A couple of weeks ago, I attended a conference in upstate New York, where the American writer and film-maker Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm, Restrepo) traced his father’s flight from the Nazis.
From Dresden he made it to Spain, then to France, and then to Portugal. Eventually he managed to settle in America in 1941 because “he said fascism would never follow him here”.
Junger did not need to labour the point because it may well be that the guarantee of a fascism-free America is a warranty about to expire. There is a 50-50 chance that, a week from now, a fascist will be heading back to the Oval Office.
The US in which Junger’s father found refuge was by no means a full democracy. Millions of Black citizens were systematically disenfranchised. White supremacist groups had deep roots and powerful political influence.
But the US did have vibrant democratic institutions, traditions and civic movements and it did, of course, expend an immense amount of blood and treasure in helping to liberate Europe from the Nazis. It was not naive to imagine that this was one place where fascism would not follow.
It is now. The term I coined in writing about Donald Trump as president in 2017 was “pre-fascist”. It was intended to suggest that although he was not there yet, the direction of travel was clear. But it’s been obvious for a while that the “pre” should be dropped.
[ Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flowOpens in new window ]
Rather belatedly, Kamala Harris has used the f-word about Trump. Last week, John Kelly, the former Marine general who was Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, said that “he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure”.
Another retired general who worked closely with Trump, the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley told Bob Woodward, as reported in Woodward’s new book War, that “Now I realise he’s a total fascist”.
Some historians object to this characterisation on the grounds that Trumpism doesn’t look quite the same as the fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s.
But firstly, fascism has never been an entirely uniform system. (Anti-Semitism, for example, was not central to Benito Mussolini’s original version – he called it a “German vice” – but fundamental to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi project.)
And secondly, it should be obvious that its current form, in the age of social media and postmodern performative politics, would not be an exact match for what it was like a century ago.
The one solid objection is that fascist regimes are typically geared towards war – and that Trump is not. He is indeed the first US president to display open contempt for America’s cult of its military heroes – whom he regards as “losers and suckers”.
But Kelly tells Woodward that Trump’s gripe in office was that his military leaders were not unquestioningly loyal.
“Why”, he asked Kelly, “can’t you be like the German generals?” Kelly says he responded “Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’”
Trump’s idea of war is internal. He proposes to use the army against what he now openly calls “the enemy within” and wants generals who will do his bidding without question. Trump, who told Kelly that Hitler did “some good things”, has openly embraced the Führer’s rhetoric.
The basis of his entire campaign has been the demonisation of an out group (dark-skinned immigrants instead of Jews) as “vermin”, underpinned by a eugenicist claim that they are “poisoning the blood of our country”. This is a direct echo of Mein Kampf: “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning”.
But how far can he go? His pet supreme court, remember, has already cleared his path by declaring him above the law for any official acts he may commit as president. Criminal justice is not an impediment.
Trump has set out his criminal intentions quite explicitly: revoking the broadcast licences of TV stations that displease him; jailing and encouraging the rape in prison of journalists who do not reveal their sources; violent attacks on “radical left lunatics” (a category that encompasses mainstream liberals and Democrats) by the National Guard, “or if really necessary, by the military”; prosecuting his political opponents and Democratic donors (Trump has so far issued over a hundred threats to prosecute his enemies); conducting show trials (Trump approved a call for “televised military tribunals” to go after “traitors” like the Republican dissident Lynne Cheney); arresting poll workers who do not produce the right election “results”; sending the military to take control of Democrat-run cities and repress protests; rounding up millions of undocumented migrants and holding them in vast camps pending deportation.
Some of this is relatively easy to do and some very hard. The easy stuff is taking control of the department of justice and ordering its prosecutors to instigate cases against anyone Trump dislikes. At the very least, this can wreck people’s lives, miring them in legal costs, making it impossible for them to work and intimidating other dissenters.
The harder stuff is getting the military to build concentration camps and conduct huge sweeps of American cities for people to fill them. It is telling that it is former generals who have taken the lead in calling out Trump’s fascism – the army does not want to become Trump’s storm troopers. My guess is that this will be more a media war than anything else – terrorising communities and building hysteria.
Trump is lazy and incompetent – he prefers golf to government – old and increasingly unhinged. He will also be distracted by two things.
One is the opportunity for corruption on a massive scale: the blank cheque the supreme court has handed him is literal as well as figurative. The other is dynastic planning. He will want his son Don jnr rather than JD Vance to be his successor. The manoeuvring will make the Borgias look like the Waltons.
So Trump 2.0 would be fascism tempered by senility, greed and nepotism. We find our consolations where we can.