When leftists say that an opponent is governing like a fascist, usually what we mean is that this enemy has defeated all source of domestic opposition, outlawed their opponents, already cancelled any mechanism by which they might be removed from office. But any objective consideration of Trump’s recent moves would surely have to start from his weakness. By early 2026, much of Trump’s domestic agenda had been exhausted. He had wanted to turn the Democrat-run cities into sites of mass deportations; but in Minneapolis a mass movement of protesters overwhelmed ICE officers with noise, struck against federal invasion, covered the city with signs making it obvious to immigration officers that their presence was unwelcome. The regime killed two protesters, made arrests in the thousands, but was forced to withdraw. Trump has a detailed plan for tariffs, under which different foreign states would be so shocked by the prospect of having taxes levied on their goods that they would pay for the United States to reindustrialise its economy. The Supreme Court declared his tariffs illegal.
Trump’s error in Iran
What made Trump pivot to Iran was the combination of the seemingly unlimited opportunity provided by US military power and the sense that US domestic politics was too complex, too difficult for him to bend to his will. Trump’s error, in relation to Iran, was to assume that in every nationalist dictatorship was, like Venezuela, staffed by a deputy leader willing to stage a coup against their own leader. From the point of view of whether Trump represents a break in US politics or continuity with the recent past, every President since 1990 has similarly faced obstacles at home which seemed to disappear abroad. This was a cliché of US politics under each of the two George Bushes, Clinton, Obama and Biden. Each of them sought to assert American power, none is remembered today as their generation’s Mussolini.
One way to distinguish between conservatives in office and fascists, is that the former tend to moderate in power while the latter radicalise. Fascism means a distinctive approach towards political organising (a combination of mass and reactionary politics), it unleashes a degree of popular anger, promises its supporters jobs after it has purged the liberal state. It uses popular mobilising to get past the sclerosis of bourgeois democracy, the usual need to placate different classes of people, different political interests. Conservatives, who don’t desire to purge the state(they don’t need to, they can draw on a pre-existing alliance with the ruling class), tend to lose interest in foreign adventures if that triggers sufficient domestic opposition, After all each new overseas military base must be staffed, equipped, paid for. Authoritarians tend to lose themselves in the sugar-rush of victory. They enjoy the conflicts, find habits of creative accounting to defer the bill. Fascists are simpler, they demand war without end.
Isolationism is alive and well in the US
Socialists outside the US tend to downplay the importance of isolationism on the US right. At the recent CPAC conference, however, the main subject of debate was whether to support or oppose Trump’s war. Critics, which include such high-profile figures as potential Republican Presidential candidate in 2028, Tucker Carlson, have been buoyed by the growing influence on the right of “Groyper” ideology. The latter, which is mimetic of interwar fascism, encourages Republicans to see Israel as one of their country’s main enemies.
In relation to Venezuela Trump found an answer which kept both sides of his base happy. To those who want to expand US power, he could say that he had brought a hostile state back under US control. To those who fear being sucked into a cycle of endless war, he could say that Maduro had been defeated without any US casualties. He shared a footage of the raid over the Vietnam-era anti-war song, ‘Fortunate Son’. This wasn’t a mistake on the President’s part. In Iran, too, he thought that bombing an unpopular enemy would cause it to collapse. Trump could get, from his perspective, the benefits of war without the cost.
The US leader enjoyed the first few days of bloodshed, but has been reduced since to making threats on social media as the conflict goes on longer than he had thought. In that sense of frustrated ambition, how is he different from George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11? The success of the Al-Qaeda attack seemed to be such a terrible setback, that a similarly great victory was required to put US expansion back on track. Simply in order to demonstrate that the US remains a superpower, there needed to be further conflicts in an addictive sequence on an ever-grander scale. After Afghanistan the US turned on Iraq; just as today it has gone from Venezuela to Iran. Then as now, leaders found war addictive. But Bush was no fascist. In the sixth year of Trump’s presidency, the US has struck Islamists in Nigeria, bombed Caracas and now started a real war with Tehran. That list is bad enough but at the equivalent point of his regime, Hitler – whose Germany was not an unchallenged military hegemon and could only proceed more slowly – had already introduced conscription, occupied the Rhineland, installed Franco in power, annexed Austria and was on the verge of occupying Czechoslovakia.
When Trump began his second term, I wrote a piece for the US magazine Spectre arguing that Trump was an authoritarian leader and could become a fascist. I wrote that history had made the worst outcomes more likely by surrounding Trump with a series of far-right societies from which he could steal ideas, including the regimes in Hungary, India and Russia. “In a world which declares it a rational and legitimate exercise of state policy for Israel to murder the civilian population of Gaza,” I wrote, “Trump’s fantasies of occupying Greenland and totally cleansing the Gaza strip of all remaining Palestinians become ‘rational’ too.” When talking about the relationship between Israel and the US I had in mind two comparisons. One was Hitler’s relationship to Mussolini, and the way in which each sought to be the leading power, in relation to Austria, then in relation to Spain. The fact that there were two right-wing authoritarian regimes meant that each radicalised faster, there are more than two today.
Is Trump like Mussolini?
I was also thinking, specifically, of the relationship between violence and the militancy of different right-wing governments. In the 1920s, part of what made Mussolini’s victory possible in Italy was the way in which – even before taking power – his supporters had murdered several hundred opponents on the left, smashed socialist printing presses, shot Socialist and Communist deputies. That violence set a tone for the dictatorship which followed. The fact that the leaders of Israel have committed a genocide, and gone unpunished makes it easier for US bombers to destroy schools with similar impunity. To deny that the 1930s are, in essence, being repeated – shouldn’t stop anyone from hearing echoes of the past. But for the label of fascist to become accurate, I argued, “a regime must continuously radicalize, innovating in response to events, crossing thresholds including the use of mass violence against enemies in society and the state”. And that’s the right test now, too.
The use of military power in Iran is a sign potentially of the US regime radicalising – or desiring to. But the war is unpopular, and has tended to aggravate pre-existing tensions within Trump’s base. Iran isn’t Vietnam; the most likely endpoint remains some strengthening of US foreign power. But, from the perspective of building a non-democratic future, what a tyrant would be seeking is such popular support for the war, that they could use the army to destroy enemies at home too. (Read popular responses in Italy to the state’s successful war on Abyssinia, and that’s exactly what happened then). As a potential domestic tyrant, Trump hasn’t been able to use the war to increase his power
It’s not impossible that by 2028 Trump could have converted his leadership into a full-blown dictatorship, but that hasn’t happened yet.
Eds: Other contributions welcome