EXTREMISMIs Donald Trump a Fascist? Here’s What an Expert Thinks
Experts are divided over the question of whether or not the term “Fascist” applies to Donld Trump. New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat says she is still divided on the issue. She wrote that “in some ways, the label of Fascism is too reductive for Trump” because he “praises Communist dictators as much as he praises the Fascistic leaders,” but “it is beyond doubt that Trump has provided a new stage and a new context for fascist ideologies and practices.”
Gen. John Kelly, Donald Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, went public this week with his concerns that the former president met the definition of a fascist. Speaking to the New York Times, Kelly declared that Trump “would govern like a dictator if allowed”. Days later in an interview vice-president Kamala Harris agreed with him.
Trump replied in his usual style. On Truth Social, he called Kelly a “degenerate … who made up a story out of pure Trump Derangement Syndrome Hatred”. He also posted on X, falsely accusing Harris of “going so far as to call me Adolf Hitler, and anything else that comes to her warped mind”. In fact, Harris has not called him “Hitler”. Funnily enough, it was his own running mate, J.D. Vance, who once called him “America’s Hitler” in a private text message.
Helpfully, Kelly also provided a surprisingly rigorous definition of fascism, a term famously flexible as both a political concept and a political insult. He described it as “a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy”.
This is remarkably close to widely accepted historical definitions of the political tendency that arose with the foundation of Italy’s fascist movement in 1919 and spread across interwar Europe. Federico Finchelstein, professor of history at the New School for Social Research, has summed it up as “a political ideology that encompassed totalitarianism, state terrorism, imperialism, racism, and, in Germany’s case … the Holocaust”.
Historians on Fascism
Historians have been debating whether the term applies to Trump since his first presidential campaign and his election on 9 November 2016. Very early on, in a 2015 conversation with a Vice reporter, Cornell University history professor Isabel Hull stated that Trump was “not principled enough to be a fascist”. She described him as more of a “nativist-populist”.
Finchelstein wrote an entire book to explain the difference between historical fascism and contemporary populism. While they share many features, he argued fascism is a form of dictatorship while populism functions within the boundaries of democracy.
Yet, populism can turn into fascism when it resorts to the practices of identifying and persecuting internal enemies. Timothy Snyder, a professor of history and global affairs at Yale University, has repeatedly stated that Trump is indeed a fascist, recently telling Vanity Fair that Americans might just quietly adapt to the “banality” of tyranny.
