Not just populist

As a regular reader of your newspaper I find you get most of the important things right like Ukraine and Brexit; but why do some of your contributors go out of their way to deny that Donald Trump is a fascist?

Dan Katz repeats the “Trump is not a fascist” mantra (Solidarity 676) maintaining instead that Trump is merely “a right wing populist”. That view may have been plausible a few years ago, but what marks Trump out from the likes of Orban and Erdogan nowadays is that he has actually initiated a right wing insurrection which came close to succeeding in overthrowing the elected government.

That event is not mentioned at all in Dan’s letter, but I feel the most apt to describe the events of 6 January 2021 as an attempted fascist coup. Trump was definitely involved in its planning and the leading participants were members of the various fascist groups. In this respect it was very similar to the attack on the French National Assembly in 1934 by the fascist leagues.

I appreciate that we shouldn’t call everyone on the right “fascist”, but fascism itself historically has been subject to many changes. Mussolini himself made it up as he went along and didn’t turn Italy into a one-party state until some years after he came to power. Some historians have even said that it is only possible to talk about fascism for Mussolini’s movement.

In the 1930s, Trotskyists in the Socialist Workers’ Party were of the opinion that fascism in the USA would take on specifically American forms and it was wrong to expect it to develop as a close copy of European fascism. They cited the Ku Klux Klan as a variant of fascism, the Klan’s principal purpose being to suppress the Black population. Trump has history with the Klan, as had his old man. He is personally a fascist.

Dan says “if elected in 2024 Trump would be more destructive and dangerous than during his previous presidency.” We’d all agree to that, but what form would it take? A wholesale purge of the civil service and the FBI and their replacement with Trump loyalists would certainly be one of the things on the cards. US government and society would move in a much more authoritarian direction for sure.

This is why I think it incorrect not to call Trump a modern day fascist. He should not be considered “ordinary” bourgeois politician of the ‘populist’ persuasion who won’t change things fundamentally if he gets a second term.

Wesley Harding, Liverpool