The Felon's Regime: Yes, It’s Fascism

While the most recent news stories suggest a hopefully de-escalation of the  ICE reign of terror in Minneapolis, the reality remains that the Felon has unleashed his Gestapo-like bad actors on Minneapolis, Maine, and other cities in a cruel campaign pitched as immigration enforcement while in truth what we have witnessed is an effort to silence opposition and to instill fear and to intimidate the local populace. The murders of Renee Good and Alex Preti have sent an undeniable message that even whites are not safe from brutality and death that have become the trademark of ICE and DHS.  Much of the news media has been reluctant to call out the Felon's agenda for what it is in fact: fascism.  A long piece in The Atlantic looks at the Felon and his regime's tactics and playbook that rely on threats, cruelty and street thugs all too reminiscent of of other fascist and authoritarian regimes.  The big unanswered questions are (i) whether congressional Republicans grow a spine and oppose this vicious regime and limit it's overreach and lawlessness(ii)  whether local populations will refuse to submit to the regime's reign of terror and intimidation.  More of the media needs to openly call what we are witnessing for it truly is. Here are highlights from the piece that look at the hallmarks of a fascist regime and the Felon's agenda:

Until recently, I resisted using the F-word to describe [the Felon] President Trump. For one thing, there were too many elements of classical fascism that didn’t seem to fit. For another, the term has been overused to the point of meaninglessness, . . . . fascism has been an incoherent doctrine, and even today scholars can’t agree on its definition. Italy’s original version differed from Germany’s, which differed from Spain’s, which differed from Japan’s.

I accepted President Biden’s characterization of the MAGA movement as “semi-fascist” because some parallels were glaringly apparent. [The Felon] Trump was definitely an authoritarian, and unquestionably a patrimonialist. Beyond that, though, the best description seemed to be a psychological one propounded by John Bolton, Trump’s first-term national security adviser: “He listens to Putin, he listens to Xi, he listens to how they talk about governing unburdened by uncooperative legislatures, unconcerned with what the judiciary may do, and he thinks to himself, Why can’t I do that?

Writing a year ago, I argued that [the Felon's] Trump’s governing regime is a version of patrimonialism, in which the state is treated as the personal property and family business of the leader. That is still true. But, as I also noted then, patrimonialism is a style of governing, not a formal ideology or system. . . . . Fascism, in contrast, is ideological, aggressive, and, at least in its early stages, revolutionary. It seeks to dominate politics, to crush resistance, and to rewrite the social contract.

Over [the Felon's] Trump’s past year, what originally looked like an effort to make the government his personal plaything has drifted distinctly toward doctrinal and operational fascism. 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.

Then the facts change, I change my mind. Recent events have brought Trump’s governing style into sharper focus. Fascist best describes it, and reluctance to use the term has now become perverse. That is not because of any one or two things he and his administration have done but because of the totality. Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears.

Demolition of norms. From the beginning of his first presidential run in 2015, Trump deliberately crashed through every boundary of civility; he mocked Senator John McCain’s war heroism, mocked fellow candidate Carly Fiorina’s face, seemingly mocked the Fox News host Megyn Kelly’s menstruation, slurred immigrants, and much more. Today he still does it, recently making an obscene gesture to a factory worker and calling a journalist “piggy.” This is a feature of the fascist governing style, not a bug. Fascists know that what the American Founders called the “republican virtues” impede their political agenda, and so they gleefully trash liberal pieties such as reason and reasonableness, civility and civic spirit, toleration and forbearance. By mocking decency and saying the unsayable, they open the way for what William Galston has called the “dark passions” of fear, resentment, and especially domination—the kind of politics that shifts the public discourse to ground on which liberals cannot compete.

Glorification of violence. Every state uses violence to enforce its laws, but liberal states use it reluctantly, whereas fascism embraces and flaunts it. Trump thus praises a violent mob; endorses torture; muses fondly about punching, body-slamming, and shooting protesters and journalists; and reportedly suggests shooting protesters and migrants. His recruitment ads for ICE glamorize military-style raids of homes and neighborhoods; his propaganda takes childish delight in the killing of civilians . . . . Like the demolition of civic decency, the valorization of violence is not incidental to fascism; it is part and parcel.

