The Allure of Fascism (Vol. II), Part 18
Is Trump 2.0 fascist? In an interview published in October 2025, scholar of fascism Dylan Riley discussed this question. In Trump’s first term, Riley was a noted sceptic of the claim that Trump and Trumpism were fascistic. For him, Trump was instead “a charismatic leader ruling in patrimonial fashion over a legal-rational bureaucratic state, in a political system that is largely oligarchic, within its democratic forms.”1 But now, in Trump’s second term, Riley argues otherwise:
“It might be useful to distinguish different levels… there are lots of fascists in the administration [like Stephen Miller]. In the first term, they were very isolated. The institutions of the state were not truly MAGAized. This was the point of resistance. Now, with the conversion of centers of hard power like the Department of Justice and the FBI, the thing is seeping into the state itself. So you have a fascist government and the beginnings of a fascist state, but you don’t really have a fully fascistized society. You need all those things to come together if we want to really call it a fascist regime, I would say. What sets this term apart pretty sharply from the first one is that there really is a determined effort to get everything into line and to coordinate things. The executive order on domestic terrorism is the clearest indication of that.”2
Trump 2.0, Riley realises, is different. The “fascism” label has apparently become legitimate.
As discussed elsewhere in this collection, fascism is both a widely used and often misunderstood political term. Definitions of the term vary widely, leading writers to reach different conclusions about the supposed fascism of a given individual, movement or state depending on the definition of fascism they use. For Roger Griffin, a seminal historian of fascism, fascism is “palingenetic ultranationalism”: a revolutionary ideology, in other words, that hopes to achieve a national rebirth through mechanisms and means that go beyond the dimensions of ordinary liberal democracy.3 Another important and widely cited definition of fascism comes from Robert O. Paxton. For Paxton, fascism is “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” This behaviour, he argues, is underwritten by a set of “mobilising passions”:
“a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions; the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it; the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external; dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences; the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary; the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny; the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason; the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success; the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.”4
For what it’s worth, Griffin does not believe that Trumpism is a fascist movement: in early 2025 he described it as an example of “illiberal democracy.” Paxton, however, concluded that it was fascistic after the 2021 Capitol Riots.5
Paxton’s work rightly emphasises the psychological and affective factors of fascist politics, which have long been a focus of psychoanalytic writings on fascism. Psychoanalytic writers often focus too narrowly on the intrapsychic elements of fascism, neglecting the historical, material, and political components of fascism as they develop their views on the psychodynamic mechanisms of extremist beliefs and behaviours. Nevertheless, their work is deeply useful insofar as it identifies the pathological defence mechanisms and enjoyments that sustain fascist psychopolitics. In the psychoanalytic literature, exemplified by works from writers like Christopher Bollas, Michael Diamond, and Christina Wieland, there is broad agreement that fascism is a political ideology and programme based on the interaction between desire, terror, and psychical defences. In fascism, mechanisms like splitting and projection, paranoia, psychosis, narcissism, melancholia, and suicidality interact with latent social values like white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, nationalism, and so on, transforming our social ideals and generating a distinct set of desires and fears: the desire for gendered, racialised and sexualised domination, which creates enjoyment and a sense of self-esteem and security that together eliminate feelings of terror, narcissistic injury, and anxiety. Our investment in fascism, psychoanalysts often argue, is ultimately secured by its offer of ego security and sadomasochistic enjoyment—the sunken pleasures we find in submission, violence, pain, domination, and death.
