Trump and the Spread of Facism

Omar Kayal

Trump and the Republican party are a destructive force for this country. The extent of Trump’s damage only worsens the more someone learns about him and his administration. I know many democrats want to forget about him, but the Republican party is still very much the Trump party, and Trump is probably running again in 2024. The notion that there is a significant voting block of moderate Republicans that won’t vote for Trump and can sway the election is more or less a fantasy. So, it is important to understand what the Trump Administration did and what it means for this country. On a basic level, he tore down important institutions, legitimized bad actors, spread misinformation, normalized sexism and racism, appointed horrible federal judges, and passed destructive bills like the Trump Tax Cuts that gave most of the benefit to the extremely wealthy.

However, I want to focus on a specific aspect of Trump’s rise to power, one that is more broad and sinister, and one that correlates with a larger global trend towards facism and authoritarianism. The election of Donald Trump was predictable to anyone aware of the history of facism and what the international system looks like.

 Donald Trump won due to the democrats’ failure to deal with the material conditions of its people. Neoliberalism was not working for people and electoral politics was not producing the desirable results. Throughout history, democracy has proven  flimsy at best, and if the answer was not going to come from cooperation and institutionalism, human beings are going to separate into the groups that align with their self-interest the most. In the case of Trump’s rise to power, if we are not going to discuss the material conditions and economics of what people are going through like their work or their healthcare, the wounds of facism are going to open up. White people are going to want to exclude other groups since then they can get a bigger piece of the pie. This is the heart of modern racism and its synergistic relationship with capitalism. Trump supporters no longer want a democracy and are insecure about their placement in society. They feel a losing grip on the culture of the country and the lifestyle and privileges that they imagined having as an American. This all manifests, on a social scale, to want to exclude more people from sharing their resources. They have the excuses that Trump provided (fake news, broken government, rigged elections) so that they can go full force on doing everything they can to keep control of a country that would otherwise move further to the left if things were fairly played out in a democracy.

Trump has been laying out the groundwork for destroying America’s democracy from the beginning. He constantly shouts out in rallies how he wants to stay for more than 8 years or states in interviews how an election is going to be rigged before it even happens, but we ignore it because it's Trump and we assume he’ll say these “crazy” things. But what Trump wants to do to this country is not crazy nor funny. It has happened in many other countries that now have powerful authoritarian and fascist parties in their institutions. We almost went through a real coup with the election fraud claim and the January 6th insurrection, and we were a couple of election officials and Secretary of States away from throwing away the election results and unleashing authoritarianism. Considering the dire projections for the 2022 midterms, we need to have a serious conversation about the Republican party and the prospect of republicans in many key states holding office during the 2024 elections where Trump is probably going to declare election fraud again. Trump is not an anomaly but a direct result of the Republican project. For decades, the Republican party has known that it is a losing party that is only dependent on undemocratic institutions, like the senate or the electoral college, and undemocratic acts, like gerrymandering and restricting voting rights, to stay in power. They make the conservative base hate the government which gives the politicians freedom to do whatever damage they want to the government. We need to stop pretending we are still engaged in a strictly ideological battle because we are just putting lipstick on a pig at this point. The genius of Trump is that his administration is exceptional at furthering their own agenda while convincing the average conservative voter that he is working in their interest. He can undermine democracy and fill billionaires with more money, things that the average conservative doesn't really spend that much time thinking about, at least not directly. What republican voters actually think about every hour of every day is cancel culture, or critical race theory, or political correctness. You can fill in the blank with any other made up conservative aggrievement project in the past 30 years. The point being: conservatives, in general, only care about the culture war. Trump taps into the deep-rooted insecurity of the conservative base through these social issues to rile them up and build a personal attachment towards his movement. Down to its core, it is just a way to project their insecurity of being left out from a changing culture. Authoritarian leaders like to personalize politics so the base becomes emotionally charged instead of motivated by logic. One of the themes Trump likes to hit in his rallies is moralizing the debate, claiming that the other side is either immoral or too weak to stand up to immorality. He also reminisces of an extraordinary past, one that is eroding with modernization. Conservatism also shines when there is no clarity on why the things that are happening are happening. These are all talking points used by fascists in countries like Italy and France. 

When we don’t address problems directly, we open the doors for the far right. An easy example, when we don’t have a democrat who is for legalizing marijuana, the republican candidate, despite his own policy set, can run ads about how the democrats are against legalizing marijuana and it is the democrats’ fault that there are so many African Americans in prison. Some may ponder: “ why can’t we all come together and discuss this and end the debate once and for all?” Well, that’s not how our political system works at the moment. Whether or not our system is designed to be this undemocratic, there are too many factors like systemic barriers and private interests that obscure the debate. This leaves many desperate to find a place where they can find real debates happening. People want to get to the truth of everything and have a grasp of everything going on in the world. This is where “the free marketplace of ideas” comes in, or the Internet in layman terms.