Did you wake up on October 24 looking for the definition of the word “fascism” in the dictionary? No doubt, you have followed the latest controversy shaking up the American presidential election. For the others, catch-up session: in an interview with New York Times on October 22, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, John Kelly, revealed that the former president would have praised Hitler privately during his first term, adding that the Republican candidate “had the profile of ‘a fascist who could rule like a dictator if elected.’ “I need the kind of generals Hitler had […] “People who were totally loyal to him, who followed orders,” Donald Trump also said during a private conversation at the White House when he was president, the magazine reported The Atlantic.
Comments denied by the current spokesperson for the Republican candidate. But Kamala Harris did not fail to comment, struggling in the polls ten days before the election. “Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?” “Yes, I believe it,” bluntly said the Democratic candidate who answered questions from CNN star journalist Anderson Cooper on Wednesday. Which cited a week earlier in the campaign in Pennsylvania Mark Milley, “Donald Trump’s best general” who, she claimed, described the former president as “a fascist through and through.”
In fact, the 78-year-old candidate has made a series of statements that are, to say the least, ambiguous in recent months. Let us mention, among others, his appearance in front of activists from an evangelical organization on July 26: “In four years, you will no longer have to vote [si je gagne]”. Or more recently, his witch-hunt-like diatribe on Fox News on October 13 against the “enemy within”, the alliance of “sick people [et] madmen of the radical left”. Not excluding, if necessary, calling on the National Guard and the army to restore order. Should we still recall the assault on the Capitol in 2021, largely provoked by its refusal to recognize his defeat against Joe Biden.
A climate that does not smell good of respect for institutions and oppositions. And a rhetoric which, according to the American journalist Anne Applebaum, author of a recent article entitled Trump talks like Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, smells like mothballs. Like when the former president uses the term “vermin” to describe his adversaries. “The word verminas a political term, dates from the 1930s and 1940s, when fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt and animals […]. This language is not just ugly or disgusting: these words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler often used these kinds of terms,” analyzes Anne Applebaum.
Just as after having long hesitated to equate Trumpism with fascism – believing that this label had been used too lightly to still mean anything – the historian Robert Paxton, specialist in the Vichy regime, changed his mind after the January 6 assault: “Mr. Trump’s open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line.”
The rationality argument doesn’t work
For the past forty-eight hours and the “revelations” of John Kelly, anti-Trump people of all stripes have been taking to television sets one after the other to warn of the danger that the billionaire “fascist” poses to American democracy. Enough to stop the Donald’s dynamic as D-Day approaches? Nothing is less certain.
First, because the Trump vote is not a rational vote. Crying wolf will only strengthen his popularity with his very solid base. “Each time he was indicted, his popularity increased and donations poured in,” noted the highly regarded British journalist Matthew d’Ancona recently in the columns of The New European. Trump’s campaign “plays on the deepest fears and instincts of the American electorate, putting forward rational arguments against him will not work”, warns this former editor-in-chief at the newspaper The Spectator. “The weakest argument made by Democrats is that a significant number of voters will suddenly become aware of Trump’s appalling character and behavior. No public figure on the planet has been so scrutinized, discussed and analyzed. […] It is ridiculous to imagine that the American electorate does not know exactly who and what it is,” concludes Matthew d’Ancona, calling on the liberal camp to change gear: “Whether he wins or he loses, Trump has always been supported by 47 to 51% of voters during this campaign. Whatever happens on November 5, it should be enough to convince liberals in America and elsewhere that what they are offering is no longer enough.”
The accusation of fascism against Donald Trump is not new. Already during the Republican primary in 2015, the American press pointed out the danger that, according to it, the New York billionaire represented: “As the first primaries approach, and Trump gains points in the polls, his descent towards fascism progresses more faster than I feared,” commented journalist Ryan Cooper, for example. Which did not prevent him from beating the odds and beating Hillary Clinton in 2016. Nor from beating the odds again and winning the Republican primary last March. In the same way, on this side of the Atlantic, the “fascist” label brandished by some of its critics has not deprived the National Rally of electoral success in recent years. Just as, also, the “neofascist” post-it attached to Giorgia Meloni did not block her path to the presidency of the Italian Council, nor even to gaining influence in Brussels or receiving the compliments of British Labor Prime Minister Keir Starmer on its migration policy.
The Democrats’ miscalculation
There is another reason why the “fascist” card brandished by anti-Trump people risks pschitt: it misunderstands the motivations of the male vote, which Donald Trump tirelessly flirts with. “The takeover of the Republican Party by fascists turned out not to be a break for a majority of men,” Anand Giridharadas, political columnist for the MSNBC channel, commented this Wednesday. For this ex-columnist New York Times, it is not so much the fascist nature of the project carried by Trump that should worry Democrats, but the fact that so many Americans, including a large majority of men, are ready to vote for this project: “Regarding of men and their enthusiasm for fascism today, the emotional dimension is perhaps the most dominant. […] many have been convinced – perhaps the word brainwashed would be more appropriate – that the future is something that should terrify them. Let the future laugh at them, thumb its nose at them. That he will silence them, coerce them, devalue them, censor them, starve them, etc. However, in a democracy, feelings very quickly become facts.”
Anand Giridharadas also invites the Democratic camp to review its strategy: “A fraction of the mass of American men who have succumbed to the lure of Trump’s fascism need to feel seen, heard and recognized in their stress, their anxiety and their feeling of dislocation in the face of the future that lies ahead […]. Saving the country from tyranny must become an aspiration for men. This doesn’t have to be a lecture.”
In the Guardian, columnist Emma Brockes, author of an article entitled The word fascist has lost all its meaning. And Trump uses it to his advantage, points out “the casualness and infantilization with which we use the term fascist”, which make it difficult, if not impossible, to replenish its meaning.” “Most of us have come out of this phase where everything that opposed us was fascist. Yet some aspects of the pleasure that the word provides have survived its wear and tear,” adds Emma Brockes.
Finally, in what promises to be the closest election in the history of the United States, the fascism card played by Kamala Harris to try to convince the last undecided on the Democratic side could prove to be a sword move in water. Because according to a recent YouGov survey, relayed by the New York Timesit is Trump supporters, not Harris, who are most likely to think the United States could slide into a fascist dictatorship: “While other polls consistently suggest Democrats are worried about stability of American democracy, few of them think that a shift to fascism is really in the country’s future,” writes the American daily. Fascist Trump? John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security advisor, found a way to reassure himself: “I don’t think he’s smart enough to have an ideology.”
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