Skip to main content¹

Search²

Open Navigation Menu

Dispatches³

¹ #main-content
² /search
³ /magazine/dispatches


           What Does It Mean That Donald Trump Is a Fascist?



Trump takes the tools of dictators and adapts them for the Internet. We
should expect him to try to cling to power until death, and create a
cult of January 6th martyrs.

By Timothy Snyder¹

November 8, 2024

Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux

Save this story

Save this story

This article is part of a series of reflections responding to the 2024
election. Read more »²

It was wrong to treat Donald Trump as a series of absences. The standard
critique has always been that he lacks something that we imagine to be a
prerequisite for high office: breeding, or grammar, or diplomacy, or
business acumen, or love of country. And he does lack all those things,
as well as pretty much any conventional bourgeois virtue you can name.

Trump’s skills and talents go unrecognized when we see him as a
conventional candidate—a person who seeks to explain policies that might
improve lives, or who works to create the appearance of empathy. Yet
this is our shortcoming more than his. Trump has always been a presence,
not an absence: the presence of fascism. What does this mean?

When the Soviets called their enemies “fascists,” they turned the word
into a meaningless insult. Putinist Russia³ has preserved the habit: a
“fascist” is anyone who opposes the wishes of a Russian dictator. So
Ukrainians defending their country from Russian invaders are “fascists.”
This is a trick that Trump has copied. He, like Vladimir Putin, refers
to his enemies as “fascists,” with no ideological significance at all.
It is simply a term of opprobrium.

Putin and Trump are both, in fact, fascists. And their use of the word,
though meant to confuse, reminds us of one of fascism’s essential
characteristics. A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between
words and meanings. He does not serve the language; the language serves
him. When a fascist calls a liberal a “fascist,” the term begins to work
in a different way, as the servant of a particular person, rather than
as a bearer of meaning.

That is quite a fascist achievement. Faced with the complexity of
history, liberals struggle with the overwhelming volume of questions to
be asked, answers to be offered. Like communism, fascism is an answer to
all questions, but a different kind of answer. Communism assures us that
we can, thanks to science, find an underlying direction in all events,
toward a better future. This is (or was) seductive. Fascism reduces the
imbroglio of sensation to what the Leader says.

A liberal has to tell a hundred stories, or a thousand. A communist has
one story, which might not turn out to be true. A fascist just has to be
a storyteller. Because words do not attach to meanings, the stories
don’t need to be consistent. They don’t need to accord with external
reality. A fascist storyteller just has to find a pulse and hold it.
This can proceed through rehearsal, as with Hitler, or by way of trial
and error, as with Trump.

That requires presence, which Trump has always had. His charisma need
not resonate with you: probably, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s would not have
reached you, either. But it is nevertheless a talent. To be a fascist
and to call someone else a fascist requires a cunning that is natural to
Trump. And in that naming of the enemy, absurd as it is, we see the
second major element of fascism.

A Leader (“Duce” and “Führer” mean just that) initiates politics by
choosing an enemy. As the Nazi legal thinker Carl Schmitt maintained,
the choice is arbitrary. It has little or no basis in reality. It takes
its force from the decisive will of the Leader. The people who watched
Trump’s television ads during sporting events had not been harmed by a
transgender person, or by an immigrant, or by a woman of color. The
magic lies in the daring it takes to declare a weaker group to be part
of an overwhelming conspiracy.

The one thing that is not arbitrary about the choice of an enemy is that
it must exploit vulnerabilities. The Trump ads projected a fantasy of
Kamala Harris allowing millions of sex-changed foreigners to take jobs
from Americans. This touches, all at once, on gender, economic, and
sexual vulnerability. We are unprotected and impoverished and will be
replaced by something alien. And this is all orchestrated by a shadowy
enemy in the background—in this case, a woman of color who knows how to
laugh.

The “great replacement” theory is an example of an unoriginal fascist
lie: conspirators will make you impotent and bring others to take your
place in the world. The apparent complexity of the world resolves itself
as a conspiracy, just as the attendant anxiety is resolved by hatred.
This works with almost any combination of enemies. It can be a
conspiracy of deep-state politicians to kidnap babies, or a conspiracy
of Jews to corrupt women. Fascism wins when the enmity summoned begins
to tell the story itself.

