Thread of What Is Fascism And Is Donald Trump A Fascist

here you go guys

good question!

literally fasciscm was a political movement/totalitarian ideology but I guess most people use the word metaphorically now, not unlike how nazism is used (though I guess a few people identify as nazis but hardly any consider thmselves fascists)

Donald Trump is not a Fascist, a truth so obvious as to be worth the clusterfuck that's about to ensue

he is far-right
he has a hate campaign against members of a religious group that he sees as enemies of america
he is pro-war

but
besides being a birther he seems to be ok with democracy

i'm not an expert on this stuff but i think fascism was thought of as a reaction against both democracy and communism, which just seems idiotic now. so no, trump is not a fascist. yet.

he seems to be ok with democracy

imo Trump does not actually have a coherent ideology (whereas most memorable fascists adhered very closely to the ideology in which they explicitly believed, the ideology of fascism), but I'd be comfortable classifying him as a berzerker fascist because he says shit that's right in line with fascist governance -- national registry of Muslims, closing mosques, his obsession with national strength & power -- not security and robust health, but "beat the other guy" strength. so, in the imaginary world where he gets elected, he might well govern like a fascist, and he's certainly said plenty of fascist things.

but he probably couldn't, himself, provide any definition whatsoever of fascism. a fascist, however wrongheadedly, believes he is doing good for his nation. Trump's pathology is messier.

OTOH it's really fine to call him a fascist because calling assholes fascists is a time-honored tradition and we're not all fedora-sporting EXCUSE ME THAT'S NOT WHAT THE WORD MEANS bores

boomin' post

was Mussolini an asshole though?

Guessing this has already been linked elsewhere: http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/12/10/9886152/donald-trump-fascism

Donald Trump has been endorsed by Stormfront's Don Black and by David Duke.

I'd be more concerned with Trump's supporters, who seem comfortable with fascist ideas and who would benefit from fascist policies.

Not that I think we are in danger of a fascist government, but the "Patriot" movement is fascist.

i like the distinction made in that vox article. for example there are numerous problematic governments + parties that don't deserve the fascist label like apartheid south africa which was a repressive, draconian, racist regime, but not really a fascist one. ppl calling their political opponents (on either side of the aisle) fascists has a long history but it kinda flattens the meaning of things. is trump a risk for inflaming racist violence? yes. would POTUS trump be a risk for shutting down the other 2 branches of govt and concentrating all State power into his hands? i don't think so, and there's no indication that's his plan. by contrast, hitler in 1923 was already trying to coup the government (which is to say that despite his later participation in the democratic german process his intentions to disassemble said democracy was present from the very beginning. even Stormfront racists are not necessarily fascist - bc if the word is to mean anything besides "political/ideological pov with whom i disagree" it needs to mean a particular political program. said program might include horrific racism, but that's not the trademark. also it's not like the left has a monopoly on misusing the term cf jonah goldberg's "liberal fascism" book.

thank u for starting this thread, mr. loves chachi.

also in a more general sense i'm v wary of flattening / histrionic language. it seems like inflammatory accusations (in various political arenas) are designed to inflame the passions of yr ideological cohorts more than make a sensible argument. but surely if trump deserves to be shunned + marginalized it's not bc he maybe fits some of the definitions of the word 'fascism,' but bc he has done and said actually terrible things. why add the extra step? a. trump said disgusting racist thing. b. we should shun him for that. why do we need to squeeze "therefore he's a fascist," in between? iirc slatestarcodex has written about how categorical language is used to collapse distinctions in the listeners' mind. really the use of fascism as a term of condemnation is a syllogism - x is a fascist; fascism is wrong (why? bc fascist european govts did disgusting things); therefore X is wrong. but if X is wrong on its own merits then it's unnecessary to compare X to Hitler or whomever is the stand-in in this argument for "we all agree he is evil and therefore anyone like him is also evil."

