Donald Trump is the furthest thing from the ‘fascist’ his enemies brand him

The ubiquitous and ongoing critique of Donald Trump from the so-called social democratic ‘left’ in America – namely that he is a ‘fascist’ – is not only inaccurate, but completely fails to comprehend Trump as a unique modern political phenomenon.

Trump is not a fascist.

Fascism emerged in the 1920s as an historically specific internationalist revolutionary political movement that sought to overthrow both liberal democracy and communism, while maintaining and preserving the capitalist economic order.

As Hungarian historian and philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs pointed out in the epilogue to his book ‘The Destruction of Reason’, published in 1953, it is simply impossible for fascist ideology to serve as a dominant ideology in Europe or America in the post-World War II era.

This is not to say that ruling liberal democratic ideologies in the West cannot manifest deeply illiberal components. Nor is it to maintain that such ideologies cannot generate authoritarian counter-ideologies that can become influential and dominant.

Even in the 1930s, fascism remained a subterranean political movement in those Western countries (America, Britain, and France) in which liberal democracy had become the prevailing political ideology in the 19th century and after World War I.

Germany and Italy were exceptions – nation states that were formed in authoritarian fashion in the latter half of the 19th century – in which liberal democracy had failed to prevail as it had elsewhere in the West.

Trump is not a fascist because, unlike fascism, ‘Trumpism’ does not constitute a coherent ideology. In fact, there is a sense in which Trump is not really an ideological politician at all.

The contrast with fascism is stark.

National Socialism was a political movement that was based upon a coherent ideology – an amalgam of Volkish racial anti-Semitism and the 19th century liberal ideology of eugenics. Hitler sought to bring about revolutionary social and political change in Europe – and beyond – by biological means and military aggression.

Trump is quite incapable of formulating such a program – and, even if he did, it would hold little appeal for the American electorate. Nor is Trumpism an aggressive expansionist ideology in terms of foreign policy, let alone a genuinely revolutionary one.

It is, therefore, patently absurd for liberal democratic politicians and their sycophantic allies in the Western media to continue to brand Trump as a fascist.

Such a false categorization of Trump reveals the fundamentally ahistorical mentality of Trump’s critics, and – more importantly – their intrinsic inability to engage in any kind of meaningful critique of the expansion of American global hegemony since 1945 and its corrupting consequences internally in America.

In this regard, Trump’s critics lack the integrity and insight of principled 1960s American critics of the expanding American Empire – such as Barrington Moore Jr, William Appleman Williams, and Gore Vidal – as well as like-minded contemporary American critics like John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs.

This brings us back to Trump and his foreign policy.

Unlike his neocon predecessors (both Democrat and Republican alike, and it should not be forgotten that the neocon movement started within Jimmy Carter’s Democratic Party, not with George W. Bush) Trump is an isolationist – isolationism being an extremely strong trend in American politics for over 250 years.

The American founding fathers wisely warned against America becoming involved in “foreign entanglements” – because they had firsthand experience of how the British Empire had oppressed its colonial subjects.

They also understood how empire had corrupted and debauched internal British politics. Washington, Adams, and Jefferson all feared the consequences for the new American republic if, mutatis mutandis – in Edmund Burke’s telling phrase – “the breakers of the law in India became the makers of the law in England.”

Woodrow Wilson won a presidential election in 1916 as the politician “who had kept America out of the war.” He entered the war only after the German submarine campaign continued to sink American ships, and in order to save the West from the spectre of communism after the Russian Revolution in 1917.

The isolationist American Senate, however, subsequently refused to endorse Wilson’s internationalism, and vetoed America joining the League of Nations.

Likewise, Franklin D. Roosevelt only entered World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 – more than two years after the war had commenced.

Unfortunately, all post-war American presidents – until Trump – cast aside isolationism and firmly committed America to the global expansion of its empire. And, from the Carter regime onward, neocons have framed America’s expansionist and aggressive foreign policy.

Thus the Cold War, misguided wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the America-driven and disastrously provocative expansion of NATO over the past 30 years.

Trump’s foreign policy stance constitutes a decisive break with the past.

Trump’s isolationism is evident in his firm determination to end the Ukraine conflict. He has also taken initial steps to end the reactionary Netanyahu regime’s brutal colonial oppression of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Whether this will succeed is, however, not yet clear.

And whether Trump’s isolationism extends to cutting deals with Iran and China is, at this stage, very much an open question.

What then of Trump’s domestic policies? Here Trump’s authoritarian and anti-liberal democratic tendencies are already apparent.

Trump is determined to reshape the Judiciary, the Department of Justice, the FBI, and any other domestic institution that does not cravenly support his domestic agenda. This should come as no surprise – Trump has always been openly contemptuous of liberal democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law.