A fascist marries conspiracy and necessity. Not everyone can tell a
spontaneous Big Lie, as Trump did, when he lost the 2020 election. And
the Republicans around him did not challenge him. The Big Lie came to
life when his followers stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Crucially, he paid no price for that. That made the Big Lie true, in a
fascist sense. His de-facto impunity and then de-jure immunity also
generated a sense of the untouchable, the heroic.

Trump’s presence has always been a co-creation: his and ours. From the
moment when he first came down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, he was
treated as a source of spectacle. Because he was good for television, he
was accepted as a legitimate candidate. In the print media, he grew
through the doctrine of both-sides-ism⁴: no matter how awful his deeds,
his opponent had to be presented as equally bad. This empowered him to
be both wicked and normal. During every campaign’s final months, polling
had a similar effect⁵. By displacing policy differences and reducing
politics to two faces or two colors, polls reinforce the notion that
Trump belonged where he was, and that politics was just a matter of us
or them.

“Only real New Yorkers take the sewer system.”

Cartoon by Chris Gural

Copy link to cartoon

Link copied

Shop

What amplifies Trump’s presence more than any other medium is the
Internet. He is a natural with its quirky rhythms. And its algorithms
make the rest of us open to exactly his sort of talky fascism. On social
media⁶, we are drawn away from people of complexity and toward blunt
stereotypes. We ourselves are categorized, and are then fed content that
brings out, in Václav Havel’s term, our “most probable states.” The
Internet does not just spread specific conspiracy theories; it primes
our minds⁷ for them. This was already true before Elon Musk reshaped
Twitter⁸ in Trump’s image.

Our engagement with the machine illuminates a difference between the
fascists of the twenty-twenties and the fascists of the
nineteen-twenties. Back then, the machine was seen as bold and
beautiful, a brutal instrument that would return us to our nature by
wrenching us from the hold of soft civilization. The Italian poet
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti had an epiphany after an automobile accident
in 1908, which led him to Futurism and then to fascism. For Hitler, the
internal-combustion engine hastened a “Blitzsieg,” a lightning victory.
The superior race with the superior technology exterminates other races,
takes other peoples’ land, and thrives.

We are still driving around using internal-combustion engines, as we
were a century ago; what has changed more than our means of locomotion
is our means of staying put. When the Nazis dreamed of a radio in every
home or a newsreel before every film, they did not imagine Germans
motionlessly staring at screens for most of the day, as we all do now.
Fascists a hundred years ago liked the male body, physical fitness, and
marching around outside. Fascism today involves a masculinity softened
by screen time. In both eras of fascism, women were explicitly deemed
inferior. If the old fascism depended on a fantasy of accelerated male
prowess, today’s rests on the anxiety of mechanical inability.

The fascist fantasy traditionally involved a return to nature. The
Leader’s voice guided us into a competition with other races for
habitat. Hitler was obsessed with coming ecological catastrophe, and he
argued, in “Mein Kampf,” that Germans had to seize land or starve. That
was incorrect. But, a hundred years later, those internal-combustion
engines and other archaic technologies actually have changed the climate
to the point of causing droughts and storms, as we saw during this
electoral season. When such disasters occur, today’s fascists react as
Trump and J. D. Vance did: they blame the victims and the immigrants,
and invent conspiracy theories. If the old fascism killed for the sake
of a dream of uniting with nature, the new fascism will kill by a
politics of catastrophe, a deliberate acceleration of global warming,
and its exploitation in the service of the politics of us and them.

A century ago, socialists wanted to believe that fascism was just
another sign of the decay of capitalism. And they were right, at least
insofar as businessmen then didn’t understand that fascism would reshape
all of politics and society, and not just suppress labor unions and
undermine democracy. Today, though, the point would be much sharper.
Trump does not actually have a lot of money, but he pretends to—getting
away with that lie is part of his presence. And his close fascist
allies, Musk and Putin, are probably the two wealthiest people in the
world. The fascism of today is nestled between the digital oligarchy
(Musk) and the hydrocarbon oligarchy (Putin). Trump has pledged himself
to America’s own hydrocarbon oligarchs, thereby insuring climate
disaster, suffering, immigration, and even more occasions for division.

