Claims that Trump is fascist have always lacked substance. There has been no shortage of pundits cranking out books and commentaries claiming that Trump is a proto-, semi-, or even fully fledged fascist. But their claims often amount to little more than historically illiterate hyperbole. The best they can often come up with to substantiate the accusation of fascism is the fact that Trump has said anti-democratic things, such as his claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Yet if that makes Trump a fascist, what does that mean for Hillary Clinton and her Democratic enablers? They spent much of Trump’s presidency claiming that he had effectively ‘stolen’ the 2016 election, with help from Russia.
Or, if anti-Trumpers are really pushing the fascism analogy, they will portray last year’s Capitol riot not as an unorganised rampage of assorted malcontents, but as an act of insurrection, a direct and deliberate assault on democracy, a Reichstag Fire for the 2020s.
Even ostensibly ‘academic’ attempts to draw parallels between historical fascism and Trumpism end up diluting the historical specificity of fascism. Signs of Trump’s alleged fascism are said to be found in the fact that he is ‘authoritarian’, ‘illiberal’, or ‘nationalist’. And so fascism ends up being turned into a label that can be applied to a vast array of political administrations across the world.
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