Lessons in Fascism
Prof. Ben-Ghiat has been laying out brutal truths on why Trump is a fascist
These days, we hear the words “fascist” and “authoritarian” used far more frequently, and rightfully so when it comes to defining Donald Trump and his anti-democratic lackeys. But things can get quite muddled as the other side tries to use them to describe Democratic leaders, and on the left as we try to split hairs between what is fascist and what is, for example, merely “illiberal.”
We’re fortunate that Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who is an expert on modern fascism and particularly the roots and contours of it in Italy under dictator Benito Mussolini, posts frequently about Trump's brand of American re-packaged fascism to help guide the way to understanding the threat he poses.
We interviewed her over a year ago at The Big Picture (you can see that Q&A here) long before Trump came back to power. Lately, she’s been pointing out that many of the policies, strategies, and actions of the incoming Trump administration are overtly fascist and authoritarian in nature. In today’s piece, I will reiterate her commentary and flesh out each point within a broader political context.
Through this exercise, I hope that readers will recognize that Ben-Ghiat’s warnings about Trump must be taken quite seriously. Because if it walks like Il Duce and quacks like Il Duce…
Thuggery and the fascist state
“[A]uthoritarianism 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,” Ben-Ghiat posted on Twitter.
She was referring to a remark by Vanity Fair writer Gabriel Sherman, who stated, “An under covered story is how GOP politicians fear their physical safety if they defy Trump agenda. A high level MAGA person told me: ‘They should be afraid. They didn’t win the election. Trump did.’”
We already saw a version of this in the leadership race in the House after Speaker Kevin McCarthy was forced out. As MAGA acolyte and Trump ally Rep. Jim Jordan sought the top position, death threats began against representatives (and even their staff and families) who voted against him and prevented him from taking the reins.
Indeed, we saw an even earlier version of this when, as former Sen. Mitt Romney recalled, senators were afraid to vote to convict Trump during his second impeachment out of fear for their safety. As the Washington Post reported, “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.”
A democracy cannot function properly under threats of violence, where any dissent comes with the risk of physical retaliation. That describes Russia, and not America as we have known it.
We have been heading to that dangerous point for some time already. And with Trump’s second victory, the far right is being quite open about its intent to enforce Trump’s will through threats of reprisal against any who would defy him. A key test looms: Will GOP senators refuse to recess Congress to allow backdoor appointments, and are there at least four of them with enough principle and backbone to deny the worst of his nominations—including Matt Gaetz—a place in our government?
Bringing in criminals and cronies to run things
There is credible evidence that Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for Attorney General, is himself a rapist and sex trafficker. The fact that this is no bar to his nomination speaks volumes of Trump’s contempt for the rule of law and his intent to destroy it from within.
Ben-Ghiat puts this succinctly into context: “Authoritarianism is the conversion of rule of law into rule by the lawless.”
“Gaetz embodies this,” she concludes. In his case—as well as Russian apologist and propagandist Tulsi Gabbard nominated for Director of National Intelligence and Fox & Friends weekend host Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary—background checks by the FBI would stand in the way of this… so they simply won’t do them.
Appointing corrupt or crony officials also increases the ability of Trump and his allies to steer money toward themselves. The government winds up getting rearranged for the benefit of the president’s friends, Ben-Ghiat warns. A prime example of this is the appointment of Brendan Carr to head the FCC. Carr is a big champion of Elon Musk and his Starlink system, and as Eric Lipton of the New York Times notes, the FCC controls orbital satellite access by space communication companies in the U.S.
Carr will be well-positioned to help his buddy Musk out.
Charge them with being “terrorist-supporting”
Republican lawmakers in Washington are looking to equip Trump with special powers to bring the hammer down on nonprofits accused of being “terrorist-supporting.”
“The terrorism charge is from the authoritarian playbook,” writes Ben-Ghiat, noting that it was one “used regularly” by Putin in Russia and Erdogan in Turkey.
