Why Trump is a Fascist (EXTENDED VERSION)
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I'm Brooke Gladstone. Before we get to the episode, I just want to tell you about a live event that Micah and I are doing this evening. That is, if you're listening on Wednesday the 30th.

We're joining WNYC's daily news host, Brian Lehrer, for a live two-hour show all about the media coverage of the election and what you can expect on election night. It's national and we'll be taking calls. So check your local listings to hear it on the radio or you can listen on WNYC's website. Tune in tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern.

Now to the show. On Sunday, Donald Trump hosted a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, prompting critics to compare the event to another one in the same place many years ago. In 1939, more than 20,000 supporters of a different fascist leader, Adolf Hitler, packed the garden for a so-called pro-America rally.

a rally where speakers voiced anti-Semitic rhetoric from a stage draped with Nazi banners. Those speeches in New York drew chilling attention to the ways in which American policy had inspired the Fuhrer. American lawmakers generations ago promulgated laws forbidding intermarriage between white and black, yellow, brown, and red inhabitants. It has then always been very much American. Wherever a race problem became acute...

to instinctively attempt to create legislation designed to protect the Aryan character of this nation.

At Sunday night's rally at the Garden, Trump and his allies, untempered and unbound, traded in racist tropes and nationalistic rhetoric to an eager crowd warmed up by the insult comic Tony Hinchcliffe. I don't know if you guys know this, but there's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah. I think it's called Puerto Rico.

The lineup included Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, RFK Jr., Rudy Giuliani, and the irresolutely jingoistic Stephen Miller. America is for Americans and Americans only. And of course, the main attraction. The United States is now an occupied country, but it will soon be an occupied country no longer. Not going to be happening. Not going to be happening.

November 5th, 2024, nine days from now, will be Liberation Day in America. In the past few weeks, there seemed to come a tipping point where Trump's speeches became increasingly specific about the vengeance he'd wreak against his enemies. And even those who had hesitated were now applying the word fascist to the GOP's nominee.

On last week's show, we aired an interview with Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University, who has used the F word to describe Trump early and often. The interview was cut pretty short to fit into the broadcast, so for this midweek podcast, we're offering this longer version. Dare I say, enjoy? Enjoy.

I've been sort of involved in the, let's call it, fascism wars since my 2018 book, when I talked about how much the rhetoric we're seeing is just very clearly fascist rhetoric. So Trump's been called authoritarian, dangerous for democracy for a long time. Here's Hillary Clinton in 2016, a week before he became the GOP's official nominee. This man is the nominee of the party of Lincoln.

We are watching it become the party of Trump. And that's not just a huge loss for our democracy. It is a threat to it. In the eight years since...

What has he done or said or implied that advances him from a threat to democracy to a fascist? Yeah, I think focusing on Trump is a mistake because it's really the whole fascist social and political movement. And that's why the history of the United States is so vital. Rather than looking at Europe, where we did have figures like Mussolini and Hitler, we need to look at the whole structure

For example, Langston Hughes in 1937 said, "Black Americans don't need to be told about fascism. It's just the European word for Jim Crow." But now we have a much more European structure with a fascist leader of a fascist social and political movement, a kind of Christian fascism here. So we have to look at the one-party states in the American South for kind of the model that's going to be federalized now.

What we see in the South, whatever we call that, gerrymandering, the voter restrictions that result in states with large black populations like Mississippi and Alabama being white-dominated still today. People often say Trump himself doesn't have an ideology. And it is tempting and indeed correct to see him as a

a kind of vehicle for this longstanding fascist social and political movement. But I think Trump does have an ideology. The ideology is xenophobia, racist xenophobia against non-white immigrants.

When you put out your book in 2018, Sean Illing observed in Vox that you have a controversial approach to all of this. You think that fascism is often regarded as an ideology or of a regime type, but you say it's a way of doing politics that feeds on a particular style of propaganda. In order to address this,

the many people who think the word is still strong to apply today, if in fact fascism is a way of doing politics.