Trump has also moved very swiftly to dismantle authoritarian woke ideologies and their insidious consequences. He has also taken steps to put an end to the disastrous open borders immigration policy promoted and facilitated by Obama and Biden.

Whether Trump will succeed in successfully implementing his domestic agenda is not yet clear. Constitutional challenges to some of his executive orders are already before the courts, and more can be expected.

This week Trump called for the impeachment of those “crooked judges” who have ruled against some of his executive orders – provoking an unprecedented public rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

It is thus already clear that Trump’s attempts to disregard the Constitution will lead to a serious constitutional crisis and an accompanying intensification of political conflict over the next four years.

How resilient liberal democratic institutions will prove to be under the Trump onslaught is difficult to predict – bearing in mind that many of these bodies have become weakened and corrupted under previous Democratic administrations.

One thing is clear however – the shattered Democrats are at present unable to mount any effective political resistance to Trump’s domestic or foreign policy programs. Not for nothing did Trump contemptuously taunt ‘Pocahontas’ Elizabeth Warren during his recent speech to Congress.

Kamala Harris has disappeared from sight, and the ultra woke Gavin Newsom recently recanted on his previous championing of transgender athletes in women’s sport. This, however, hardly constitutes a viable alternative political program to Trumpism.

The Democrats’ dilemma was highlighted recently when they criticized Trump for diminishing free speech in America by shutting down America’s propaganda agency, USAGM. These, however, are the same Democrats that have for decades championed an authoritarian ‘cancel culture’ that has diminished free speech and destroyed the careers of anyone courageous enough to oppose the Democrats’ woke ideologies.

Even more troubling for the Democrats is the fact that the American elites that once supported them are now changing political tack, and falling in behind the Trump regime – just as the liberal 19th century French elites made their peace with Louis Napoleon’s authoritarian regime. It should not be forgotten that Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy Jr. were once fervent Democrats who denounced Trump as a fascist.

How then are we to properly categorize Trump as a politician?

He is, of course, sui generis. Trump is first of all a modern celebrity politician – among whose ranks the inept Vladimir Zelensky must also be numbered. He is also a populist who captured the Republican Party after realizing (as previous third-party candidates had not) that capturing a major party was the only way that a third-party politician could ever become president.

Trump is thus a new kind of politician – a modern celebrity populist.

His predecessors include William Jennings Bryan and George Wallace, and he shares with them their ‘common man’ rhetoric, anti-intellectualism, contempt for liberal democracy and traditional conservatism, as well as their program of demonizing the East Coast and Washington elites. And, like his populist predecessors, Trump promises to miraculously revive a weakened and corrupt America.

Trump also has a great deal in common with Louis Napoleon. Elected president of the new French Republic in 1848, Louis Napoleon – being constitutionally barred from a second term as president – mounted a coup in 1851, dismissed parliament, and declared himself emperor. He ruled France in authoritarian and repressive fashion for the next 20 years – until military defeat in the Franco Prussian War led to the collapse of his regime.

Trump is also constitutionally barred from running for the presidency in 2028, and he may well attempt to overturn this legal impediment to a third term. In February 2025, he posted an image of himself wearing a crown with the caption “Long Live the King.”

But Trump’s modernity and the fundamentally changed nature of politics in America over recent decades render such historical comparisons otiose and misleading.

Trump became president in a decadent American society dominated by a mindless celebrity culture – in which there was no longer an educated elite or an educated public; in which liberal values and basic notions of decency had collapsed completely; and in which politics had descended into complete irrationality and become an unedifying and brutal spectacle akin to a celebrity-based television show.

These fundamental changes long predated Trump’s entry into politics, and without them he could not possibly have become president. Only in an America that had degenerated to this extent could populism in its new Trumpian form become a dominant political force.

Lukacs in the work cited above predicted that the expansion of the American Empire would result in internal cultural decadence and the corruption of American politics.

Lukacs highlighted various aspects of this, including a rise in juvenile delinquency – not for a moment imaging the school shootings that are now a regular occurrence in America. Nor could he possibly have imagined the degenerate nature of a popular culture that feted a ‘celebrity’ like Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs and continues to exploit his celebrity status as it belatedly seeks to destroy him.

Donald Trump is not a fascist.

He is a modern celebrity populist whose election as president is a symptom of the irreversible decadence and decline of contemporary American politics and American society more generally.

Social democratic critics of Trump, however, cannot accept this categorization of Trump because it entails admitting that American society has degenerated culturally and politically in recent decades – a state of affairs for which they themselves are primarily responsible.

Far easier to simply brand Trump a fascist, and ignore America’s ongoing decadence and decline.