The Man Who Would Be “Dictator on Day One”
Says Hitler Did Good Things

Is Donald Trump a Fascist?

Donald Trump salutes jailed January 6 riot leaders singing U.S. national anthem, November 2023 in Houston, Texas. (Photo: Brandon Bell / Getty Images)

A lot of people in the United States – and not only – are very afraid of what a second term for Donald Trump as president will mean. That includes many of those who have been targeted by his vitriolic rants and threats, including immigrants facing mass deportation, leftists, women’s rights and black activists, transgender people, trade unionists … the list goes on. At the same time, many want to fight the looming catastrophe. In order to do so effectively, it’s important to have a clear understanding of the nature of the enemy we are confronting. The focus has been on the individual who will soon be in the White House, but that should not lose sight of the military and police apparatus, the most powerful in the world, of which he will be commander-in-chief.

There is a lot of talk about Donald Trump as a “fascist.” Kamala Harris toyed with it for a bit until her Democratic Party handlers decided it would scare suburban housewives, so she and her vice-presidential sidekick, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, settled on calling Trump “weird.” Then, as the campaign was drawing to a close, General Mark Kelly, who was Trump’s chief of staff for a year and a half, was so worried about a second Trump presidency that he went public. Asked if Trump is a fascist, he replied: “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators – he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure” (New York Times, 24 October 2024).

Kelly said in a three-part on-the-record interview that what led him to speak out was the ex-president’s threats of “using the military on – to go after – American citizens.” He also found disturbing that Trump repeatedly said, “You know, Hitler did some good things, too,” even after the general responded that “everything he [Hitler] did was in support of his racist, fascist life.” The former and now future president, who at first talked of “my generals,” didn’t accept that top officials and military officers are sworn to defend the Constitution, instead of him personally, Kelly said. The next day, 13 former Trump administration officials issued an open letter backing the general and warning of Trump’s “desire for absolute, unchecked power.”

Kelly’s definition of fascism, which he said he found on the internet, is “a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy.” That sums up Trump’s outlook, he remarked. Many liberals also call the president-elect a fascist, as do a number of left groups, notably reformists like the Communist Party USA, the RCP (Revolutionary Communist Party, or revcom.us) and sundry other Maoists and Stalinists. By this they mean “very repressive” or “very reactionary.” They also referred to the military junta of General Augusto Pinochet (which seized power in Chile in a bloody coup in 1973) as fascist, for example, along with other military dictatorships around Latin America.

Trump 45 with his flunkies in the Oval Office of the White House. This time around his motto is “No more Mr. Nice Guy,” starting out with a barrage of executive orders (decrees) on Day One, particularly targeting immigrants. (Photo: Andrew Harnik / AP)

This loose use of the term mischaracterizes the fascist movement in Italy, Germany and elsewhere in the 1920s and ’30s, and fascist groups today. It also builds illusions in bourgeois “democracy,” which can be plenty repressive. At the same time, it misses what Trump and his MAGA movement are about. Donald Trump is a would-be strongman, aspiring to command a one-man regime that intimidates or crushes any potential opponents. He wants to be the CEO of America, Inc., with no bothersome board of directors, who rules by bellowing “you’re fired!” The FBI, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, armed forces and police are to be his personal army. His talk of being a “dictator on Day 1” tells you all about Day 2, and after.

The fascist movements in post-World War I Europe were mobilizations of masses of despairing petty-bourgeois (middle-class) layers, ruined by the capitalist economic crisis, as well as despairing workers and unemployed, “a plebeian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers” in order to obliterate and atomize a substantial radicalized proletariat, as Leon Trotsky explained at the time.¹ They could coexist, at first, with parliamentary norms – both Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany came to power “legally.” But the paramilitary fascists were the battering ram of finance and industrial capital to head off and behead a looming potential workers revolution. Those conditions do not presently exist in the U.S. or Europe today, but there are nonetheless sizeable, and dangerous, fascist movements or parties, and politicians.

As Trotsky underlined in a 1934 essay on “Bonapartism and Fascism,” the need for “a correct theoretical orientation is most strikingly manifested in a period of acute social conflict, of rapid political shifts” when “all sorts of transitional, intermediate situations and combinations arise.” In particular, he noted, that in the lead-up to the 1933 Nazi seizure of power in Germany, as was also the case with the installation of fascist rule in Italy in the 1920s, there was a “transitional governmental form” that the Bolshevik-Leninists (i.e., the Trotskyists) called bonapartism. A bonapartist regime, he wrote, would be “a military-police dictatorship … barely concealed with the decorations of parliamentarism.”⁵ That is what Trump would like to see, and that is the looming danger we face today.

