Trump Isn’t a Fascist - and That’s the Problem

Why clinging to 20th-century labels is leaving us unprepared for a very 21st-century form of power

A small note before we start: This post is slightly more meandering and rambly than usual - it’s based around a thought that’s been niggling inside my head for the past several days, and it starts from a gut reaction that I recognise in myself, and trying to figure out why it no longer works, so you’re basically seeing me figure out what has been bugging me in real time, and it’s very possible you’ll feel that happening on the page. That said, your thoughts are, as ever, greatly appreciated.

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I don’t think I could count just how many times I’ve been called a Nazi – and I’m almost 100% certain that most of you reading this have been called a Nazi at least once during online exchanges, possibly before breakfast, most likely by someone with a cartoon avatar of someone and a flag in their bio and most likely because you said something utterly unforgivable like “invading other sovereign nations and kidnapping their leaders is bad, actually.”

And, of course, I’ve been guilty of this myself in the past - reaching for the term “fascist” has become an increasingly easy thing to do, and over the past probably decade and a half or so, this has become a type of sorting mechanism on the intervoids. If you disagree with something vehemently enough, something you do find morally repugnant, you tend to reach for the worst words you know:

Fascist. Nazi. Stalinist. Maoist.

Photo by Brooke Balentine on Unsplash

Pick your poison. The aim in this is rarely precision - it’s articulative. Shorthand. It’s emotional and a way of saying “this is beyond the pale”, and becomes especially relevant when the pale itself feels like it’s racing down the hill, wildly on fire and destroying all our known norms and standards.

And, to be perfectly fair, there is a reason we do this - words like Nazi, Fascist, etc. mean something. They’re in no way or form neutral descriptors, but historical warnings that are soaked in blood, suffering and mass death, and we tend to use them in a way to make our discomfort with certain actions, be they governments, commentators or other actors very clear. We’re also not doing so without reason - when we see the suppression and manipulation of media, the human rights abuses just waiting to happen against minority groups and the way that the world is going, we can all be forgiven for feeling like we’ve been transported back 90 years to a period that preceded some of the worst atrocities in human memory.

But there is an issue with this - and I’ve been mulling over this quite a bit since this weekend, when the Geriatric Orange Gameshow Host decided to, yet again, chuck a handgrenade into geopolitics through his illegal invasion of Venezuela, kidnapping of Maduro and his wife and yet again starting another year off with all of us quietly muttering “what the fuck is this now.” I’ve seen quite a few posts decrying the fascist nature of this. Dire warnings about a certain Nationalist Socialist with a funny moustache. Mentions of a Stalinesque way of leadership.

The problem with this being that Donald Trump… well, he isn’t really these things.

I’m in no way or form saying he’s benign, he is very clearly not some misunderstood businessman, misunderstood moderate or misunderstood anything - he is authoritarian, dangerous, corrupt and actively corrosive to democratic norms. I’m also not saying that he’s not as big a threat as the usual throwbacks, he’s clearly shown that he is. This piece is not meant to downplay anything - quite the opposite.

But what we do need to acknowledge, and quickly, is that he is something different. Something novel.

There is a tendency to try and pigeonhole many of his (and his administration’s) actions into the language of the 20th century, and as already mentioned, for good reason - however, we’re now in the point of the game where it becomes counterproductive, and we risk delaying an actual understanding of the shape of the power that he’s exerting.

The labels we keep reaching for in our outrage and indignation, while filled with the appropriate horror, are attached to systems that were, for the most part, ideologically coherent. Fascism was built around myth, nation, rebirth and destiny. Stalinism had a totalising worldview with a warped theory of history and a bureacratic terror state that was designed from the ground up to subsume the individual into an abstract concept. Maoism justified extreme violence and oppression in revolutionary and mass mobilisation. Naziism proceeded with genocide as acts of racial purification, and aligned with Fascism, had the ever alluring theme of “better than” and used the apparatus of state to deliver its goals.

What I’m increasingly thinking of as “Trumpism” doesn’t really bother with any of that - beyond Project 2025, which reads more like a tactical guidebook to deliver far-right ideologies, there is no real grand theory. No “new man” or radiant tomorrow, or any attempt to persuade people that suffering now will lead to salvation later. Trump offers something else instead - brutal transactionalism.

Loyalty is rewarded. Disloyalty is punished. Norms are ignored. Rules are bent or completely broken dependent on expediency or convenience.

Which is why calling him a Fascist, Nazi or any of our other go-to phrases of condemnation falls flat. There is, of course overlap, but the central parts of the definition are just not quite there. Fascism was theatrical - obsessed with aesthetics, ritual and mass participation, whereas Trumpian MAGA politics tend to be almost aggressively and belligerently unpoetic and feel far closer to a grim reality TV show than mass rallies of destiny. His rambling, deluded speeches don’t promise any sort of historical meaning - they promise winning. There is no invocation of sacrifice - they rather invoke dominance and grievance.