The oligarchs bring to our fascism its libertarian entry point: they
preach that government is the source of all evil. As we yield to that
logic, the hydrocarbon oligarchs drill away at the earth and the digital
oligarchs at our minds. A weakened government can control neither, nor
can it promise sound infrastructure or the welfare state. In these
conditions, freedom is viewed not only as a struggle against the
government but also as a struggle against one’s own neighbors. The
people who claim to want individual freedom are the same people who
clamor for mass deportations. America’s hydrocarbon and digital
oligarchs support this kind of libertarianism; it is social media that
guides men (and it is usually men) away from the idea that they are
solitary heroes to the conviction that other groups must be punished.

Fascism is now in the algorithms, the neural pathways, the social
interactions. How did we fail to see all this? Part of it was our belief
that history is over, that the great rivals to liberalism were dead or
exhausted. Part of it was American exceptionalism: “it can’t happen
here⁹” and so on. But most of it was simple self-absorption: we wanted
to see Trump in terms of his absences, so that our way of seeing the
world would go unchallenged. So we failed to see his fascist presence.
And, because we ignored the fascism, we were unable to make the easy
predictions of what he would do next. Or, worse, we learned to thrill at
our own mistakes, because he always did something more outrageous than
we expected.

It was predictable that Trump would deny¹⁰ the results of the 2020
election. It was predictable that his Big Lie would change¹¹ American
politics. It is predictable, today, that he will give free rein to the
oligarchs who, he knows, will continue to generate the social and
digital bases of a politics of us and them. It is predictable that, in
returning to power, he will seek to change the system so that he can
remain in power until death. It is predictable that he will use
deportations to divide us, to accustom us to violence, and to make
accomplices of us. It is predictable that he will create a cult out of
the martyrs of January 6th. It is predictable that he will coöperate
with similarly minded rulers abroad.

When the historian Robert Paxton was asked¹² about Trump and fascism a
few weeks ago, he made an important point. Of course, Trump is a
fascist, Paxton concluded. It was fine to compare him to Mussolini and
Hitler, but there was a larger point. It took some luck for those two to
come to power. “The Trump phenomenon looks like it has a much more solid
social base,” Paxton said, “which neither Hitler nor Mussolini would
have had.”

Fascism is a phenomenon, not a person. Just as Trump was always a
presence, so is the movement he has created. It is not just a matter of
the actual fascists in his movement, who are scarcely hiding¹³, nor of
his own friendly references to Hitler or his use of Hitlerian language¹⁴
(“vermin,” “enemy within”). He bears responsibility for what comes next,
as do his allies and supporters.

Yet some, and probably more, of the blame rests with our actions and
analysis. Again and again, our major institutions, from the media to the
judiciary, have amplified Trump’s presence; again and again, we have
failed to name the consequences. Fascism can be defeated, but not when
we are on its side. ♦

Published in the print edition of the November 18, 2024¹⁵, issue, with
the headline “American Fascist.”

 ¹ /contributors/timothy-snyder
 ² https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/dispatches/2024-trump-beats-harris-writers-reflect
 ³ https://www.amazon.com/Road-Unfreedom-Russia-Europe-America/dp/0525574468
 ⁴ https://snyder.substack.com/p/both-sides
 ⁵ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/27/polling-has-turned-the-us-election-into-a-game-we-need-to-take-a-reality-check
 ⁶ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/11/the-artificial-state
 ⁷ https://www.salon.com/2024/11/08/americas-political-discordance-the-want-progressivism/
 ⁸ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/elon-musk-ron-desantis-2024-twitter/674149/
 ⁹ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2020/06/22/american-fascism-it-has-happened-here
¹⁰ https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/not-normal-election
¹¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html
¹² https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/magazine/robert-paxton-facism.html
¹³ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/05/trump-staffer-fired-from-republican-party-for-being-a-white-supremacist
¹⁴ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-authoritarian-rhetoric-hitler-mussolini/680296/
¹⁵ /magazine/2024/11/18


New Yorker Favorites
====================


 • Can reading make you happier¹?

