However, if we look at the far-right rhetoric and discourse that underpins the MAGA movement, we may be able to understand a little better what is happening and why. For starters, an obscure conspiracy theory about an imagined leftist power structure poised to destroy America has become feverishly active again. It has links to the most paranoid moments of the Cold War, especially the McCarthy era, and deep roots in Hitler’s Germany. It has become bloated in recent years with a powerful emotional charge, propelling it from the nightmare fringes of American culture to the very centre. Now the hysteria is at full throttle, maddened by the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
The rage is palpable, dominated by the fearsome gaze of Trump, captured by many photos from below in proper magisterial pose like the Führer himself. Behind the scenes, in the White House and the other imposing government buildings around Foggy Bottom, this conspiracy theory is managed and directed, with enormous ambition and arrogance, by a carefully selected cadre of clever Trump loyalists. They would never see themselves as part of ‘the Trump base’ – rather as masters of it. They have no less an ambition than to create a whole new world order and save Western Civilisation from the internal rot threatened by left-wing forces that must be crushed. For the helpless non-believers in MAGA, all this catastrophising about ‘the radical left’ morphs into the spectre of fascism advancing another step closer.
Inside MAGA, the ideologically loaded notion ‘Cultural Marxism’ is central to the faith. Its shadow is everywhere. Trump is convinced that American universities are dominated by ‘Marxist maniacs and lunatics’. When a judge ruled that he could not send hundreds of migrants to a gulag in El Salvador, Trump described him as a ‘trouble-maker … an agitator … a radical left looney’ and ignored the order. JD Vance routinely calls professors ‘the enemy’. Elon Musk says empathy is the fundamental weakness of the present world order and caring about human suffering is ‘a bug’ to be eliminated from social systems. After the assassination, Musk declared that ‘the radical left celebrated the cold-blooded murder of Charlie Kirk’. Trump and Vance blamed ‘radical leftists’. Hyper-toxic and violent language abounds online. Neo-Nazi militias bay for civil war. Far-right websites call the killing ‘the American Reichstag fire’, alluding to the 1933 conflagration in Berlin used by Hitler as a pretext to suspend constitutional protections and arrest political opponents. As a rising star in the youth wing of MAGA, Kirk himself began his career as provocateur by creating a McCarthyite watchlist of university professors ‘who advance leftist propaganda in the classroom’.
Since the start of 2015, mainstream media have been treating the descent into fascism as if this is just another bad election cycle to be waited out. The ending of constitutional democracy and the steady advance of Trump’s authoritarian rule is normalised by mainstream commentators as simply the political pendulum swinging again through another iteration of familiar conservative governance, this time from centre right to far right. With little analysis of the movement behind him, Trump is seen as an unpredictable, inscrutable, even crazy authoritarian bully (‘Will I, won’t I attack Iran? … nobody knows’) who has somehow managed to put himself at the head of millions of angry zealots whose moment has come to take back the ‘real America’. He strides across the media landscape, his urge to cruelty and destructiveness paralysing not only the political opposition but any journalistic attempt to enable critical, public understanding.
Using the word neofascism (to distinguish it from 20th century fascism) is still considered too inflammatory for the mainstream media. Even Democrats prefer ‘oligarchic authoritarianism’. Or course, there may be good reasons not to use the F-word at this time. By the clever trick of an inversion that would become all too familiar in 2015, Trump had already demonised the term ‘antifa’ in his first term. Antifa was branded part of the broad left-wing threat, the dangerous enemy. Following the killing of Charlie Kirk, a thirst on the far right for witch-hunting and vengeance was helped by Trump’s verdict that ‘vicious and horrible radicals on the left are the sole problem’. The MAGA narrative about the killer’s motivation and associations linked him not only to gender politics but also to the ‘anti-fascist movement’. So the F-word is itself highly weaponised. It has to be treated with care in the current hyper-sensitive American polity.
But for analysts, it is still better than ‘authoritarian’ as it allows us to pull together relevant threads, to think about the historical, economic and cultural conditions in which fragmented political formations, under certain conditions, begin to coalesce and gain enough momentum to take and use power aggressively. Using ‘neofascism’ allows us to make comparisons and linkages across time and across geography. All the defining features of fascism are evident in America now: the cult of personality, the demonisation of minorities, the rejection of constitutional restraints, the systematic assault on democratic institutions underpinning civil society, the hostility aimed at universities, museums and the media, the punishing of law firms for perceived disloyalty, the deployment of federal troops and masked ICE agents against residents, the unleashing of violence against opposition politicians, the persecution of critics of Israel for protesting against genocide in Gaza, the threat to tear up broadcasting licences if television networks allow late-night comedians to continue lampooning Trump or to speak in less than hagiographic terms about Charlie Kirk. The major anxiety in the American polity today is whether all this will emerge stronger or weaker after next year’s election cycle.