Going beyond the psychical elements of fascism, other writers emphasise the continuities between fascism and existing historical practices and socioeconomic structures. Decolonial and critical race theorists like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon argue that fascism emerges from what they call the “boomerang effect,” whereby the violence and oppression enacted by imperialist and colonialist white supremacists in the colonies or against racialised populations is aimed back at members of the dominating group.6 There is little within fascism, they correctly argue, that has not already been perpetrated by the racial and colonial state against Black individuals or colonised people. The difference is that white individuals within the home state, like leftists and Jews, are now targeted in addition to the colonial subjects. Or, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “There was no Nazi atrocity—concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood—which the Christian civilization of Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.”7 Black American writers like George Jackson, Toni Morrison and Angela Y. Davis note, too, that there is an obvious continuity between fascism and the structures and practices of anti-Black domination in the US: the Nazis, after all, found inspiration in America’s Jim Crow laws when drafting the Nuremberg Laws.8
If race and colonialism are central to fascism for these writers, others working in the Marxist tradition argue that capitalism is its most important feature. Fascism, it was common to say, is capitalism in decay. In Georgi Dimitroff’s famous formulation, fascism is the “open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinist and the most imperialist elements of finance capital,” whose basic aim is “preventing revolution.” Slavoj Žižek updates this Marxist definition via Lacan, arguing that fascism is essentially a defence against recognising the “traumatic real” of the capitalist economic system, revealed in moments of capitalist crisis. In place of recognition, the fascist subject disavows the true source of the crisis in an effort to preserve capitalist class relations, relocating the sources of society’s ills onto a racialised minority group like the Jews. For Žižek, fascism is therefore a revolution where nothing changes.9
After a century of analysis, scholars of fascism have generated a wide variety of competing definitions, which are often mutually incompatible. Nevertheless, I believe that we should combine these earlier definitions where possible when we analyse the supposed “fascism” of a contemporary ideology, individual, group, or state. Synthesising these definitions, fascism emerges as a nationalist, anti-democratic, illiberal, authoritarian and reactionary form of mass politics, driven by fantasies of decline and rebirth and mechanisms of paranoid splitting and projection, which typically becomes alluring en masse in times of protracted social, economic, and political crisis. Fascism works to radicalise historic structures of racial and gendered domination and to preserve relations of capitalist exploitation: it reinforces patriarchal, heterosexual, and racialised power dynamics, maintains private property and deepens worker exploitation, and typically features close cooperation between corporations and the state. In fascism, forms of violent repression, typically aimed at external (imperial and colonial) enemies and internal, historically subjugated populations, are redirected against populations ordinarily shielded from that violence. On the psychological and emotional levels, fascism aims both to restore the supposedly lost pride of privileged populations whose entitlements are perceived to be at risk due to the prolonged crises, and to create a psychosocial state of security based on the policing, domination, detention, expulsion, and destruction of individuals and groups figured as threats to those privileged populations. As such, fascism is a political movement driven by sadomasochistic enjoyment, the yearning for narcissistic wholeness, and the desire for ontological security, whose logical extreme is war and genocide, and which perversely invites its own destruction by aiming violence at those subjugated others, inspiring their resistance.
Definitions of fascism like this describe it in full flight; fascism, however, does not typically emerge as a fully formed ideology or movement. Instead, fascist mass movements usually grow gradually and anarchically out of existing liberal democratic institutions, societies, and personalities. It is important, then, to view fascism in processual and spectral terms, as a form of political behaviour that unfolds upon a spectrum that reaches from liberal democratic (i.e., capitalist-colonialist-imperialist) “normalcy” through to the extremes of fascism. Liberalism and fascism are connected, in other words, via a psychosocial space of ante-fascism: a space of ideological and material creative destruction, becoming and transformation, wherein liberalism shades gradually into fascism, thereby guaranteeing the overlap of psychosocial and historical features of liberal democracy and fascism. All the characters examined in this book, from David Bowie to Kanye West, from Jordan B. Peterson to Karlfried Graf Dürckheim, have traversed this space of ante-fascism, moving from one extreme to the other throughout their lives. Movement across the ante-fascist terrain is provoked by crises, generated by the internal contradictions of liberal democratic societies, which strike individuals and masses both psychically and socially, causing a mutually reinforcing and co-constitutive movement of psychological, political and social radicalisation. This radicalisation results in violent mass movements that seek to exclude and eliminate internal enemies and to dominate enemies abroad. Fascism thereby tends towards state violence, war, and genocide.
Riley’s distinction between the “different levels” of fascism—individual, administrative, institutional, governmental, and social—helps us envision the varied psychosocial levels upon which this movement occurs. By speaking of fascism as a multi-level and spectral phenomenon, rather than a singular variable, we can address the sheer ambivalence and confusion of our political moment and add nuance to our analysis of a given individual or movement. We can consider the extent to which a person, group, or institution is fascist on these varied levels. Doing so allows us to grasp the unique nature of the fascism on display. No two fascisms are exactly alike: they differ in terms of their specific fixations, desires, fears, practices, and programmes, and the origins thereof.
Trumpism, we have seen, is not a coherent and cohesive political logic. Nor is it a unified and consistent political movement. Rather, its content is shaped by historical contingency, and its “ideology,” insofar as it has one, is syncretic. Like other historical far-right movements, Trumpism also contains a variety of strategically aligned far-right movements, all with different and competing agendas. Trump’s second administration and its influential allies encompass a range of individuals that represent a variety of factions, ideologies, and institutional interests, and who together form a strange, hard-right political coalition. Some of these individuals are wedded to a radical and odd techno-feudal libertarianism (Thiel); others, to a vision of dictatorial Christian theocracy (Vought), sometimes with overtly eschatological elements (Hegseth). Some adhere to an apparently straightforward white ethno-nationalism (Miller), while others still blend all these competing elements with a commitment to MAGA’s longstanding populism (Vance).
