Donald Trump leads the most overtly fascist political movement the world has seen since 1945 and a second term as president would sound the death knell for American democracy.
George Grundy concludes his series on the collapse of American democracy in the lead-up to the 2024 Election. Read the first part here, part two here, part three here, part four here, part five here, part six here and part seven here.
THE IDEA THAT today’s Republican Party under Donald Trump represents a neo-fascist movement, reminiscent of organisations from the 1930s, is supported by some of the most august and sober voices in American public life.
Former General Barry McCaffrey has said that what we are seeing is “a parallel to the 1930s in Nazi Germany”. He calls MAGA Republicanism a “cult” posing a major threat to the United States.
Political strategist Steve Schmidt says America is “on the edge of an abyss”. Conservative lawyer George Conway has called Trump “a narcissistic sociopath, a psychopath… a megalomaniac”, adding, “we’ve seen people like this throughout history”.
These are not voices from the fringes. Generals, lawyers, people who know Trump well. People who worked closely with him and were often aligned with his political goals, but are now so alarmed that they publicly state the danger he poses to the nation.
Former Chief of Staff John Kelly recently said that if Trump is re-elected, “God help us”. Trump’s former Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, now calls him a “threat to democracy”. His former Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, said Trump is “unstable and unhinged”.
Former National Security Advisor John Bolton has said that a second Trump term would be “unremitting” days of constitutional crisis. Trump’s former Attorney General, Bill Barr, warns that he is a “consummate narcissist” who will put “gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else”. Some of these people are, remarkably, still voting for Trump.
In fact, 17 of Trump’s first-term cabinet members have warned of the danger posed by a second term in office. His own Vice-President, Mike Pence, has declined to endorse him.
Suspension of the Constitution, deportations, evisceration of the media. If you’re missing the similarity to 1930s Germany at this point it can only be through wilful blindness. Trump issues constant “nod and wink” signals to White supremacist organisations, dined with Nick Fuentes (a White supremacist whose stated goal is “total Aryan victory”) and has said that he will consider pardoning all those imprisoned for their roles in the 6 January attacks on Congress.
These groups and individuals increasingly resemble a paramilitary wing of the hard Right, a cabal unswerving in their devotion to Donald Trump. If pardoned, they will also know that any future violence on behalf of Trump will enjoy implicit protection from the law.
America’s media still employs some of the voices that misleadingly tried to calm passions the first time around. Trump speaks in hyperbole, they said. It’s theatre. He’ll grow into the presidency. There are no excuses this time. American democracy scraped through the sternest of tests in 2020. If Trump wins in 2024, it will be the nation’s last election.
The battle is not yet lost. The distance from now until November is still an eternity in political terms. No one could have predicted that a financial cataclysm would strike America just before the 2008 Election and few could have foreseen a worldwide pandemic intervening in 2020. Many Americans pay little attention to politics until the last few weeks before an election. Much can change.
Ignore national polls. It is generally accepted that in order to win, Kamala Harris needs a margin of roughly 3.7 per cent nationally. Joe Biden may have won in 2020, but the truth is he squeaked through by about 42,000 votes in a small number of swing states. America’s antiquated electoral college system requires Democrat candidates to win by even greater percentages each cycle. Trump lost by 3 million votes in 2016 and Biden won by 7 million in 2020 — both won the electoral college by the same margin.
November’s election is likely to take place in the most febrile political atmosphere during what will, essentially, be a poll on whether Donald Trump should be sent to prison. In a battle for personal survival which he will pitch as that of the nation’s existence, Trump’s rhetoric is likely to become almost apocalyptic.
Trump has recently taken to saying that he expects that there will be significant terrorist attacks on the United States (because of migrants). Although the FBI says that domestic far-Right violence is the greatest threat to America, this allows Trump to amplify his violent, racist rhetoric and claim prescience should some horrific event take place.
We can’t wish this reality away. The time for hoping that millions of Americans would somehow come to their senses is long past. Trump has a very real chance to win this year and the prospect of a second term in office should be absolutely terrifying for anyone who enjoys the relative safety of the world order today.
America has a far more extensive history of fascism than we sometimes care to remember. In the 1930s, Father Charles Coughlin had perhaps the widest reach of any American demagogue and preached open fascism and anti-Semitism to his millions of followers.