How did we get to this point in history? As several analysts in the past have pointed out, the maturing of American fascism would not require a separate fascist party, as it did in Europe. It could emerge instead from political realignments within the existing two-party system. What it would require, though, is the ability to quickly integrate into the tight embrace of executive power all of the separate strands of the state: the legislative branch, the civil service, the national security apparatus, the judiciary, the military and police, independent regulatory agencies and the entire cultural apparatus of society, including universities, museums and the media.
Their integration includes not just policies enactment by loyal operatives, but the weeding out of bureaucracies of disloyal elements, so that there is full ideological alignment with the MAGA movement. In the wake of the Charlie Kirk murder, first reports mentioned members of the military being critical of Kirk and therefore not worthy to serve their country. This is a reminder of how fragile and impermanent the process of alignment can be.
There is an obvious precedent to this cultivation of a single mindset. During the consolidation of Nazi power in 1933-34, the first phase of the fascisation of German society was referred to as Gleichschaltung, that is alignment, the breaking of liberal democracy into pieces by ‘bringing into line’ the different institutions of the state and cultivating one single way of thinking. This ‘synchronising’ of institutions across Germany was accomplished by a combination of ideology, coercion, enforced cooperation and intimidation. Some well-known figures in the homeland of the Enlightenment were involved. German philosopher Martin Heidegger, for instance, rector of the University of Freiburg as the Nazis came to power, took on the task of purging critical voices and bringing academic colleagues into line with Nazi ideology. Heidegger even presided over symbolic book burnings.
Less well known outside MAGA circles is Carl Schmitt, the legal theorist of Nazism, who provided much of the intellectual ballast of the Third Reich and has had a direct influence on the Trump movement today. Schmittian theory gives a patina of respectability to influential voices within MAGA who produce intellectual justifications in the think tanks. Schmitt’s publications have captivated several leaders in the movement, including Vance, the tech billionaire Peter Thiel and the man who influenced both, the ‘neo-monarchist’ Curtis Yarvin. Schmitt emphasises politics as confrontation and shows how to consolidate power in times of exception and crisis. Schmitt’s strong influence today can be seen in the frenzied search for enemies in the wake of the Kirk assassination, as dozens of people are targeted for comments they made about Kirk and his purported killer.
Central to Schmitt’s political theory was the need to get rid of all opposition by using the power of the state to demonise adversaries and turn them into enemies. He recommended the periodic identification of internal enemies by the state. This is best achieved, he argued, by an unencumbered sovereign who can crush dissent and bring democracy up to its perfect _expression_ in dictatorship. ‘Sovereignty’ is the ability to decide what is an exception to the rule of law and then to act accordingly. A strong leader can bypass norms, rules and institutional obstacles to fulfil ‘the will of the people’. He should be able to declare emergencies and then create exceptions to the constitutional order and thus expand his power. As Trump himself put it: ‘He who saves his country does not violate the law.’
Schmitt is also relevant to the right-wing obsession with ‘wokeism’. In the waning months of the ill-fated Weimar Republic, before Adolf Hitler’s assumption of power, Schmitt was advocating an attack on the ‘wokeism’ of the time, the well-intentioned Weimar effort to inculcate pluralistic tolerance in its citizens as they emerged dazed from the catastrophe of World War I and the collapse of the German empire. A fierce critic of parliamentary politics, Schmitt argued that liberalism led to ‘torpid’, indecisive and ineffectual governance, clearly worthy of contempt by the incoming Nazi government.
