Amid Talk of Fascism, Trumps Threats and Language Evoke a Grim Past
When former President Donald J.Trump’s longest serving chief of staff said the other day that his old boss “falls into the general definition of fascist,” Mr.
Trump let loose with the insults, assailing his onetime right hand as a “total degenerate,” a “LOWLIFE” and a “bad General.”What Mr.Trump did not do, at least at first, was actually deny that he was or aspired to be a fascist.Any other politician might consider that a damning denunciation worth rebutting.
Only when asked days later did he directly dismiss the idea.But in the nine years that he has been running for or serving as president, Mr.
Trump has regularly evoked the language, history and motifs of fascism without hesitation or evident concern about how it would make him look.While presidents have pushed the boundaries of power, and in some cases abused it outright, no American commander in chief over the past couple of centuries has so aggressively sought to discredit the institutions of democracy at home while so openly embracing and envying dictators abroad.Although plenty of presidents have been called dictators by their opponents, none has been publicly accused of fascism by his own handpicked top adviser who spent day after day with him in the Oval Office.Mr.
Trump does not use the word to describe himself — in fact, he uses it to describe his adversaries — but he does not shrink from the impression it leaves.He goes out of his way to portray himself as an American strongman, vowing if re-elected to use the military to crack down on dissent, to use the Justice Department to prosecute and imprison his foes, to shut down news media outlets that displease him, to claim authority that his predecessors did not have and to round up millions of people living in the country illegally and put them in camps or deport them en masse.He has already sought to overturn a free and fair election that even his own advisers told him he had lost, all in a bid to hold onto power despite the w...