Table of Contents
I. Why the F-Word Still Matters
II. The Architecture of Fascism
III. Trump – the American Translation?
IV. Inside the Strongman’s Mindset
V. Narrative as a Weapon
VI. Knowledge as Battleground
VII. Monuments, Memory, and the War on “Woke”
VIII. Miller, Bannon, Musk: The Trinity of Extremism
IX. Counterarguments and Rebuttals
X. How Democracies Counter a Fascist Configuration
XI. The Courage to Diagnose
Bibliography
I. Why the F-Word Still Matters
Not the four-letter outburst, not the one that turns patriarchy red in the face, but one far more dangerous: fascism. It is the term mainstream academic and media conversation circles tiptoe around, warned that it is overused, alarmist, or merely partisan. The worry is not new. In 1944, George Orwell observed that “the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”¹ The caution is sensible: when every opponent becomes a “fascist”, the concept dissolves into insult and history loses its precision.
But this avoidance carries its own distinct hazard: the risk of conceptual and analytical underestimation of a clear and present danger. Fascism is not a rhetorical flourish; it names a historical, ideational, and organisational reality with a distinctive structure and purpose. To pretend otherwise, when its patterns recur, is intellectual abdication.
As Robert Paxton argues, fascism is best understood as a form of political behaviour — a dynamic process that arises in crisis, exalts a leader who claims exclusive representation of the nation, and licenses transgressive means in the name of national rebirth.² Roger Griffin’s classic formula captures the same core: palingenetic ultranationalism — the promise to redeem a humiliated people by purifying and regenerating the nation.³
These are not museum pieces; they are living blueprints. Two errors must be resisted. The first is inflation — using the word as a catch-all for any illiberal act. The second is euphemism — downplaying plainly fascistic tendencies as merely “authoritarian” or “illiberal”. The discipline is to name fascism when the evidence warrants, and not before. This paper does exactly that, applying established political-science criteria to Donald J. Trump.
The claim is not that Trump replicates Mussolini or Hitler feature-for-feature — history never repeats so neatly — but that, when filtered through the definitional core, Trump’s method and intent align with fascism rather than mere authoritarianism.
We will show this by examining his personalised cult, his deliberate corrosion of institutional constraints, his war on the press and universities, his palingenetic promise (“make the nation great again”), and his instrumentalisation of political violence.
A brief note on scope and fairness. This thesis evaluates Trump himself — his leadership style, rhetoric, decisions, and the system he builds around him — not the moral worth of every person who has voted for him. Fascism is leader-centric and elite-enabled. It is about the project and its operating system: advisers who translate grievance into programme (Stephen Miller), propagandists who weaponise mass affect (Steve Bannon), and powerful platforms that normalise unreality at industrial scale (a media-tech environment in which an individual like Elon Musk can structurally amplify disinformation and delegitimisation of democratic authority).
The focus is analytic, not pejorative. We ask whether the architecture of Trump’s politics — its ends and means — matches the fascist blueprint.
Why insist on the word at all? Because, as Jason Stanley argues, fascist politics works by normalising its own extremism — by muddying epistemic waters until truth appears optional and the very act of naming becomes suspect.⁴ If we accept that drift, language loses its edge precisely when democracies need it sharpest.
The project of this paper is to keep the edge keen: to separate the merely authoritarian from the frankly fascist, to show why the latter label fits Trump, and to do so with evidence rather than invective. In short: neither coy nor reckless — just accurate.
¹ George Orwell, “What Is Fascism?” Tribune, 1944.
² Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Knopf, 2004).
³ Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1991).
⁴ Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (New York: Random House, 2018).
II. The Architecture of Fascism
Fascism is best grasped as a configuration of ideas, institutions, and behaviours rather than a single policy or symbol. Political science offers two complementary lenses. First, a minimal ideological core: Roger Griffin’s formulation of palingenetic ultranationalism — the promise of national rebirth after decadence, under a unifying, purifying politics.⁵ Second, a process model: Robert Paxton’s account of how movements pass from fringe agitation to alliance with conservative elites, to power, to radicalisation and rule through licensed transgression.⁶
These converge in practice: an authoritarian leader claims exclusive representation of the nation, mobilises a mass following around grievance and mythic renewal, and dismantles liberal constraints to remake society.⁷
1) Italy: The Prototype
The first fascist regime arose in Italy after World War I amid economic crisis, social unrest, and elite panic. Benito Mussolini fused a paramilitary movement (the Blackshirts) with electoral politics, then leveraged violence, patronage, and monarchical deference to convert a precarious foothold into dictatorship.⁸ The ideology he canonised in The Doctrine of Fascism announced an all-encompassing state in which individual rights exist only insofar as they serve national destiny: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”⁹
This was not mere rhetoric. Through emergency decrees, censorship, party monopoly, and corporatist structures binding labour and capital to state aims, Fascism sought to regiment the economy and civil society without abolishing private property.¹⁰
Equally central was the sacralisation of politics: rituals, uniforms, myths of Rome, and choreographed mass spectacle to transfigure the leader into the nation’s living spirit.¹¹ Violence had a redemptive aura — punitive squads enforced conformity while projecting vitality and will.¹² The result was a mobilising dictatorship with totalitarian aspiration (though uneven capacity), sustained by propaganda, repression, and a cult of the leader (Il Duce).¹³
2) Germany: Totalitarian Radicalisation
German National Socialism radicalised the model. The Nazi seizure and consolidation of power (Gleichschaltung) combined legal instruments (the Enabling Act) with extralegal terror (SA/SS intimidation) to obliterate pluralism.¹⁴ The Führerprinzip personalised sovereignty: law and institutions were subordinated to the leader’s will, celebrated as the authentic voice of the people.¹⁵
Propaganda under Goebbels saturated public and private life; independent media and parties were extinguished; culture, education, and youth were organised to produce a compliant, militant citizenry.¹⁶
Nazi ideology fused palingenetic nationalism with biological racism: the Volksgemeinschaft (“people’s community”) demanded racial purification, culminating in exclusion, expropriation, and genocide.¹⁷ War and conquest were framed as the summit of national regeneration, with violence treated as creative destruction.¹⁸ Economically, the regime combined private ownership with dirigiste control, rearmament, and cartels oriented to strategic goals.¹⁹ The system realised a totalitarian project more fully than Italy: comprehensive repression, mass mobilisation, and genocidal policy as state raison d’être.²⁰
3) Spain: Authoritarian Convergence with Fascist Elements
Francisco Franco’s dictatorship emerged from civil war, not electoral breakthrough. While Falange doctrines imported fascist motifs — national syndicalism, leader cult, paramilitary aesthetics — the mature regime settled into a clerical-military authoritarianism more conservative than revolutionary.²¹ It repressed pluralism, centralised power, cultivated nationalist myth, and harnessed church and army to enforce social hierarchy, but lacked the same totalising mobilisation and utopian re-founding drive found in Italy and Germany.²²
Even so, Spain demonstrates how fascist methods and symbols can infuse a broader authoritarian project: single-party hegemony, censorship, corporatist shells, and ritualised loyalty to a paternal leader.²³
4) From Cases to Criteria: The Fascist Configuration
Across these regimes, a repeatable pattern appears. For our analytic framework, we distil ten dimensions — each historically grounded and mutually reinforcing:
These elements admit variation (Spain’s traditionalism vs. Germany’s racial revolution; Italy’s corporatism vs. Germany’s rearmament cartels), but the through-line is constant: a leader-centred movement promising national regeneration through unity, hierarchy, and transgression, institutionalised by one-party dominance, propaganda, coercion, and the ritual politics of belonging.²⁴
Two clarifications sharpen the tool we will now apply. First, fascism is not reducible to generic authoritarianism. Authoritarians often conserve an existing order; fascists seek revolutionary refoundation, mobilising the masses to build a new national polity.²⁵
Second, fascism is not a mere style. It is a programme with institutional implications: leader sovereignty, party–state fusion, rule-by-decree, elimination of pluralism, politicised violence, and a state-directed social/economic order.²⁶
With this blueprint, we can examine contemporary cases for family resemblance and degree — not checklist literalism. The next section applies this framework to Donald J. Trump’s political project.