What are the stepping stones? What is happening now that so alarms you? Well, you're looking at the targets of fascism. Immigrants, LGBTQ people, which were central targets of the Nazi party. Gender fluidity is an enemy of fascism because fascism is about making sure the dominant group remains numerically the largest group.

and women are there to bear children. So the idea of trans women is antithetical to the central role, the identity of women in fascist ideology. On the federal level, you can already see in Project 2025 and elsewhere, Trump has been clear that they want to remove federal funding from school districts unless they use immutable gender categories. So all children born

male must be referred to with male pronouns in order for the school to get federal funding. We have these divisive concept bills in over 20 states requiring what Trump calls patriotic education. You can't teach history in a way that white Americans will feel badly about it.

And this has created an authoritarian culture in schools. Families are encouraged to report teachers who teach quote-unquote divisive concepts. And also, they're broadening the concept of obscenity and decadence to include LGBTQ plus perspectives.

This is exactly what the Nazis did early on. They targeted LGBTQ perspectives as obscene and did book bannings and enormous book burnings of literature that contained LGBTQ perspectives.

We also have the labeling of writers from minority groups, such as Toni Morrison, as obscene. And we have that literature being banned. There's strong and explicit imitations of Viktor Orban's regime in Hungary. Viktor Orban has removed

the work of the only Hungarian Nobel Prize winner in literature since World War II, Imre Kotez, from the National Curriculum. He was a Jewish Holocaust survivor who writes about those experiences. People in states like Connecticut don't seem to realize how dramatic these proposals have changed K-12 education in more than 20 states. Why do you mention Connecticut there?

Because Connecticut has been kind of free of this. Oh, I see. And that often happens, not recognizing the effects of these very dramatic laws. Then we have these laws extended to universities. University tenure protections are being dramatically weakened. That means the speech of professors. And they're targeting courses that give us critical perspectives on U.S. history.

sections on settler colonialism. The very idea that we're going to force by law education to be patriotic is not a democratic idea. Democracies are self-critical. Democracies try to realize the values of freedom and equality gradually against a backdrop where those ideals were not realized. And to do that, you need critical inquiry into the past. And that's precisely what is being a

attacked right now in many states. But is it fascism? You say that everyone equates fascism with Hitler and the Holocaust, but that if you go with that theory, you'd have to kill six million people to be fascist. But what about the years before that mass killing? Was Germany a fascist state? And when did it become one? Because, uh,

I think the press in general don't like to be accused of having their hair on fire, but there seems to be quite a lot of flaming tresses these days. I'm sorry, but if in 2024 you can't recognize what's going on as fascism, history will judge you. Yeah.

So in 2018, when I said this is a fascist social and political movement and people freaked out, that was one thing. But it's 2024 right now. So it's completely inarguable that in 1935, Germany was a fascist regime run by Hitler. There was no democracy. They were changing the education system. They were changing the

media, the courts, and we're already seeing that here. The Supreme Court has been altered, so it's just a vehicle for far-right policy at this point and for Trump. We have judges that have been appointed that are ruling against voting rights. We have attacks on voting that are reminiscent of

of Jim Crow, denunciations of cities with large black and brown populations as corrupt and sources of illegitimate voting. That's exactly what led to the end of Reconstruction, the period when black Americans were briefly allowed to vote.

Obviously, the Nazi Party viewed themselves as Nazi in 1935. And there were lots of fascist parties around the world. The British Fascist Party, it has fascist in the title. Their motto is Britain for the British, all about immigration and making sure that Britain remained ethnically pure. I think we have to regard...

the second Klan in the 1920s as fascists. There was militias, the Ku Klux Klan, violent militias. The ideology was fascist. They thought Jews were using labor unions to create racial equality and pushing Black people to do a race war. You know, as Nancy McLean has shown, the second Klan is ideologically indistinguishable from the German Nazi party in the 1920s.

So we've got the ideology of fascism, the targets of fascism, the creation of an enemy among these targets saying that your woes are because of LGBTQ citizens, because of immigrants. We have the description of anyone who's not in the fascist social and political movement as Marxist. That's straight out of Nazi Germany.

