Trumpism-Fascism Marches On
And so Does Weird US Academic Fascism-Denial
I hope readers will pardon me for taking a short break from the Israel-Gaza war to reflect on some of the latest Trump news and a bit of creepy US academic fascism-denial I recently beheld.
As president of the United States, please recall, Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump called neo-Nazis and Confederal Flag-waving white supremacists “fine people.” He wanted to crush the George Floyd Rebellion with the United States military, asking his Defense Secretary why the American army couldn’t “just shoot” protesters. He praised the teen fascist Kyle Rittenhouse for murdering Black Lives marchers with an illegally owned AR-15 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He even made a special point of visiting Kenosha on the last night of his failed 2020 campaign.
Trump as president told his border patrol agents that he’d pardon them if they shot migrants. He advocated electirified border fences and told one of his hate rallies how much he enjoyed thinking about the image of Mexican asylum-seekers being chased by big vicious German Shepherds.
When a federal fugitive task force carried out the extra-judicial execution of an anti-fascist who had killed a Christian fascist in Portland, Oregon in the late summer of 2020, Trump called the government hit “retribution.”
Trump left office angry because metal detectors prevented his Proud Boy, Oath Keeper, and Three Percenter friends from bringing AR-15s to the January 6 Attack on the US Capitol – an attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after he lost an election he tried to steal.
Trump has been spreading his big Hitlerian lie of a stolen election ever since, inducing tens of millions of Americans to seriously believe his multiply disproven and racist claim.
Trump is now running around the country telling his preponderantly white and hate-filled backers “I will be your retribution” – a promise of bloody vengeance to be inflicted against liberals, “the Radical Left,” and anyone he views as his political enemy. He is promising to invade Mexico and suggests that the US should deport all of its Marxists and socialists. He absurdly claims that American higher education is controlled by “the Radical Left” and conflates the capitalist-imperialist Democratic Party with communism. He is making transparent threats of violence against those who indict, sue, and prosecute him for his numerous crimes, which include the attempted overthrow of previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law.
Trump recently said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” — perhaps the most explicitly fascist thing he’s ever said (and that’s saying a lot). He made a campaign stop at a far-right gun shop that sold weapons to a racist mass shooter who murdered three Black people in Florida. He got up in front of the California Republican Party to joke about the vicious hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband committed last year by a maniac who believes Trump’s Leviathan Lies about the 2020 election. Trump then endorsed the extrajudicial execution of suspected shoplifters.
Through his influence and that of his revanchist base over the House of Representatives, Trump nearly shut down the federal government last month and may succeed in doing so next November 17th.
This rabid fascist dog is the runaway Republican presidential nominee. He stands a strong chance of winning back the White House given the right-tilted bias of the archaic Electoral College and the unpopularity of the ancient neoliberal warmonger Joe Biden. And this time the orange hued malignancy is coming with an army of “conservative” policy advisors working up elaborate plans for the unprecedented expansion of presidential authority and the remaking of American governance along Christian white nationalist lines.
Two months ago, Herr Trump’s leading devoted cultist in the US House, Matt Gaetz, joined his Dear Leader on stage at the Iowa State Fair to say that only “force" can bring change to Washington. Gaetz’s comment came after Trump had been federally indicted for trying to stage a coup in 2020 and 2021. Gaetz spoke in paranoid terms that the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels would have appreciated:
"Mr. President, I cannot stand these people that are destroying our country. They are opening our borders. They are weaponizing our federal law enforcement against patriotic Americans who love this nation as we should. We are having a great time at the fair. We love standing with you. But we know that only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C. And so to all my friends here in Iowa, when you see them come for this man, know that they are coming for our movement, and they are coming for all of us.”
A FOX News host, a Republi-Nazi comedian named Greg Gutfeld, recently echoed Gaetz’s Trumpian call for “force,” arguing that “elections don’t work.”
The Republicans’ latest candidate to replace the insufficiently fascist Trump bootlicker Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the US House is the relentless Republi-fascist Jim Jordan (Rf-OH), a onetime enabler of collegiate wrestling sex abuse who has stood in the vanguard of House Republican putschism and election denialism. As the Associated Press reports:
:After Trump lost the election to Biden in 2020… Jordan repeatedly cast doubt on the outcome of the contest while organizing the House Republican response. Documents obtained by Congress through its investigation of the attack offer a window into Jordan’s involvement in Trump’s bid to stay in office. Days after the election, Jordan traveled with fellow GOP Rep. Scott Perry to Pennsylvania to meet with the Republican state House speaker, where the two congressmen ‘raised some questions regarding what I’ll call the legal process,’ then-Speaker Bryan Cutler told investigators…On Dec. 21, 2020, Jordan was among those attending a White House meeting focused on pressuring then Vice President Mike Pence to use his ceremonial role presiding over the electoral college to overturn the election, according to documents from the investigation… Jordan also hosted a Jan. 2, 2021 conference call with the White House to discuss logistics for Jan 6, including Republican plans to object to the election’s certification, according to call logs and testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows…White House call logs also show that Jordan called Trump twice on Jan. 6 — both before and after the attack…During his speech that day, which preceded the Capitol attack, Trump singled out Jordan for praise. In the days after the Capitol was attacked, Jordan raised the possibility of getting presidential pardons for members of Congress, though never directly asked for one, Hutchinson told the congressional committee. A week later, Trump presented Jordan with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Even now, with all this fascistic madness and all the neofascism on ugly display in one red state after another, not to mention on the US Supreme Court and across the national Republican Party, I still see ostensibly educated, commonly doctorate-possessing people looking at me sideways when I call Trump and Trumpism fascist. Just the other day I beheld the esteemed American historians David Greenberg and Nell Irvin Painter going public at the bourgeois liberal New Republic “Stop Trump Summit” with amazingly persistent (at this late date) head-in-the-sand qualms about joining the European and world historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the Yale philosopher Jason Stanley, the prolific social critic Henry Giroux, and the political scientist Anthony DiMaggio (and myself and my brilliant comrades at Refuse Fascism) in painting Trump and Trumpism with the obviously accurate brush of fascism.