She’s referring to a bill that recently went down to defeat but will be voted upon again soon, to give Trump the power to falsely label and punish nonprofits as “terrorist-supporting.” He could then use that charge to effectively shut them down without due process.
Specifically, according to Nonprofit Quarterly, HR 9495
if enacted, would give the US secretary of the treasury the power to strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status if unilaterally deemed by the Department of the Treasury to be a “terrorist-supporting” organization—a hazy definition that would allow the Trump administration to selectively and arbitrarily target nonprofits viewed as political enemies.
The law would be easily misused. Trump has already labeled certain civil rights organizations as “terrorist-supporting” amid widespread campus protests over Gaza. The law would provide a new mechanism for the White House to suppress any organization opposing the president’s agenda.
As the ACLU stated in an open letter opposing HR 9495, the “terrorist-supporting” label is a massive expansion of government power over what already are strict limits on organizations that might assist terror organizations:
The executive branch already has extensive authority to prohibit transactions with individuals and entities it deems connected to terrorism and nonprofit organizations are already prohibited from providing material support to terrorist organizations. In fact, it would be a federal crime for them to do so.
Democratic opposition exists but needs to be stronger, as many Democrats voted in favor of the bill during an early attempt to pass it by a two-thirds vote.
“We all oppose terrorism and organizations that actually materially support terrorism should not enjoy tax-exempt status but that’s not what this bill is about,” said Rep. Mary Scanlon (D-PA). “This bill gives the president, any president, a broad authority to target and silence civil society groups the president does not agree with, and then the groups have no way to challenge this determination.”
Targeting the free press
Trump recently called for an investigation into Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, who published a poll in Iowa showing Harris up by three points. The poll wound up as a massive and embarrassing miss—the first time Selzer has ever been this wrong in her polling. But for Trump, the poll was personal.
”An investigation is fully called for,” Trump posted, claiming Selzer published “A totally Fake poll that caused great distrust and uncertainty at a very critical time” and that this was “possible ELECTION FRAUD” by Selzer.
Ben-Ghiat puts this directly into the Trumpian perspective. “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.”
The chilling effect on the press by such calls by Trump should not be underestimated. Already, many leading papers (e.g., The Washington Post, USA Today and the LA Times) declined to endorse a candidate for president, even though it was clear their editors backed Harris. The fear of reprisal from the incoming administration was already too great for those guardrails to bear the load, and no shot had even been fired yet.
Now, with Trump openly threatening “investigations” into those who come out with data, polls, stories or evidence against him, will the public be able to count on the media to report on Trump’s tariffs and the actual effect on inflation, on his mass deportations and the suffering they will cause, or on how unqualified and corrupt his nominees are? Will Trump continue to come after any papers, networks, and reporters writing these essential stories?
Like the charge of “terrorist-supporting” against nonprofits, Trump has already signaled he intends to punish any outlet or independent source that runs negative stories about him. Voters and readers must demand that the media play its traditional role of exposing truth and shining a light upon government failure, incompetence, and corruption. Capitulation by the press would invite even more egregious behavior and bullying by Trump.
The infallibility of Donald Trump
The sycophancy of the GOP toward Trump is reaching new and dangerous levels. One of his biggest cheerleaders in the House, Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX), made that painfully clear, telling reporters, “If Trump says tariffs work, tariffs work. Donald Trump is really never wrong. Think about it. He is never wrong.”
As Ben-Ghiat dryly observed, “Mussolini's slogan was ‘Mussolini is Always Right.’”
It isn’t just elected GOP officials who are fawning over Trump. Celebrities such as Sylvester Stallone are heaping praise upon him, even comparing Trump to Jesus Christ and to his own character Rocky of the films. “We’re in the presence of a really mythical character,” Stallone recently gushed. “Nobody in the world could have pulled off what he pulled off.” Stallone then called Trump “the second George Washington.”
“The idea of the Leader as mythical, or world historical, a man above all other men, is a staple of authoritarian leader cults,” Ben-Ghiat warned in response.
