David Runciman writes:

On 6 January 2021, two weeks before he was due to leave office, Trump encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol in a bid to prevent the congressional ratification of his election defeat. Though Trump claims he was not responsible for what happened next, the riot that followed – with his supporters storming government buildings and elected officials fleeing for their lives – echoed some of the darkest chapters of modern European history. This is how fascists behave when democracy stops working for them. It was monstrous. But it was also ridiculous. The mob seemed clueless what to do once they had breached the Capitol’s defences. They were dressed for a day trip, not an insurrection. Some – most notoriously the “QAnon shaman” in his horned raccoon headgear and patriotic face paint – looked as though they were headed for a kids’ fancy-dress party. If this was fascism, it was also a farce.

The question of whether a conman can also be a fascist – or a fascist also a conman – has become more pressing after Trump came within inches of becoming a martyr for the cause. On 13 July Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to assassinate Trump at a campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania, grazing the candidate’s ear with one shot and killing a member of the crowd with another. A few weeks earlier, the New Republic – a left-leaning magazine – had published a special issue devoted to the threat posed by Trump’s potential return to the White House. Its cover pictured him with a Hitler comb-over and toothbrush moustache (based on a 1932 Nazi campaign poster), with the tagline “American Fascism: What Would It Look Like”. The image went viral.

Plenty of Trump’s supporters were quick to link the two events. Chip Roy, a Republican congressman from Texas, tweeted an image of the New Republic cover after the assassination attempt with the words, “You bastards.” JD Vance, who had not yet been chosen as Trump’s running mate, wrote, “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” This despite the fact that in 2016 Vance had posted on Facebook, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump might be a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he might be America’s Hitler.”

Cynical asshole or fascist? Since 2016, Trump’s behaviour has made the question more acute without settling it. Robert O Paxton, an authority on the historical definition of fascism, argued in 2017 that, despite many overlaps, Trump did not ultimately fit the bill: he was too much of a poser, too lacking in a coherent political programme and too much of a plutocrat. Hitler expropriated the wealthy; Trump sucks up to them. But after the events of 6 January 2021, Paxton changed his mind. In Newsweek a few days afterwards he wrote, “Trump’s incitement of the invasion of the Capitol … removes my objection to the fascist label. His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line.” Trump’s time in office, by implication, had not revealed him to be a fascist (he had, after all, failed to deliver on his promise to jail his main political rival, as he had failed to deliver on many of his promises). It was the manner of his refusal to leave office that had moved the dial.

Michael Tomasky, editor of the New Republic, wrote in his introduction to the magazine’s American fascism issue, “We at the New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, ‘He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.’” The articles that followed laid out what life in the US under a second Trump term might be like. They imagined far greater repression of minorities, a violent clampdown on illegal immigration, co-option of the US military by Trump, infiltration of the US state by hardline ideologues, the hollowing out of democratic institutions and curtailment of civil liberties. It would certainly look a lot like fascism. [Continue reading…]