American Fascist 2024

 

American Fascist 2024

May 31, 2024

 

Back in October, 2016, when Donald Trump was the Republican candidate for president and it appeared that he might win (mostly because so many people so irrationally hated Hillary Clinton) I put a post on this blog with the title “American Fascist.” I argued as best I could that the term fascist truly does apply to Trump. I discussed first what the word fascist means. Then I attempted to describe what it could mean for someone to be a true fascist in the American context. Sadly, I must now say that parts of that essay seem hopelessly naïve today. Back in those days I stressed that American fascism was not violent, that it had not tried to grasp or retain power through violence. The events of January 6, 2021, belie my claim that violence has never played a role in the transition of power in our country and likely never would. I must now revise what I said in 2016.

I must start this revision by stating the undeniable fact that Donald Trump, who still is undeniably an American fascist, lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden. He lost both the popular vote and the electoral college vote. The election officials of every state, many of them Republicans, certified the outcome of the vote in their state to Congress. There is absolutely no evidence of any significant voter fraud in the 2020 election. None. Anywhere. Biden won the election fair and square. Trump lost it fair and square. About that there simply is no doubt.

Trump has never conceded the election to Biden. A concession by a losing candidate in an election in this country has no legal significance, but it is nevertheless traditional in this country for a candidate for any political office who loses an election to concede defeat and wish the winning candidate well in the position to which that candidate has been elected. John McCain, for example, conceded defeat to Barack Obama in a most gracious and positive concession speech. Concession has no legal effect, but it often brings an election to a de facto close and facilitates the winning candidate peacefully assuming the office to which she has been elected.

Donald Trump has never admitted that he lost to Biden. He has never wished Biden success in his presidency. Quite the contrary. Against all of the evidence, Trump continues to claim not only that he won the election but that he actually won it in a landslide. He keeps on insisting that somehow someone stole his victory from him. There isn’t a shred of evidence to support that claim. Nonetheless, Trump had Rudy Giuliani and other lawyers file frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit in the round 1 of his attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. They lost every one of those cases because they weren’t able to present a single piece of evidence in support of their claim of election fraud.

These frivolous lawsuits were round 1 of Trump’s efforts to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election. That attempt failed, but it wasn’t the last round in Trump’s fight to overturn the election that he lost. Round 2 consisted of a demand to Vice President Pence that he use his position as President of the Senate to throw out the electoral college votes the states had submitted to the Senate and to declare that either Trump won the presidency or declare the election void. I am no fan of Mike Pence, but we all owe him a debt of gratitude for telling Trump that he did not have the legal authority to do such a thing. He refused to comply with Trump’s demand in any way as he presided over the Senate’s certification of the election results. Round 2 of Trump’s efforts to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election thus failed just as round 1 had.

So Trump instigated round 3, the incitement of violence against the United States Senate, in fact against the Constitution of the United States that Trump had sworn to protect and defend when he was inaugurated as president. He called on his supporters to come to Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, the date when Congress would convene to certify the election of Joe Biden as President of the United States. He told them there would be a “wild time” in Washington that day. As the Senate was convening to perform its constitutional duty, as pro forma as that duty might be, Trump held a big rally near the White House and just up Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol. In his typical manner, he whipped the crowd into a frenzy against the Senate and against Pence, repeating lie after lie about how he really won the election. He told them to march to the Capitol. They did. They tried violently to stop Congress from performing its constitutional duty. Mostly thanks to Vice President Pence, round 3 of Trump’s attempt to stay in power through unlawful means failed just as rounds 1 and 2 had.

Thus our nation experienced the gravest threat to our form of government since the Civil War, and we witnessed the first attempt by anyone to overturn the results of a free and fair American election by force. That attempt failed, thank God; but that day we saw a fascist president resort to strongarm tactics in what amounted to an attempt to overthrow American democracy. Back in 2016, when Trump was elected president, it never occurred to me that our more than two hundred year old tradition of respect for the electoral process and the nonviolent transfer of power would end after the next presidential election. It certainly never occurred to me that the duly elected President of the United States, the fascist Donald Trump, would play a key role in bringing those noble traditions to an end. Yet that is what happened in our nation’s capital city on January 6, 2021.

I can no longer say what I said in my earlier post about violence never having played a role in the transfer of the presidential office. I can no longer say what I said then about American fascism not having anything like Hitler’s brownshirts. Organized groups of violent American fascists like the Proud Boys played a central role in the January 6 assault on American democracy. Our political culture has descended to a depth I not only didn’t think I’d ever see but that I thought we were incapable of reaching. Well, I did live to see it, and there seems to be no bottom for the outrages of our American fascists. It appears they will stop at nothing to grab power. And we can thank Donald Trump and his incessant stream of lies about the 2020 election for bringing American fascist scum out of the shadows and making American fascism almost if not quite socially respectable. My conclusion back in 2016 was correct. Donald Trump is an American fascist. Now I know that he is a far worse fascist than I thought he was. My bad. I’ve tried to correct it here.