⁵ Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 26–30.
⁶ Robert O. Paxton, “The Five Stages of Fascism,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 1 (1998): 1–23.
⁷ Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Knopf, 2004), ch. 2.
⁸ R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy (London: Penguin, 2006).
⁹ Benito Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism” (1932), in Fascism: Selected Texts, ed. Adrian Lyttelton (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000).
¹⁰ Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).
¹¹ Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
¹² Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
¹³ Philip Morgan, Italian Fascism, 1915–1945 (New York: Palgrave, 2003).
¹⁴ Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris (London: Penguin, 1998).
¹⁵ Ian Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
¹⁶ Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
¹⁷ Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
¹⁸ Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2003).
¹⁹ Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Allen Lane, 2006).
²⁰ Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).
²¹ Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
²² Stanley G. Payne, Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).
²³ Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
²⁴ Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism (Westport: Praeger, 2003).
²⁵ Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000).
²⁶ Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1945).
III. Trump – the American Translation?
Fascism is not a museum exhibit; it is an operating system. Using the blueprint above, we examine how Trump’s political project instantiates its core modules. The focus is architecture (ends and means), not partisan distaste. Where relevant, historical parallels (Mussolini’s decrees, Hitler’s propaganda state, Franco’s cultural regimentation) are woven in to clarify the pattern — not to force a one-to-one equivalence.
1) The Cult of the Leader [cf. Criterion 2: Leader Cult & Personalism]
Trump’s politics is organised around a personal sovereign who claims unique insight and exclusive representation of the “real nation”. The programme’s centre is not a platform; it is him. His 2016 acceptance speech crystallised the logic: “I alone can fix it.”²⁷ That line is not a flourish; it is a theory of authority.
The leader becomes the nation’s voice and will, which in the German case was theorised as Führerprinzip. In practice, this produces (a) loyalty tests that trump law or competence, (b) an ever-expanding circle of enemies (anyone disloyal), and (c) a politics of affect — mass rallies, chants, and ritual humiliation of out-groups — rather than deliberation.
The cult requires control over narrative, which is why Trump identifies independent arbiters — press, courts, scientists — as illegitimate when they contradict him. Branding the press “the enemy of the people” is not a mere insult; it is a claim that truth and representation reside solely in the leader, a classic move of totalising movements.²⁸
Compared with Mussolini’s balcony theatre and Hitler’s Nuremberg choreography, the media differ, but the function is constant: fusing audience and leader into a unitary political body through spectacle. Psychologically, the cult is stabilised by grievance and grandeur — narcissistic entitlement wrapped in national destiny. The more institutions resist, the more the cult intensifies, because resistance proves the conspiracy and justifies escalation.
2) Attacks on Institutions (Executive Overreach, Judiciary, Civil Service, Universities) [cf. Criterion 5: Anti-Liberalism & Anti-Pluralism]
Rule by decree, or as close as possible. Fascist regimes normalise rule by decree. In the U.S. system, overt decree is constrained, but Trump’s method is to govern by executive order and memorandum as the default instrument, then to delegitimise or circumvent checks when blocked. The clearest early example was Executive Order 13769 (“travel ban”), targeting entire national/religious categories rather than individualised risk.²⁹ When courts intervened, the order was iterated rather than abandoned — an authoritarian learning loop familiar from interwar cases (legal defeat → tactical revision → persistence of the core aim).
Personalising the state. Late-term moves like “Schedule F” sought to collapse the boundary between a merit civil service and a patronage/loyalty apparatus, enabling mass purges of career officials and replacement with personal loyalists.³⁰ That is a structural attempt to personalise the state, a key step in party–state fusion.
Delegitimising the judiciary and law enforcement. Trump routinely framed adverse judicial decisions as attacks by “biased” or “so-called” judges, and pressed the Department of Justice to protect friends and pursue enemies — culminating, after the 2020 election, in pressure on DOJ leaders to declare the election corrupt so he and allies could “leave the rest to me.”³¹ He directly badgered state officials (e.g., Georgia’s secretary of state) to “find” votes, collapsing the distinction between campaign and state power.³² This is not ordinary norm-breaking; it is an assault on the neutral architecture that stands between leadership will and law.
Subjugating expertise; weaponising the administrative state. From science agencies to inspectors general, the through-line was loyalty over legality: sidelining or removing officials whose findings contradicted presidential narratives; recoding neutral functions as political assets.³³ Proposals to re-impose Schedule F in a subsequent term would turn this practice into a system, aligning the bureaucracy to leader sovereignty — Mussolini’s logic translated into American administrative law.