not a fascist. a poster child for why we need steep inheritance, income, and capital gains taxes. smug incurious privileged bullies like DT have way too much sway in our neo-feudal system

if anything the kind of robber baron demagoguery that Trump specializes is more unappealing than Fascism but i like the distinction because broadly speaking Fascists are team players (assuming you're on their team) where is Trump is a piggy-eyed leech who doesn't give a fuck about anything beyond his own gratification. even his Team America shtick is half a front and half his own wet dreams

also he's absolutely a product of American capitalism not a reaction against it

i'd be fine if a bunch of major media outlets wanted to run with the idea that trump is a fascist. who cares, nothing is sacred in that arena anyway. i got over the fact that obama was a 'socialist.' by the time the 'real fascists' arrive it's probably not going to matter much what we call them anyway

something that came up on the other thread is whether his desire to ban muslims (non-citizens?) from entering the US, and deporting 10 million undocumented immigrants, is an example of the obsession fascism has with cleansing but i'm not even sure if that's true. sure you could describe it as a cleansing but i don't think that trump thinks that mexicans or muslims are an inherent evil (and certainly not in the way Hitler felt about Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, etc). like this distinction is very subtle but he wants to keep muslims out of the country bc of worldwide islamic radicalism and he wants to deport 10 million undocumented immigrants bc they broke the law being in this country. both of those decisions are toxic and their implementation would lead to horrific violations of human rights. but both of those motivations are within the realm of rationality - there is radical islam in the world and there are a number of undocumented immigrants in this country. his solution to those problems is terrible but they are real problems. by contrast when we talk about fascist cleansing i think we mean an attempt to cleanse the population of the Other entirely - which is a motivation buried in a kind of irrational mythological understanding of the nation as a particular volk. in fact on a number of occasions i've seen trump say things like i love mexicans some of my favorite people are mexicans, whereas it wouldn't make sense for hitler to have been like no i like the jews i just think we need to figure out what to do w/ them until we have a solution to jewish terrorism. they were inherently a blemish on the unified nation by din of their coincidence of birth (which is why the racial laws were necessary), not bc of any kind of rational political motivation.

if anything the kind of robber baron demagoguery that Trump specializes is more unappealing than Fascism but i like the distinction because broadly speaking Fascists are team players (assuming you're on their team) where is Trump is a piggy-eyed leech who doesn't give a fuck about anything beyond his own gratification.

There was an interesting piece by Ollie Carroll, i think, this week suggesting that there are only two genuinely political parties in Ukraine at the moment - Fascist and Communist. Everyone else, including the whole of the mainstream, is a front for robber barons. Trump is not a fascist or 'genuinely political' in any meaningful sense but arguably one of the main dangers he poses is that blurring the lines of what passes for acceptable political discourse without actually proposing anything to address the economic and social grievances his supporters have is going to make irl fascism more attractive in the long run.

I think Trump's impulses re: Muslims and "Mexicans" are very much in line with fascist and other far right totalitarian regimes. Worth keeping in mind that Nazism didn't explicitly advocate ethnic cleansing as part of their platform (which is not to say that Hitler didn't believe that they should all be murdered as early as 1920) but were much initially focused on expulsion of non-Germans.

I gotta say I'm really confused by the "well he's not trying to dismantle democracy" line. I mean, if *you* decided to enact my tinfoil hat scenario from the primary thread, would you actually mention any antidemocratic intentions at this point?

Idk, maybe the term isn't fascist, but I feel like some form of widespread labeling needs to be done in order to differentiate him and whoever picks up his banner in four years as a different animal from the usual "Jesus told me to cut taxes" people, especially in the minds of people who, unlike me, are clever enough not to be wasting hours of their days every day following this bullshit. As scary as those guys can be, their gameplan doesn't trend towards the same kind of existential threat that makes an f-word-style regime so brutal and hard to reverse.

That said, I'm completely open to the idea that I just grew up post-Reagan and thus consider the actually-far-more-dangerous religious right to simply be a part of the scenery but am scared by the new shiny bad thing because it's new and shiny (to my personal experience, I mean, obviously this shit ain't new).

xp there's nothing in trump's presentation of history that suggests the kind of mythological cleansing of the other that hitler was obsessed w/. it's not like hitler got into power and then decided to get rid of all the jews. he was talking about jewish conspiracies and the stab-in-the-back myth very early on. it's all over mein kampf.

Indeed, in Mein Kampf, written in the early 1920s, Hitler explicitly linked the imagined deceit of the Jews in the First World War with the need for their destruction, saying that the ‘sacrifice of millions at the front’ would have been prevented if ‘twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas.’ii

moreover if you take his distinctions seriously he wants to get rid of undocumented immigrants (not American citizens of Mexican extract) and apparently backtracked on not allowing muslim American citizens into the united states. that's def not the totalizing of identity that fascism specializes in. the german people were germans, not jews or gypsies. ditto the italian people. but trump's American people includes Mexicans and Muslims. it's just the non-American Mexicans and Muslims he doesn't want and that isn't a concern exclusive to fascism unless you believe that all anti-immigrant sentiment is inherently fascistic but i see no reason to make that claim.

