The Allure of Fascism (Vol. II), Part 15
“What a difference a president makes. A short time ago, we were a dead country. Now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world. The hottest.”
—Donald Trump, 2026.1
The Inauguration
“Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”2
“What a difference a president makes. A short time ago, we were a dead country. Now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world. The hottest.”
—Donald Trump, 2026
A God-given mission—that is how Trump framed his second presidency at his inauguration on January 20th, 2025. Once he returned to power, though, scenes of corruption, cruelty, and atrocity quickly followed.
At Trump’s 2025 inauguration, some of the ceremony’s most exclusive seats were reserved for Silicon Valley’s wealthiest CEOs. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook, and Shou Zi Chew all attended the celebrations at the nation’s capital. Most of these individuals had obtained their unimaginable wealth in part because of US government policies: investments in the nation’s surveillance architecture after 9/11, the low interest rates and QE after the GFC, the radical financial policies enacted during the pandemic. In the past, almost all these individuals had given money to Democratic candidates and liberal causes. But in 2025, they donated millions to Trump’s inauguration ceremony.3 The alliance between the American state, the political right, the oligarchy, and surveillance tech companies (such as Palantir and Flock) was now undeniable.
At a rally celebrating the inauguration, Elon Musk gave a speech. Reflecting Silicon Valley’s embrace of the far right, the world’s richest man made two successive, identical salutes, thrusting his arm outwards and upwards with a flat palm. People immediately noted the gestures’ similarities with Mussolini’s “Roman salute.” Elon Musk, a supporter of Germany’s neo-Nazi-affiliated Alternative für Deutschland party, denied that it was a fascist salute, and went on to make a string of Nazi jokes on his social media platform.4 Shortly afterwards, this unelected billionaire took up his appointment as the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, where he fired hundreds of thousands of government employees, shut down agencies funded by Congress without legal authorisation, and defunded USAID, an act that will likely cause millions of deaths before 2030.5
The Charlie Kirk Memorial Service
In September 2025, Charlie Kirk—Christian nationalist, white supremacist activist, and leader of Turning Point USA, an organisation with ties to the Heritage Foundation—was shot and killed at a talk in Utah. Trump himself stated that the “radical left” was responsible for the atrocity. Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff and homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, claimed that Kirk’s death was caused by a “‘vast domestic terror movement’ of left-leaning non-government organizations” that are “promoting violence in the country.”6 Kirk’s death would ultimately be used by the White House to justify its criminalisation of “Antifa” and “extreme transgender” ideologies.7 Afterwards, Trump would also direct military generals to defend the US from “the enemy within.”8 But before that, at the memorial service for Kirk, Miller gave a disturbing speech:9
“The storm whispers to the warrior that you cannot withstand my strength and the warrior whispers back, I am the storm. Erika is the storm. We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion. Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry. Erika stands on the shoulders of thousands of years of warriors, of women who raised up families, raised up cities, raised up industry, raised up civilization, who pulled us out of the caves and the darkness into the light. The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble.”
“And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity… You have no idea how determined we will be to save the civilization, to save the West, to save this republic, because our children are strong and our grandchildren will be strong. And our children’s children’s children will be strong. And what will you leave behind? Nothing. Nothing. To our enemies, you have nothing to give. You have nothing to offer. You have nothing to share but bitterness. We have beauty. We have light. We have goodness. We have determination. We have vision. We have strength. We built the world that we inhabit now, generation by generation… You cannot threaten us. Because we are on the side of goodness. We are on the side of God.”
Miller is a longstanding Trump loyalist and white supremacist who Kevin McCarthy once referred to as “Trump’s brain.” The architect of Trump’s deportation policies, ICE raids, and the administration’s police takeover of Washington DC, Miller has also claimed that Trump has essentially limitless “plenary authority” as president and that the administration could suspend habeas corpus to deport migrants.10 “Miller’s fingerprints,” The Nation wrote, are “all over the early initiatives of Trump’s second term, including turning legal refugees away from the United States, suspending foreign aid, launching ICE raids on major cities, and leaning on the major tech companies to ban diversity initiatives.”11 Miller also plays a central role in the Trump administration’s counter-terrorism initiatives. “The Democrat [sic] Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens,” he said on Fox News. “It is an entity devoted exclusively [his emphasis] to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”12 Miller is also a known white supremacist. A trove of leaked emails in 2019 revealed his deep attachment to white nationalism, while in 2024, Trump reportedly said to Miller that “if you had it your way, everyone would look exactly like you”; Miller apparently replied, “That’s correct.” On another occasion, Trump also reportedly said “that if it was up to Mr. Miller there would be only 100 million people in this country, and they would all look like Mr. Miller.”13
After his comments at Kirk’s memorial, Dylan Riley correctly noted that Miller essentially made “a Nazi speech.” Miller’s speech not only drew on ideas of cultural creativeness and barrenness, threats to “civilisation,” the binaries of dark and light, the legacy of “Rome” and “Athens,” and the unique strength of “the West.” Its “storm” imagery also echoes rhetoric used by Joseph Goebbels, whose infamous “Total War” speech ended with the call: “Now, people rise up and let the storm break loose.”14 “It’s obvious,” Riley said after Miller’s comments, “that there are not only fascists, but essentially national socialists, in the administration.”15
It would not be the only time when Miller would openly use fascist rhetoric. In an interview in early 2026, he said “we live in a world—in the real world, Jake—that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”16 Days after Miller’s speech at Kirk’s memorial, The Guardian reported that he had “played a leading role in directing US strikes against suspected Venezuelan drug boats.”17 As of July 2026, these strikes have resulted in the extrajudicial murders of at least 221 people since September 2025.18 The justification: they were “narcoterrorists” attempting to import fentanyl, a “weapon of mass destruction,” into the United States.19 For Miller, all these acts were part of Trump’s attempt to turn America into an “extraordinary paradise.”20 “It is impossible to review the events of the last decade and conclude that it is anything other than divine providence that Donald J. Trump is the President of the United States on the year of America 250,” he wrote on July 4th, 2026.21