The word “fascist” was used to describe Donald Trump in rhetoric leading up to the 2024 election. In a way, that has reduced it to “just a word” that lost its “punch.” Regardless, Donald Trump is a fascist and there is plenty of evidence to support this claim in his second term. It’s true, even if the word has “lost its power.”
In the same way, the overuse of “antisemitic” and “antisemitism” has rendered the words weak and meaningless. When you accuse a group of Jewish Americans protesting for peace in Gaza of being antisemitic, it becomes absurd, without meaning.
Timothy Snyder, an American historian who specializes in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust, wrote about Donald Trump being a fascist in a piece from The New Yorker website at the beginning of November. Before we go through all of the things that provide evidence for the accusation that Donald Trump is a fascist, here are excerpts from Snyder’s article:
“The oligarchs bring to our fascism its libertarian entry point: they preach that government is the source of all evil. As we yield to that logic, the hydrocarbon oligarchs drill away at the earth and the digital oligarchs at our minds. A weakened government can control neither, nor can it promise sound infrastructure or the welfare state.
In these conditions, freedom is viewed not only as a struggle against the government but also as a struggle against one’s own neighbors. The people who claim to want individual freedom are the same people who clamor for mass deportations. America’s hydrocarbon and digital oligarchs support this kind of libertarianism; it is social media that guides men (and it is usually men) away from the idea that they are solitary heroes to the conviction that other groups must be punished.
Fascism is now in the algorithms, the neural pathways, the social interactions. How did we fail to see all this? Part of it was our belief that history is over, that the great rivals to liberalism were dead or exhausted. Part of it was American exceptionalism: “it can’t happen here” and so on. But most of it was simple self-absorption: we wanted to see Trump in terms of his absences, so that our way of seeing the world would go unchallenged.
So we failed to see his fascist presence. And, because we ignored the fascism, we were unable to make the easy predictions of what he would do next. Or, worse, we learned to thrill at our own mistakes, because he always did something more outrageous than we expected.
It was predictable that Trump would deny the results of the 2020 election. It was predictable that his Big Lie would change American politics. It is predictable, today, that he will give free rein to the oligarchs who, he knows, will continue to generate the social and digital bases of a politics of us and them. It is predictable that, in returning to power, he will seek to change the system so that he can remain in power until death.
It is predictable that he will use deportations to divide us, to accustom us to violence, and to make accomplices of us. It is predictable that he will create a cult out of the martyrs of January 6th. It is predictable that he will cooperate with similarly minded rulers abroad.”
It Was Clear That Donald Trump is a Fascist
During the 2024 election campaign, I wrote two articles: Could fascism happen here? and Are the guardrails and our Constitution strong enough to prevent an authoritarian? I wrote them because I could see what was coming if the country elected Donald Trump again.
Especially after we witnessed his disregard for the country, democracy, and the rule of law following the 2020 election with his Big Lie, Fake Electors Scheme, and the January 6 attack on the Capitol. I knew if he won, democracy would end. I knew if he didn’t win, he would punish us and destroy the country and take it down with him because Donald Trump is a fascist.
I was more concerned than most about the classified documents in his possession that he was refusing to give back. As a Malignant Narcissist and a Psycopath suffering from Main Character Syndrome, he would sell the nation’s secrets to the highest bidder. At the very least, he would share them with Vladimir Putin or Viktor Orbán.
I raised the alarm when the authoritarian leader of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, visited Mar-a-Lago along with one of the main players at the Heritage Foundation, the authors of Project 2025. Orbán and Trump share an origin story. Orbán was elected once, but lost re-election. He spent years planning his retribution and takeover of Hungary should he win again.
Sure enough, he was elected for a second term and has never left. That was 15 years ago. He delegitimized the media before taking control of it. The steps he took to destroy democracy are the same ones Trump began to carry out in his first term.
I saw Orbán’s visit with Trump and a Project 2025 author as a meeting that was set up for Orbán to teach Trump how to destroy democracy in the U.S. and provide the Heritage Foundation with information to include in their “How to become a dictator” instruction manual. Because Donald Trump is a fascist, it would result in the end of democracy.
When Donald Trump took office in January, he sought out to cause as much damage and destruction as possible. He wanted to do it so quickly that the media wouldn’t be able to expose every single thing he was doing. It was a tactic Steve Bannon famously called, “Flood the zone with sh*t.”
The president signed a flurry of Executive Orders attacking the LGBTQ+ community, trans members of the military, the bathroom debate, DEI, immigrants, the “woke” Kennedy Center” (which he took over as Chair, firing board members, because Donald Trump is a fascist), Colleges and Universities, the list goes on and on.
Fascist Moves
Alien Enemies Act
President Trump invoked an Act meant for use by the military when we are at war—the country is ashamed for what we did each of the times it was invoked in the past. The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 allows the President to remove citizens from the country we’re at war with from the U.S.
He used powers from the Act to send 238 Venezuelan immigrants to a dangerous dungeon of a prison in El Salvador. He claimed they were members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren De Aragua who committed violent crimes. That was a lie. He lied in order to further his goal of removing all Muslim and brown people from the country because… Donald Trump is a fascist.
An investigation by 60 Minutes/CBS of the criminal records of all 238 men found that 75% of them had never committed a crime in the U.S. or in Venezuela. The Maryland father, who the Trump administration admits was deported by mistake, is one of the innocent men now stuck there for the rest of their lives.
There was also a gay makeup artist and a man with an autistic brother who taught swimming lessons to children. These young men got caught up in the deportation to El Salvador because of their “gang tattoos.” The man with an autistic brother has a tattoo of the autism awareness ribbon on his calf and the makeup artist has two crowns with “mom” and “dad” written on them tattooed on his wrists.