The university as the enemy. Trump framed higher education as radical indoctrination and moved to chill campus speech via a “free inquiry” executive order tied to federal funds.³⁴ He launched an anti- “critical race theory” drive to restrict what public bodies could teach about race and gender (OMB’s “divisive concepts” memo).³⁵ The “1776 Commission” was positioned as an alternative magisterium offering a state-sanctioned narrative in place of critical inquiry.³⁶
3) Media as the Enemy (Propaganda & Unreality) [cf. Criterion 6: Propaganda & Unreality]
Fascist politics requires an epistemic monopoly. Where legal monopoly is impossible, a de facto monopoly is pursued: flood the zone with unreality, delegitimise independent media, and elevate friendly channels. Trump promised to “open up” libel laws and waged a continuous information war against outlets that contradicted him.³⁷ He separately threatened to challenge broadcasters’ licences, signalling willingness to use state levers against critical networks.³⁸
In the digital space, the system scales. The goal is not just messaging but infrastructure: an attention economy that rewards outrage, conspiracy, and leader-centric narratives. Post-2020, changes in platform ownership and policy at scale demonstrated how a single private decision-maker could structurally amplify disinformation and the delegitimisation of democratic processes; not classical state propaganda, but functionally analogous in collapsing a common fact-world.³⁹
4) Palingenesis: National Rebirth via In-Group Purity and Out-Group Menace [cf. Criteria 1 & 9: Palingenetic Myth & Exclusionary Nationalism]
Trump’s mythic core is palingenesis: “American carnage” as diagnosis, “Make America Great Again” as cure.⁴⁰ The emotional cadence is classic: a humiliated nation, a corrupt elite, and the pure people threatened by internal enemies; only a singular leader can restore glory.
The policy expression centres on categorical exclusion and stigmatisation — travel-ban orders; “zero tolerance” and family separations as deterrence theatre; and steep cuts to refugee admissions.⁴¹ This is not merely a “tough” policy. It is the politics of purity: define the nation’s essence, locate pollutants, and promise renewal through removal.
That logic animated fascist projects from Rome’s bonifica (moral reclamation) to the Volksgemeinschaft’s racial cleansing. In contemporary U.S. form, it appears as ethno-civilisational talk — who is “truly” American — and as crusades against allegedly subversive doctrines (CRT, “wokeness”) said to be dissolving national strength.⁴²
The in-group/out-group frame is sealed by a victimhood inversion: the dominant group is cast as persecuted, entitled to “any action” in self-defence. Paxton identifies this entitlement as a fascist constant; Trump’s movement is saturated in it.⁴³ The leader then licenses and models transgression — mocking legal constraints as weakness, depicting opponents as enemies of the nation — so that violence appears curative rather than criminal.
5) Violence as Political Renewal [cf. Criterion 4: Licensed Violence]
The most revealing episode is the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The project was multi-pronged: a months-long disinformation campaign (“stolen election”), pressure on state officials and DOJ to manufacture legitimacy, mobilisation of supporters to “fight like hell”, and, on 6 January, the breaching of the Capitol by a coalition that included organised extremist groups later convicted of seditious conspiracy.⁴⁴
In a 2020 debate, the leader told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”, an unmistakable signal that para-political force belonged to the movement’s repertoire.⁴⁵ Earlier cues normalised the idea that force corrects politics: praising the assault of a reporter; urging “rougher” treatment of suspects; musing that “Second Amendment people” might have solutions if courts or elections failed.⁴⁶ The federal deployment to Portland in 2020 (including unmarked officers detaining protesters) previewed a willingness to blur lines between public order and political control.⁴⁷
No, this is not the SA or Blackshirts. But the function is familiar: party-aligned or leader-signalled actors using intimidation and violence to achieve political ends, while formal authorities are pressured to ratify the leader’s will. 6 January marked the passage from rhetorical brinkmanship to attempted self-coup — exactly the juncture Paxton describes as a crossing of the red line from authoritarian populism into overtly fascist method.⁴⁸
Transitional synthesis
On each dimension of the blueprint — leader cult, institutional corrosion, epistemic capture, palingenetic nationalism, and licensed transgression — already in his first presidency, Trump’s architecture matches the fascist configuration more closely than generic authoritarianism. The differences (federal constraints, absence of a formal one-party state) reflect context, not intent; where law blocked totalisation, the project adapted (executive governance, administrative purges, platformised propaganda, extra-institutional mobilisation).
The next section analyses the psychological engine that drives and stabilises this system — how narcissism, paranoia, projection, and loyalty-testing convert grievance into a politics of domination.
²⁷ Donald J. Trump, “Transcript: RNC Acceptance Speech,” New York Times, July 21, 2016.
²⁸ Committee to Protect Journalists, “The Trump Administration and the Media,” 2017–2021.
²⁹ U.S. National Archives / Federal Register, Executive Order 13769 (2017).
³⁰ Brookings Institution, Molly E. Reynolds and Jonathan R. Siegel, “What Was Schedule F, and Why It Matters,” 2022.
³¹ Senate Judiciary Committee (Majority Staff), Subverting Justice, Oct. 2021.
³² The Washington Post, “Transcript and Audio of Trump’s Call with Georgia’s Secretary of State,” Jan. 3, 2021.
³³ U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, Staff Report on HHS/CDC Interference, Dec. 2022.
³⁴ U.S. National Archives / Federal Register, Executive Order 13864 (2019).
³⁵ Office of Management and Budget, Memorandum M-20-34, “Training in the Federal Government,” Sept. 4, 2020.
³⁶ President’s Advisory 1776 Commission, The 1776 Report, Jan. 18, 2021 (archived).
³⁷ The New York Times, “Trump Vows to ‘Open Up’ Libel Laws,” Feb. 26, 2016.
³⁸ RCFP (Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press), U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, 2017–2021.
³⁹ The New York Times, “Elon Musk Completes $44 Billion Deal to Acquire Twitter,” Oct. 27, 2022.
⁴⁰ Donald J. Trump, “Inaugural Address,” Jan. 20, 2017 (U.S. National Archives).
⁴¹ HHS OIG, Separated Children Placed in ORR Care, Jan. 2019.
⁴² Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Project 2025). Washington, D.C., 2023.
⁴³ Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Knopf, 2004).
⁴⁴ Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack, Final Report. Washington, D.C.: GPO, 2022.
⁴⁵ Presidential debate, Sept. 29, 2020; transcript.
⁴⁶ Reuters, “Trump Suggests ‘Second Amendment People’ Could Act if Clinton Appoints Judges,” Aug. 9, 2016; BBC News, “Trump Praises Congressman for Body-Slamming Reporter,” Oct. 19, 2018.
⁴⁷ GAO, Federal Response to Protests in Portland, Oregon, GAO-21-334, 2021.
⁴⁸ Robert O. Paxton, “The Five Stages of Fascism,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 1 (1998).
IV. Inside the Strongman’s Mindset
This section treats psychology as political technology: not a clinical verdict, but an account of traits that, when embedded in institutions and amplified by media, produce the fascist configuration described earlier. We focus on the leader’s operating style — how dispositions translate into rule: personalisation of authority, normalisation of transgression, sacralisation of in-group identity, and instrumentalisation of violence and unreality.