Trump remains as committed to himself as ever, wavering in his commitment to these competing factions as he pursues self-aggrandisement, power, self-enrichment and spectacle. But his rhetoric and imagery have taken on an increasingly religious, messianic dimension, suggesting that he has reached an even greater level of dictatorial, narcissistic delusion.
What unites these disparate groups—from the nativist “America First” populists, to the Christian nationalists, to the white supremacists, to the Silicon Valley libertarians—is a set of commitments and beliefs. Collectively, they agree that the US has entered a period of existentially threatening decline, caused by both internal and external enemies. They believe that radical action is required to halt the decline and restore prosperity. They suggest, implicitly or explicitly, that the US should restrict or eliminate democracy and centralise governmental power in the hands of the executive, and that government bureaucracy should be destroyed or curtailed significantly to achieve these goals. Lastly, they believe that the government and corporate America should cooperate closely, enriching the wealthy and protecting their class interests at the expense of the wider populace. They are united, in other words, in their radical desire for undemocratic authoritarianism, oligarchy, and the accumulation of private wealth, and their deep fear of inaction in the face of crisis.
In terms of domestic policy, the Trump administration has pursued a radical libertarian destruction of state institutions (DOGE) while supporting capitalism and oligarchic self-enrichment, again with the collaboration of these disparate groups. This support has sometimes taken the form of the state acquiring equity in private companies (Intel), a practice Robert Reich described as a form of “national socialism.”10 They have deepened state surveillance efforts (Palantir), engaged in violent and spectacular deportation campaigns (ICE’s activities), committed extrajudicial executions (the drone strikes on boats) and deployed the military against the citizenry (the Marines and the National Guard). They have sidelined Congress and ignored rulings by their obviously corrupt Supreme Court, and have tried to rule via executive orders. They have also worked towards criminalising dissent (especially leftist, antifascist and pro-Palestine protestors) by using counter-terrorism provisions, and telegraphed their intentions to disrupt the mid-term elections. In terms of foreign policy, the administration has engaged in chaotic imperialism (Iran, Venezuela, and the Gaza ‘Board of Peace,’ and, to a lesser extent, Cuba, Greenland, Canada and Mexico), and attempts at economic and geopolitical isolationism (Trump’s tariffs, the threats to withdraw from NATO, the self-destructive dealings with American allies, especially in Europe, the annihilation of USAID).
Importantly, Trump’s second administration has also deepened its commitment to paranoid policing and violence. The US government’s War on Terror, which began with Reagan and exploded under Bush, has expanded radically under Trump. That “War” now targets Islamic fundamentalists, leftist radicals, drug-runners from Central and South America, and people with extreme views on “migration,” “race” and “gender.” A vast amount of money has therefore been allocated to the Department of Homeland Security, a post-9/11 institution, to surveil, detain, imprison, and deport individuals deemed non-American. Their masked agents patrol city streets, arresting individuals and families without warrants and bundling them into unmarked vehicles that take them away to vast detention facilities where they can be held indefinitely or deported to “third countries” to which they have no connection. At the same time, the administration has essentially criminalised leftist activism, giving out incredibly harsh sentences to antifascist protesters and their associates, whom they accuse of supporting “domestic terrorism.” They have also engaged in imperialism against so-called sponsors of terror abroad. After capturing Maduro, the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has essentially assumed control of Venezuela’s “finances, the distribution of its natural resources and its government.”11 As of July 2026, the US continues to bomb Iran and support Israel in its expansionist and genocidal efforts.
This incomplete description of Trump’s second administration demonstrates that, in both intent and practice, it is undemocratic, authoritarian and pro-capitalist. Under the guise of counter-terrorism, it violently pursues a nativist, racist, imperialist and anti-leftist agenda, without care for due process or the legality of their actions. They have redirected the violence of the War on Terror against their own citizens. Many of the hallmarks of fascism are there. But are they enough to declare his administration “fascist”?
Endnotes
The Nature of Fascism, pp.26–27.
The Anatomy of Fascism, pp.218–220.
Quoted in Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s End Times Fascism, p.29.
See Alberto Toscano’s Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis, ch. 2.
See The Universal Exception.