Here was Ben-Ghiat’s sharp statement on the matter:
“we are in the middle of a very formidable degradation, an engineered degradation of democracy, and in that sense we’re like Germany in 1932. We’re also like Chile in 1972… because to have the [CIA-backed Pinochet] coup in 1973, there were three years of discrediting and undermining of ….[Chile’s democratically elected socialist president] Allende and democracy and building an appetite for authoritarian rule…a coup. We think of coups – I had not idea there’d be one here – as quick but they require planning and the right climate to be accepted after they happen. The main thing I’m concerned about with MAGA, which I see as a kind of right-wing counterrevolution in the fascist tradition, is that Trump has been re-educating Americans since 2015, using his rallies, using his events, to see violence differently, to see [political] violence in a positive light. He is a superb propagandist. He’s one of the most important propagandists of the 21st Century. People laugh when I say that, but it’s true and the emotional re-training to consider violence as necessary and patriotic…that’s why he went to Waco, that’s why he went to the gun store. His campaign is a radicalization vehicle and that’s [about] preparing whatever form [fascist takeover] will take, which we can’t know.”
[The constituent elements of fascism include] ‘a revolution of reaction’ (Mussolini 1921)….the desire to de-stabilize accepted authority….extremism that becomes mainstreamed. You see that in our country. You have violence understood as the only way to change history…so Matt Gaetz recently went to the Iowa State Fair to support Trump. People were eating their corn-dogs, they’ve got their toddlers with them and Matt Gaetz says, ‘only through force will we bring change to corrupt DC.’ I read that as him saying ‘elections won’t work, democratic reform won’t work. It’s violence.’ ..Then you have hyper-nationalism, you have xenophobia, you have the targeting of enemies, who can be internal enemies, or external. Trumpism and its allied movements, including the faith traditions, the evangelicals, they’re all hitting notes that go back to the original fascist years.”
A brilliant summary that Greenberg foolishly and arrogantly dismissed on the ground that “fascism as a word…has been degraded as a political slogan and epithet, a kind of crying wolf phenomenon…What’s more important,” Greenberg said, “is that we focus on these elements in his [Trump’s] political repertoire, the hyper-nationalism, the encouragement of violence and so on.”
“And plus,” professor Painter chimed in, with a truly idiotic comment, “we don’t have to use the word fascist, which has a kind of European aura around it.” (Yes, she actually said that)
Professor Ben-Ghiat sat politely while the two elite academic Americanists responded as if they hadn’t paid remotely serious attention to what she said — as if she hadn’t defined fascism in a serious, specific, and adult way, as if the “constituent elements” of Trumpism don’t cohere into a fascist whole, as if she hadn’t explained precisely how Trump and the Trumpist movement were functioning within the fascist tradition, as if she hadn’t mentioned Latin America as well as Europe, as if fascism was only a European phenomenon, as if the United States (a great inspiration for Hitler’s vision and the Third Reich) possesses some kind of “can’t happen here”/exceptionalist immunity to fascism, as if Trump hadn’t already attempted a fascist coup (“crying wolf!”), and as if the Republi-fascists aren’t positioned to take back the White House and perhaps triple-branch power (both legally/-electorally and extra-legally/-electorally) in 2024-25, with ambitious plans for the Christian white nationalist makeover of the US governance order.
How ironic: few recent outrages are quite as explicitly fascist and culturally genocidal as the numerous red state laws passed in recent years that make it a crime to teach the history of American racism and sexism past and present.
(I’ll resist the temptation here to dig further into academic fascism denialism, a topic to which I dedicated an entire chapter [titled “The Anatomy of Fascism Denial”] in my most recent book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America. That this cringing denialism — replete with the charge of crying wolf — has endured and isn’t thoroughly discredited in so-called higher education past January 6 is a telling statement about the terrible state of US “liberal” and “left” (LOL) academic culture today.)
Oh, by the way, Trump’s Truth Social take on the Israel-Hamas war: “I kept Israel safe, remember that. I kept Israel safe. Nobody else will, nobody else can, and I know all of the players. They can’t do it. But I kept Israel safe and I will keep Israel safe. Thank you very much,” he added. (In a separate video: “Joe Biden’s total ineptitude, weakness and incompetence has led to this horrible attack on Israel, and it will only get worse. It’s only going to get worse.”)
Yes, the standard Strongman claim: He alone can fix it! So says the fascist Amerikaner leader who one year ago complained that American Jews don’t appreciate him enough and that they needed to “get their act together” and show more gratitude for his past policies toward Israel “before it is too late.”
Back to Israel-Gaza for my next commentary….