Whether President Trump himself has enough of a coherent governing philosophy to be called a fascist is an unanswered question. However, more than a few members of his governing circle do, Stephen Miller and Russell Vought chief among them.
Writing in The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution ran down a fascist checklist as it fits the American presidency: “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.”
Mr. Rauch’s first item on the list, lebensraum, meaning living space, was a central aspect of Nazi Germany’s desire for territorial expansion. The president’s mania for taking Greenland or annexing Canada brings this idea to mind, as does a preference for wide open spaces depicted in some social media posts by the Department of Homeland Security.
Despite the horrors, many Americans remain comfortable in a police state. They find collective punishment appealing. They are drawn to the worship of a central leader. They may believe that politics should be zero-sum, without negotiation or balance among differing views. They cheer when independent, apolitical law enforcement becomes a tool of the ruling party. They enjoy the dehumanizing language directed at any group the president does not like — Haitians, Somalis, liberals, female reporters who ask tough questions.
Because his followers reject objectivity, they can deny what is in front of their noses, Mr. Rauch wrote — the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, for example. Glaring hypocrisy does not bother them.
The Trump government has undermined elections and co-opted the news media much the way Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, did for Nazi Germany. Trump has aligned himself with other fascist leaders and pulled the United States out of critical international treaties and alliances. Fascism “embraces bold, exhilarating action unshackled to rational deliberation,” Mr. Rauch observed.
Little of this is new. The Nazis admired Jim Crow laws in the U.S. and were said to have found inspiration in our own system of racial segregation. And too many Americans echo back, signing on to the myth of ethnic purity in which one must be white, Christian, conservative, and Anglo-Saxon to matter.