Establishing control over the universities was a key component of European fascism and so it is today, with the current crop of far-right theorists pushing hard against ‘Cultural Marxism’ and its supposed role in ‘inculcating Communist propaganda into young people’. The far right in the hey-day of the John Birch Society modelled itself on what it saw as Communist Party strategies in the 1950s (secret meetings, use of coded names to ensure the anonymity of members, promoting phoney front groups etc). The movement of today finds inspiration in stigmatising the Frankfurt School for (wrongly) urging the destruction of Western culture. The actual ideas of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and their Jewish émigré colleagues are twisted into a conspiracy theory about a vast, hostile left-wing network. This began circulating in a wide variety of far-right narratives, including the schizophrenic fringe politics of the Lyndon Larouche movement in the early 1990s. A decade later, the evangelical Pat Buchanan published an influential book The Death of the West, which became a best seller among Christian nationalists. He blamed everything that was wrong with America, especially its immigration problems, on ‘Cultural Marxism’.
In Trump’s recent Executive Order attacking modern architecture and his insistence that all future federal buildings would have to be built in ‘the classical’ style, there are shades of Hitler’s accusations of ‘Cultural Bolshevism’ aimed at modernist art in the 1930s as the Third Reich emerged. Cultural Bolshevism became a successful propaganda trope in his regime, complete with its anti-Jewish connotations, reshaping German universities in alignment with Nazi ideology.
Cultural Marxism is broadly accepted by the MAGA-cap wearing, conspiracy-addled faithful as a simple shibboleth, thrown about at school board or county library meetings, echoing Carl Schmitt’s uncompromising ‘friend-enemy’ trope. In Trump’s second term, however, the shibboleth is weaponised by the most powerful think tanks on the far right, especially the Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute, so that it becomes a central weapon in the fascisation of American society. The think tanks organise seminars, summits, residential training courses, fellowships, conferences, workshops, glossy publications. They launder key terms and phrases from the fringe far-right vocabulary into mainstream political discourse, which then feeds into podcasts, radio discussions, TV news talking points, books, pamphlets, fodder for social media influencers and so on.
Like Cultural Bolshevism in the Third Reich, Cultural Marxism is a dog-whistle for antisemitism of the old ‘blood sacrifice’ type (which feeds into the QAnon conspiracy), not the newly minted Zionist lobby version of antisemitism that includes criticism of Israel and genocide in Palestine. For true MAGA believers, it evokes a gripping, immersive hallucination of a vast, imagined, nefarious, leftist power structure, global in scope, that never stops trying to take over the US and accelerate the rot that is consuming Western civilisation.
‘Cultural Marxism’ lingered for decades at the fringes of the far-right before Trump arrived on the political scene to seek power. It sprang into mainstream discourse about the time Trump was head-hunted by Steve Bannon and his Breitbart alt-right colleagues during Obama’s first term. They spotted Trump as a good bet for the presidency. At that point, the traditional far-right whinge about ‘political correctness’ and ‘liberal wokeness’ turned into a vast roar, reverberating nightly around Trump’s orgiastic campaign rallies. After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, it is once again fuelling enemy-seeking witch-hunt frenzies.
Trump’s second term differs from his first not only because of the greater help he received from think tanks and a greater readiness to begin his Gleichschaltung immediately, but also because most of the tech billionaires in Silicon Valley swung in behind him. Neofascist concerns about cultural rot planned by foreign Jewish Marxists rose to a new plane when they became aligned with the interests of Silicon Valley authoritarian libertarians. These oligarchs had no interest in QAnon conspiracies and other popular hallucinations of the rear-guarders of the movement cohering around Trump. But they decided to back him in his second term, having largely ignored him in his first. The core of the newly emerging tech billionaire oligarchy was a blatantly greedy urge to load money and flattery on the new president, so that he would use his power to fight regulation and enrich them, as well as the Trump family. Together they would privatise as much as possible of the American government apparatus. Plans to do this were embedded in the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint manifesto, Project 2025, an 800-page document that served as a how-to manual for the Trump presidency.
No time was lost. Elon Musk’s deft ‘chainsaw’ raids into government offices and regulators’ files swiftly followed the inauguration. There was no subterfuge in this. It was well publicised in the media and moved at breakneck speed. Less visible was Musk’s insertion of a Trojan horse into the centre of the American government IT apparatus in the form of Peter Thiel’s Palantir technology. This is able to consolidate a huge range of data across all government departments – Treasury, Defence, Immigration, Environmental Protection and Revenue – as well as regulatory authorities established by Congress to protect the public interest in media, climate disruption, education, social services, health, consumer protection, chemical pollution and so on.