So everything you described represents a tipping point in the last six years? Well, look, we are sinking into what has been called for many years the fascism debate. And I think it can be a little misleading. And I think we should actually avoid it to some extent. I think that what we've got is a far-right authoritarian anti-democratic movement

Wait, are you saying that we shouldn't be using the word? No, we should be using the word, but people get bogged down in these kind of irrelevant details. What we have is a far-right authoritarianism that targets the same targets Hitler did. And the people who are like, okay, you shouldn't call it fascist,

fully agree that this movement has all the dangers of fascism. So I use the term fascism because we don't have another word for something that looks so much like fascism. Everyone agrees, even in the fascism debate, that what we're facing is very dangerous. So you're not worried about diluting the power of such an alarming word?

No, the word is required now to keep us out of the history books as being complicit in the rise of fascism. This is a 911 call. Those who are refusing the label of fascism are normalizing what we're seeing because the impact of saying this is not fascism.

That impact on listeners is, okay, we really don't need to worry much. This is politics as usual. This is not politics as usual. That's not to say that these forces haven't always been here in the United States.

There's another way of looking at it just where this is sort of a victory of whatever the Jim Crow South has transformed into. And I think there's widespread agreement that this is the federalizing of what's happening in states like Texas now. In the Black American tradition, you call those forces racial fascism. Back in 2018 in a Guardian piece, you quoted Toni Morrison saying that,

Before there was a final solution, there was a first one. This is from her 1995 address to Howard University. And after the first, there was a second. And after the second, there was a third. Who knows how many more? Because the descent into a final solution is not a jump. It's one step. And then another.

You wrote that Morrison's interest wasn't in fascist demagogues. It was in forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems. Yes. The United States, as Morrison is saying in that piece, which is called Racism and Fascism, has variegated.

very often embrace fascist solutions to national problems. For example, we have the largest prison system in the world. We deal with many of our national problems like racial inequality, like income inequality, by using a system that locks people up in giant prisons.

And that's a fascist solution to a national problem, especially the targeting of the formerly enslaved population of the United States, the targeting of the national minority. So Morrison is talking about fascist solutions to national problems. She's pointing out that we're already used to them. And that's 1995. So we already have those normalized. And that's

That smooths the way for the more dramatic and explicit version of fascism we're seeing right now. So let's consider why people vote for Trump. Some say it's because he'll solve structural problems within American democracy. Do you think that people who vote for Trump...

Do it because of or despite his fascist leanings? There is a large literature on what makes people vote for authoritarians or strongmen in Ruth Ben-Ghiat's terms. The authoritarian personality work by Adorno and co-authors published in the early 1950s is all about this. The authoritarian personality being someone who leans towards voting for fascist leaders. They even came up with something called the F scale, the

fascism scale for measuring this. And the features are things like being raised in a patriarchal family, because patriarchy is very central for fascism. And the whole idea of decline is connected with feminism. My country goes downhill if women stop having babies and start taking leadership roles. Correct.

You also say that many people who employ fascist tactics or embrace them do so cynically, that they don't really believe the enemies they're targeting are so malign or so powerful as their rhetoric suggests. But there comes a tipping point where rhetoric does become policy. Rhetoric always becomes policy once it's normalized because speech...

Speaking about the world is a way of behaving in the world. When you describe people as vermin, you're justifying treating them as vermin. The idea of justifying a practice without engaging in that practice is well nigh incoherent. The whole reason you're justifying those practices is so you can go and do them. And the explicit labeling that we're seeing is vermin.

explicit justification. The labeling of political opponents as threats to the nation, as an enemy within, is a justification for targeting them with the apparatus of the state. Mm-hmm.

You mince no words when you say that the contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public good is an impediment, such as those in the hydrocarbon business, as well as social, political, and religious movements with roots in the Confederacy. Right.

and that as in all fascist movements, these forces have a popular leader unconstrained by the rules of democracy. You're saying that big oil is pushing this as well? Trump is making a lot of really nice promises to them. So those remarks were made before the tech fascists really made themselves salient.

