The American fascist agenda
How fascism rose in the 20th century and may be brewing again today
Far-right parties have recently gained traction in Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile, rhetoric and ideologies associated with U.S. President Donald Trump continue to raise concerns among his opponents about a possible shift toward fascism.
As somebody currently studying to be a reporter and a journalist, it is terrifying to see Trump, only a month into his presidential term, deciding to control press access to the Oval Office.
Trump is not the only far-right politician to have gained popularity and risen to leadership in recent times.
Germany’s far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), won the second most number of seats in the country's recent elections. While Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has denounced Benito Mussolini’s racist laws, she has also tried to separate her party from the fascist elements of previous far-right groups in the country.
American historian Robert Owen Paxton describes fascism in his book The Anatomy of Fascism, as political behaviour that is obsessed with community decline, humiliation, and compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity. This takes shape as a mass mobilization of nationalist militants aligned with uneasy traditional elites. It involves the abandonment of democratic liberties and the use of redemptive violence—unchecked by legal or ethical restraints—to achieve internal cleansing and external expansion.
Trump checks more than a few of those boxes—from his talk of annexing Canada and Greenland to stacking his cabinet with billionaires.
Are we witnessing a resurgence in 20th-century fascism? To answer this question, we must define fascism and examine its first known manifestation in Europe.
After losing World War I, Germany had to sign the Treaty of Versailles, which required them to pay reparations to the Allied Powers and cede key industrial and agricultural territories to France.
Although Germany went through a period of hyperinflation in 1923, they were able to fix their economy through the American Dawes Plan. However, after the 1929 Wall Street stock market crash, German industries failed, and unemployment rose to 6 million.
The growing grievances certain Germans had with the government and their inability to solve material issues allowed Adolf Hitler to convince right-wing veterans and young men to join his cause in restoring Germany to its “former glory.”
Hitler and the Nazis used slogans to reinforce their white supremacist views like “blood and soil,” which reinforced a pure “Aryan” German race. Trump has said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Hitler mentioned “blood poisoning” in his book Mein Kampf, writing, “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.”
Yet Hitler’s rise to power was not exactly a sweet legal succession of power. The Nazi Party was able to increase the number of seats they held in the 1930 and 1932 elections; however, they still did not have a majority of seats in government.
Dr. Norman Ingram, a professor of modern French history at Concordia University, believes that it was the Enabling Act of 1933 that consolidated the Nazis’ power.
“The Enabling Act is a four-year moratorium on parliamentary government. The Reichstag (the lower house of Germany’s parliament) gives up its powers of governing,” Ingram said. “The chancellor is no longer responsible to the Reichstag. The chancellor is able to rule by decree powers.”
A large factor in the Enabling Act being passed was the intimidation and violence Nazis used to prevent members of the Communist and Social Democratic parties from attending the vote. The executive orders Trump has used to organize the American government and political economy are similar to the decree powers Hitler utilized.
The only way the Nazis could fully rule with impunity was to completely eliminate any opposition that would stand in their way.
In Germany, hundreds of leftists were killed by the Nazi Sturmabteilung paramilitary, while nearly 200,000 were eventually thrown into concentration camps. In Italy, Mussolini and his Squadristi routinely beat and killed opposition and burned trade union buildings.
While I don’t think Trump has reached this level, there is no denying that his rhetoric and constant refusal to accept the 2020 U.S. election results fuelled the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He also has openly pledged to “root out communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”
One of the most fascist and radical things about Trump is his massive deportation plans. These measures could potentially lead to the deportation of students involved in Palestinian activism.
Ahistorical claims about the Nazi Party have increased, with AfD chancellor candidate Alice Weidel recently stating that Hitler was a "communist," not "right-wing." Even if the Nazis called themselves “national socialists,” they were far from adopting socialist policies.
The Nazis were strong capitalists and regularly promoted private property and free competition. For the Nazis, “socialism” was a term that allowed them (the State) to intervene in the free market while also allowing them to appeal to working-class interests. Their real intentions were with wealthy industrialists.
Similarly, Trump has not shied away from being buddy-buddy with his corporate allies. On his inauguration day, exclusive seats were reserved for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the world’s wealthiest loser Elon Musk. Musk, who oversees the Department of Government Efficiency, has gutted regulatory agencies even though his companies have been investigated by over a dozen of said agencies.
As fascists destroy existing social safety nets and side with corporate oligarchs, they create consent for their actions by misdirecting people’s anger towards marginalized groups.
The Nazis and Mussolini’s fascists used racist, antisemitic, ableist, homophobic and transphobic propaganda. This gained them power and “served to misdirect legitimate grievances toward convenient scapegoats,” as political scientist Michael Parenti writes in his book Blackshirts and Reds.
The Nazis’ bigotry was formalized into law through the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, and they carried out one of the largest genocides in history, the Holocaust. They also engaged in book burnings of transgender medical information through the looting of the German Institute of Sexology in 1933. They even targeted their own members; as Parenti notes, some of the Nazis' earliest victims were gay leaders within the Sturmabteilung.
Far-right parties today have co-opted the same bigotry, signing discriminatory laws that specifically target members of marginalized communities.
Trump recently signed two executive orders. The first would only allow the federal government to recognize two unchangeable sexes, male and female. The second would ban transgender women from participating in women’s sports.
Trump’s playbook is exactly like the Nazis’.
The reason you can’t afford a house or access socialized medicine isn’t because of years of neoliberal policies and austerity measures; instead, Trump has convinced his supporters to blame trans people and undocumented immigrants.
Trump’s actions so far have shown that he wants to play dirty and undermine the checks and balances that governments are supposed to have.
As Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci wrote while imprisoned in Italy by Mussolini: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
This article originally appeared in Volume 45, Issue 11, published March 18, 2025.