Executive Orders
The President has signed questionable and, at times, blatantly unconstitutional/illegal orders attacking law firms for representing people he doesn’t like or representing people who were challenging him in court.
He recently signed an order instructing the DOJ to investigate two members of his previous administration; Myles Taylor—who he wants charged with treason for writing a book exposing the dark things that happened in his first term and Chris Krebs—former Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA—a Republican appointed by Trump, who he claims is guilty of several vague “things” having to do with results of the 2020 election. If this doesn’t show you that Donald Trump is a fascist, I don’t know what will.
In reality, the only thing Krebs did was tell the truth about the 2020 election. To Donald Trump the fascist, that in itself is a crime. We’ve watched members of Congress and government officials twist themselves in knots when asked to answer questions like “who won the 2020 election?” or “Can you admit that Trump lost the 2020 election?”
Retribution Against BLM
Donald Trump had a problem with the Black Lives Matter movement that exploded in protests for racial Justice after the murder of George Floyd during his first term. He hid in the bunker of the White House when they held a protest in D.C. He smoke-bombed protesters so he could easily cross the street to stand in front of a church and take a picture holding the Bible upside down.
Since Donald Trump is a fascist, he asked if police could just “shoot protesters in the legs.” There was a period of time in Portland, Oregon when unmarked black vans would pull up and men would get out and drag protesters into the back before speeding off. The DHS later confirmed that they were federal agents. (Side note: Did we ever learn what happened to those people?)
Donald Trump is a fascist, so he sought revenge against BLM protesters. He told Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington, D.C. that he would cut off federal funding if she didn’t remove “Black Lives Matter” from a street leading to the White House. She was also ordered to rename the street, “Black Lives Matter Plaza,” to “Liberty Plaza.”
Abducting College Students Off the Street
Benjamin Netanyahu’s grip on our government has caused a massive attack on our right to free speech and right to protest. Federal Agents have been arresting college students with visas or green cards and attempting to deport them. They aren’t being charged with any crimes, but they criticized the government of Israel by pushing for the slaughter and starvation of innocent Palestinians to stop. One of the students didn’t protest, she co-authored an op-ed in the college newspaper where she mentioned an economic boycott of Israel.
Donald Trump is a fascist, so dissent is not allowed—against him or his friends. Mahmoud Khalil was the first student to be arrested and taken to a detention center in Louisiana. Officials refused to tell his wife, an 8 months pregnant American citizen, or his lawyer, where they had taken Khalil. President Trump posted on social media that this was only the first of many arrests of students who engaged in protests on college campuses over the Summer.
Momodou Taal’s arrest followed and soon after, video surfaced showing plainclothes officers stopping Rümeysa Özturk on the street and arresting her. The doctorate student did nothing but write an op-ed. Hundreds of students have been arrested since, including 53 recent arrests at three universities in Texas. They say hundreds of students have had their legal immigration statuses revoked, according to the computer system used by the universities for foreign students. The students hadn’t even been notified about it!
Economic Warfare
President Trump started trade wars with Canada and Mexico early on by slapping tariffs on our largest trading partners and allies. He removed them, then put them back in place a month later. This chaotic behavior caused the Stock Market to react negatively to the uncertainty of our economic situation.
On “Liberation Day,” Trump put a 10% base tariff on every country, along with a shockingly high “reciprocal tariff” calculated using a nonsensical formula created by Peter Navarro. The Market crashed and continued to go down for days afterward. Economists and reporters called it an unnecessary financial crisis of his own making. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board called it the “Dumbest Trade War in History.”
His handling of the economy is just another example of why Donald Trump is a fascist. He’s not doing what’s best for the country or the American people. He’s doing it to feel powerful and have the world capitulate to his ego and his demands.
There is currently a 145% tariff on China. They refuse to back down, saying in a video that they’ve been around for 5,000 years, so they existed at a time when there was no United States and they can do it again for another 5,000 years. They retaliated with a 125% tariff on the U.S. and are looking for other trading partners. In the end, we need China more than they need us.
Every country President Trump is attacking in this trade war is leaving us behind and working together to move forward without the United States. Trump is destroying relationships with our allies and our standing on the global stage. These things are not easily reversed should we have an election in 2028 and a Democrat comes into office.
Constitutional Crisis
People keep saying we are close to a Constitutional crisis but, in my opinion, we’re already in one. The Trump administration ignored a verbal order to turn the planes headed to CECOT prison in El Salvador around. Government officials including Attorney General Pam Bondi have been going on television saying judges “have no right” to tell the Executive Branch what to do.
A Maryland Judge recently ruled that the administration had to bring the mistakenly deported father back to the U.S. On a Friday, she gave them a deadline of 11:59 PM on Monday. Officials were on Fox News mocking the order. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was claiming he was a member of the gang MS 13 and that he was guilty of human trafficking. None of which is accurate.
The Supreme Court ruled that President Trump could continue deportations but anyone being deported must be given advanced notice so they have a chance to challenge their removal in court. The Venezuelans sent to El Salvadir were denied their right to due process. Had they been allowed to challenge it in court, they could have proven they had no affiliation with a gang and Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man sent by mistake, wouldn’t be in prison right now.
The Supreme Court also said the administration must “facilitate the return” of the man mistakenly deported, as ordered by Maryland Judge Paula Xinis, kicking the case back down to her. She followed up by ordering daily updates on the status of his return. The administration ignored the order. We are in a Constitutional crisis. I blame this on Chief Justice John Roberts for giving Trump full immunity (to be a fascist without consequences).
The evidence that President Donald Trump is a fascist is plentiful. I plan to add to this article over time to provide a detailed resource people can point to when arguing that the United States has slid into fascism.