So there's a number of business interests here, as there always are in fascist movements. Fascist social and political movements only win when they've got groupings behind them, most of which don't regard themselves as fascists.

A salient example is Elon Musk, who wants state regulations removed. The billionaire class, they see in fascist movements a way of distracting the population from their own depredation. So they want regulations lifted against them. They want taxes lessened. And they understand that the fascist leader will direct the nation's ire against fascism.

the kind of people who want more regulations on rich people, and against people who have nothing to do with economic inequality, like immigrants or LGBTQ citizens. Also, we've got some of the structural conditions that enable fascism. We've got some of the structural conditions that enable dramatic social change, and that could be for the good or for the bad.

What structural issues? Massive wealth inequality. Right. People are absolutely right to be upset. You can't really have a democracy with this kind of massive wealth inequality because resentment will flow through the nation's veins. And resentment can be misdirected. And fascist social and political movements, their aim is to misdirect that resentment against the targets of fascism, which are always immigrants, minority groups,

So when you have this massive inequality, you have the groundwork for enormous resentment. And this has been recognized in democratic political philosophy since Plato. So you say that the media have done a really bad job of communicating how bad these –

essentially fascist policies are or the impact they can have on people's lives. The media have failed to explain, you say, that these are real things that can happen to you.

Still, even at this point in the campaign? Yes, it's been terrible. Each group who supports Trump's social and political movement, Christian nationalism, the billionaires who want regulations removed and want to pollute the environment, each of these groups does not see the effects a Trump regime would have on them. So take black American men who support Trump.

The media is not making salient that Trump wants a national stop and frisk program. I think things would change if people were aware of this. The media is not explaining in detail what mass deportation means.

If you're Latino and considering voting for Trump, you need to recognize that it's your cousin who filled out their paperwork incorrectly. That's the target here. So the media is doing a terrible job of explaining the dramatic nature of these policies.

of reporting the effects of these complete conspiracy theories like voter fraud. There is no problem of voter fraud in the United States of America. It's virtually non-existent. And yet, the media is treating it seriously. The figures in Trump's social and political movement like J.D. Vance or Ron DeSantis, they know there's no mass voter fraud. They know that perfectly well. They're just using that.

to distract attention from the real causes of inequality. Jason, would you tell me about your father and your mother and your grandmother and how their experiences steered you? Yes.

Yes. So my father, at the age of almost seven, got out of Nazi Germany. He arrived in the United States in August 1939 with only my grandmother. My mother and her sister were the only survivors of their family and their parents. They were among the 130,000 Jews that Stalin took into the gulag, Polish Jews, which was the largest surviving group of Polish Jews.

When they returned to Poland in 1945, my mother was five years old. No one remained. All seven of my great-uncles were killed in Sobibor, along with my great-grandmother. All of their children were murdered. My father experienced Kristallnacht in Berlin. And my grandmother was a German-Jewish woman who dressed as a Nazi social worker and with the aid of

a friend in the Gestapo actually, rescued hundreds of people from the concentration camp Sachsenhausen. My grandmother wrote a memoir called The Unforgotten, in which she describes what is relevant for today, namely 1930s Nazi Germany. Not the Nazi Germany after the invasion of

Poland. But the Nazi Germany that had the features we now should look for in the United States, the gradual move to mass violence, the gradual ideological preparation of the citizenry for the kind of mass violence against internal enemies that characterizes Nazism. She recounts experience with Nazi officers who assured her that in Nazism's vilification of Jews, they certainly didn't mean her.

Yeah, yes. She talks about an SS officer asking to dance with her. And she says, I am the enemy. And he says, oh, we don't mean you. Yeah, she was one of the good ones. She was a cultured German Jewish woman, an actor for Max Reinhardt and Fritz Lang.

a grand woman living in Schöneberg in a fancy area of Berlin, and many members of the Nazi party thought that they could only occupy high-ranking positions and be favored if there were members of the Nazi party. So there was a widespread thought that the anti-Semitism was merely political. It wasn't serious. It wasn't to be taken literally. That seems to echo a bit, with at least the early coverage of Trump.

