During the meeting in the Oval Office between Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump last Friday, a journalist asked the Mayor-elect of New York City: “Are you affirming that you think President Trump is a fascist?” Mamdani started to offer a conciliatory response, but Trump interjected: “That's okay. You can just say yes. I don't mind.” It was an odd thing for the leader of the free world to say. I can’t imagine any other president of the US or any other nation would ever have made such an admission, even many who were openly fascist. I don't think the comment got the coverage it deserved.
Here’s the moment:
Q: Are you affirming that you think President Trump is a fascist? MAMDANI: I've spoken about-- TRUMP: That's okay. You can just say yes. I don't mind.— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 21 November 2025 at 20:53
I am not sure if he realised what he was admitting to. He seemed perfectly happy, even proud of it, which suggests to me he doesn’t know what fascism is. That or his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has convinced him it’s a good thing, which is not as improbable as you might believe.
Mussolini was the founder and creator of fascism. He coined the term "fascism" and established the first fascist political party, the National Fascist Party (PNF), in Italy in 1921. That served as the template and inspiration for other fascist movements across Europe, including Hitler's Nazi Party in Germany.
Umberto Eco, an Italian born in 1932, has written about what he called Eternal Fascism (Ur-Fascism in Italian), and he uses 14 points to identify a fascist movement. Not all 14 are necessary; some movements don’t have certain elements, but they are still fascist. Here are a few of the fourteen that seem to me to describe Trump and his administration:
The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
You can find the complete list with greater definition in an article Eco wrote for the New Yorker magazine in 1995, twenty years before Trump entered the political fray (Eco died in 2016).
When you look at what's happening in America right now, you can see that Trump was right, he is a fascist. He is launching trumped-up legal cases against those who have crossed or annoyed him in some way. The army is illegally patrolling the streets in some cities.
The conditions in which thousands of ICE detainees, very few of them with any criminal convictions, are being kept before being deported to God knows where are akin to the early concentration camps. Beatings, humiliations and lack of food are commonplace.
Trump is now building up military forces in the Caribbean, ready to attack Venezuela. He has already unlawfully killed almost 100 people in small boats that he claims, without evidence, are drug traffickers.
Trump is a fascist, and he doesn't care who knows it. We should all be very afraid.
The BBC
Sir Robbie Gibb, a member of the BBC's board of governors, gave evidence to a hearing of the Culture, Media and Sport (CMS) committee yesterday following the two high-profile resignations at the BBC and a threat of legal action from Donald Trump over an edit of his 6 January speech. Gibb was a former BBC journalist who became an adviser to Theresa May before being appointed to the BBC board of governors by Boris Johnson. He is unashamedly a Tory.
In 2020, a consortium of business and media figures, led by Gibb, successfully bid to buy the 180-year-old paper The Jewish Chronicle. Gibb claims to be the 100% owner, but there are some questions about who put up a £3.5 million loan that has now been written off. Gibb refuses to say where the money came from.
He has been accused in the past by several former BBC journalists, including Emily Maitlis, of being an ‘active agent’ of the Conservatives. Yesterday, when asked why he thought people believed him to be biased, he told the committee:
“I don't know why people write that, it's not for me to say,” he said. “Perception is important, but not as important as reality.” He told the committee that he has become “weaponised” – and insisted he was “hugely impartial”.
Gibb claimed: “I think there couldn’t be a bigger mismatch between the way I’m presented in some quarters, in relation to my attitude."
Sir Robbie, who spent over 20 years working at the BBC and was director of communications for former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, was asked how he managed his own bias.
"I have impartiality through my bones," he told the committee, saying it was "drummed" into him when he joined the BBC in 1991.
You can judge how impartial he is at The Jewish Chronicle:
Gibb; “ I had no editorial role whatsoever at the Jewish Chronicle”. Lee Harpin, reporter at the paper; “RG made a habit of calling into the office on print days to check up on what stories were topping the news list, and offering a view’”
— Alan Rusbridger (@arusbridger.bsky.social) 24 November 2025 at 17:55
Or by this article in The Daily Mail on Brexit and Labour in 2019. The Broadcasting, Entertainment, Communications and Theatre Union has called for Gibb to be sacked from the BBC board. The union say:
"We simply do not see how staff can have faith in the BBC's leadership while a crucial position on the board is filled by someone perceived by many staff and external commentators as sympathetic to, or actively part of, a campaign to undermine the BBC and influence its political impartiality."
No, he is not impartial and never has been.
By the way, nobody asked Michael Prescott, who also gave evidence yesterday and who wrote the memo accusing the BBC of anti-Trump bias, why he himself had misleadingly edited Trump’s 6 Jan speech to create the impression that Trump hadn’t encouraged the mob by telling them: "....you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong."