Let loose in the corridors of Washington by Musk, Palantir is now creating a surveillance nightmare for the future, as a few Democrats have pointed out. Palantir will make it easier for Trump’s administration to spy on and target his growing list of enemies, starting with supporters of Palestinian rights and moving on to others that can be identified in any way with the agenda of ‘Cultural Marxism’. In the social media screening witch-hunt triggered by the Kirk assassination, this will undoubtedly include what Trump calls ‘the vicious and horrible radicals on the left’, including critics of Israel and ‘anti-fascists’.
At full stretch, Palantir Maven Smart Systems technology has its surveillance and intelligence-gathering capabilities fine-tuned in the hands of the Israeli Defence Forces in Gaza and applied to finding human targets across the Strip. ICE can use it to track in real time the movements across the US of immigrants-of-interest. It fulfils the old dream of J Edgar Hoover to have complete dossiers on every citizen available to FBI field offices at a moment’s notice. Russell Vought, chief architect of Project 2025 and now playing a central role in Trump’s inner circle, declared during the dying days of the Biden government that ‘the stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, by enemies who already hold the weapons of the government apparatus’.
Probably more significant today than the Heritage Foundation as the main incubator of propaganda currents washing through MAGA rhetoric is the Claremont Institute. Its members appear regularly on Fox News, serve at high levels in the Trump administration, including the National Security Council, and lead initiatives in the ‘Cold Civil War’ against immigrants and diversity. It developed the Professor Watch List initiated by Charlie Kirk. It advocates the idea of the presidency becoming ‘a form of absolute monarchy’, and pushes the idea of China as the new global enemy. A major Claremont project is to draw disenchanted white youths online into the neofascist movement and enable MAGA ideas to dominate their underground discourse. This is in addition to its work in fine-tuning neofascist ideology through podcasts, seminars and publications, coordinating Congressional plans with lawmakers and working out detailed legal and media strategies for frontline operatives.
One influencer with strong links to both Thiel and Vance is the former computer programmer Curtis Yarvin, sometimes referred to as ‘the court philosopher to the MAGA movement’. In his various publications and podcasts, Yarvin insists that all power in America should be centralised in the executive branch, led by a ‘monarchical president’ who rules above the legal system and the courts. Americans, he says, ‘are going to have to get over their dictator-phobia’ The universities must be closed down, because they produce the kind of knowledge that will destroy Western civilisation. The belief that universities are ‘evil’ resonates also in the extreme evangelical Christian nationalist wing of MAGA. Their religious apocalypticism, focussed on the Second Coming, pushes for total ethnic cleansing in Palestine. It brands all criticism of Israel as ‘terrorist antisemitism’.
Senior White House advisor Russell Vought spells out why the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is necessary: ‘One would be hard pressed to identify a people or culture more fundamentally at odds with the foundations of American self-government than Palestinians … who have a culture poisonous to the health and integrity of American communities … and whose ideology, despite the counter claims of intersectional Marxists, has as its aim the total destruction of Israel.’ The goal of Steve Miller and the other White House extremists is to rapidly dismantle the pro-Palestinian movement in the US and crush any progressive support for it, especially in schools and universities. Project Esther is set up to brand a broad range of critics of Israel as terrorists, ‘so they can be deported, defunded, sued, fired, expelled, ostracised or otherwise excluded from open society’.
It is tempting to see both fascism in the 1930s and neofascism in 2025 in idealist terms only, that is, to decouple MAGA from any materialist realities, such as carefully thought-out strategising and organisational know-how applied at the top of the movement, funded by wealthy interests, now increasingly referred to as tech-fascists. Seen in an idealist frame only, the movement represents extreme irrationalism presided over by a small group of megalomaniacs under the leadership of a demagogue, careening towards a form of violent totalitarianism that is filled with rage, chaos, revanchism. There is much more to it than that, however.
The MAGA movement is built on those ideological elements that appeal to white lower-middle class activists that form the centre (‘the base’) of Trump’s electoral success. But the successful political mobilisation we see now is ultimately serving the needs of a billionaire class, what Steve Bannon called ‘the lords of easy money’, not the economic needs of the millions of lower middle class people who voted for Trump. This relatively small super-wealthy class, comfortably positioned in the upper echelons of society, controls a hugely disproportionate chunk of the wealth of the country and the power over politics and the economy that this brings.