The danger of cult-like obedience and fealty to Trump, to the point where he literally can do no wrong, is this: When things begin to go wrong, as they likely will, the GOP will be forced to find other reasons for why things are going so badly. If, for example, tariffs cause massive inflation and economic misery, Republicans will need to cast about for others to blame, including China, the “globalists” (meaning Jews), or American corporations. Anyone but Trump.
We already witnessed the horrible consequences of half the nation believing Covid-19 was a hoax perpetuated by the Democrats and not what it truly was: a highly contagious, deadly disease. We may soon live through an Orwellian nightmare of Trump insisting up is down and black is white—whether it’s an economy in a tailspin, mass deportations and detention camps, or the need for him to invoke emergency powers to stop an “invasion” at the border—all with his own party not only going along with his lies without question but actually insisting that it would be wrong to even question the truth according to Trump.
Don’t trust the professionals
“The war on experts will be fought on many fronts,” Ben-Ghiat recently warned. Those include science, medicine, the law, education, history, and more. “Truth tellers and researchers are first delegitimized and then criminalized in authoritarian states,” she added.
She was responding to a resurfaced clip of anti-vaxxer and conspiracy peddler Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whom Trump has now tapped to head the Department of Health and Human Services. In the interview, Kennedy insists, shockingly, that you “cannot trust medical advice from medical professionals.” While conceding that people should stick with their doctors, Kennedy also urged listeners to “take care of your own healthcare” and to “question everything.”
Trump and Project 2025 have directly targeted the federal bureaucracy, threatening to eliminate the Department of Education and fire tens of thousands of career civil servants, replacing them with MAGA loyalists. Kennedy himself promised to fire 600 employees at the National Institutes of Health and reportedly would be “replacing them with a new cohort of workers as he seeks to dramatically reshape America’s health agencies.”
Why do this? Ben-Ghiat warns, “Authoritarians must politicize everything to make the world conform to their fanaticism and lies.” By putting anti-science skeptics like Kennedy in charge, they hope to undermine the administrative state by upending norms, ignoring expert recommendations, and prioritizing political obedience.
Keeping them sick and scared
In the area of public health, where scientists and experts are necessary to contain some of the worst dangers to the general population, the rise of anti-science leaders like Kennedy could be catastrophic. We saw this during the pandemic in states across the country that chose to ignore the recommendations of government officials and made the truth-sayers, and not the virus, the enemy.
What benefit does the Trump administration derive from this? Ben-Ghiat notes bleakly, “A diseased population is easier to control, as every authoritarian and con artist turned politician knows.” In the event of a bad outbreak, for example from the new strain of avian flu which has now been detected in humans on the West Coast, Trump’s authoritarian impulses might lead him to seize even greater control of American society.
Even in the absence of a national emergency that Trump could exploit, Kennedy’s plans for our national “health” appear to go far beyond his opposition to vaccines. As he once told a group of voters, Kennedy would immediately halt the development of new drugs for cancer, Alzheimer's, and other illnesses for a period of eight years.
Such a cessation of research would have devastating long-term consequences for families who might otherwise have had access to life-saving treatments and drugs in just a few years. It is hard to fathom the scale of suffering that could arise with the likes of Kennedy in charge of our national health systems.
A rubber stamp Congress
Speaker Mike Johnson has always been willing to do Trump’s every bidding, including killing the bipartisan border deal when Trump asked him to and, more recently, agreeing to consider a congressional recess so that Trump may ram through his appointments.
“Totally expected,” remarked Ben-Ghiat, because “his absence of morals and sycophancy are why [Johnson] was made speaker in the first place.”
Trump requires a spineless sycophant in the key role of Speaker and has spoken openly of a “secret” the two of them share. That secret may well be Speaker Johnson’s creation of conditions that permit Trump to unilaterally adjourn Congress—with it also up to Trump as to when it could reconvene.
Recently on Fox, Speaker Johnson said, “I believe in the principle of a new president being able to choose his team,” and he wished the Senate “would simply do its job of advice and consent and allow the president to put the persons in his cabinet of his choosing.”