Nazism is hardly an ideology at all beyond the struggle of races and the anti-semitism at the heart of that, it's not only not incidental to Hitler's politics but his theoretical politics never went very far beyond it

Nazism isn't Fascism tbf

Right but Nazism also /= Fascism either, that's why it's a subset of it. I'd say Trump started demonizing immigrants and Muslims pretty much from the get go too. If your argument is "but he didn't doesn't say he want to kill them all so it's not fascism" then I think basically nothing that's Nazism will ever be Fascism to you.

I'm not saying that he's not a fascist because he didn't say he wants to kill them all. I'm saying that he is distinguishing within Mexican and Muslim groups which suggests a less than totalizing vision of peoplehood and Otherness.

Racial "cleansing" isn't necessarily inherent in fascism. The idea of rebirth is arguably more important. Racial "cleansing" is often the result of that impulse though.

If you wanted to make the case that Trump was a fascist, there's quite a lot of crossover between his movement and the palingenesis that is one of the core building blocks of fascism. There's nothing beyond the surface though.

think people shd draw some lines between "policies Trump really gives a shit about", "things Trump will say because he thinks it might get him elected", "things Trump will say because he enjoys playing the asshole character 'Donald Trump'" and "things Trump would actually be allowed to do by all the other power-holders in the US in the hugely unlikely event he became President?" because i think this stuff all makes a difference to how seriously you dissect his opinions/try to label him

altho to quote JCLC calling assholes fascists is a time-honored tradition

so i'm not sure that "make america great again" is an example of fascistic rebirth. not least because what president has not campaigned on some level under the banner of making american great again? isn't every non-incumbant campaign pretty much a "change" campaign? and he isn't really speaking to a rebirth of a white identity - even tho some supremacists have heard things that resonate for them. has he really talked at all about whiteness and white consciousness (both staples of supremacist movements)?

do we reveal anything new/useful about the world by calling him a fascist, or do we just enjoy having the opportunity to use the word?

everyone itt probably knows both the strict and loose definitions of the word fascist and understands donald trumps' political views and place vis-a-vis the republican party. there are aspects of his appeal that call back to strongman fascist leaders, but not so long ago we had a cowboy president who had a 90% approval rating and who said stuff like 'you're either with us or against us'. even though that guy was less openly racist I'm not sure the situation was less 'fascist'.

trump appeals to the white-identity nationalist reactionaries who form the base of the republican party. this group existed before donald trump and they'll exist after him, he just found himself w/ a bulworth-esque situation where he can say whatever he wants (so exactly what they want to hear rather than mostly what they want to hear) as he's not tied to any political donors or a political career.

geez I go tot sleep for a few hours

xxp It's not racial identity he's talking about, it's national identity. Pinochet was arguably not much more racist than a lot of other Latin American leaders.

Trump's palingenetic appeal - one great leader will return a faded and corrupt nation to its former glory by sweeping away the old order of both political stripes and giving birth to the new forged in his own image - is outside of the scope of yr standard politician who'll "make x great again" but i don't think he really believes it or would know what to do with the power given the opportunity.

"one great leader will return a faded and corrupt nation to its former glory by sweeping away the old order of both political stripes and giving birth to the new forged in his own image" i'm not going to say it's impossible to squint and see this as trump but i think it's a bit of a stretch. he's running as a republican, he says he likes a lot of the other candidates, he has agreed not to run as an independent, he's deeply indebted to the current system, he talks about america "winning again" but not as a rebirth or awakening. i think he's much closer to a candidate claiming to make america great again than a fascistic leader.

he has agreed not to run as an independent,

oh come on

you're penchant for giving him the benefit of the doubt is truly baffling

your egh it's early for me

i'm not giving him any benefit of the doubt, i'm just looking at what he has said and how he has presented himself. if we're talking about his true motivations i think there's a slam-dunk case that he's a berlusconi-style buffoon who doesn't believe or give a shit about any of this. if we're going to talk about him as a fascist it needs to be on the level of his political presentation and reception.