So there is an alliance now, albeit a tenuous one, between tech-fascists, seeing themselves threatened by a variety of factors that jeopardise their privileged position, and sectors of the lower middle class, feeling left behind by liberal democracy. These are the people C Wright Mills once called the ‘rear-guarders’ of the capitalist system, held together by a generally regressive ideology. Revanchism is the underlying sentiment behind much of the rhetoric of key MAGA influencers like Steve Bannon, Nick Fuentes and the late Charlie Kirk. Key concerns of the billionaire ruling class, on the other hand, are all about protecting and expanding wealth: fighting government regulation in all its forms; forestalling tax increases on their wealth; funding climate change deniers; scuttling corporate anti-monopoly rules; defeating laws to protect public health and safety; promoting the privatisation of large parts of government; radically shrinking the footprint of the state; and crucially, ensuring that there are no limits on their ability to pour money into election campaigns.
The financial and organisational foundation of neofascism is rooted in the old libertarian system that held sway for much of the twentieth century, including the legacy wealth leached off the tobacco, oil, coal and arms industries (via family foundations associated with old names like Koch, Bradley, Olin, De Vos, Scaife Mellon). In what could be seen now as a dress rehearsal for MAGA, this older wealthy class dominated American capitalism long before Silicon Valley became a household name. It mobilised the very successful Tea Party ‘astroturf’ (as opposed to grassroots) movement, an apparently ‘spontaneous’ bottom-up rebellion against Obama’s very modest agenda of healthcare reform, minimum wage increases and climate action. The libertarian oligarchy of fifteen years ago deemed Obama’s agenda an unacceptable, quintessentially Cultural Marxist project. Worse, it was led by the first Black president, hell-bent on what they called ‘Cuban-style statism’. The cross-class alliance between a carbon-industrial oligarchy and the followers of various far-right conspiracy theories of the time was turbo-charged by traditional Jim Crow racial resentment rooted in the KKK and ceaselessly promoted by millionaire media celebrities Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. But its time had not yet come. It wasn’t successful at winning power until the Breitbart team under Steve Bannon decided against Sarah Palin and opted instead for the real estate mogul from New York with a dodgy past. Jane Mayer examined this pre-fascist moment in her 2016 book Dark Money: How a Secretive Group of Billionaires is trying to Buy Political Control in the US.
These Dark Money interests fostered ways to exercise power discreetly, from the shadows, by inducing front groups of lower-middle class activists to take on the agenda of the industrial class. They initially rejected Donald Trump but relented when he looked like a winner, then joined the new wealth group of Silicon Valley capitalists, embracing interests in finance (Blackstone), space rocketry and satellite sectors (Musk, Bezos) as well as weapons and intelligence (Palantir, Anduril) and artificial intelligence (all of them). Fantasies of techno-authoritarianism circulate constantly in their sphere, along with hopes that the power of data analytics and AI will swing everything in their favour. With a tight hold on AI and a wink from Trump, they are challenging the dominance of older corporations involved in the arms industry, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman and General Atomics.
There are tensions in the uneasy alliance that constitutes American neofascism. Apart from differences that break out in very public ways, such as the Jeffrey Epstein controversy, there are underlying class contradictions that are not difficult to see. It is inevitable that divisions will emerge between the top echelons of monopoly capitalism and the base, often referred to disparagingly by tech-fascists as ‘the proles’ or ‘the Hobbits’. It has happened in fascist movements elsewhere that once the ultra-wealthy class has obtained full control of the state, the more militant part of the base is discarded. The most dramatic example of this was in 1934, when the Nazi Party felt strong enough to discard the paramilitary brownshirt wing that had helped it to come to power in the bloody purge of the Night of the Long Knives (defended by Carl Schmitt as ‘the highest justice’).
In Trump’s case, many of the MAGA faithful were startled to realise that they were being excluded from the cabinet Trump put together in January 2025. Despite their hopes of cabinet representation, Trump assembled a committee of billionaires and charged them to be the core of his new political vanguard elite. The populist mindset of white Christian nationalism is still represented in Trump’s inner circle, by mid-level officials like J.D.Vance, Stephen Miller and Rusell Vaught, but it was clear from the start that big tech and finance capital rather than MAGA ‘rear-guarders’ would be in charge.
Despite sharing a libertarian ethos and strong fascist urges in dealing with constitutional democracy niceties like civil liberties, there is little beyond ideology to connect in any meaningful way the tech and finance plutocrats with the white Christian nationalist base. Their economic interests do not match. The economic chasm between the two classes is too vast. The logic of this tension must inevitably lead to the selling out of the majority populist cohort of MAGA, when the authoritarian dynamic at the top of the pyramid tightens its grip on all forms of dissent, both inside and outside the MAGA movement.
