . . . said Mr. Trump was ‘quite sensitive’ to ‘our worry about drugs. He wishes me well, too, in my campaign, and he said that, well, we are doing it as a sovereign nation, the right way.”39
What Trump failed to address was that Duterte has supported and employed the use of death squads both as mayor of Davao and as the president of the Philippines. He has established what is essentially a nationwide killing machine that includes giving “free license to the police and vigilantes” to kill drug users and pushers while allowing children, innocent bystanders, and others to be caught in the indiscriminate violence.40 The New York Times has reported that under Duterte’s rule “more than 7,000 suspected drug users and dealers, witnesses and bystanders—including children—have been killed by the police or vigilantes in the Philippines.”41 It is terrifying to believe that a U.S. president would endorse such policies. Trump’s alleged support of Duterte also raises questions about how much violence he might use in the United States against dissident journalists. Duterte has told journalists, “You are not exempted from assassination, if you’re a son of a bitch.”42 David Kaye, a U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, stated in response to Duterte’s threat that “justifying the killing of journalists on the basis of how they conduct their professional activities can be understood as a permissive signal to potential killers that the murder of journalists is acceptable in certain circumstances and would not be punished.”43 During his 2017 tour of Asia, Trump met with Duterte and reaffirmed his “great relationship” with the Philippine dictator while making no mention of human rights, “although the pair did discuss their mutual distaste for Barack Obama.”44 Trump’s fondness for dictators appears to have no limits, especially in the case of Duterte, a monster whom the New York Times has described as relishing “the image of killer-savior. He boasts of killing criminals with his own hands. On occasion, he calls for mass murder.”45 On the subject of drug addicts, he has stated, “I would be happy to slaughter them.”46
Duterte has called former U.S. President Obama “the son of a whore,”47 has drawn comparisons between himself and Hitler,48 and has stated—now proven by the leaked transcript—that Trump approves of his drug war,49 in addition to threatening to assassinate journalists.50 Duterte’s likening himself to Hitler offers a horrifying view of his embrace of lawlessness as a governing principle and his use of the machinery of death to enforce his rule. Comparing himself to Hitler, Duterte’s own words speak for themselves:
Hitler massacred 3 million Jews. Now, there is 3 million—what is it? Three million drug addicts, there are. I’d be happy to slaughter them. At least if Germany had Hitler, the Philippines would have [me]. You know, my victims, I would like to be all criminals.51
Duterte’s legalized brutality is captured by photographer Daniel Berehulak, who while in the Philippines states that he had “worked in 60 countries, covered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and spent much of 2014 living inside West Africa’s Ebola zone, a place gripped by fear and death, [but] what I experienced in the Philippines felt like a new level of ruthlessness: police officers summarily shooting anyone suspected of dealing or even using drugs, vigilantes taking seriously Mr. Duterte’s call to ‘slaughter them all.’”52
Trump’s open support for Duterte may arise out of his admiration for Duterte’s militant approach to crime, hatred of the press, and enforcement of one-man rule. It may also have to do with the Trump family’s various business ventures in the Philippines, including ownership of a new $150 million tower in Manila’s financial district.53 All of these issues represent elements of Trump’s extreme allegiance to his own insatiable self-interest and to a number of anti-democratic policies he has crafted, possibly both. Either way, Trump is degrading democracy in the United States, while his ties with Duterte should serve as a caution regarding how much further he might want to go.
Trump’s tacit support for Le Pen’s failed bid for the presidency of France rests on his sympathies with her anti-immigration policies, ultra-nationalism, and her claim to speak for the people. Like Le Pen, Trump has turned deflection into an art, as he directs attention away from real problems such as rising inequality, a carceral state, human rights violations, climate change, and a persistent racism that demonizes and scapegoats others. Trump wants to join hands with those other right-wing leaders who declare a similar intent to build walls and beef up the security state. His affinity for collaboration with Le Pen is matched only by his affinity for his white nationalist and white supremacist devotees, both of which feed his own narcissistic impulses, bigotry, hatred of Muslims, and what Juan Cole calls “neo-fascism” cloaked in the guise of “economic patriotism.”54
At the same time, Trump’s disdain for human rights, a critical press, and dissent has endeared him to Vladimir Putin in Russia, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, and Egypt’s bloodthirsty dictator, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Erdogan, Putin, el-Sisi, and Trump are ideological bedfellows who harbor a great deal of contempt for the rule of law, the courts, or any other check on their power. Erdogan, in particular, has not only imposed a state of emergency on his country and installed himself as a virtual dictator, but has also purged and arrested dissidents in the critical media and in academia. After Erdogan assumed dictatorial powers through what many believe was a rigged election, Trump congratulated him in a phone call. Erdogan and Trump are ideological intimates, only Erdogan has carried his authoritarian policies to a greater extreme. He is on record as describing his political system as an “illiberal state,” where there can “be no room for cosmopolitan, free thought.”55 He has made good on his embrace of authoritarian rule by jailing his opposition, including journalists, academics, and civil servants. He has been particularly ruthless in attacking the autonomy of Turkey’s universities and has pledged to close the internationally renowned Central European University in Budapest.56
El-Sisi is a brutal military dictator “who overthrew his country’s democratically elected president in a 2013 coup, killed more than 800 protesters in a single day, and has imprisoned tens of thousands of dissidents since he took power.”57 Soon after el-Sisi came to power on July 3, 2013, he put into place many of the policies that were essential to his establishing an authoritarian government. As Joshua Hammond points out:
