Going Deeper: It’s Settled -- Trump is a Fascist

But Hold On: Help is on the Way

Note: The video following the article is usually an additional item for paid subscribers. I am leaving this one open because the discussion about our pro-democracy coalition should be a reminder to us all. Please consider supporting the work and my team by becoming a paid subscriber! Thanks!- AK

Welcome to the 3^rd edition of my weekly column “Going Deeper” where we step back and take longer look at one of the top issues of the day.

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When I first saw it, I couldn’t believe my eyes. A new banner -- it’s at least 40 feet tall -- has been hung between the pillars of the Department of Justice’s headquarters in Washington, DC. It’s a giant picture of Donald Trump glowering from beneath his highlighted helmet of hair. Beneath his face and the department’s seal is a slogan that echoes his political campaigns. It reads -- “MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN.” (Of course, I wasn’t shocked though…)

Created and installed with taxpayer money, the banner eerily resembles the billboards depicting the ayatollahs in Iran, Kim Jong Un in North Korea, or, before his fall, Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Trump is promoting himself as, literally, above the law. From the moment he took office and pardoned all of the rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Trump has pursued the power of a dictator. Despite MAGA’s protests about the exact language used to describe Trump’s actions, he and members of his administration are displaying all of the widely acknowledged characteristics of fascism. Let’s take a look at the evidence:

A Cult of Personality -- From the very beginning of his political life, in the election of 2016, Trump declared himself the only person worthy of leadership -- “Only I can fix it” -- and bonded with his followers with “us vs. them” rhetoric. But even before he entered politics, Trump spent decades promoting himself as someone to be admired by the masses. He put his name on everything from casinos to golf courses and neckties. When his infidelity led to scandal he leaned into it, believing men wanted to be like him. Given the opportunity to host a reality show, he leapt at the chance to gain nationwide fame.

It was a short jump from TV celebrity to the mass political rallies attended by overflow crowds of devoted followers, some of whom followed him around the country so they could go to one event after another. Ardent conservative Christians saw him as a Biblical hero. Young followers online called him the “God emperor.” Estimates of his cult following ran into the tens of millions. In 2023, a CBS News poll found that 71 percent of Republicans trusted Trump more than their family and religious leaders.

In his second term of office, Trump has gone all-in. In his inaugural speech he declared, “I was saved by God to make America great again.” He has begun adding his name to federal buildings and suggested that New York’s Pennsylvania Station and Washington’s Dulles Airport be named after him. (Florida officials are already moving to name Palm Beach airport for him.) He’s put his name on federal programs -- one for drug discounts, another for special savings accounts -- and he forced the Smithsonian Institution to alter an exhibit, removing references to his first-term impeachments and the January 6 attack.

An unabashed Trump is so obsessed with his own glory that he has openly campaigned for the Nobel Peace Prize. In January, he told a crowd at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland that “Usually they say, ‘He’s a horrible dictator-type person, I’m a dictator. But sometimes, you need a dictator.” While his overall approval ratings are currently quite low -- a bit above 40 percent -- his cult remains strong. A few months ago, a similar number agreed that “President Trump is a strong leader who should be given the power he needs to restore America’s greatness.”

Suppression of the media --

Trump and his Federal Communications Commission chairman are actively trying to suppress and intimidate the media, and they are getting away with it. Chairman Brendan Carr has threatened the licenses of TV networks that don’t adhere to his interpretation of a decades-old “equal time rule.” The intimidation is working, especially at CBS, where lawyers recently pushed late-night host Stephen Colbert not to air an interview with a Texas candidate for U.S. Senate. Colbert complied, but not without raising a stink about it. CBS has been so cowed by Carr that it fired Colbert, whose last show will air in May. Carr has also threatened the ABC talk show “The View.”

Soon after taking office, Carr, who often wears a gold lapel pin showing Trump’s face in profile, ordered investigations into National Public Radio (NPR) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Subsequently, under Trump’s influence, Congress ended decades of funding for the two broadcasting entities. CPB, which distributed funds to public broadcasting stations, was shut down. NPR and its stations have cut their budgets, laid off workers, and now depend entirely on fundraising for their survival.

Carr has also ordered investigations into the San Francisco radio station KCBS’s coverage of the ICE immigration crackdown and into diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies at Comcast, which owns NBC and the cable news outlet MSNOW. No matter how they turn out, these investigations punish the targets because they have to spend time and money defending themselves.

Trump is not hiding his purpose. In a recent social media post he said, “I actually believe it’s seditious, perhaps even treasonous, for The New York Times, and others, to consistently do FAKE reports in order to libel and demean THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.” They are true Enemies of the People, and we should do something about it.”

