of Justice threatening to arrest and charge mayors with a federal crime who do not implement his anti-immigration policies and racist assaults on immigrants.38 His minions and collaborators, like Devin Nunes, attack law enforcement agencies including the Justice Department, FBI, and individuals such as Special Counsel Mueller for attempting to enforce the law.39 What can be learned from past periods of tyranny is that the embrace of lawlessness is often followed by a climate of terror and repression that is the essence of fascism.
Trump’s call for blind loyalty reflects more than vanity and insecurity. Trump lives, as Masha Gessen observes, “surrounded by enemies, shadowed by danger, forever perched on the precipice.”40 He has in not too subtle ways also convinced a wide range of radical extremists, from the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis to the racist and fascist alt-right movement, that he shares their hatred of people of color, immigrants, and Jews. Imaginary horrors inhabit this dystopian world and frighteningly resemble shades of a terrifying past of genocide, concentration camps, and world war. As Jeffrey St. Clair puts it, “Trump projects the image of president as gravedigger,” offering up to fearful, angry, scared, and resentful whites “sacrificial killing[s] on their behalf. Mass arrests. Torture. Deportation of the sick and helpless. He vows to turn entire nations into glowing morgues. All for them. And they eat it up, savoring the bitterness.”41
State of Disunion
Nowhere is this dystopian vision more succinctly contained than in Trump’s first State of the Union Address and the response it garnered.42 Billed by the White House as a speech that would be “unifying” and marked by a tone of “bipartisanship,” it was in actuality the opposite. Steeped in divisiveness, fear, racism, war mongering, nativism, and immigrant bashing, it once again displayed Trump’s contempt for democracy. Claiming “all Americans deserve accountability and respect,” he spent ample airtime equating undocumented immigrants with the criminal gang MS-13, regardless of the fact that undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than American citizens do. As Juan Cole points out, “Americans murdered 17,250 other Americans in 2016. Almost none of the perpetrators was an undocumented worker, contrary to the impression Trump gave.”43 According to Cole, “Where the race of the perpetrator was known in 2016, about 30 percent were white and 36 percent were black; less than two percent were known to be of another ethnicity. However, Trump foregrounded murders by immigrants. Homicide tracks pretty closely with poverty, not with race.”44 For Trump, as with most demagogues, fear is the most valued currency of politics. Moreover, he delivered it in spades, suggesting that the visa lottery system and “chain migration” — in which individuals can migrate through the sponsorship of their family — pose a threat to America and “present risks we can just no longer afford.” He suggested even DREAMERS were part of a culture of criminality and in a not too subtle expression of derision stated “Americans are dreamers too.” White nationalists such as Richard Spencer and David Duke cheered Trump’s remark. This was one of many gestures well-suited to his white nationalist base.
Trump proudly declared that he was not going to close Guantánamo and once again argued “terrorists should be treated like terrorists.” The ruthless policy of “extraordinary rendition” and torture, rather than being seen as war crimes, fan the paranoia, nihilist passions, and apocalyptic populism that feed his base. Pointing to menacing enemies all around the world, Trump argued for expanding the nuclear arsenal and the military budget. He also called on “the Congress to empower every Cabinet secretary with the authority to reward good workers — and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people” — in other words, to rid the federal workforce of those who disagree with him, allowing him to fill civil service jobs with friends, families, cronies, and sycophants.
His insistence on “loyalty” instills fear in those he appoints to government positions if they dare to hold power accountable. This is what happens when democracies turn into fascist states. As Jacob Levy points out:
[Trump’s call] on Congress to allow Cabinet officials … to fire civil servants on grounds of political disagreement, ending the century-old rule of a professional and apolitical civil service that stays on as political appointees come and go. This is of a piece with the months-long rhetorical assault on the so-called “deep state” by Trump and the Trumpist media. Maybe there will be no such legislation. But Trump saying it matters. House Speaker Paul Ryan echoing the call for a “purge” at the FBI matters. Fox News’s constant public delegitimation of the civil service matters. It matters in particular for the Russia investigation, of course. Trump means to push out anyone who isn’t on “his team” in a way that the FBI and the Department of Justice are really not supposed to be, and that process is underway in front of our eyes. But it also matters more broadly for the character of the American state and bureaucracy. By discouraging professionals and encouraging politicization, Trump is already changing the civil service by his speech.45
None of this is entirely unexpected. As Michael Tomasky puts it, “Honestly, who couldn’t have imagined any of this? To anyone who had the right read on Trump’s personality — the vanity, the insecurity, the contempt for knowledge, the addiction to chaos — nothing that’s happened has been surprising in the least.”46 Nevertheless, Trump is worse than almost anyone imagined: he is not only the enemy of democracy, he is symptomatic of the powerful political, economic, and cultural forces shaping this new American fascism.
Roger Cohen, writing for The New York Times, argues that Trump has so degraded and soiled public discourse that people have become numb and exhausted. How else to explain the sycophantic posturing of the mainstream press and much of the American public in the face of Trump’s racist State of the Union Address? As Cohen observes:
Many commentators swooned. It was enough that Trump did not go on walkabout. For NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, “It was optimistic; it was bright; it was conciliatory.” Frank Luntz, a respected Republican pollster, thought that only one word qualified: “Wow.” He tweeted that the speech was a “brilliant mix of numbers and stories, humility and aggressiveness, traditional conservatism and political populism.” Jake Tapper of CNN discerned “beautiful prose.” Even the Washington Post saw “A Call for Bipartisanship” (its initial Page One headline) lurking somewhere. Three in four American viewers approved of the speech, according to a CBS News poll.47
There are some critics who claim that Trump is simply a weak president whose ineptness is being countered by “a robust democratic culture and set of institutions” and not much more than a passing moment in history.48 Others, such as Wendy Brown and Nancy Fraser, view him as an authoritarian expression of right-wing populism and an outgrowth of neoliberal politics and policies,49 while historians such as Timothy Snyder and Robert O. Paxton analyze him in terms that echo some elements of a fascist past. Some conservatives such as David Frum view him as a mix between a modern day, self-obsessed, emotionally needy narcissist and demagogue whose assault on democracy needs to be taken seriously and asserts that whether or not he is a fascist is not as important as what he plans to do with his power. For Frum, there is a real danger that people will retreat into their private worlds, become cynical, and enable our collective slide into a form of tyranny that would then become difficult to defeat.50
Corey Robin argues that we overstep a theoretical boundary when comparing Trump directly to Hitler. According to Robin, in comparing Trump to Hitler or the policies of the Third Reich, we not only exaggerate the threat that Trump poses to the values and institutions of democracy but overestimate the growing threat of authoritarianism in the United States. For Robin, Trump has failed to institute many of his policies, and thus is just a weak politician with little actual power. He contends that George W. Bush’s policy decisions were far worse than anything we have seen in Trump’s emerging administration and concludes that while Trump talks like an authoritarian, he never really gets what he wants. Jacob Levy sums up Robin’s argument, “A year later, we’re still in NAFTA and NATO, there haven’t been mass deportations, Hillary Clinton hasn’t been thrown in jail, the separation of powers is intact, and so on. Just ignore his words.”51
But words matter. They