The resetting of relations after the killing of Charlie Kirk, a very significant figure in the MAGA youth movement, who was also credited with bringing Vance and Kennedy to Trump’s attention, may well increase this momentum. Early promises of defending free speech at the start of Trump’s reign have suddenly given way to a darker mood of censorship and paranoid squashing of all forms of dissent, even lampoons by late night television comics. If this mad urge to censor impinges directly on the populist base, for instance around its obsession with Jeffrey Epstein’s circle of friends, there may be trouble. Trump’s base has been baying for full disclosure about Epstein for over a year and there is no sign of that demand going away. Trump insists there is no more to know. The populist wing of MAGA has already been left wondering whether campaign promises about lower prices might be ignored, or expectations of lower taxes might be dashed. Many in the base have to swallow drastic cuts in Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, while they see the wealth of the billionaire class rise to further dizzying heights, helped by tax cuts.
Every iteration of fascism emerges from historically unique circumstances in each country it blights: Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal have their own unique histories. In Roosevelt’s time, fascists unsuccessfully organised against the New Deal, branding it a Communist plot to attract rural Blacks into cities to foment a race war against white supremacy. In trying to understand how an opening has been created in 2025 for fascism to take root so quickly, it is wise to see the fascisation of society as a complex process that develops out of seemingly unrelated sociocultural components – and not reduce it to one set of criteria.
A fully neofascist American state, operating unhindered on its own aggressive terms and closing down all dissent with executive orders, is still a work-in-progress. If Trump’s first term in the White House represents what political scientists call ‘a pre-fascist moment’, his second term is rapidly assuming the shape of the real thing. Many Americans have been seduced into giving their consent to the slow collapse of constitutional democracy. The speed of the Trump coup means that epistemic chaos, a key feature of American society already flagged by commentators such as Shoshana Zuboff (in her magisterial book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism) is being alarmingly intensified as Trump’s Project 2025 zooms on towards the end of its first year. The sheer magnitude of what is going on is astonishing. The psychological distance between what is happening politically and citizens’ capacity to feel its full significance – cognitively, morally and emotionally – represents a dangerous disconnect akin to what happened in fascist Germany, documented by Hannah Arendt at the end of the Third Reich in her discussion of the ‘banality of evil’.
What seems almost certain now in the aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk is that the hatred and vitriolic speech that have dominated online social communication will translate into real violence in the off-line world. There is no shortage of speculation about well-organised, trained and armed militias waiting for their moment to be called into action in defence of what they view as the nation. A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Centre provides a chilling picture of the 1,371 extremist groups active across America, biding their time since the departure of Joe Biden. For them, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives became ‘ground zero’. Charlie Kirk’s killing will undoubtedly spur vengeance.
Trump declared after the murder that he had no interest in ‘uniting the nation’ and that many individuals and groups considered to be ‘on the left’ were already under investigation. Ten years ago, Facebook, Twitter and Google promised to remove hate speech, violent content and disinformation from their platforms. This measure is no longer practised, with blood-filled video of the assassination circulating freely online and calls for ‘an American Reichstag fire’ getting louder. The short-term future is bleak.
In the heel of the hunt, we must return to language, words, discourse, and ask what term we should use to describe MAGA. Can we call the second Trump administration a fascist regime? Or is this to ignore its manifestly hollow and farcical dimension and grant it an undeserved dignity as a world-historical drama? It looks more like a massive agglomeration of rackets and scams led by a racketeer-in-chief. Would it be better therefore to call it simply authoritarian or totalitarian?
Just after the Kirk killing, John Ganz brilliantly explored this issue in The Nation, a reader-supported progressive magazine that has been analysing political affairs for 160 years, since before the American Civil War. It was put on the government’s enemy list in a very public way just after the assassination, when JD Vance took over the hosting of Charlie Kirk’s daily talk radio show and named it as subversive. After careful examination of the choices (too detailed to explore here), Ganz finally settles on calling Trumpism a petty-tyrant brand of fascism. That label seems to fit the facts the best. The good news is that tyrannies end badly for the tyrants, either through a conspiracy of former close supporters or an uprising of the people. The bad news is that Trump might just succeed in closing down The Nation.
28/10/2025
Farrel Corcoran is professor emeritus, School of Communications, Dublin City University. He is a former chairman of RTÉ.