For liberals and reformist pseudo-socialists and -communists, labeling Trump and his MAGA movement fascist is in the service of building an “anti-fascist united front,” that is to say, a “popular front” of class collaboration, chaining the left, labor and oppressed sectors of society to the supposed “democratic” sections of the capitalist rulers. As in the 1930s, the popular front is a ticket to defeat, because no section of the ruling class will go against the fascists if they perceive their class rule to be threatened. Fascism and the popular front, Trotsky wrote, are the last recourses of the bourgeoisie to stave off revolution. Trotsky’s call was for a “workers united front” to combat fascism with its own class forces on the road to the working class taking power.

Fascist Proud Boys in the front ranks of pro-Trump rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021.
(Photo: Jon Cherry / Getty Images)

There are actual fascist action groups in the U.S., which have been getting ready for “Trump 47.” In the 2020 presidential campaign, Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” which they did, and in the January 6 (2021) storming of the U.S. Capitol, this gang of provocateurs was in the front ranks. Several Proud Boys were sentenced to multi-year prison terms for their role there. (Trump has vowed to pardon all those arrested for January 6.) They have not gone away. This past January 6 [2024], the news agency Reuters reported that “Dozens of Proud Boys – some in body armor and helmets” made a show of force at the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio.”³ They were also out in force at Trump campaign rallies in Wilmington, NC, and Wildwood, NJ.

The fascist Proud Boys, who see themselves as Trump’s army, reportedly have 154 local decentralized chapters in 48 states. The Oath Keepers, a second far-right group prominent in the January 6 riot, claim over 500,000 followers on Facebook.⁴ They and the III Percenters, a far-right militia grouping that also had several members indicted for the January 6 riot, showed up at anti-racist protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and in Minneapolis in 2020, trying to spark a civil war. Along with the far-right “sovereign sheriffs” movement, they are all itching to go after protesters. And local police and sheriffs’ departments are shot through with people who would love to use their power against leftists, immigrants and anyone designated an enemy by Trump.

There are also quite a few local and regional fascist squads.⁵ But the main danger is not from these relatively marginal groups themselves, but from their ties to the state. A word from Trump could set this “army” in motion, with the backing of “law enforcement” agencies. In Nassau County on Long Island, NY, local officials have been forming an armed militia of “provisional special deputies,” for “emergencies.”⁶ And far-right militias are pushing to become enforcers of Trump’s mass deportations.⁷ The interpenetration of fascists, ultra-rightist militias and police is already pretty far advanced. At least 52 of those arrested over the January 6 riot were military, police or government personnel, and over 80 of the 700 indicted had military backgrounds.⁸

(Left) Italian fascist squadristi (known as Blackshirts) with Mussolini in 1922 March on Rome. Right: German SA stormtroopers (known as Brownshirts) with Hitler in Nuremburg in 1928. These were paramilitary action squads, part of a mass movement, for the purpose of smashing the left and radicalized workers movement
(Photos: Public domain; National Archives)

The various fascist and ultra-rightist action groups have been compared to the Italian squadristi, gangs of thugs in the early 1920s that attacked leftists and strikers, and became Mussolini’s fascist militia, as well as to Hitler’s SA (Storm Troopers) militia. There are some similarities, but the Italian Blackshirts and German Brownshirts were part of a mass fascist movement, unlike in the U.S. today. The ragtag outfits in the U.S. sporting Hawaiian shirts and military fatigues, or fake Nazi get-ups, are almost a caricature of those paramilitary units – but still deadly dangerous. And as with the interwar fascists, their strength derives from backing or tolerance by the bourgeois state, which holds them in reserve.

