Donald Trump has been called a fascist since the early days of his presidential candidacy for 2016. Over the past nine years I have
repeatedly argued against this description, while noting that both his campaigns and his administration had important fascistic tendencies. But I’ve
also argued that we need to treat the question dynamically, being alert to both changes in Trump’s politics and the interplay between his politics and other forces.
Fascism is
a category we impose on political phenomena to help make sense of them. The question isn’t whether a given conception of fascism is “true,” but whether it’s more or less useful, both analytically and strategically, for understanding political connections and differences. A
three way fight approach argues that it’s most useful to think of fascism as an autonomous political force that makes a radical break with the established order, intensifying existing hierarchies in many ways but also challenging established elites for power. Three way fight politics also warns that there is nothing inherently fascist about dictatorship, racial oppression, or even genocide, and that even
anti-fascism can be used to advance political repression against liberatory forces.
Trump has promoted many elements of fascist politics, such as political demonization, supremacist attacks on oppressed groups, authoritarianism, and a distorted kind of anti-elitism based on conspiracist scapegoating. As noted above, he also cultivated a symbiotic relationship with organized fascists and other far rightists. But some key pieces of fascist politics were always missing. Trump didn’t offer an ideological vision to systematically transform society, he didn’t try to build an independent organizational base, and he didn’t challenge the legitimacy of the established political system—at least for a while.
The changes I outlined in the previous sections above have brought the MAGA movement significantly closer to fascist politics, although important differences are still there. Trump and his supporters have brought a kind of system disloyalty into mainstream politics in a way we didn’t see in 2016, and have intensified the shifts toward authoritarianism and supremacist scapegoating. MAGA forces haven’t built a new, unified mass organization, but they’ve spent the past eight years developing an extensive, if loose political network, and they’ve gained much tighter control of the Republican Party than they ever had before, at least temporarily. Initiatives such as the Heritage Foundation’s
Project 2025 have helped flesh out an overall ideological vision for the movement. And having tried once already to overturn the results of a presidential election by force, MAGA forces can be expected to do so again if they don’t win outright,
as in 2020-21 using some combination of propaganda, bogus legal challenges, and physical attacks to discredit and challenge the election—but this time in a more organized and systematic way.
These developments mean that Trump’s presidential bid is even more dangerous than it was four years ago. At the same time, in my view they don’t represent fascism’s full-scale, radical break with the established order.
Fascism aims to impose a unified ideological vision on all spheres of society, from politics to the workplace, from mass media to family life. This goes far beyond the kind of policy prescriptions we see in Project 2025. Some of the forces that support Trump, such as the powerful
New Apostolic Reformation network, have that kind of comprehensive vision, but they don’t control the MAGA movement as a whole—witness Trump’s retreat from staunch opposition to abortion rights to a “let the states decide” position.
The MAGA movement is part of a new
international wave of right-wing populist initiatives that have surged over the past two decades and especially since the 2008 global economic crisis. These initiatives have a lot of fascistic features, notably authoritarianism, aggressive nationalism, and ethnic or religious scapegoating. In power, they carry out supremacist policies and intensify repression, but they work within the existing governmental framework in a way that limits their power to some degree. For example, Poland’s Law and Justice Party was voted out of office in 2023, while India’s Bharatiya Janata Party lost parliamentary seats in 2024—despite
jailing or threatening many opposition leaders—and was forced to govern in coalition after ten years of single-party governance. That’s not how fascist states work.
To be clear, a second Trump presidency would be disastrous. Recognizing and countering that danger is more important than whether we call it fascist or not. And Trump doesn’t have to dismantle the US electoral system to wreak massive damage. That “democratic” electoral system, in its various incarnations, has provided the framework for witchhunts and lynchings, roundups of political dissenters, the enslavement of African people and genocide against Indigenous nations. It can be turned to such ends again.