That of course is not the role the Senate plays in giving “advice and consent.” The “consent” part of that actually requires the Senate to weigh in to either approve or reject the president’s nominees. That is the system of checks and balances that has prevented extremist appointments in the past, and it should apply now.
But Johnson has suggested that he would be in favor of Congress, and specifically the Senate, abdicating that role by somehow forcing the chambers into recess so that Trump can make “recess appointments,” a power reserved to the president under the Constitution. This would circumvent the Senate’s normal role of giving advice and consent and strip away a key check upon Trump’s power, meaning the House will have acted to strip away a key constitutional power of the other chamber.
It remains to be seen whether newly elected Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) will go along with the plan, or whether Trump and Johnson have devised a way to force an adjournment even without Thune’s approval. For example, the Constitution provides that if the House and the Senate cannot agree upon a date for adjournment, then the President can adjourn Congress unilaterally. It is not a stretch to consider that Johnson may declare the two chambers to be out of agreement, opening the door to Trump to unilaterally adjourn Congress for the first time in our nation’s history.
Destroying the world to remake it
One of the most frightening goals of Trumpism is that the world somehow needs to be destroyed and the people suffer great pain before the “good” part comes to them in the name of a new order, in this case under Trump. This idea was recently amplified by Elon Musk as he and fellow oligarch Vivek Ramaswamy prepare their recommendations on how to gut the federal government.
In her recent and important piece in The New Republic, Ben-Ghiat warns directly of the parallels to Mussolini:
Il Duce framed fascism as a revolution of reaction against the left, against liberal democracy, and against any group that threatened the survival of white Christian civilization. Carrying out a violent destabilization of society in the name of a return to social order and national tradition, fascism pioneered the autocratic formula in use today of disenfranchising and repressing the many to allow the few to exploit the workforce, women’s bodies, the environment, and the economy.
Trumpism is in this tradition. It started in 2015 as a movement fueled by conservative alarm and white rural rage at a multiracial and progressive America. It continued as an authoritarian presidency envisioned as “a shock to the system” that unleashed waves of hate crimes against nonwhites and non-Christians. It culminated in the January 6 assault on the Capitol, which was a counterrevolutionary operation in the spirit of fascism. Its goal in deploying violence was not just to keep Donald Trump in office, but to prevent the representatives of social and racial progress from taking power.
Ben-Ghiat cites Project 2025 as the obvious blueprint for this transformation, noting its intention
to destroy the legal and governance cultures of liberal democracy and create new bureaucratic structures, staffed by new politically vetted cadres, to support autocratic rule. So new agencies could appear to manage parents’ and family rights, Christian affairs, and other pillars of the new order.
Gone completely is the party of small government under the old GOP. The new fascists want a big government staffed and run by their own loyalists who can control every aspect of American life. But to get there, they will need to thoroughly destroy the old systems.
Whether that destruction comes through economic upheaval, manufactured “invasions” or health crises, or a wholesale firing and acquiescence of the existing administrative state—with all of its scientific, legal, intelligence, national defense and healthcare expertise—the end game remains the same: an authoritarian state remade to suit Trump’s agenda and benefit his cronies.
The first responsibility of any democratic resistance is to realize we are in a crisis state and near to tipping into authoritarian rule, and to create effective counterstrategies while knowing the true stakes of the fight ahead. For a very long time, experts such as Ben-Ghiat have been warning that we are sleepwalking into fascism, and it likely brings small comfort to see themselves being proved correct.
Going forward, there must be no question that fascism is not only what MAGA seeks but what it now actively deploys. Terrifyingly, those flashing warning signs are now present policy. And should institutions such as the media and the checks and balances from Congress and the courts fail us soon, we will learn in the very hardest of ways how quickly and far a once robust and thriving democracy can fall.
The next article needs to list all the ways we can block or slow-walk what they are trying to do. For me, it's donating to legal organizations positing themselves to fight back in the courts.
Keep the lessons coming. They are hard to hear and scary, but knowledge is power (of a sort anyway). I want to know what is being done and what’s ahead as terrifying as it all is. Thank you for being there.