Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th president of the United States put on display fascism’s 21st-century iteration — a combination of oligarchic power and ultranationalism unlike anything in recent memory.
It was a shameful spectacle for a country that deems itself to be the world’s greatest democracy and the leader of the so-called free world. Trump was flanked by billionaire tech moguls and far right leaders from Italy, Germany, Argentina, France, the U.K., and other countries around the globe. His inauguration speech promised a “golden age of America” by making the country “greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before.”
It was an inauguration speech dripping with authoritarianism and jingoism in which Trump cast himself as the savior of the country. “Our sovereignty will be reclaimed. Our safety will be restored. The scales of justice will be rebalanced,” he said, and described the leadership of the past four years as incompetent and corrupt, without specifying Joe Biden or other Democrats by name.
The speech left little doubt about its ideological character. Indeed, the political message behind Trump’s return to the White House was best captured by Elon Musk’s Nazi-like salute during the inauguration celebrations (though, in this case, predictably, the Anti-Defamation League rushed immediately to Musk’s defense by downplaying the significance of the gesture). The South African billionaire has appointed himself as leader of the West’s far right movement and has been fomenting fascism since he helped Trump win reelection. For Musk and his ilk, who expect to be the biggest beneficiaries of the new administration’s much anticipated anti-regulation blitz, Trump’s return to office promises a new “Golden Age” of U.S. world dominance and prosperity for the super-rich.
Acting like an authoritarian from day one, Trump signed dozens of executive orders that pose a direct threat to democracy and make a mockery of human rights and the rule of law. He ordered a crackdown on immigration, withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement and the World Health Organization, and pardoned about 1,500 of his supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol four years ago. He signed executive orders that seek to end birthright citizenship, which the U.S. Constitution has guaranteed for more than 150 years; terminate federal diversity, equity and inclusion guidelines; and roll back protections for transgender people.
Trump also signed an executive order that aims to weaken federal employee protections by reinstituting Schedule F in the excepted service, which Biden had rescinded when he took office. This move is intended to help Trump replace federal employees with loyalists faithful to his agenda. The architects of Project 2025 advocated the revival of Schedule F as part of their aim to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.” And Trump announced that he will fire over 1,000 appointees from the Biden administration.
History never repeats itself exactly, but there are deeply troubling ideological and political parallels between European fascism in the 1930s and Trump’s MAGA vision. To start with, ultranationalism is a key foundation of fascism. Mussolini came to power with a promise to make a “clean sweep” of Italy and to restore Rome to its “golden age.” (Hitler had a similar vision for Germany, and a major difference between Italian fascism and Nazism is that the former did not prioritize biological determinism.)
Under Trump and his MAGA movement, ultranationalism has been given a new lease on life as the U.S. has had a long-standing tradition in ethnic nationalism and extreme chauvinism. The Alien and Sedition Acts, four internal security laws passed by the U.S. Congress in 1798 during the administration of President John Adams, called for the deportation of people from “hostile” nations and made it a crime to criticize the government. The slogan “America First,” fused with the idea of “100 percent Americanism,” was dominant between the World Wars. And as Adam Smith, director of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, said, in “1930s America, fascism was on the march.”
Trump’s second term promises to turn ultranationalism into state ideology — and the blizzard of executive orders that took place on his first day in office signify in no uncertain terms that his administration will make good on its campaign vow to get rid of “the enemy from within” by any means necessary. If the latter materializes, the fusion between ultranationalism and the authoritarian state will produce a full-fledged neofascist government cohabiting with violent neoliberalism as the economic regime.
And it will materialize, starting with the sweeping action on immigration and border control, which will enable Trump to carry out his monstrous deportation plan. Having echoed Nazi language by dehumanizing immigrants of color as “animals” and “poisoning the blood” of the nation, Trump is bent on executing the most massive deportation in U.S. history. This plan isn’t merely a “disgrace,” as Pope Francis labelled it, but the apotheosis of cruelty.
In his last major essay, “Nine Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Marxist philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin describes in the ninth thesis Paul Klee’s painting named “Angelus Novus,” which Benjamin had purchased in the spring of 1921, as the Angel of History. He writes:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. … This is how one pictures the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. That which we call progress, is this storm.
Klee’s “Angelus Novus” is used by Benjamin, who at the time was fleeing from the gestapo, as a metaphor for the illusion behind the capitalist idea of progress. In the end, like this notion of progress, Trump’s pursuit of a “Golden Age” can only lead to disaster and ruin, to catastrophe for the U.S. and the rest of the world.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
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