I'd argue he's not running as a Republican. He's running for the Republican nomination as Donald Trump. Either way, he's not really a fascist though i wouldn't discount the idea that there's a crossover between traditional fascism and some elements of his support base who wouldn't self-identify as such.

in the last debate they asked him (and then after the debate he was asked 2-3 more times in interviews) about whether he'd run as an independent and he said (not exact quote) that he has grown to respect the other candidates and he feels a part of the republican party and so no he has decided he won't run as an independent and he just hopes the republican party treats him fairly at the convention. he also kept emphasizing that in some polls he beats hillary bc i think he has moved onto making the case to the party that he is a bet they should take.

if we're talking about his true motivations i think there's a slam-dunk case that he's a berlusconi-style buffoon who doesn't believe or give a shit about any of this.

otm

he's made it abundantly clear his "commitment" to the Republican Party is conditional on how he's "treated" - he doesn't give a shit about the party.

he's using the party, he has no allegiance to it

i think he's going to try and start his own news network tbh

Actually Donald Trump isn't a fascist, he is a dumb whiny man-baby with freedom fries where his testicles should be

anyway I agree w what Alex in SF and JCLC have said so far and stand by what I said on the og campaign thread: there's enough overlap between the positions and statements Trump has made and traditionally fascist ideologies to merit the use of the term imo. I think it's strange and inaccurate to act like his racism and eagerness to exploit racism in his base are situational responses to particular conditions - there is no "problem" with undocumented immigrants or Muslims in the sense that Trump and his base think it is (that they're "taking American jobs", depressing wages, destroying American culture, pose a security threat, etc.), those are all window-dressing manifestations of deep-seated racism rooted in the sense that the volk (white + Christian) of America feel threatened. That his statements don't mirror or match the extent of Hitler's views is irrelevant, it's the appeal to the violation of "true" Americans, to the sense of aggrieved identity, that is fascist.

xp

since we've got this thread and part of the title is "what is fascism," let me ask a question i asked facebook yesterday:

In 1944 George Orwell wrote in "What is Fascism?":

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make.

Here's the link for full context: http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

do we reveal anything new/useful about the world by calling him a fascist, or do we just enjoy having the opportunity to use the word?

back to iatee's point, beyond our potential (ab)use of the term in our little backwater of the internet, to the limited extent that the press/media has any impact on the polity's grasp of the candidates I think it's useful for major media outlets to be comfortable applying the term to Chump, it could be useful in solidifying opposition to him and making the views he espouses less acceptable in the general discourse. I think the degree to which we can limit the general acceptability of hateful demagoguery with potentially violent consequences is an important end-goal in itself.

xp

What do you suppose are the admissions Orwell thinks Fascists, Conservatives and Socialists are unwilling to make?

I would assume he means they don't want to admit how much alike they can be

i don't know why you think in a political context saturated with accusations of fascism applied to all sorts of disparate figures, ideas + parties calling trump a fascist would be anything but another trump in that bucket

guys this is all just pre-opening hype for his DC hotel

https://www.trumphotelcollection.com/washington-dc/

the New Statesman piece is written by *Richard* Evans, please adjust your Bob jokes for Dick ones

Robert Evans answers the thread premise with "no, but..."

Trump’s encouragement of violence against his opponents at home has been unsystematic. He has told his supporters to rough up reporters and suggested during the 2016 election campaign that his followers might like to make use of the Second Amendment of the US constitution (the right to bear arms) against Hillary Clinton. He has also described white supremacists as “good people”. But this bears no comparison to the hundreds of thousands of armed and uniformed stormtroopers and Squadristi that the Nazi and fascist leaders deployed on to the streets daily in the 1920s and early 1930s to intimidate, beat up, arrest, imprison and often kill political opponents.
Hitler and Mussolini sought to transform their countries into perma-war states: a combination of education and propaganda on the one hand, and street-level violence and intimidation on the other, aimed to forge a new kind of citizen, one that was aggressive, regimented, arrogant, decisive, organised and obedient to the dictates of the state. GM Trevelyan poured scorn on Mussolini’s efforts to turn Italians into second-rate Germans, as the historian put it; but even in Germany this endeavour failed, except with a minority of Hitler’s most ardent followers.

The society Hitler wanted was portrayed in the final minutes of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), with endless serried ranks of uniformed SS troops marching across the screen like well-oiled automata. The reality was different, as the majority of Germans retreated from this dehumanising prospect into their own private lives.

Trump by contrast has encouraged a warped vision of personal freedom: a society in which people aren’t subject to government regulation or supervision, where anarchy and confusion reign, self-restraint is abandoned, violence is unchecked, and self-aggrandising corruption permeates politics.

