Trump and his MAGA movement are often labelled fascist and I used to think this was just an overreaction to some of the crazy stuff Trump comes out with, mostly without him realising what he was saying. In any case, I’m not sure I’m qualified to understand the difference between fascism, totalitarianism and authoritarianism all of which involve to a greater or lesser extent, a single dictatorial leader, an autocratic government and suppression of dissent. Perhaps they're all the same. I thought Trump was too stupid to become a dictator. Still, there are worrying signs that he is simply a figurehead and shadowy forces behind him are happy to see the US slide into authoritarianism.
Over the last few months, I’ve followed a lot of American political commentators who have been highly critical of Trump in the past. One of these is Joe Scarborough, the host of Morning Joe, a political show on the MSNBC channel.
He and Mika Brzezinski, his co-host, have recently been accused of travelling to Mar-a-Lago to ‘kiss Trump’s ring’ or what they call ‘resetting’ communications. This, according to insiders, is because of fear of retribution when the president-elect takes office at the end of January.
Joe Scarborough & Mika Brzezinski revealed they met with Donald Trump in an attempt to "reset" their communications.I explain why this was a cowardly act and break down the hypocrisy of bending the knee to Donald Trump.Watch here: https://t.co/e6V1relhI1 pic.twitter.com/0V8C98e3gy— Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) November 19, 2024
Scarborough and Brzezinski probably thought they could be targeted by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) or the Department of Justice in a political campaign against them which they might win eventually in the courts but only at huge personal and financial cost. Disappointing though it is, you can understand why they did it and no doubt others will do the same.
Each time this happens, opposition voices grow quieter, the dictator is emboldened and his position made more and more secure. You can see how it starts.
All this comes after a lot of very well-known newspaper magnates blocked their editorial boards from endorsing Harris during the campaign, again apparently because of what they thought Trump would do if he won. He only has to threaten to launch investigations into the loudest voices to silence the others. He doesn’t have to actually do much more.
This is not normal. Newspaper owners have always used their positions to push voters in one direction or another in the hope of gaining influence themselves, but I have never heard of any of them being frightened off or worrying about retribution, at least in Western democracies. What’s happening in Trump’s America is a first, as far as I know.
A Substack blog about an interview with Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an American historian who studies modern fascism. and her claims these are indeed signs that the US is descending into fascism and why Trump ought to be considered a fascist, is interesting.
She points to former Republican Senator Mitt Romney saying some other senators were afraid to vote to convict Trump during his second impeachment out of fear for their safety as reported by The Washington Post: “When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.”
Ben-Ghiat once tweeted that: "Authoritarianism brings the methods of organized crime and thuggery to bear on keeping order in the party and making sure the Leader's authority is unchallenged.”
America has always been a violent society and as the blog says, rightly, no democracy can function properly under threats of violence, where any dissent comes with the risk of physical retaliation. So, this move into overt violence under Trump, which started in January 2021 with riots in the Capitol building, I can see is an indicator of the direction in which the US is headed.
Trump has called for broadcasters like NBC to have their licences revoked simply for editing an interview with Kamala Harris. As Ben-Ghiat explains: “Welcome to the authoritarian weaponization of the state and waste of taxpayer [dollars] on vanity crusades: Anyone whose work seems to criticize the leader or produce results that he does not like must be investigated.”
And the cult that surrounds Trump don't seem bothered by it. They believe he's infallible, another trait of totalitarian regimes. One Republican congressman Troy Nehls from Texas said recently: “If Trump says tariffs work, tariffs work. Donald Trump is really never wrong. Think about it. He is never wrong.”
In response Ben-Ghiat said: “The idea of the Leader as mythical, or world-historical, a man above all other men, is a staple of authoritarian leader cults.” She also says:
“The war on experts will be fought on many fronts, truth-tellers and researchers are first delegitimized and then criminalized in authoritarian states. Authoritarians must politicize everything to make the world conform to their fanaticism and lies.”
This was in connection with anti-vaxxer and conspiracy peddler Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who will soon be the head of the Department of Health and Human Services but there are others in Trump's entourage just as crazy.
Congress isn't going to help either. Speaker Mike Johnson is a Trump devotee and will do whatever Trump asks and so will most of the Republican senators and representatives. Even some Democrats might find it easier to stay silent.
Professor Timothy Snyder, who writes about the right and fascism, has always said that the power of authoritarianism is often given freely at the beginning when individuals anticipate what the leader wants of them and provide it in advance without him (it’s always him) even having to demand it.
This is what's happening right now in America. It's not even clear that it will be able to pull back from the abyss. We have been warned.
I see the former German chancellor Angela Merkel has released her memoirs and doesn't think much of Trump. She says:
“He judged everything from the perspective of the property entrepreneur he had been before politics,” she wrote of Trump. “Each property could only be allocated once. If he didn’t get it, someone else did. That was also how he looked at the world.”
“For him, all countries were in competition with each other, in which the success of one was the failure of the other; he did not believe that the prosperity of all could be increased through co-operation.”
When she went to The White House in March 2017: "We spoke on two different levels. Trump on an emotional level, me on a factual one,” Merkel wrote of the meeting. “When he did pay attention to my arguments, it was usually only in order to construct new accusations from them.”
Isn't this Trump through and through?
She also said that Trump was keen to get her opinion on Putin: “Donald Trump asked me a number of questions, including about my East German origins and my relationship with Putin. He was obviously very fascinated by the Russian president. In the years that followed, I had the impression that politicians with autocratic and dictatorial traits captivated him.“
We are living in dangerous times.