1) Grandiosity, Fragility, and the Politics of Humiliation
Fascist movements thrive on a paradox: grandiose destiny paired with perceived humiliation — both national and personal; Erich Fromm described this as an “escape from freedom,” where the burden of uncertainty is transformed into submission to a leader who promises certitude and greatness.⁴⁹
The leader’s narcissistic grandiosity — the insistence on unique insight and indispensability — demands continual ego-regulation through public adoration and ritual victory (rallies, chants, ratings). And when reality resists, the defence is denial, rage, and scapegoating. Adorno’s classic work on the authoritarian personality traced this to a character structure prone to submission upward and aggression downward.⁵⁰
In Trump’s practice, grandiosity (“I alone can fix it”) coexists with hyper-reactivity to slights — judges, journalists, scientists, even subordinates are redefined as enemies if they contradict him. The well-documented expectation of personal loyalty from senior law-enforcement officials exemplifies the conversion of state roles into fealty relations — an authoritarian hallmark and a step toward party–state fusion.⁵¹
2) Paranoia, Conspiracy, and the Siege Narrative
Fascist politics requires a continuous state of emergency — a narrative of the nation under siege from “enemies within” coordinated by a hidden hand. Karen Stenner’s research shows how threat and normative flux activate demands for oneness and authority, and how leaders can manufacture threat to keep this activation high.⁵²
Bob Altemeyer’s work similarly documents how authoritarian followership is primed by perceived danger and elite cues that legitimise aggression.⁵³ Trump’s repertoire — “deep state” plots, rigged elections, omnipresent “traitors” — constructs a totalising conspiracy that makes moderation look like betrayal, justifies extraordinary measures, and pre-licenses disbelief of adverse facts.
3) Projection, Victimhood, and Moral Inversion
A constant of fascist rhetoric is projection: attribute to enemies what you intend to do. Hannah Arendt called this the “lie in the form of truth,” where the regime’s plans are announced as accusations against opponents.⁵⁴
The leader’s personal projection fuses with collective victimhood inversion — the dominant group recast as persecuted, entitled to limitless self-defence. Paxton identifies this entitlement as a core permission structure for transgression, and it aligns with the classic mechanism of moral disengagement that lifts ordinary restraints because “they started it.”⁵⁵
4) Cruelty-as-Signal and the Pedagogy of Domination
Authoritarians use cruelty performatively to demonstrate impunity and to teach followers what is permissible. Ruth Ben-Ghiat shows how public humiliation of rivals, minorities, and critics functions as a bonding ritual and spectacle of dominance.⁵⁶
In Trump’s case, policies and rhetoric that gratuitously inflict pain (e.g., family separations as deterrence theatre; public mockery of the vulnerable; humiliation in front of cameras of state representatives like Zelensky) serve a communicative purpose: mark out-groups as subhuman, thrill the base with acts of “strength,” and test institutional pushback.⁵⁷
The cultural shorthand — “the cruelty is the point” — captures its pedagogical role: cruelty is not a by-product; it is a signal of who rules and who counts.⁵⁸
5) Gaslighting, Unreality, and Epistemic Capture
Fascism requires epistemic control: truth must become the leader’s will. Arendt’s analysis of totalising movements and Stanley’s account of fascist politics detail how myth, conspiracy, anti-intellectualism, hierarchy, and unreality wean a polity off verification.⁵⁹
Timothy Snyder’s axiom makes the stakes explicit: post-truth is pre-fascism — abandon facts, abandon freedom.⁶⁰
Trump’s method is not Goebbels’ monopoly but platformised gaslighting: flood the environment with contradictions, deny yesterday’s statement, punish independent arbiters, and reward loyal media, binding insiders into a shared, unfalsifiable world in which every constraint becomes proof of conspiracy.
6) Synchrony, Spectacle, and Crowd Capture
Gustave Le Bon and Elias Canetti described how synchrony and spectacle dissolve individuals into crowds susceptible to suggestion and domination. Fascist politics exploits this via mass rallies and stylised performances that enact unity and intoxicate with belonging.⁶¹
Trump’s rallies — chants, call-and-response, ritualised enemies — produce affective fusion: not mere events but embodied pedagogy teaching who “we” are and what must be done to “them.”
7) Loyalty Tests, Purges, and the Personalisation of the State
Because truth and law are subordinated to the leader, the critical administrative task is to purge neutral competence and install personal loyalty. Comparative research shows personalist leaders degrade institutional capacity to increase regime security, and policies like reclassifying civil servants for at-will removal (“Schedule F”) formalise this personalisation.⁶²
8) Risk-Seeking Transgression and the Big Lie
Fascist politics normalises rule-breaking as proof of authenticity: only the leader dares to do what must be done. Strategically, repeated transgressions shift the Overton window, inure the public, and train allies to defend the indefensible, with the “Big Lie” binding identity so tightly (“the election was stolen”) that rejecting it is to exit the community — hence the narrative’s progression toward an attempted self-coup.⁶³
9) From Disposition to System
None of these traits, taken singly, is unique to fascism; what matters is the configuration: grandiosity seeking adoration, fragility demanding loyalty tests; paranoia building siege narratives; projection and cruelty licensing dehumanisation; gaslighting capturing epistemics; spectacle fusing crowds; purges personalising the state; the Big Lie mobilising extra-legal force.
Trump’s psychology is not a clinical curiosity at the margins of politics; it is the engine of the architecture mapped in Section III — traits that make the means (transgression, intimidation, unreality) feel necessary and the ends (unity through purification) feel righteous — why “authoritarian” understates the case.
⁴⁹ Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941).
⁵⁰ Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950).
⁵¹ Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018).
⁵² Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
⁵³ Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarians (2006).
⁵⁴ Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1951).
⁵⁵ Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves (New York: Worth, 2016).
⁵⁶ Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020).
⁵⁷ Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Hatewatch, “Stephen Miller’s Affinity for White Nationalist Tropes Revealed in Emails,” Nov. 2019.
⁵⁸ Adam Serwer, “The Cruelty Is the Point,” The Atlantic, Oct. 3, 2018.
⁵⁹ Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951; Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works, 2018.
⁶⁰ Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017).
⁶¹ Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895); Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Viking, 1962).
⁶² Congressional Research Service, “Removal of Inspectors General: Legal Framework and Recent Developments,” 2020.
⁶³ Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack, Final Report (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 2022).
V. Narrative as a Weapon
Fascism depends on controlling the story a nation tells itself. It requires a microphone. A movement can attack judges, immigrants, or elections only if it first discredits or disables the institutions that arbitrate truth. Trump’s politics — by design — has waged a years-long campaign against those institutions: independent journalism, public broadcasters, science agencies, and the constitutional framework that protects speech while restraining state power.