Prior to World War II, there were fascist rallies across America, including at Madison Square Garden. The Ku Klux Klan threatened violent revolution throughout most of the 20th Century (Donald Trump’s father, Fred, was arrested during a Klan riot) and there remains to this day a secessionist wing within many southern states.
Trump is not Hitler. The comparison can be imprecise, facile and reflexive. With all the preening, ego and corruption, Mussolini would be a much better fit. Yet you have to be wilfully ignorant to ignore the fact that many of the things Trump says are precisely what Hitler said, and that he and his followers increasingly resemble what Hitler and his Nazis must have looked like in the 1930s. It’s also hard to ignore the fact that around half of the Republican base is now explicitly comfortable with the idea of America as a fascist nation.
One of the most remarkable things about Hitler’s capture of Germany was how quickly the country went from the vanguard of Western democracy to Nazi fascism in just a few short years. The Nazi regime was said to have benefitted from the fact that its atrocities ‘overstep the limits of credibility’.
Or to put it another way, many Germans simply couldn’t believe what was happening. A rapid collapse of the world order that we have enjoyed since 1945 is possible, or even probable, should Trump gain power. Trump plans to implement many of his most radical policies in the first 180 days of his new administration, likely plunging the world into profound crisis in those six short months. How a new period of profound global instability would play out is impossible to predict, but it’s safe to say that it would be very bad, indeed.
Trump’s policies, his planned purge of the civil service, direct command of the army and dismantling of American democracy, would cause the nation to descend towards the abyss. Talk of a new civil war is now commonplace, often among Trump supporters, a third of whom believe that violence may be necessary to “save the country”.
What is likely to emerge first is a Balkanisation between red and blue states, whereby (for example) progressive states like California refuse to enact federal deportation laws, while other states experience violent clashes between federal and local authorities. This is already happening at the border in Texas.
America has been incredibly fortunate to have Joe Biden as President during these perilous last few years. Biden presided over an almost miraculous period of growth, crime reduction and a period of low unemployment not matched since the 1960s, successes that Kamala Harris can now claim as her own. Ruling parties are rarely rejected by the electorate when a first term has been so good.
Trump – this strange, nasty man who wears his profound mental frailties on his sleeve and is as transparent as he is deceptive – represents one of the greatest dangers to the American experiment since its inception. Even as the polls move against him, Trump still has a fighting chance of winning back the presidency.
Trump’s MAGA Republican movement frighteningly mirrors sociologist Laurence Britt’s famous ‘The 14 Characteristics of Fascism’. Intellectualism and higher education are scorned, investigated and attacked. Nationalism replaces patriotism, minorities are singled out as scapegoats for social ills. The media is cowed, religion and government intertwine, and corporate power is entrenched.
Mussolini famously said that fascism “should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power”. As many of America’s billionaires line up behind Trump, a new fascist corporatism is now in prospect.
When faced with the real prospect of gaol, ask yourself — what wouldn’t Trump do? What level would he not sink to? What is he not capable of doing? What is an action so indefensible that even Trump wouldn’t stoop to it?
The answer to these questions should frame our understanding of events this fall. It was by sheer good fortune that America avoided catastrophe on 6 January 2021. Had the rioters taken Congress-people hostage or killed them, Trump could have declared martial law. Who knows what might have happened next? This good fortune may not return a second time.
Democracy is not an immutable law of physics, it is a man-made construct and just as fragile, and in America, one of the most belligerent nations on Earth armed with the most nuclear weapons and more guns per capita than any other nation, it is hanging by a thread.
Those of us in Australia can sometimes be too sanguine about America’s reliability as an ally, especially because of our geographic place in the world. But Donald Trump leads the most overtly fascist political movement the world has seen since 1945. A second Trump term would pose profound questions for Australia’s geopolitical positioning.
It didn’t begin with trains, concentration camps and ovens. The descent into the fascist abyss was marked by a thousand nicks and cuts to the social fabric, by themselves often barely remarked upon. America sits at the crossroads. Events this November will define its future as a Republic. Perhaps the same could be said for humanity’s fate as well.
Tick tock.
Read part one of ‘America's gathering storm’ here, part two here, part three here, part four here, part five here, part six here and part seven here.
George Grundy is an English-Australian author, media professional and businessman. You can follow him on Twitter @georgewgrundy.
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