Trump, a Fascist?

That's an insult to fascists. Trump is too lazy, ignorant and unfocused to qualify.

PINKE / Flickr

Two guys in a bar watching a televised political debate. “Jesus,” says one, “those Republicans are morons.”

“Hey, I resent that!”

“Why, are you a Republican?”

“No, I’m a moron.”

I think of that joke whenever I hear the MAGA faithful take umbrage at references to Donald Trump as “Orange Hitler.” If anyone should be insulted by the comparison, it’s Adolf Hitler.

Consider:

— Hitler was a self-made man, arising from the gutter of Austrian society to become the most powerful figure in Europe by the time he was 45 years old. By  contrast, Donald was receiving $200,000 a year from his father’s real-estate empire by the time he was three, and at eight was a millionaire. As an adult he received more than $400 million from the family business.

— Hitler was a war hero, twice winning the Iron Cross in the First World War. Donald is a serial draft evader who has dismissed the American dead of World War I as “losers” and “suckers,” and said John McCain “was not a hero.”

— Hitler was a committed, serious ideologue who meant what he said, knew exactly what he wanted to do, told everyone what he would do, and did it. His ideology was malignant and colossally lethal, but he had a certain integrity by his own perverse standards. He was unhinged but he wasn’t ignorant or unfocused.

Trump has no clear set of beliefs, because acquiring even a malevolent ideology requires intellectual effort. His worldview comprises a few half-baked Archie Bunker ideas and drunk-at-the-end-of-the-bar proposals like designating a single day of violent policing to eliminate crime “immediately.” He routinely breaks promises.

“Mango Mussolini” doesn’t stack up very well with the actual Mussolini, either. Il Duce, though a bully and a blowhard, was a comparatively literate man, speaking several foreign languages. He worked as an editor for several socialist newspapers, and according to biographer Denis Mack Smith had at least a passing familiarity with Nietzsche, the French political theorist Georges Sorel and other intellectuals.

Book-Free
Trump has probably never read a book in his adult life, and rarely opens his mouth without demonstrating appalling ignorance, particularly about history. His lunatic word dumps betray an empty, disordered mind that would disqualify most people from any position of significant authority.

These are not reckless, hyperbolic observations. Sam Harris has similarly compared Trump unfavorably to Osama bin Laden, who, Harris notes, “was capable of real self-sacrifice” and “was committed to ideals beyond his narrow self interest.” What serious person could plausibly say the same about Trump?

James McNellis / Flickr

To be sure, there are Trump-Hitler analogies to be found if you care to look. Both upended the expectations of Establishment opinion that had dismissed them as laughable until the moment they weren’t. (As late as 1940, Charlie Chaplin got laughs belittling Hitler, something he regretted in light of the Holocaust.) Trump’s threat of mass deportations does smack of ethnic cleansing, and his threat to use military force against street protesters suggests an authoritarian sensibility.

But given his housefly attention span, who knows if he’d follow through on anything he promises. Indeed, what most constrains Trump from all-out fascism is his shallow, undisciplined mind. Authentic ideologues are focused and often deadly serious. This is why they commit genocide and fly planes into buildings. Trump rarely means, cares or even knows what he says. Titillating the MAGA mob and hogging the spotlight are all that really interest him. He can’t keep his eye on the ball because he doesn’t really care about the ball.

No. 1 BSD
It’s best to understand Trump not as a professional businessman or professional politician, but as a professional celebrity. He ran for president because he has a desperate, infantile need to be the biggest swinging dick in any room, and because the White House was the biggest codpiece he didn’t already own. And because Why not throw some shit at the wall and see what sticks. He’s a fascist the way Tucker Carlson is a serious intellectual.

To be sure, Trump doesn’t have to be a literate, militant fascist, steeped in Spengler and Wagner, to be dangerous. He already threatens policies that put innocent people at risk, among them abolishing Obamacare or pulling the rug out from under Ukraine. Even as an indifferent president he could be surrounded by a coterie of ideological vandals eager to wreck the china shop while the bull is off toilet-tweeting. They already have a blueprint in Project 2025, whose goal is partly “to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.”

(For a taste of what this could mean – in fact, what it already has meant – read Michael Lewis’s “The Fifth Risk,” which describes how willfully ignorant Trump 1.0 hacks casually tossed sand into the gears of successful federal programs, because MAGA.)

Of course, real fascists don’t want to deconstruct the state; they want to strengthen it. “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” as Mussolini put it. Authentic fascists oversee disciplined, highly motivated mass movements whose outward expression is huge, regimented formations at mass party rallies, not slovenly mobs in MAGA hats, ripped jeans and Confederate T-shirts.

The Trump cult represents a lot of things – grievance, ignorance, petulant populism – but let’s not devalue the F-word by equating a reality-TV huckster with those rare evil geniuses who will break every last egg to make the utopian omelet. Lucky for everyone, Trump doesn’t cut it.