Debate: His own Chief of Staff calls Trump “fascist”

Picture: Gage Skidmore

Donald Trump is a fascist, and he wants to be dictator of a fascist America. That doesn’t necessarily mean all the trappings of 1930s fascism.

Modern authoritarianism works not like the old fascism, by openly overwhelming and abolishing the structures of bourgeois democracy, but by more subtle changes in what existed before. In Russia, Putin has been effective dictator for 25 years, but there are still contested elections and there was a period when someone else (Putin’s puppet) held the main office of state.

Trump is personally a fascist, but what he proposes to do and how is not a replica of the 1930s.

He proposes to vastly increase the scope of the presidency and its power to direct the entire state apparatus, including the armed forces, federal police forces, and the civil service. It will be a super-presidency.

The Republican Supreme Court has in advance ruled that the presidency is akin to a full monarchy in that the president is above the law when acting as president. Force and violence will be controlled by the dictator president, who will also be able to summon unofficial armed militias.

The result, if he wins the presidency and pushes through his agenda, will be a form of fascism, but not a precise replica of the fascism of old.

It has been done before. Augustus, the first Roman Emperor (27BC-14AD) operated seemingly within the forms of the Roman Republic he had subverted.

Trump’s reverence for dictators around the world show he wants to become their copier. If the American Republic falls to Trumpism, that will echo around the world and encourage authoritarians everywhere.

Whether Trump wins or loses, the terrible truth is that tens of millions of Americans will vote fascist in the 5 November presidential election.

As the saying goes, if it quacks and waddles like a duck, it’s a duck. The Trump duck has been all but sieg-heiling it, praising dictators like Putin, the grotesque Kim Jong Un (third of his family to rule), and Xi Jinping, China’s dictator for life.

If he wins, he says openly that he will turn the American presidency into a dictatorship (there is no such thing as “dictator for one day”). He now says that Hitler did some good things (which could be true only if you could separate individual deeds from what Hitler was and what Nazism was and did, but you can’t).

It is not only what Trump says he will do. Some of his former colleagues from when he was president in 2017-21 have now said he is a fascist. General Kelly, his former chief of staff, has said publicly that Trump is a fascist. Former head of the US armed forces Mark Milley says that Trump is “fascist to the core”. A swathe of his one-time Cabinet members have refused to endorse him, including his former vice-president, Mike Pence.

Virtually everything Trump says is a lie; but what he says he will do is backed up by the team around him, which is an authoritarian cabal. They take their politics seriously.

Most striking is the political and ideological malleability of so many of the US’s leading politicians. They know that more or less everything Trump says is a lie, big or small or in-between. Then they tolerate and repeat his lies.

Insurrectionary

An insurrectionary crowd did not at Trump’s behest attack the seat of US government, the Capitol, on 6 January 2021, to stop the peaceful transfer of power to the winner of the 2020 presidential election. First they read it, then they said it, and now they insist it is the pure truth.

All the leaders of official Republicanism, including Donald Trump, know they are lying. For them, lying is the new truth. Truth is whatever Donald Trump says it is.

Not lying has lost all value or use for them. Truth has lost all use or value.

Trump is visibly suffering symptoms of early dementia. Vance, his vice-presidential partner, will be in place as his successor if they win. Vance is as openly tied to multi-millionaires as Trump is, and has shown himself willing to say starkly opposite things if that will serve his political odyssey. He used to be extremely critical of his running mate. Now he says the opposite.

They are all like that, without exception. Their candidate Trump is not only “a convicted felon”, but was found guilty in civil court of raping E Jean Carroll. They don’t care.

A new Republican party is possibly taking shape, as a lot of prominent Republicans have dissociated from Trump and the Trump clones, and are backing Harris and Walz.

Kamala Harris is leading a coalition against Trump.

It is preposterous on one level to see the millionaire and large-scale con-man Trump as a “rebel”, but that is how he is seen by many of his “lower-class” supporters. They have a point: Trump is a rebel not only against conventional politics, but also in his lies and conspiracy theories about hidden forces at work in the whole US system. He is a right-wing and fascist “rebel”, who seems to be against “them”, the existing system, the rulers, the “state”. He appeals to dissatisfaction and incoherent rebellion.

Bernie Sanders, a socialist rebel, appeals to reason, tells the truth, plays by the rules of reason, consistency, and objectivity even when he is most denunciatory and “contrary” and oppositional against the ruling class.

Trump’s wildness and “oppositionism”, and even his denial of reason and coherence, appeal to a lot of people, who “feel” that way in response to the establishment which mobilises its own reason and logic and uses it for the moneyed class against them. A real way out, a Marxist logic, a coherent class-struggle logic for a reasoned and attainable transformation of our world by and on behalf of the have-nots — that is largely eclipsed in US politics now.

Fascism was always like that, appeals to feelings of rebellion against what is, combining that with a self-blinding lack of an overview and coherence. In the 1930s, the Mosleyites published two papers,Blackshirt, and the more cerebral Action. ^[1]

Blackshirt was mainly agitation against the conditions in which people lived. It was when it came to explanation, and they blamed “the Jews” or “Jewish capital”, not capitalism, for the evils, that it differentiated from the left.

The semi-breakdown of the US system and the manner of its breakdown is in fact old. George W Bush lost the 2000 popular vote to Al Gore. Donald Trump lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016. Yet the system made Bush and Trump presidents, and perpetuates their presidencies via their Supreme Court appointments.

It has taken Trump, the mentally sick and monumentally ignorant billionaire conman, someone incapable of feeling for anyone or anything but himself, to bring this broken system to a crisis.

The Right is on the offensive. They want to turn round the USA in its tracks of development. They want people of colour to be third-class Americans again. They want to take away the status and rights that women have won in the last 50 years. Trump’s presidential campaign is a scarcely-disguised racism: he promises to deport 25 million people. The Trumpites tried to end “Obamacare”, and only John McCain’s vote saved it. They want to displace the real history of the USA with white-supremacist fairy tales. They want to abolish the US-wide Department of Education. They want to empower local regression in the States, and they have been remarkably successful.

A minority is attempting to seize ascendancy over the majority and enforce their own rule, to ban abortion, to rewrite history into partial and pious fairy tales.

There is no reverse equivalent here: no-one wants to force a woman in, say, Texas, who doesn’t want an abortion, into one; but the bigots who have seized local power want to forbid anyone to have an abortion.

If the Trumpites win, by way of the Electoral College, say, or by manipulating the Electoral College with the support of the Supreme Court, what will the Democrats do?

Already it is a right-wing Republican majority in the near-all-powerful, and seriously corrupt, Supreme Court. The Republicans have a majority in the House of Representatives and nearly half the Senate. The counter-revolution (that is what it is) has made powerful (and, the Right will believe, prophetic) advance even under the Biden-Harris administration. They have been allowed to do that.

What if the Republicans win enough of those structures? Will the labour unions supporting the Democratic party stand for it? Will the Democratic party, which has let so much pass, let this pass? Will they allow the Trumpite counter-revolution against 50 and more years of progress within the US plutocratic system to be overturned?

Will they allow American politics to go down to the level of Trump lies and stay there? Or will they fight back — outside the system if necessary?

The first step to that, for those who can do it, will be to vote Harris-Walz and for Democrats standing for the House of Reps and the Senate.

[1]Action disputed with the left by asking which was the true “fatherland” of the workers, Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany. For them, it was Germany. Russia? That, they insisted, was merely “state capitalism”.