The Democrats have used the word “fascist” promiscuously during Trump's two terms. Even though few know, or care about, its definition, it makes them feel good. And it wasn't long ago that some Republicans called Barack Obama a fascist as well (when they weren't calling him a Marxist), especially after his administration's interventions into private industries with the auto industry bailouts and the Affordable Care Act.
While excessive state control is one aspect of fascism, Obama didn’t strip Americans of their “God given” rights as a fascist would. Under fascism, the state is God. Cherry-picking a couple of actions and using them to characterize an entire administration's ideology while ignoring massive differences in intent, democratic governance, and rule of law doesn't make for an argument. Calling a political opponent a fascist is a cheap attack used to dismiss their policies. It's much easier than debating the merits, economics, or legality of those policies.
The Left and Right use “fascist” as an all-purpose political insult against anyone they dislike, diluting its meaning. It’d be instructive for the media to ask politicians and political commentators calling others “fascist” to define what a fascist is, but the media's as lazy as the ones slinging that word around. In our current, dumbed-down political culture, name-calling is a favorite tactic, but there's a lot of confusion about what constitutes fascism. That's why the word has consistently been at or near the top of the list of words most frequently looked up in online dictionaries.
The confusion’s because it's a complex topic. Socialism has Das Capital, and Nazism has Mein Kampf, but Benito Mussolini, the inventor of fascist, didn't write a single, structured manifesto. Instead, the Italian dictator relied on intense emotional appeals and shifting opportunism. He was once a rising star in the Italian Socialist Party, but ended up making them the scapegoats because he saw it as a winning strategy.
His form of fascism is difficult to pin down. Perhaps his slogan—"Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state"—expresses it best. That doesn't sound like what Trump is calling for, yet no American president’s been called a fascist more than him.
While Mussolini emphasized culture and loyalty, Hitler fixated on biological racism. To the Nazis, the state was a tool to preserve and expand the Aryan race. The same anti-Semitism that's now bubbling up on the Left was always the core defining feature of Nazism. But Hitler’s regime differed in so many ways from Mussolini's on race, religion, and governance that some historians believe Nazism was a separate entity from fascism. Nevertheless, when Democrats call Trump and his supporters fascists, they're thinking about Hitler. Very few of them could form an intelligible sentence on Mussolini's fascism.
Mussolini used his violent paramilitary force—squadristi (the Blackshirts)—to wrest power in the 1920s from a Socialist parliament, with the help of Italy’s hapless king, Viktor Emmanuel. After Mussolini became prime minister, he had his Blackshirts continue in their thuggery against socialists, communists, trade unionists, and other political opponents. The Blackshirts became one of the most recognizable symbols of Italian fascism and inspired similar uniformed political movements in other countries—e.g. Hitler's Brownshirts. No such movement has arisen under Trump, which undercuts the argument that he's a fascist.
Critics can point to the January 6 uprising, but it lasted only a few hours. Some have said that ICE, with its paramilitary appearance and culture, is Trump's squadristi, but the Blackshirts murdered people openly, and their goal, which they achieved, was to destroy an entire political movement—socialism. That's not happening now.
In her book, Fascism: A Warning, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright posited, "Fascism is not an ideology; it's a process for taking and holding power." While plenty of historians disagree, the stage has to be set before power can be seized. Economic crisis, political instability, social conflict, and widespread dissatisfaction with existing democratic institutions all help to set that up. That's what happened in Italy and Germany, but it's not the case in the U.S. Kamala Harris called Trump a fascist. Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Joe Biden agreed with the characterization of Trump as a fascist after former Trump chief of staff John F. Kelly made that claim.
Biden expanded on that claim: "Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic." While many Democrats took this alarmist rhetoric seriously, another way to look at it would be that it demonstrated a serious lack of judgement of the strength of those foundations. Crying wolf repeatedly sounds more like weakness than good sense.
It's true that Trump has fascistic tendencies, but he's working in a system with robust protections against fascism. Trump does share a set of characteristics with Benito Mussolini. Trump understands that the masses like a show, and he’s a demagogue with an overweening egos. At his peak, Mussolini's name was displayed on an array of products, including pasta, lingerie, hair tonic and baby food. Trump puts his name on every building or product he builds or buys. Like Trump, Mussolini was a non-smoker, a teetotaler, and a germophobe. Both share a love of scapegoating, a disdain for the media, and a romanticization of a mythologized past.
Trump and Mussolini attempted, with different levels of success, to consolidate their power by exploiting social divisions, encouraging tribal loyalties, weakening democratic institutions, and using intimidation or violence when necessary—e.g. January 6, when he cared nothing about the safety of his own vice president, Mike Pence.
Years ago, George Orwell suggested that the best one-word description of a fascist was “bully.” Trump’s a bully. But the U.S. won’t have its democracy threatened by what's in this president's heart, despite what we've heard from the Democrats.
The MAGA movement has some fascist-adjacent rhetoric and aesthetics, but it's unable to replicate fascism as a governance system. Trump’s more of an authoritarian opportunist who cracks the fascist playbook open when it suits him. Despite his populism and nationalism, two traits associated with fascism, his governance has operated within the frame of the U.S. Constitution. Trump's nationalism isn't the extreme, militant nationalism of Mussolini. His economic policy is free market capitalism, as opposed to the Italian dictator’s State-directed corporatism. The Supreme Court has ruled against Trump several times. Unlike a fascist, he's backed down when that happened.
Trump’s spoiled and thin-skinned. He's a malignant narcissist, perhaps a sociopath, but he doesn't meet the qualifications of a fascist. Calling him that word—the political equivalent of the N-word—does little for the Democratic Party while watering down the meaning of “fascism.” Trump's the political equivalent of a metrosexual. He has stylistic elements that speak of fascism, but politically he's more or less “straight.” One could say he's “fash curious.”