Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.The DHS killing of a disarmed man is among the worst.
Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic explains why he has abandoned his earlier reluctance to call Trump a fascist:
Ehen the facts change, I change my mind.Over Trump’s past year, what originally looked like an effort to make the government his personal plaything has drifted distinctly toward doctrinal and operational fascism. Trump’s appetite for lebensraum, his claim of unlimited power, his support for the global far right, his politicization of the justice system, his deployment of performative brutality, his ostentatious violation of rights, his creation of a national paramilitary police—all of those developments bespeak something more purposeful and sinister than run-of-the-mill greed or gangsterism.
Recent events have brought Trump’s governing style into sharper focus. Fascist best describes it, and reluctance to use the term has now become perverse. That is not because of any one or two things he and his administration have done but because of the totality. Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears....
Police-state tactics. Trump has turned ICE into a sprawling paramilitary that roves the country at will, searches and detains noncitizens and citizens without warrants, uses force ostentatiously, operates behind masks, receives skimpy training, lies about its activities, and has been told that it enjoys “absolute immunity.” He more than doubled the agency’s size in 2025, and its budget is now larger than those of all other federal law-enforcement agencies combined, and larger than the entire military budgets of all but 15 countries. “This is going to affect every community, every city,” the Cato Institute scholar David Bier recently observed. “Really almost everyone in our country is going to come in contact with this, one way or the other.” In Minneapolis and elsewhere, the agency has behaved provocatively, sometimes brutally, and arguably illegally—behaviors that Trump and his staff have encouraged, shielded, and sent camera crews to publicize, perhaps in the hope of eliciting violent resistance that would justify further crackdowns, a standard fascist stratagem. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s recent appearance with a sign reading ONE OF OURS, ALL OF YOURS seemed to nod toward another fascist standby, collective punishment—as did the administration’s decision to flood Minneapolis with thousands of officers after residents there began protesting federal tactics, a prioritization that was explicitly retributive.
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Territorial and military aggression. One reason I held out against identifying Trumpism with fascism in his first term was Trump’s apparent lack of interest in aggression against other states; if anything, he had seemed shy about using force abroad. Well, that was then. In his second term, he has used military force promiscuously. Of course, many presidents have deployed force, but Trump’s explicitly predatory use of it to grab Venezuela’s oil and his gangster-style threat to take Greenland from Denmark “the easy way” or “the hard way” were 1930s-style authoritarian moves. The same goes for his contempt for international law, binding alliances, and transnational organizations such as the European Union—all of which impede the state’s unconstrained exercise of its will, a central fascist tenet. (Mussolini: “Equally foreign to the spirit of Fascism … are all internationalistic or League superstructures which, as history shows, crumble to the ground whenever the heart of nations is deeply stirred by sentimental, idealistic or practical considerations.”)