Delegitimisation and Legal Warfare
The most consistent pattern is the delegitimisation of the press as an enemy class. “Enemy of the people” was not merely insult but a theory of sovereignty: if the leader embodies “the people,” then criticism of the leader becomes treachery against the nation.
In practice, this logic produced concrete actions. Press credentials were revoked from adversarial reporters until federal courts intervened.⁶⁴ Opinion columns critical of Trump’s Russia ties led to defamation lawsuits against The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, each dismissed but each framed as proof of a hostile press conspiracy.⁶⁵ In 2022, Trump personally sued CNN for $475 million, alleging its use of descriptors such as “racist,” “insurrectionist,” or “Hitler-like” constituted libel — an extraordinary attempt to criminalise description itself.⁶⁶ The aim was not judicial victory but epistemic intimidation: to signal that adverse coverage invites punitive costs.
Administrative Censorship and Retaliatory Defunding
Beyond the courtroom, Trumpism sought to bend state machinery against independent media. In 2025, the White House banned the Associated Press from presidential events after the agency refused to adopt Trump’s preferred rebranding of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”⁶⁷ The U.S. Agency for Global Media, parent to Voice of America, underwent loyalist purges and editorial interference.⁶⁸ Most significantly, Trump issued an executive order terminating federal support for NPR and PBS because they were “biased media.”⁶⁹ This reversed decades of bipartisan commitment to public broadcasting and revealed the underlying principle: state funding should flow only to outlets aligned with the leader’s narrative. Where Mussolini seized the press, Trump used appropriations and licensing law to achieve functional equivalents.
Platforms and Parallel Ecosystems
Where direct censorship was legally constrained, Trump invested in parallel ecosystems permissive to disinformation. Male-dominated podcasts became a key channel. On The Joe Rogan Experience, Trump repeated the falsehood that the 2020 election was “rigged,” refusing evidence when pressed.⁷⁰ On the Nelk Boys’ Full Send podcast, he blamed Barack Obama for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and again promoted the “stolen election” narrative, prompting YouTube to remove the episode for violating its misinformation policy.⁷¹ He courted comedian Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant podcast and earlier legitimised Alex Jones by granting him a candidate interview in 2015, mainstreaming conspiracy discourse from the fringes.⁷² This strategy bypassed institutional journalism and placed Trump’s claims in unmoderated environments designed for amplification rather than verification.
Disinformation as Campaign Instrument
The final, and perhaps most corrosive, move was the weaponisation of racist rumour. In Ohio during the 2024 election cycle, Trump and senior Republicans amplified a baseless claim that Haitian migrants in Springfield were abducting and eating pets. Local police confirmed no such reports existed.⁷³ Yet Trump repeated the slur on the debate stage against Kamala Harris: “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.”⁷⁴ Party surrogates circulated AI-generated memes of Trump saving pets from immigrants.⁷⁵ The trope echoed older xenophobic myths of impurity and dehumanisation, but the mechanism was modern: an online disinformation cycle escalating into official campaign rhetoric. Despite rapid debunking, the narrative achieved its aim — casting out-groups as existential threats and legitimising punitive state action.
Synthesis
Across lawsuits, bans, executive orders, platform strategies, and rumour campaigns, the through-line is constant: the erosion of epistemic arbiters in favour of a leader-centric information order. Where law blocked monopoly, Trump pursued functional substitutes: chilling litigation, budgetary strangulation, loyalist purges, and alternative distribution networks. The effect was not simply antagonism toward media but the construction of an environment in which truth is contingent, verification subordinate, and narrative sovereignty rests with the leader.
This is the fascist pattern updated for a platform economy: an epistemic battlefield in which the state and its allies attempt to dictate not only what is true, but what may be said.
⁶⁴ Cable News Network, Inc. v. Trump, No. 18-cv-2610 (D.D.C.), Temporary Restraining Order restoring press pass, Nov. 16, 2018.
⁶⁵ Trump for President, Inc. v. The New York Times Company, Complaint, Feb. 26, 2020; Trump for President, Inc. v. Washington Post Company, Complaint, 2020; dismissed 2023 (D.D.C.).
⁶⁶ Trump v. Cable News Network, Inc., Complaint, Oct. 3, 2022, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida; dismissed July 2023.
⁶⁷ AP News, “White House Bars AP Reporter over ‘Gulf of Mexico’ Fight,” Aug. 2025.
⁶⁸ Oversight reports on politicisation of U.S. Agency for Global Media under CEO Michael Pack, 2020–2021; see NPR, “A Tumultuous Tenure at Voice of America’s Parent Agency Ends,” June 2021; Washington Post coverage of firings and editorial interference.
⁶⁹ Executive Order 14099, “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media,” May 1, 2025; White House Fact Sheet, May 2025.
⁷⁰ The Joe Rogan Experience, Oct. 2024; Guardian transcript/coverage.
⁷¹ “Trump appears on Nelk Boys’ Full Send podcast,” Mar. 2022; Independent, Mar. 11, 2022; YouTube removal notice.
⁷² Alex Jones interview with Donald Trump, InfoWars, Dec. 2, 2015; Trump quote: “Your reputation is amazing, I will not let you down”; Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant podcast, Oct. 2024.
⁷³ Springfield Police Department statement, Sept. 2024, confirming “no reports”; Washington Post, Sept. 11, 2024.
⁷⁴ Presidential debate, Dayton, Ohio, Sept. 2024: Trump vs. Kamala Harris; transcript.
⁷⁵ House Judiciary GOP, X/Twitter post, Sept. 2024; Sen. Ted Cruz tweet, Sept. 2024; Guardian, “Republicans Spread ‘Cat-Eating Migrants’ Slur in Ohio,” Sept. 2024.
VI. Knowledge as Battleground
Fascism thrives on controlling not only information but the institutions that generate knowledge. Universities — repositories of method, critique, and pluralism — are natural enemies of a politics built on myth and obedience. Trump’s project has therefore treated higher education as both target and trophy: punish defiance, compel obedience, and repurpose institutions for ideological ends.
Executive Orders as Ideological Weapons
Within days of returning to office, Trump signed orders dismantling DEI programs and affirmative action, directing agencies to police universities for any trace of “illegal preferences.”⁷⁶ Subsequent directives went further: accrediting bodies were threatened with de-recognition if they insisted on diversity standards, forcing even Harvard’s accreditor to strip DEI language from its rules.⁷⁷ The message was clear: academic independence would survive only if it aligned with the leader’s ideological template.