Militarism -- In a giant flex, the administration intends to up the Defense Department budget by $500 billion, which is more than 50 percent of the current budget. This number is so huge that Pentagon officials don’t know how they would spend it all. The intent, as Secretary of War Pete Hegsteh has said, is to send “a message to the world.” Now look, I’m pretty hawkish in terms of having a strong and powerful military unmatched by any. But with a $40 Trillion dollar debt, we can’t be this insane. And we all know who will benefit…Trump’s friends.

Trump has always imagined himself as a great military man. He is so eager to attach himself to the military that it seems only a matter of time before he begins wearing medals. Five months into his second term he ordered a huge military parade which celebrated the Army’s 250^th anniversary and just happened to coincide with his birthday.

In December the president took to a podium at his Mar-a-Lago resort to announce that the Navy would build a class of 25 battleships that would be named after him. With Secretary of State Marco Rubio looking on, Trump explained that the ships would be “They’ll be the fastest, the biggest, and by far, 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built.” Quick note: we don’t need battleships anymore.

Months before the ship announcement, Trump and Hegseth summoned 800 generals and admirals for an unprecedented meeting where the president informed them that the military should expect deployments to American cities for law enforcement duties. While Trump has deployed National Guard troops to several cities, putting soldiers on sidewalks, his most aggressive action has been the development of a paramilitary in the form of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Outfitted in full combat gear, plus masks, thousands of ICE agents have swept across the country, using overwhelming force to conduct raids and street-level arrests of undocumented immigrants as well as U.S. citizens. ICE has operated with a heavy hand in Minneapolis, in particular, where two protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed by agents in full view of witnesses who recorded the shootings. The excessive force seen in these videos shocked the nation and the world and reflected a culture of us vs them violence communicated from the top down.

Scapegoating -- Pretti and Good were two of millions of Americans who oppose the anti-immigrant crusade that propelled Trump to power in the elections of 2016 and 2024. To hear him tell it, undocumented immigrants are responsible for just about every domestic problem from crime to unemployment. Although 90 percent lead peaceful lives, paying taxes and living as good neighbors, Trump has demonized them with lies and exaggerations. During his campaign, he trafficked in the false claim that Haitian immigrants ate neighbors’ pets. More recently, as president, he has railed against Somalis as “dirty” and “garbage” while calling for their removal.

“When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it,” Trump said in early December, “…we could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,”

Trump has levied personal attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali American member of Congress from Minnesota. He said, “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’”

In addition to immigrants and Somalis, Trump has devoted substantial effort to scapegoating the tiny number of transgender people in our society. Under his administration, transgender passport applicants will be forced to register by their sex at birth. Federal employees have been ordered to avoid using terms like “gender” and “transgender.” And Attorney General Pam Bondi has said FBI agents can pay for information leading to the arrest of activists promoting “radical gender ideology.” She compared transgender rights organizations to “domestic terrorist groups.” They are, in fact, devoted to opposing discrimination.

Finally, Trump has scapegoated the one institution that can, and occasionally does, stand up to him -- the courts. He has repeatedly attacked judges who hand down unfavorable rulings, calling them “radical left” and “fools and lapdogs.” When the Supreme Court struck down his tariff regime the president responded with fury, saying of certain justices,s were “They’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution,” he added. “It’s my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that’s far smaller than people would ever think.”

Disdain for Human Rights -- The deaths of Pretti and Good reflect a culture of violence that permeates the anti-immigrant campaign. ICE routinely operates with force and fails to provide adequate housing and medical care for people taken into custody. Many arrestees are processed so quickly and transferred over such long distances that they don’t have the opportunity to obtain legal counsel, and their families have no way of knowing their whereabouts.

In infamous cases, ICE has taken terrified children into custody, sending them to camps where they live with their parents as prisoners. One boy, five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos became a symbol of this abuse as onlookers photographed agents taking him into custody. Liam, who wore a blue bunny hat with floppy ears and a Spiderman backpack, was sent with his father, a legal asylum seeker, to a detention center in Texas where they were held for ten days until a judge ordered their release.

Complaints about conditions at Dilley include mold, worms, and insects in food, 24-hour lighting even in sleeping areas, filthy bathrooms, inadequate schooling, barren play areas where children play with rocks, and medical neglect. Despite official limits on the length of stay -- 20 days -- children have been held for fifty days and more.

More than 3,800 children have been seized by ICE in the past year, but elders have been subject to rights abuses too. Most recently, a 65-year-old British grandmother was arrested, shackled, and then held for six weeks despite having a valid tourist visa.

In recent days, the administration has announced it will be going after refugees who have come to the U.S. legally but have failed to apply for permanent residency. This is a shift from a long-standing policy that treated this bureaucratic problem as a civil matter. More than 100,000 refugees could be affected.