That fall, Sisi launched a sweeping crackdown on civil society. Citing the need to restore security and stability, the regime banned protests, passed antiterrorism laws that mandated long prison terms for acts of civil disobedience, gave prosecutors broad powers to extend pretrial detention periods, purged liberal and pro-Islamist judges, and froze the bank accounts of NGOs and law firms that defend democracy activists. Human rights groups in Egypt estimate that between 40,000 and 60,000 political prisoners, including both Muslim Brotherhood members and secular pro-democracy activists, now languish in the country’s jails. Twenty prisons have been built since Sisi took power.58
Trump’s response to his human rights violations and the turning of Egypt into a police state was to publicly announce that he was “very much behind President el-Sisi. He’s done a fantastic job in a difficult situation.”59 Trump has also offered to meet with Thailand’s prime minister, Prayuth Chan-ocha, a junta head who is responsible for jailing dissidents after he took power through a coup. But the masterpiece of Trump’s terms of endearment for his fellow leaders is undoubtedly his description of one of the most brutal and disturbed dictators in the world, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, as “a smart cookie.” While it is difficult to know what he admires about Kim Jong Un, he does mimic much of his authoritarian behavior, particularly his addiction to the threat of violence. For instance, when Kim Jong Un stated that he has a “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times,” Trump responded with a mix of breath-taking immaturity and the threat of unimaginable violence stating, “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”60
Trump has repeatedly praised Vladimir Putin, which is not surprising given Trump’s business ties with Russia. As Trump made clear in 2013 on the Late Show with David Letterman, “I have done a lot of business with the Russians.”61 Many people believe that Trump’s business connections far exceed what he is willing to admit. His refusal to publicly disclose his tax returns has been criticized as a way for Trump to hide shady business dealings, including financial ties with Russia.62 While Trump’s business connections with Russia are not clear, there is a deeper concern about the degree to which Trump might be indebted to economic and political interests in Russia. Jeremy Venook rightly observes:
Trump’s track record in doing business in Russia doesn’t definitively demonstrate that he currently has connections to the country. . . . It also doesn’t in any way mean that he colluded with Russia during the campaign, which is the reason for the FBI’s investigation. But the problem underlying the inquiry into Trump’s financial ties isn’t simply whether he currently has projects there; it’s whether his dealings leave him indebted to the Russian government or the nation’s oligarchs, which could compromise his decision-making.63
The processes by which Donald Trump rose from being a petty celebrity and self-promoting wheeler-dealer to president of the United States and commander in chief of its global military apparatus will be studied for years to come. The key issue is not whether black swans like the Trump family will continue to appear—they will. Rather, the issue is understanding the underlying social, political, and commercial forces that enable them to achieve power and impose their interests over those of the common good. When individualized resentment, brute force, and scapegoat-centered violence are normalized, we move closer to becoming a militarized police state and a fascist society. As we do, it becomes too easy to forget the totalitarian tendencies that drove the United States to invade Iraq, commit torture, perpetrate war crimes, degrade the ecosystem, and conduct extensive surveillance of its own population. The Trump family is only a symptom, not the cause, of our troubles.
Amid the anxiety regarding Trump’s power over the country, we must recognize that indignation can be channeled into various forms of productive resistance, or it can be appropriated and manipulated as a breeding ground for resentment, hate, bigotry, and racism. What is clear is that Trump knew how to turn such an odious appeal into both a performance and a spectacle—one that mimicked the darkest anti-democratic impulses of the modern era. Many on the left called any critique of Trump prior to his election victory “hysterical,” since they assumed he could never win, and instead portrayed Hillary Clinton as the new Satan who had to be demonized at all costs. This kind of binary thinking is not only bad politics but may have inadvertently fed the zeal for authoritarian rule that has advantaged the spread of Trumpism. As Bob Herbert mentioned to me:
Trump threatens everything we’re supposed to stand for. He’s the biggest crisis we’ve faced in this society in my lifetime. The Supreme Court is lost for decades to come. His insane tax cuts will only expand (and lock in) the extreme inequality we’re already facing. I don’t need to provide a laundry list for you. The irony of ironies, of course, is that the very idiots, racists, misogynists, and outright fools who put him in the presidency will be among those hammered worst by his madness in office.64
Under Trump’s power and influence, the state of democracy in the United States will be set back for years, especially given Trump’s propensity for vengeance, crushing dissent, and sheer animosity toward anyone who disagrees with him. We have already seen this with a wave of policies that include his withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Accord; his attacks on Black youth coupled with his call for an increase in racial profiling as a centerpiece of his law-and-order plank; his call to lower taxes for the rich, deregulate business restrictions, and eliminate social welfare programs; making good on his pledge to appoint a die-hard conservative to the U.S. Supreme Court, and his expanding of the police state as he further militarizes the borders and accelerates mass deportations. We need a broad-based movement for a radical democracy, one that brings together various isolated movements to struggle for a democracy appropriate for the twenty-first century, based on participatory democracy and a massive redistribution of wealth and power.
While the light of our present democracy, however flawed, dims, we cannot let anger and resentment distort our organizing and political work. It is time to wake up and repudiate the notion that the interests of corporations and those of citizens are one and the same. They are not. We must use our indignation to fight collectively for a democracy that refuses to forget the atrocities of the past so that it might secure a better future. Such a struggle is a process, a call to continue organizing to safeguard the promise of democracy for the generations ahead. Such a struggle must also address the ways new configurations of power are imposing a harsh culture of cruelty that will further heighten the contradiction between the possibility of democracy that the United States has stood for and the present-day confluence of political authoritarianism, white supremacy, corporate power, and creeping fascism.