In Europe, where there is more of a history of leftist and rightist mass mobilization, there is a growth of fascistic and fascist parties within the shaky framework of bourgeois “democracy.” Those who would minimize the danger call these parties “conservative populists.” They say “where are the concentration camps?” Oh sure, for immigrants, of course, but they don’t count for the pseudo-“democratic” bourgeois and petty-bourgeois (partly because they can’t vote). The outright fascist parties (Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia in Italy, the Austrian Freedom Party, or FPÖ) have “security” squads, some deceptively labeled, of course. Fascistic parties like the Alternative for Germany (AfD) have connections to fascist action squads, but generally at arm’s length.⁹

The fascist Rassemblement National (RN, National Rally) in France has a Department of Security and Protection (DPS, shown at right) that has similar equipment to the paramilitary police  (CRS).  The DPS regularly attacks protesters (Jewish students and "yellow jacket" demonstrators in 2019, climate protesters in 2022, opponents of RN in 2024 elections).  (Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikipedia Commons)

In the United States, the Republican Party remains a conservative bourgeois parliamentary party, although by now it has been thoroughly subordinated to the pseudo-populist politics of Trump’s MAGA movement. But here as well, there is a fascistic (or fascist-like) wing of the Republicans emerging, including the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia, Lauren Boebert in Colorado, Andy Biggs, Paul Gossar and Kerry Lake in Arizona, and others, who have ties to outright fascists and far-right militias, and several of whom were implicated in the January 6 fascist-led riot. Plus, there is now a soon-to-be vice president of the United States who is a certified fascistic ideologue, and a president who spouts fascistic language.

The ruling class does not at present need a militarized mass movement as a battering ram to smash a restive and potentially radicalized working class. So far, the sellout union bureaucracy has dutifully performed its task as “labor lieutenants of capital” of preventing workers’ struggles from breaking out, or keeping them in line when it’s deemed necessary to let workers blow off some steam. Trump’s regime of billionaire buddies is pushing up against any democratic restraints that would hinder its drive to privatize and milk the federal government to the extent possible to drive up the profit rate as decaying capitalism continues to shed any semblance of social welfare for those it exploits and oppresses.

Could this new “corporate government” writ large evolve into a full-fledged authoritarian “strong state”? Yes, it could, but it would be a wrenching process, not a smooth sliding over. To get there, it would have to undertake such drastic measures as would almost certainly provoke opposition and chaos. A president who demands personal loyalty of “his” generals, who told a Christian “Believers’ Summit” in July, hosted by the fascistic Turning Point USA outfit, that they “won’t have to vote again” in four years, who views the Supreme Court as his flunkies and who has repeatedly threatened to impose martial law against protests might demand the Constitution be amended to suit him … or just overrule it by declaring a national emergency.

Yet the defeated and demoralized Democrats are not about to lead a struggle to defend democratic rights. Recall that their strategy to stop Trump in 2020 hinged on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and that to stop him in ’24 they tried to mobilize the courts, another pillar of the state repressive apparatus. They promoted the notorious CIA and FBI, together with the Cheneys and a raft of other infamous war criminals, spymasters and “dirty tricks” specialists in repression, as champions of “democracy.” Moreover, the Democrats have also imposed police-state measures such as Trump is threatening. Round up immigrants and put them in concentration camps? Liberal Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt did that to Japanese Americans in World War II. Use the Insurrection Act of 1807 against leftist and anti-racist protesters? The Biden administration used it against racist rightist rioters in the non-insurrection of January 6, a precedent that Trump might well invoke.

In January 2024, hundreds of thousands demonstrated across Germany (above, Hamburg) against the fascistic AfD (Alternative for Germany), whose leaders conspired with outright fascists to provoke mass deportations. But the protest was carried out together with the governing pro-Ukraine war coalition that is already  deporting immigrants “in a grand style.”  No collaboration with capitalist and social-democratic warmongers and deporters!  (Photo: Carmen Jaspersen / Reuters)

The fight against a lurch toward authoritarian, bonapartist rule (see “Trump 2: Gearing Up to Rule by Decree”) must be a class struggle, not a defense of threadbare bourgeois “democracy,” which (as we have just seen) is but a screen to mask a “battle of the billionaires.” Yes, some liberal Democrats committed to defending democratic rights will doubtless join in opposing Trump’s repression, but there must be no political bloc with the Democratic Party, its politicians or any other capitalist party. The huge demonstrations in Germany a year ago against the fascistic AfD were popular fronts with the governing Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats, who are waging an imperialist proxy war against Russia over Ukraine and carrying out deportations “in a grand style.”

Can it happen here?¹⁰ Yes. But the struggle to stop mass deportations of immigrants, to defend leftists, gay, lesbian and transgender people against Trumpian repression and rightist, racist and homophobic attacks, to repulse the fascist gangs and send them scurrying, and to resist an increasingly bonapartist regime ruling through police-state measures, must rest on the independent mobilization of the working class and oppressed people against all the exploiters and oppressors. And that requires a revolutionary workers party to take the fight forward to a workers government, here and throughout the world. ■

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