Defunding as Coercion
Where ideology was resisted, Trump deployed the purse. Research grants and federal contracts were abruptly frozen at universities accused of tolerating “un-American” ideas — from Columbia to Harvard to Princeton.⁷⁸ The tactic bypassed due process: billions in funding were suspended, not after findings of discrimination, but after the administration issued political ultimatums. Columbia capitulated, agreeing to restructure departments and impose mask bans on protesters to have funds restored.⁷⁹ Harvard refused, sued the government, and faced escalating retaliation, including threats to revoke its ability to host foreign students.⁸⁰ The purpose was not regulation but submission: to show that even elite institutions could be bent or broken by executive fiat.
Censorship of Campus Dissent
Trump’s directives demanded universities discipline student organisations and demonstrations he deemed hostile to “American values,” singling out pro-Palestinian groups for derecognition and sanction.⁸¹ Institutions were instructed to centralise discipline, empower police to break up protests, and ban face coverings at demonstrations. Far from protecting free inquiry, these measures imported the logic of authoritarian policing into campus governance: dissent recast as extremism, protest as disloyalty.
Synthesis
The through-line is unmistakable. Universities were not treated as partners in knowledge but as adversaries to be tamed. Executive orders replaced pluralism with enforced orthodoxy; funding freezes transformed research into a hostage; censorship directives redefined protest as subversion.
In historical fascist regimes, culture and education were nationalised as instruments of myth and obedience. Trump’s 2025 campaign against universities updates that script for the American context: higher education forced into ideological receivership under the threat of state power.
⁷⁶ Executive Order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” Jan. 21, 2025; rescinding affirmative action requirements and directing federal agencies to enforce compliance across educational institutions.
⁷⁷ Executive Order on Accreditation, Apr. 2025; Education Department authority to revoke recognition of accrediting bodies requiring DEI standards; NECHE (Harvard’s accreditor) subsequently proposed deleting DEI language from standards (Aug. 2025).
⁷⁸ Department of Education and multi-agency funding freezes against Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, Mar.–May 2025; public statements cited “anti-American” or “antisemitic” campus climates.
⁷⁹ Columbia University compliance agreement, Mar. 2025; university memorandum agreeing to mask bans, curriculum oversight, and stricter protest discipline in exchange for restored research funding.
⁸⁰ Harvard v. United States, Complaint filed Apr. 21, 2025; Harvard lawsuit challenging retaliation and funding freeze; DHS threats to revoke SEVP certification for foreign students.
⁸¹ Federal letter to Harvard, Apr. 11, 2025, demanding derecognition of pro-Palestinian groups and disciplinary action against protest leaders; Department of Education directives on protest policing.
VII. Monuments, Memory, and the War on “Woke”
Because fascism is a politics of identity, culture is not peripheral; it is the point. Trumpism’s culture war is not an incidental grievance but the mass-mobilisation substrate — organising friends and enemies through symbols, rituals, and spectacles.
Consider monuments and street politics. After a 2017 neo-Nazi rally with fascist imagery, the president said there were “very fine people on both sides,” reframing a white-supremacist provocation as an equivalently legitimate civic dispute.⁸² In 2020, amid racial-justice protests, the White House issued orders to protect monuments and to create a National Garden of American Heroes — not neutral curation but a state-authored pantheon and criminalisation framework designed to sacralise a particular national myth and to police challenges to it.⁸³
In sport, the president used the bully pulpit to stigmatise peaceful, high-visibility protest — demanding NFL owners fire players who knelt during the anthem (“Get that son of a b— off the field”).⁸⁴
By 2025, this pattern had hardened into an explicit anti-woke crusade. The White House ordered reviews of the Smithsonian’s exhibits to purge “woke ideology,” complaining that slavery was presented too negatively and demanding a more “patriotic” tone.⁸⁵ Trump personally installed himself as chair of the Kennedy Center board, purged its leadership, and justified the move by attacking drag shows and “gender ideology” in the arts.⁸⁶ The National Endowment for the Arts began conditioning grants on recipients certifying they did not “promote woke agendas,” while state allies accelerated book bans that stripped schools and libraries of works on race, gender, and LGBTQ identities.⁸⁷
“Woke,” in this configuration, is not a descriptor but an epithet: the fascist label for cultural enemies, used to collapse pluralism into treachery, and to recast censorship, funding cuts, and monument-building as acts of national salvation.
Couple these moves with repeated proposals to zero out cultural endowments, and a coherent pattern emerges: privilege culture that glorifies the state and punish culture that questions it, all under the banner of fighting the “woke.”
⁸² Charlottesville rally, Aug. 12, 2017; Trump press conference, Aug. 15, 2017: remarks on “very fine people on both sides.”
⁸³ Executive Order 13934, “Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes,” July 3, 2020; White House Fact Sheet on the “National Garden of American Heroes,” 2020.
⁸⁴ Trump remarks, rally in Huntsville, Alabama, Sept. 22, 2017: “Get that son of a b— off the field.”
⁸⁵ White House, “President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian,” Aug. 2025; Smithsonian review directives ordering removal of “woke” framing in exhibits; Trump complaint that the National Museum of African American History and Culture “overemphasised” slavery; Congressional Black Caucus response, Aug. 2025.
⁸⁶ Trump appointment as Kennedy Center chair, Feb. 2025; removal of 18 trustees and replacement with administration loyalists; firing of Kennedy Center president and installation of interim leadership; justification citing drag shows and “gender ideology.”
⁸⁷ National Endowment for the Arts grant requirements, Mar. 2025; revocation of National Queer Theater grant, May 2025; PEN America reports on Florida book bans, Aug. 2025; Texas SB 13 book removal law, 2025.
VIII. Miller, Bannon, Musk: The Trinity of Extremism
Stephen Miller operationalised exclusion.⁸⁸ As prime mover of family separations and maximal deterrence at the border, he pushed policy toward collective-punishment logic and laundered white-nationalist source material into administrative action.⁸⁹
Steve Bannon supplied theory and strategy.⁹⁰ His vow to “deconstruct the administrative state” captured the project: not conservative reform, but demolition of neutral capacity (civil service, regulators, diplomatic corps) so that personalist rule and movement loyalty can fill the vacuum.⁹¹
Elon Musk is not a state actor, but post-acquisition policy at a central social platform has had state-political consequences: restored reach for previously de-platformed propagandists (including a former president), empirical spikes in hate-speech dissemination recorded by independent monitors, and new friction for watchdogs who documented those trends.⁹²
Synthesis
Fascist movements are coalition projects: ideologues (Miller), strategists (Bannon), and infrastructure owners (Musk) can align — deliberately or not — to produce an information-punitive system that targets out-groups, shreds neutral capacity, and warps the public square.⁹³
⁸⁸ DOJ/DHS policy memos on “zero tolerance” family separations, 2018; Miller communications cited in New York Times, June 2018.