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2021/01/why-trump-isnt-fascist

― stylish but illegal (Simon H.), Saturday, January 23, 2021 1:18 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

fuck off bob

― Left, Saturday, January 23, 2021 1:27 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Just want to say, this article was written by some guy named Richard Evans. Robert Evans would be the last person to say Trump wasn't a fash. Come on, people.

thank u both for the correction

Apologies! I just wanted to make a joke about breakfast sausages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR6OBgypWlY

I was wondering.

https://i.imgur.com/LyhxRDx.jpg

Richard Evans's Third Reich Trilogy is quite good

(bad Twitter follow, though, he was an anti-Corbyn melt and #resistance-y)

Melty old dick he may be but definitely knows a thing or two about fascism. The best living british historian of any profile imo

Just want to say, this article was written by some guy named Richard Evans. Robert Evans would be the last person to say Trump wasn't a fash. Come on, people.

my bad

at Bob Evans yr fascism comes with two scrumptious sides

Melty old dick he may be

Melty Old Dick is the best Pogues tune

Lol

Mouldy Old Dough

I feel like "is Donald Trump literally hitler or not" kind of misses the point in the end. There are many different kinds of demagogues. He was bad. He wasn't Hitler, but he was bad enough.

if he was even as much as 45% of Hitler, our democracy woulda rolled over and died easily, without a fight

"he was bad BUT AKSHUALLY..." article = fail

"fuck off dick"

so admittedly a big motivation for using the f word is in the hope of inspiring some kind of effect beyond what other words would be able to achieve but it's accurate enough that any quibbling over it is immediately suspect

do these people who think you can verify fascism with a checklist ever try comparing the various 20th century fascist regimes/movements with each other, or with their ideal version of fascism? pretty sure a lot of things that are universally considered fascist today would fail their test if they were this stingy in applying the word to the past

Robert Evans would have started off discussing whether or not Trump was a fascist, but would have gotten distracted and then talked about how much he loved Ali McGraw for a few hours

Did he want to bar Muslims from entering the country? Yes. Did he call Mexicans rapists and "bad hombres"? Also yes. But did he have an operating plan to build the country's economy through strategic investment and tax reform on big business? Not on your nelly, baby. We were rounding the fourteenth hole - Don was working on his slice, while I was fishing one out of the old-fashioned my caddy, Cherice, had handed me - when I asked him "Donald, if you could have it all over again, is there one woman you'd stick with?" He might have answered, but I was already thinking about Ali, and how I could now afford to have some Venice Beach muscle men send that rat bastard McQueen to FedEx to sign for a new set of teeth.

richard evans's "the coming of the third reich" is really good history, if a bit dry. his book on historiography, "in defense of history", is good too. he was also the main expert defense witness in david irving's trial against deborah lipstadt.

i don't have a problem with an expert on nazis pointing out the differences between the present situation and the nazis.

what is the intended effect of an intervention like this?

considering the number of credentialed historians who still refuse to call settler colonialism "genocide" I'm not inclined to just defer to the experts' definitions here

Yeah, it's a bit of a "let me tell you what real fascism is" and then waving away what fascism actually is... would Evans consider the US-backed Suharto regime fascistic, for example, because it didn't live up to his standards of organization and rigidity?

I don't get too hung up about the word fascist. Words have loose meanings, fuzzy edges. It's OK if you use it on Trump, it's OK if you don't think Trump qualifies.

saw this just now:

https://jewishcurrents.org/neofascism-after-trump/

brilliant, sic

Trump is piecing together a set of narratives and mythologies that would be very adaptable to establishing an extra-constitutional regime based on the presumed need to secure the nation from the dire threats posed by a set of easily-scapegoated outsiders, Mexicans and Muslims in this instance. He also casts himself as so far superior to his rivals as to be, in effect, a 'supreme leader'. These are primary foundations upon which to build a cult of personality and a police state.

So, yeah, Trump is following the fascist road, which is also the road to a totalitarian, extra-legal government focused on one leader.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Five years on, I'd say he followed that road as far as his limited competence could take it. Lucky for us, he failed. But he still blazed a path that will be easier for someone else to follow, even if he dies, is imprisoned, or simply drifts into irrelevance.

"Again, it’s instructive to look at the case of modern India. The BJP came to power in India before Modi. Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the first BJP prime minister, in the 1990s. He had little political support, and could not deliver on much of the cultural program so important to the BJP. But this period saw the infamous Gujarat Riots, in which Hindus engaged in a pogrom against Muslims for nearly two months, killing a thousand people. Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, was accused not only of neglecting the situation but actively inciting it. Meanwhile, Vajpayee proved the economic utility of a BJP government by accelerating market reforms and leading to stunning profits for Indian capital. The BJP did not win the following election; it was not repudiated, but it underperformed, and neoliberal “normality” was reinstated with Manmohan Singh. Modi came to power a decade later.