Donald Trump is an American fascist, but just what is a fascist? Historically speaking, the word comes from the political party and movement led by Benito Mussolini during and after World War I in Italy. The word “fascist” derives from a symbol of power in ancient Rome that consisted of a bound bundle of rods with an axe head protruding from it. It became the symbol of Italian fascism. Mussolini seized power in Italy in 1922 and destroyed what had been a democratic government.

For many decades now, we have associated the word fascist less with Mussolini than with Adolf Hitler. Mussolini inspired Hitler. Adolf Hitler was an absolute nobody until the mid to late 1920s. He was never prominent at anything other than leader of the Nazi party. He had been a corporal in the German army in World War I. He tried to be a successful artist in Vienna but failed. He came to prominence when, in 1923, he led an attempt to seize the government of the German state of Bavaria by force. That attempt failed, but Hitler served only a short time in jail for having led a violent insurrection against the government. While he was in jail he wrote Mein Kampf, an appallingly badly written book that lays out the plans for dictatorship and extermination of Europe’s Jews and others that Hitler planned to carry out if he ever got the chance. He got that chance in 1933, when German President von Hindenburg appointed him chancellor, thinking that the traditional conservative forces in Germany could control him. They were wrong. As we all know, Hitler proceeded to plunge Europe into Europe’s most destructive war ever and to carry out the Holocaust, surely the greatest sin against humanity anyone has ever committed.

Is Donald Trump an American Hitler? His biography has little in common with Hitler’s. Trump was born into money. His father got him started in the real estate business in New York City. He claims to be a wildly successful businessman and to be very rich. He wasn’t as successful a business man as he claims to be. He has filed bankruptcy several times. He and his organization have been found liable for massive violations of New York state business law. No one outside of his inner circle knows how rich he really is. He is a shameless self-promoter. He gained national prominence through a television show called The Apprentice on which he played a very successful businessman. He neither held nor ran for any political office until he announced his run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Adolf Hitler clearly had some sort of personality disorder. So does Donald Trump. He is a narcissist who cares only about himself, his wealth, and his having political power. It is not clear, at least to me, where Trump came up with his fascist politics, but he certainly has them.  

It is now 2024, and we have another presidential election in November of this year. Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee for president once again. He has managed to turn the Republican Party, once called the Grand Old Party, the party of Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, and Dan Evans, into a political entity that has no purpose other than to put Donald Trump back in office. It walks in lockstep with Trump the way the Nazi party walked in lockstep with Adolf Hitler. There are former Republicans who oppose Trump, but there are no current prominent Republicans who do.

Trump once said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his supporters would not abandon him. That appalling statement is being proved true. Trump hasn’t shot anyone or had anyone shot yet, but on the day before I wrote this essay, a jury in the case of New York v. Trump found Trump guilty of thirty-four counts of the felony of falsifying business records in the first degree. As of May 30, 2024, Donald Trump is a convicted felon. Yet every Republican politician the press has quoted on the subject has attacked that verdict and the case in which it was brought as fraudulent and rigged. Trump claims that the judge in that case is corrupt, something for which there is not a shred of evidence.

It remains to be seen what this guilty verdict does to Trump’s support among the American public, but the Republican Party is marching in lockstep with Trump once again. It’s prominent politicians don’t so much say Trump was innocent of the charges against him, which he clearly wasn’t. Rather, they attack the American system of criminal justice that produced the guilty verdict in the first of Trump’s several criminal indictments to come to trial. The Republicans’ attack on the rule of law is a purely fascist action. Shortly after Hitler came to power he essentially got Germany’s parliament to suspend the law and give Hitler unlimited power. If Trump becomes president again, he will almost certainly take actions as close to Hitler’s as he can get away with.

Trump and his MAGA movement are conducting an assault on an foundational principle of American democracy, namely, the rule of law. They reject the tenet of that rule that says that no one, not even the president, is above the law. Fascists reject democracy, and the MAGA movement is fascist. Trump has said, in effect at least, that he does not support the constitution of the United States. He wants to replace American democracy with his own authoritarian rule. He wants to fill the federal government not with qualified public servants but with sycophants whose loyalty is to him not to the constitution or the American people. January 6 represented a grave threat to American democracy. November 5, 2024, the date of the next presidential election, presents an even greater threat to the American way of government. If Donald Trump wins that election, and it looks very much like he could, American democracy may never recover.

If Trump loses the 2024 presidential election, will his supporters, who include members of violent militias, use force in an attempt to put him back in the White House? There is no way to know, but they used force on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to keep him in the White House. If President Biden beats Trump in 2024 the way he did in 2020, our nation will have to be prepared to counter violent attacks on government institutions and officials. Nothing is beneath Trump or his vehement supporters. It is a characteristic of fascist movements to try to seize power by force when they cannot do it legally. We face a threat to our freedoms and to our democratic system of government like none we have faced since the Civil War, which ended over a century and a half ago. Will American freedom face and defeat that threat? Maybe, but I wish I were confident that it will.