⁸⁹ SPLC, Hatewatch, “Stephen Miller’s Affinity for White Nationalist Tropes Revealed in Emails,” Nov. 2019; HuffPost investigation, 2019.
⁹⁰ Steve Bannon interview, Hollywood Reporter, Nov. 18, 2016.
⁹¹ Bannon quote, CPAC speech, Feb. 23, 2017.
⁹² Center for Countering Digital Hate, “Twitter Hate Speech After Musk Acquisition,” Nov. 2022–2025; Institute for Strategic Dialogue, monitoring reports, 2023–2025.
⁹³ Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Knopf, 2004), pp. 218–222.
IX. Counterarguments and Rebuttals
Precision matters, and so do fair objections. The strongest critiques of the fascism diagnosis fall into six families. We state each plainly, then answer with definition, history, and evidence — so what remains is not polemic, but a case that survives steelmanning.
Objection 1: “There’s no one-party state, so it isn’t fascism.”
Reply. Fascism is a process as much as a regime type.⁹⁴ Paxton outlines stages: movement-building; alliance with conservative elites; power through crisis; normalisation of transgression; and, given opportunity, radicalisation to dictatorship.⁹⁵ Fascist method exists before one-party consolidation; the decisive danger window is pre-consolidation, when a leader tests boundaries, penetrates institutions, and seeks enabling alliances.⁹⁶
Historical analogies abound: Mussolini’s first years (1922–24) retained coalition cabinets, parliaments, and courts even as Blackshirt violence and exceptional decrees narrowed opposition; Gleichschaltung in Germany unfolded across months after January 1933.⁹⁷ The appropriate metric is trajectory: are pluralist constraints being delegitimised and dismantled in service of a palingenetic project under a personalised leader?⁹⁸
Objection 2: “Trump has no coherent ideology; fascists had doctrine.”
Reply. Fascist ideology is a mythic core — palingenetic ultranationalism — rather than a scholastic catechism.⁹⁹ Mussolini’s and Hitler’s programmes were protean on economics and social policy; what did not vary was national rebirth, leader cult, primacy of will over law, and purification of the polity.¹⁰⁰ Fascism is deliberately anti-programmatic in the rationalist sense: action, combat, and a “politics of the deed” over detailed platforms — voluntarist and opportunistic, using whatever instruments advance refoundation.¹⁰¹ Hence fascism absorbed contradictory planks (privatisation vs. statism; social welfare vs. austerity) so long as they served unity, hierarchy, and domination.¹⁰² Trump’s ideological output — resentment nationalism, leader sovereignty, friend–enemy logic, purity politics, sacralisation of “the people”, and permission of cruelty — matches this mythic core even without a white paper.¹⁰³
Objection 3: “He deregulates; classic fascists expanded the state.”
Reply. Fascist economics is dirigiste, not uniformly statist.¹⁰⁴ It aims to subordinate markets and property to national destiny, not abolish private ownership.¹⁰⁵ In practice, fascists oscillated between business alliances and coercive direction as needed for rearmament, patronage, or social pacification.¹⁰⁶ A contemporary American translation is to dismantle regulatory veto points that frustrate the leader’s will while building personalised control over the civil service (e.g., Schedule F), law enforcement, and communications infrastructure.¹⁰⁷
Objection 4: “Institutions stopped him; therefore, not fascism.”
Reply. Institutional resistance does not negate fascist intent; it clarifies the stakes — method and goal diagnose the project, not merely outcomes.¹⁰⁸ The self-coup attempt on 6 January showed a willingness to use extra-legal force to overturn an election.¹⁰⁹ The post-election pressure on the Department of Justice and state officials to “find” votes showed a strategy of replacing legal verification with leader certification.¹¹⁰ The question is not “did he succeed,” but “did he pursue fascist means to enthrone will over law?”¹¹¹
Objection 5: “This is just ‘populism’ or ‘authoritarianism’ — don’t dilute the F-word.”
Reply. “Populism” describes a style (people vs. elite) and “authoritarianism” a degree of constraint; neither captures the refounding configuration — leader cult + mythic rebirth + licensed transgression + institutional corrosion + politicised violence.¹¹² Paxton and Griffin supply that missing structure.¹¹³
Objection 6: “Label it ‘fascism’ and you’ll alienate persuadables, hardening polarisation.”
Reply. Diagnosis must be earned, but when earned it clarifies stakes and enables wider coalitions by shifting the contest from left/right to rule/anti-rule.¹¹⁴ The label should target the operating system (leader sovereignty, Big Lie, licensed cruelty) while keeping exit ramps open so citizens can disengage without humiliation.¹¹⁵
⁹⁴ Robert O. Paxton, “The Five Stages of Fascism,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 1 (1998).
⁹⁵ Paxton, ibid.
⁹⁶ Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Knopf, 2004), ch. 2.
⁹⁷ Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris (London: Penguin, 1998); R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy (London: Penguin, 2006).
⁹⁸ Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 26.
⁹⁹ Griffin, ibid., pp. 36–38.
¹⁰⁰ Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, pp. 13–15.
¹⁰¹ Emilio Gentile, The Sacralisation of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
¹⁰² Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 210–218.
¹⁰³ Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works (New York: Random House, 2018), ch. 4.
¹⁰⁴ Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, pp. 143–152.
¹⁰⁵ Roger Griffin, Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 53.
¹⁰⁶ Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction (London: Allen Lane, 2006).
¹⁰⁷ R. Daniel Kelemen, Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Globalisation (Cambridge: Polity, 2017).
¹⁰⁸ Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017), lesson 2.
¹⁰⁹ Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack, Final Report (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 2022).
¹¹⁰ DOJ Inspector General report, Dec. 2021; Raffensperger testimony, Jan. 6 hearings.
¹¹¹ Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018), pp. 102–109.
¹¹² Cas Mudde & Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
¹¹³ Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, pp. 220–224; Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, pp. 38–42.
¹¹⁴ Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (1932; tr. 2007).
¹¹⁵ Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works, conclusion.
X. Defensive Architecture: How Democracies Counter a Fascist Configuration
If the diagnosis is fascism-in-practice, the treatment must match the disease. A resilient democracy does not rely on luck or gentlemen’s agreements; it engineers friction so personalism, epistemic capture, and para-political force run into law, transparency, and organised civic power. While the following proposals are tailored to the U.S. constitutional context, the underlying principles of insulating institutions from personalism and defending epistemic security are universally applicable.
Reinforcing the State
Personalised rule advances when neutral capacity converts into loyalty machinery; the remedy is statutory — foreclose mass reclassification of career officials into at-will categories so a future executive cannot purge expertise and replace it with fealty (pre-empt any Schedule-F-style manoeuvre).¹¹⁶ After the last decade’s lessons, add tenure and due-process protections for election administrators and inspectors general, plus fast-track review when removals smell of retaliation.¹¹⁷ Proposals to expand political control over the bureaucracy should be read for what they are — steps toward party–state fusion — and countered in statute before the next crisis.