With Venezuela as our most recent example of the derangement that he is introducing to the world, if you were looking for a “Fascist” motivation, you’d expect talk of liberation, destiny, civilisation or at least some sort of half hearted crusade - but what we got instead was far simpler. Something flatter.

Drugs. Oil. Stolen property. Hemispheres. “We’re going to run the country.”

Trump’s increasingly threatening stance towards Greenland is underpinned by the same logic - his posturing doesn’t reflect any sort of racial or national destiny, but rather as strategic imperatives. Security. Opportunity. Greenland is a piece on a chess board, valuable purely because of location and resource, with no real thought given to people who live there. The comparison with the concept of “Lebensraum” becomes tempting, but it just doesn’t quite fit.

The corruption we’ve seen Trump engage in - the gifted aircraft from Qatar, the launch of his own cryptocurrency days before the inauguration last year, his direct enrichment of his own family and businesses - also deviate significantly. Authoritarian regimes of the past would either try to hide their corruption, or justify it as necessary for the greater good. Trump engage in corruption openly. Brazenly. There’s zero sheepishness or obfuscation - just a feeling that this is how things work now. A performative entitlement as opposed to ideological corruption.

Even his use of military deployments in blue cities in the US under the guise of “law and order” doesn’t completely track with what we’ve seen before - it’s not a classic case of martial law. It’s messaging - a reminder that force exists at the short fingertips of the president and can, and will, be used against political opponents.

All of the actions that have so shocked us by the President of the United States have his fingerprints all over them - the lawsuit against the BBC is a personal vendetta. Tariffs aren’t deployed as economic doctrine, but as punishment against imagined insults and harms. The cultural annexation we’re seeing in the form of the Kennedy Centre being extra-legislatively renamed to have Trump’s name front and centre is a self-aggrandisement, not one of nationalistic celebration. The flattening of the East Wing to be replaced by the crony-funded Trump Ballroom not an act of monument building, but an act of ego.

Beyond just the inaccuracy of these descriptors for the behaviour that we’re seeing, there is also a risk, because if we keep diagnosing what is becoming an increasingly 21st century problem, we will keep reaching for the wrong solution. The world has changed significantly since the time of the Fascists, Nazis and Stalinists - these movements were, by and large, set in a world of fixed borders, national industries, mass mobilisation and relatively contained flows of people, capital and information.

The responses to them were therefore similarly structured - nation-states, collective sacrifice, industrial regulation and post-war institutions that were designed to cage power both geographically and legally.

That world no longer exists, and we’re learning, what feels sometimes far too slowly, that our usual responses to the rise of a tyrant simply do not work anymore. The UN feels like it has run its course, NATO is at the precipice of irrelevance and the rules based order, which was already questionable in its efficacy to begin with, feels like it is now starting to give agonal gasps.

To be effective against the rising of Trumpism, both in the US and in the rest of the world in its own form, we have to acknowledge the environment that it’s incubating in - global mobility, in which money moves far faster than legislation, where oligarchs can park assets across jurisdictions with a few clicks. Where tech giants now rival states in terms of power, wealth and influence and can shape public discourse at a planetary scale without ever standing for election - or ever really facing accountability.

Power in the early 21st century is liquid - it leaks, arbitrages and it relocates.

Calling Trump a fascist or a nazi or any other descriptor does nothing to address these facts. Fascism worked under the assumption of a captive population. Trumpism assumes optional citizenship, offshore wealth, privatised loyalty and media and tech ecosystems that have become functionally sovereign.

The tools that we were once able to use effectively to constrain tyranny and authoritarianism - treaties, domestic laws, human rights, shame - all no longer work as well as they did in a world in which executives, platforms and capital can simply… opt out, and the danger of clinging to defunct language and historical shorthand puts us on the back foot.

We cannot fight a corporatised, oligarchical, tech enabled, self-aggrandising, celebrity driven authoritarianism with the institutional muscle memory of the mid-20th century anymore - we need new tools. New forms of coordination, new shapes of regulatory ambition and new thinking about democratic control over transnational power.

We won’t build any of that if we’re still arguing about whether the moustache is historically accurate, or scratching our heads about why the newest strong man on the scene isn’t bowing to the pressures and weapons that previously worked.

Trumpism, in its current state, is thriving in the gaps we have between our systems - the gaps between national law and global capital, between democratic accountability and corporate reach. Between public institutions that are no longer trusted and privatised infrastructure that now increasingly pervades in the west. If we treat it as merely another form of Fascism, we are also flattering ourselves into thinking we know what to do when it’s becoming very clear after every insane, unprecedented action that the US is taking that the ground is shifting beneath our feet, and we’re just not keeping up.

Words matter. The language we use matters - and it’s never mattered as much as it does right now. Not as an academic exercise, or a clear sign of pedantry - but as a precondition for the action we need to take.

Calling Trumps actions fascist feels righteous and clarifying - but neither righteousness nor clarity are strategy, and both run the risk of pointing us in the wrong direction. If we keep treating Trumpism as a rerun, we will keep reaching for rerun solutions - and we will keep being surprised when none of them seem to work.

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