Might is right. Also characteristic of fascism is what George Orwell called “bully-worship”: the principle that, as Thucydides famously put it, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” This view came across in Trump’s notorious Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky . . . . Stephen Miller, the president’s most powerful aide, told CNN’s Jack Tapper: “We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Those words, though alien to the traditions of American and Christian morality, could have come from the lips of any fascist dictator.

Politicized law enforcement. Liberals follow the law whether they like it or not; fascists, only when they like it. Nazism featured a “dual state,” where, at any moment, the protections of ordinary law could cease to apply. Trump makes no secret of despising due process of law; he has demanded countless times that his opponents be jailed . . . and he has suggested the Constitution’s “termination” and said “I don’t know” when asked if he is required to uphold it. His single most dangerous second-term innovation is the repurposing of federal law enforcement to persecute his enemies . . .

Dehumanization. Fascism draws its legitimacy from its claims of defending the people from enemies who are animals, criminals, brutes. [The Felon] Trump characterizes (for instance) political opponents as “vermin” and immigrants as “garbage” who are “poisoning the blood of our country” (language straight out of the Third Reich).

Police-state tactics. Trump has turned ICE into a sprawling paramilitary that roves the country at will, searches and detains noncitizens and citizens without warrants, uses force ostentatiously, operates behind masks, receives skimpy training, lies about its activities, and has been told that it enjoys “absolute immunity.” He more than doubled the agency’s size in 2025, and its budget is now larger than those of all other federal law-enforcement agencies combined, and larger than the entire military budgets of all but 15 countries. . . . . Kristi Noem’s recent appearance with a sign reading One of ours, all of yours seemed to nod toward another fascist standby, collective punishment—as did the administration’s decision to flood Minneapolis with thousands of officers after residents there began protesting federal tactics, a prioritization that was explicitly retributive.

Undermining elections. Trump’s recent musing that there should be no 2026 election may or may not have been jocular (as the White House has maintained), but he and his MAGA supporters believe they never lose an election, period. . . . . . Rigging, stealing, or outright canceling elections is, of course, job one for fascists. Although Trump is term-limited, we must not expect that he and his MAGA loyalists will voluntarily turn over the White House to a Democrat in 2029, regardless of what the voters say—and the second insurrection will be far better organized than the first.

What’s private is public. Classical fascism rejects the fundamental liberal distinction between the government and the private sector, per Mussolini’s dictum: “No individuals or groups outside the State.” Among Trump’s most audacious (if only intermittently successful) initiatives are his efforts to commandeer private entities, including law firms, universities, and corporations.

Attacks on news media. Shortly after taking office in 2017, Trump denounced the news media as “the enemy of the American people,” a phrase familiar from dictatorships abroad. His hostility never relented, but in his second term, it has reached new heights. Trump has threatened broadcast licenses, abused his regulatory authority, manipulated ownership deals, filed exorbitant lawsuits, played favorites with journalistic access, searched a reporter’s home, and vilified news outlets and journalists. Although Trump cannot dominate news media in the United States in the way that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary, he is running the Orbán playbook.

Territorial and military aggression. One reason I held out against identifying Trumpism with fascism in his first term was Trump’s apparent lack of interest in aggression against other states; if anything, he had seemed shy about using force abroad. Well, that was then. In his second term, he has used military force promiscuously. . . . The same goes for his contempt for international law, binding alliances, and transnational organizations such as the European Union—all of which impede the state’s unconstrained exercise of its will, a central fascist tenet.

Mobs and street thugs. The use of militias and mobs to harass, rough up, and otherwise intimidate opponents is a standard fascist stratagem (the textbook example being Hitler’s Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938). As few will need reminding, the Trump-MAGA parallel is the mob and militia violence against the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Alternative facts. As Orwell, Hannah Arendt, and practically every other scholar of authoritarianism have emphasized, creating a reality-distortion field is the first thing a fascistic government will do, the better to drive its own twisted narrative, confuse the citizenry, demoralize political opponents, and justify every manner of corruption and abuse. While other presidents (including some good ones) have lied, none have come close to Trump’s deployment of Russian-style mass disinformation . . .

The resemblances are too many and too strong to deny. Americans who support liberal democracy need to recognize what we’re dealing with in order to cope with it, and to recognize something, one must name it. Trump has revealed himself, and we must name what we see.