As ICE widens its net, the Department of Homeland Security is moving to literally warehouse detainees in indoor concentration camps. The department has already purchased two giant empty warehouse buildings. One it intends to convert to a prison for 8,000 and another is slated to house 10,000. DHS is planning to spend $45 billion dollars as it builds out a sprawling detention system across the country. The plan is to build enough centers to up the bed count from 41,000 to 100,000.

With its new prisons and mistreatment of people arrested and incarcerated the administration is destroying America’s credibility as a beacon for human right around the world. Instead we’ve become a pariah as the rights chief of the United Nations describes what’s happening here as “routine abuse and denigration of migrants and refugees.” This being done in our name.

Mixing Religion and Government -- Here again, the record is dominated by Pete Hegseth, an apparent Christian nationalist, who recently invited the radical Christian nationalist preacher Doug Wilson to lead a prayer service at the Pentagon. Wilson, who has called non-Christian immigrants “parasitic,” has opened a church in Washington, D.C., so that he can advocate for recognition of America as a Christian nation. He called himself a “paleo-Confederate.”

Before Wilson’s appearance at the Pentagon, Hegseth delivered a Christian nationalist speech at the annual National Prayer Breakfast. Where he said: “America was founded as a Christian nation. It remains a Christian nation in our DNA, if we can keep it. And as public officials, we have a sacred duty 250 years on to glorify Him [Jesus Christ]. That’s precisely why we instituted a monthly prayer service at the Pentagon, an act of what we see as spiritual readiness.”

Trump has not directly declared the country a Christian nation, but he has long signaled to the Christian Right that he has sympathy for their cause. “As president, I will always defend our nation’s glorious heritage, and we will protect the Judeo-Christian principles of our founding.” Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance has told Americans they should “put Christ at the center of your life”

Although it should go without saying, while Christianity has been a major cultural force, nothing in our founding documents -- the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation or the Constitution suggests we are a Christian nation. Instead, the First Amendment prohibits the establishment of a state religion.

Anti-Intellectualism -- Trump’s hostility toward science, the arts, and academic institutions has been well-documented. Soon after he was inaugurated, he gutted the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and installed himself as chairman. The purpose? To make sure the center would present only programs he approved. Later, after adding his name to the center, he announced that it would be shut down for massive renovations. He has also ordered that the Park Service remove from its displays of art exhibits that depict discrimination and racism as part of American history.

Trump’s move against artists has been subtle compared with his attacks on universities. He has ordered investigations of alleged anti-Semitism at more than 60 universities and threatened to withdraw billions of dollars in federal funding if schools do not comply. Columbia University agreed to pay a $220 million settlement to avoid sanctions. Brown University made a similar deal (agreeing to ban transgender women from women’s housing) but Harvard has chosen to fight in court.

Science has borne the brunt of Trump’s anti-intellectualism as federal research programs have been gutted and thousands of scientists have been fired from federal agencies like the CDC, NASA, the EPA, and NIH. Grants to study the problem of climate change have been canceled and data has been cherry-picked to justify reducing pollution controls. In one of the administration’s boldest anti-science moves, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy put fringe skeptics in charge of the board that determines vaccine approval and policy.

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The formal evidence is clear. Trump fits the fascist bill. But there’s one factor that is hard to put into words yet seems defining. I would call it, totalitarian charisma. Most of the past century’s dictators have had this quality. Hitler’s loud, fast-paced, fist-shaking speeches. Mussolini’s jutted chin. Stalin’s fierce paternalism. Mao’s certainty. Saddam’s strong, father-figure pose. I’m sure you could make your own list of authoritarians who, through personality and propaganda, mesmerized their nations.

Trump’s charisma is, like the others, populist in its framework. Although he is an Ivy League-educated billionaire -- as elite as they come -- he successfully presents himself as a man of the people. His cruel, crass, and bigoted speech is regarded as refreshing and appeals to his cult. His attacks on immigrants affirm their prejudices. As he goes after the press and intellectuals, he’s striking a chord with those who resent them as elitists. He hates the people his followers hate this fact creates an incredibly tight bond.

Fortunately, those of us who are opposed to Trump and Trumpism are bonded too. We are bonded by the American ideal, which I believe is much stronger than any single figure could be. Yes, it has been subverted by a genuine fascist in a way we once believed couldn’t happen. But the opposition is growing through protests, and a political resistance that will show itself in the coming election. Look at the polls. Consider the protests. Hold on. We, the anti-fascists, are on the rise.

These videos come with most articles as an additional item for paid subscribers. I’m leaving this one open because it’s important re: our pro-democracy coalition. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you’re are able…as it is helping me be able to focus fully on this fight and support my family and team!