Yes. Well, I think the media continues to not take things like the proposals in Project 2025 seriously. Oh, I don't know about that. It comes up.

A lot. But the particular policies are so extreme that I haven't seen the kind of 911 calls that it deserves. But Trump doesn't know anything about Project 2025. Right. I mean, that's why we have to recognize that this isn't just about Trump.

This is a social and political movement of Christo-fascism, if you will, and libertarians who want the government to be essentially eliminated so they can have full power and not be constrained by essentially working class Americans. So they don't have to share. I mean, isn't that what it's about? Yeah.

Yes, it's about sharing because democracy is about sharing. Democracy is the idea that it's our country together and we work together to have public goods like public schools, which are under attack by this social and political movement, that we have the rule of law that applies equally to the wealthy and the poor alike. Those are features of democracy and that's what they want to destroy.

So, what are the forces in our society that are best poised to fight fascism? We are the force best poised to fight fascism. Right. We are in such a fractured media environment, we're simply preaching to the converted. That's right. But people in local communities can see that their targeted neighbors are their neighbors and friends.

And so they're best poised to support them. And that's what I'm talking about with us. Unfortunately, we have not just a fractured media environment, but a fractured society, alienated, lonely people who don't have as many bonds with neighbors as are needed to protect against what's coming. And then as far as institutions are concerned, journalists.

And it's no surprise that we have this fascist social and political movement occurring at the same time as journalism is under such attack. The destruction of local media is the problem. People trust their local media, and the local media has been decimated in the United States. As a result, we're left in the media environment that you are describing.

ruled from on high by specific interests, be they on the center left or the far right. You still have, you know, the network news. Well, Sinclair Broadcasting... Except for... Yeah, you're right. You're right. Sinclair has bought up a lot of those stations and has directed them very explicitly in what they can say and what they can't.

We have the destruction of local media by being bought up by these, in the case of Sinclair, far-right media conglomerates. And a lot of local radio has been bought up by, I guess you would call it,

Christian fascists. Yes. And that's not local media. I mean, people will simply cease to trust media. And that environment, as we know, combined with social media, results in conspiracy theories having Ferrari engines. So I repeat, what are the forces in our society that are best poised to fight fascism? Journalists.

the independent press, local news that people can trust. All of which are weakened, but... All of which are dramatically weakened. The courts, when they impose a rule of law that is the same for everyone... Many of which have been packed by people...

people who were selected by Leonard Leo and the Heritage Foundation. Precisely. So we've already lost a lot of the essential media ecosystem for a democracy. And then our schools and universities are the sources of critical investigation. Yes, that critical investigation can be disturbing at times.

and can go places that you might find inappropriate. But if you make that critical investigation illegal, you have something that looks much more like fascism. So we need to support teachers and university professors who do that critical work of keeping non-dominant perspectives alive. So teachers and professors, journalists,

Communists, courts dedicated to the rule of law. And finally, among the regular targets of fascism are unions. Of course, that proverb, first they came for the communists and I said nothing because I was not a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists.

unions are a traditional target of fascism because unions make politics material. Fascism is based around this national identity that is not material. So if people are focused on their identity as white, for instance, they're not going to be focused on their identity as a worker. And when you're focused on your identity as a worker, you care about things like the weekend, right?

And the eight-hour workday. You care less about whiteness. Fascists target unions because unions give us the kind of materialist politics that is the basis of a healthy democracy. It sounds like you're saying that to support intersectionalism, you have to argue not from an intersectionalist perspective. Yeah.

You need solidarity. You need solidarity among difference. Solidarity is a kind of intersectionality because it's an intersectionality between all sorts of different identities. Everybody likes the weekend. Jason, that's a fabulous ender. Thank you very much. Thank you, Brooke. Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale University, and his latest book is Erasing History, How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.

Thanks for checking out the Midweek Podcast. Join us for the big show on Friday. Bye.

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