No analogy is perfect, but Trump is more Vajpayee than Modi. This is not the end of something; it’s the beginning. We have yet to see what Trumpism 2.0 will bring. There will be a fallow period as these forces regroup post-Trump, but neofascism is likely to continue to develop in the US. Meanwhile, we are likely to see an uptick in sporadic neofascist violence outside of electoral politics."

brilliant, sic

Did he want to bar Muslims from entering the country? Yes. Did he call Mexicans rapists and "bad hombres"? Also yes. But did he have an operating plan to build the country's economy through strategic investment and tax reform on big business? Not on your nelly, baby. We were rounding the fourteenth hole - Don was working on his slice, while I was fishing one out of the old-fashioned my caddy, Cherice, had handed me - when I asked him "Donald, if you could have it all over again, is there one woman you'd stick with?" He might have answered, but I was already thinking about Ali, and how I could now afford to have some Venice Beach muscle men send that rat bastard McQueen to FedEx to sign for a new set of teeth.

You've made me want to rewatch The Kid Stays In The Picture all over again.

just want to chime in that i am also extremely here for that post

reading through the fauci interview, one of the most frightening things to me about the modern paranoid republican movement is how instantly, devastatingly effective it is at designating enemies.

anyone can be called out as a baddie at any time, and the mob will swing unhesitatingly into line. death threats, social media campaigns, texts to daughters' mobile phones, the apparatus works extremely well and it works almost instantly.

so, i don't know if that's fascism. but it will make any public figure think very hard about taking certain stands, contradicting certain people. it's not about 'guts' really it's about personal capacity to endure these threats and harassment not just to yourself but to your whole family, and not everybody will be willing to do that. i honestly don't see a way out of this situation. social media and the amount of information available on the internet makes this sort of intimidation trivial.

Yes, we live in the age of social media-enhanced, weaponized mass paranoia.

anyone can be called out as a baddie at any time, and the mob will swing unhesitatingly into line. death threats, social media campaigns, texts to daughters' mobile phones, the apparatus works extremely well and it works almost instantly.

This is exactly what they say about "the left," btw

also, K-Pop stans

Trump was 100% intending to continue along that path toward fascism/dictatorship. His first term he was just testing his limits. If he had won a second term, that term would have been focused on putting pieces in place to cement his power for a third term and beyond. Whether or not he would have succeeded is questionable, but surely if he was able to put enough enablers in the right positions (say, another hand picked SC justice?) and continue driving militant furor among his base for intimidation and leverage, it could have happened.

yeah when the right talks about "cancel culture" I'm pretty sure they're just talking about fascism, they have zero problem getting people fired for taking a stance on racism

I think these judges he appointed were loyal to the conservative project, not Trump himself. (Look how they dropped his spurious lawsuits!) I don’t think they’d have been reliable allies in cementing his power. Even his AG had a line and it was this coup stuff.

I mean, who knows, but I think he was always going to fail in this final endeavor to become the first American dictator.

if he'd had the institutional support to hold onto his position regardless of election results he would and could have done. someone who is just as racist and authoritarian but with more establishment support and/or a better-organised mass movement behind them could easily do or have done so. I could even see more powerful interests proping up (a) trump if someone from further left had won the presidency

True. I think Trump’s greatest contribution toward future dictatorship was his incessant testing of limits and boundaries which ultimately showed just how soft and malleable they are.

yeah I think the brazenness in which Republicans have shown their willingness to defend literally anything, up to and including a violent insurrection, bodes very very poorly for our future, especially now that it's been telegraphed that nothing's gonna happen to Trump and guys like Hawley & Cruz are gonna keep their seats

Then you have these kinds of fascists:

Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys extremist group, has a past as an informer for federal and local law enforcement, repeatedly working undercover for investigators after he was arrested in 2012, @Reuters finds https://t.co/bsudhNVHEF by @AramRoston 1/5 pic.twitter.com/igVSVCKOzK

— Reuters (@Reuters) January 27, 2021

“I don’t know any of this,” he said, when asked about the transcript. “I don’t recall any of this.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-justice-dept-seized-post-reporters-phone-records/2021/05/07/933cdfc6-af5b-11eb-b476-c3b287e52a01_story.html

this is so fucking funny, they've built him a little fake Twitter that does nothing to keep him busy pic.twitter.com/NozGe89UVa

— 📻 thomas website (@nailheadparty) May 10, 2021