Securing Electoral Transfer
Democracies also live or die by how power changes hands. The Electoral Count framework was a pressure point; the correct design tightens timelines, narrows objections to judicially verified defects, and raises the bar for congressional challenges so performance cannot substitute for evidence.¹¹⁸
Authoritarians rely on emergency shortcuts when ordinary channels resist. Domestic deployments of federal tactical teams should require objective statutory triggers, public reporting on use-of-force and detainee processing, and a categorical ban on unmarked operatives in crowds, because anonymity dissolves accountability.¹¹⁹ Similarly, narrow Insurrection Act pathways so domestic military deployment requires multi-branch concurrence and cannot be conjured by rhetoric alone.¹²⁰ Courts and legislatures must be configured for speed under stress. When core political rights are at stake — vote counting, certification, press access — jurisdictions should provide fast-track review and presumptive standing for actors facing systemic harm; emergency deference apt for hurricanes is often misapplied to speech or election cases.
Protecting the Epistemic Commons
The next front is the epistemic commons. In the 1930s, capture meant a state monopoly; today, it means attention monopolies and opaque ranking systems. The democratic response is governance of the pipes: independent audits of large-platform recommender systems for election and public-safety risks; public-interest APIs so researchers can map virality, coordination, and manipulation; regular civic-risk reports around elections so governments and civil society see the same dashboard.¹²¹
When virality becomes a weapon, platforms should add friction, not gags — circuit breakers for sudden civic surges, provenance signals to reduce deepfake pay-off, and prebunking prompts where Big-Lie narratives predictably reappear.¹²² Where office-seekers demand the largest megaphones, democracies can condition reach on minimal civic commitments (no incitement; no election delegitimisation) — equal rules for equal privileges, not viewpoint policing.
Strengthening Parties and Coalitions
Because the fascist method is elite-enabled, party and electoral design matter. Parties should treat acceptance of electoral defeat as a gatekeeping threshold and rework nomination systems that reward factional intensity over majority preference; nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting are not talismans, but they are risk-reducers that can lower the payoff of performative extremism and make broad consent the shortest path to office.¹²³
Cross-partisan pro-rule coalitions — business, labour, faith, veterans, constitutional conservatives — should pre-commit to opposing self-coup strategies before the next crisis, because elite signals shift follower behaviour and stiffen institutional spines.¹²⁴
Local Protection and Civic Resilience
Protection must reach the local level. Democratic breakdown often begins with intimidation of clerks, canvassers, and judges; the fix is practical: security funds, legal-defence pools, rapid-response teams for threatened officials, and criminal penalties that treat coercion of election workers as an attack on the franchise.¹²⁵
Finally, resilience is civic. Research across more than a hundred campaigns shows that mass non-violent action is likelier than violence to succeed and to preserve democracy after victory; it lowers participation costs, widens coalitions, and denies strongmen the theatre they crave.¹²⁶ Where movements have fused identity to a leader, invest in dignified exit ramps — programmes that let people leave without humiliation, with peer mentors, bridge media, and community projects that meet the psychological needs the cult once met.¹²⁷
¹¹⁶ Congressional Research Service, “Schedule F,” 2022.
¹¹⁷ Project on Government Oversight, “Inspector General Protections,” 2023 report.
¹¹⁸ Electoral Count Reform Act, Dec. 2022.
¹¹⁹ DHS Inspector General, report on Portland deployments, 2020.
¹²⁰ Peter Feaver & Richard Kohn, Soldiers and Civilians (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), on Insurrection Act powers.
¹²¹ National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Addressing Misinformation and Disinformation: The Importance of Audits and Access (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2023).
¹²² Claire Wardle & Hossein Derakhshan, Information Disorder Report, 2017.
¹²³ Anthony McGann, Primary Elections and Political Extremism, 2014.
¹²⁴ Steven Levitsky & Lucan Way, Competitive Authoritarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ch. 6.
¹²⁵ Brennan Center for Justice, “Election Officials Under Attack,” 2021–2022.
¹²⁶ Erica Chenoweth & Maria Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
¹²⁷ Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), pp. 217–223.
XI. The Courage to Diagnose
Before remedies, a crisp diagnosis: fascism appears where five conditions converge — a leader cult, institutional subversion with loyalty replacements, legitimised violence, an intent to end the alternation of power, and a palingenetic programme. Trumpism meets all five; remaining pluralist guardrails reflect resistance, not misclassification.
The point of using the F-word is not to provoke; it is to think clearly. Fascism is not every illiberal impulse, nor every hard-right policy. It is a configuration: palingenetic ultranationalism animated by a personal sovereign, institutionalised through licensed transgression, epistemic capture, and para-political force, and justified by a story of purity and rebirth.¹²⁸
Measured against that definition, Trump’s political project is not merely “authoritarian”. It is fascist-in-practice — a modernised variant adapted to constitutional constraints and the platform economy. It seeks to replace law with will, truth with narrative, citizenship with cult, and opposition with enemy status. Where it met resistance, it escalated: from delegitimising the press to delegitimising elections; from pressuring subordinates to pressuring states; from rhetorical brinkmanship to a self-coup attempt.¹²⁹
Democracies do not fall only when tanks roll. They can be hollowed by narratives, appointments, protocols, and platforms. They fail when citizens choose comfort over clarity — when we refuse to name the threat while there is still time to counter it.¹³⁰
This paper has maintained a commitment to intellectual honesty paired with practical resolve. The language is careful because the stakes are enormous. But once the definition is met, euphemism is complicity. Calling Trump’s project fascism does not anathematise millions of neighbours. It separates a leader’s operating system from the citizens caught in its story, and it invites those citizens onto exit ramps that protect their dignity while rejoining the civic bargain.
It calls on institutions to harden chokepoints before the next stress test; on platforms to treat attention as public infrastructure; on parties to value rule over rulership; on professionals to hold the line; and on all of us to remember that truth is not a team sport.¹³¹
History’s warning is not theatrical; it is practical. Fascism succeeds when we accept its normalisation, and it is beaten when we organise — legally, civically, culturally — around a richer loyalty: the constitutional promise that no leader is above law, no neighbour is beneath respect, and no lie can be allowed to replace the world we share.¹³²
¹²⁸ Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 26–30.
¹²⁹ Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack, Final Report (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 2022).
¹³⁰ Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018), ch. 6.
¹³¹ Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017), lesson 10.
¹³² Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1951), conclusion.
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