Donald Trump, American Fascist - by Thomas Zimmer
▻https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/donald-trump-american-fascist
Finally, on October 13, Trump sat down for an interview with Fox News and was asked if he expected immigrants to cause chaos on election day: “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump replied. “We have some very bad people, some sick people, radical left lunatics…. And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
It is true that the term “fascism” is overused colloquially and in the public discourse. Quite often, it is uttered as a casual slur. Or it is used strategically to stigmatize something or someone as the ultimate evil. But the fact that the term is also being used in careless ways that don’t hold up analytically must not keep us from acknowledging that it is diagnostically correct to call Donald Trump and his movement fascist. Trump is not “the new Hitler” and he is not “just like Mussolini” – such facile analogies are useless and silly. We are not facing an exact replica of the Ur-fascism that rose to power in Europe’s interwar period. Trumpism is a specifically American, specifically twenty-first century version of fascism.
