A New Kind of Fascism

For some years, a variety of news commentators and academics have called Donald Trump a fascist. I was one of those who resisted using that term. I thought it had long been abused by casual, imprecise applications, and as a historian of Nazi Germany, I did not think Trumpism was anywhere close to crossing the threshold of that comparison. I still deny that Trump’s presidency was fascist—but I’m concerned that if he wins another trip to the White House, he could earn the label.

Fascism was most fully exemplified by the regimes of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. These regimes combined totalitarian dictatorship, wars of imperial conquest, and outright genocide in the case of Hitler (of Jews, Slavs, Roma) or ethnic mass murder in Mussolini’s case (of Libyans, Ethiopians, Slovenes). Placing Trumpism in the same category seemed to me trivializing and misleading.

I argued instead that Trump was more like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan than Hitler or Mussolini, and should be categorized as an “illiberal populist” rather than a fascist. And in one very important respect, Trump differed sharply from the European fascists of the interwar period.

They were ardent militarists and imperialists. War was the crucible in which the new fascist man was to be forged; territorial expansion was both the means and the end of fascist power and triumph. Trump has shown little ambition to pursue such aims. In his first term, he shamelessly abased himself before Russian President Vladimir Putin, exchanged “love letters” with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, signed the Doha Agreement with the Taliban committing the U.S. to withdrawal from Afghanistan, and petulantly sought to downgrade U.S. treaty obligations to NATO and South Korean allies that he deemed to be “delinquent” and getting a “free ride.”