 • Why walking helps us think².

 • The Vogue model who became a war photographer³.

 • The perils of Pearl and Olga⁴.

 • Sentenced to life for an accident miles away⁵.

 • The resurgent appeal of Stevie Nicks⁶.

 • Fiction by Lore Segal: “Ladies’ Lunch⁷”

Sign up⁸ for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The
New Yorker.

Timothy Snyder⁹ is a professor of history at Yale. His books include “On
Freedom¹⁰.”

More:Election 2024¹¹

Read More

Open Questions

Do They Really Believe That Stuff?

According to a new book, America’s political derangement has
psychological roots.

By Joshua Rothman

Comment

Standing Up to Trump

Jeff Bezos endorsed a Trump-era slogan—“Democracy Dies in Darkness”—for
his newspaper, the Washington Post. Why wouldn’t he let it endorse a
candidate?

By David Remnick

The Political Scene

Trump’s Final Days on the Campaign Trail

Under assault from all sides, in the last weeks of his campaign, the
former President speaks often of enemies from within, including those
trying to take his life.

By Antonia Hitchens

Dispatches

A Fourth-Rate Entertainer, a Third-Rate Businessman, and a Two-Time
President

The 2024 election, like the one in 2016, had the same nutty and vapid
Donald Trump, the same retrograde gender politics, and the same result.

By Lorrie Moore

The Weekend Essay

Ukraine’s Waiting Game

In and around Kyiv, war has become part of daily life, even as the
public grows weary of its costs.

By Keith Gessen

Dispatch

Donald Trump’s West Palm Beach Victory Celebration

Surrounded by an ever-expanding cast of MAGA characters, the perpetual
candidate becomes President-elect again.

By Antonia Hitchens

The Lede

Donald Trump’s Revenge

The former President will return to the White House older, less
inhibited, and far more dangerous than ever before.

By Susan B. Glasser

Dispatches

How America Embraced Gender War

Both Trump’s and Harris’s campaigns framed the Presidential election as
a contest between men and women. Did the results prove them right?

By Jia Tolentino

Letter from Biden’s Washington

Garbage Time at the 2024 Finish Line

Nine years in, Trump is in reach of another term as the technocrats
struggle to contain him.

By Susan B. Glasser

The Lede

Kamala Harris Makes Her Closing Argument at the Ellipse

At a rally whose location evoked January 6th, Harris sounded the alarm
about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies but refused to linger in the
national shame spiral that has formed around him.

By Katy Waldman

Podcast Dept.

The Mystery of Three Hundred Bodies in the Woods

The podcast “Noble,” about severe malpractice at a Georgia crematorium,
shows that even the most shocking of horror stories can be sensitively
told.

By Sarah Larson

Dispatches

Democrats Tried to Counter Donald Trump’s Viciousness Toward Women with
Condescension

The Harris campaign felt the need to remind women voters that they can
vote for whomever they want. Women understood this. The campaign failed
to.

By Jill Lepore

© 2024 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. The New Yorker may earn a
portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as
part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this
site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or
otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices¹²

 ¹ /culture/cultural-comment/can-reading-make-you-happier
 ² /tech/annals-of-technology/walking-helps-us-think
 ³ /magazine/2008/01/21/lee-miller-war-photographer-model
 ⁴ /magazine/1953/08/08/the-perils-of-pearl-and-olga
 ⁵ /magazine/2023/12/18/felony-murder-laws
 ⁶ /magazine/2016/11/28/the-resurgent-appeal-of-stevie-nicks
 ⁷ /magazine/2017/02/27/ladies-lunch-lore-segal
 ⁸ https://www.newyorker.com/newsletter/daily
 ⁹ /contributors/timothy-snyder
¹⁰ https://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Timothy-Snyder/dp/0593728726/
¹¹ /tag/election-2024
¹² http://www.aboutads.info
