I'm an expert on fascism and I know what Trump's actions during the George Floyd protests look like

For a long time, I avoided using the word, instead preferring 'narcissist' or 'plutocrat'. But this week it became clear I was wrong

A week after the brutal slaying of a handcuffed black man named George Floyd, Donald Trump took to the Rose Garden teleprompter in Washington, DC. It was June 1st, 2020, and few expected any reassurance. The President’s prepared speech was shorter than the widely circulated film of Floyd having the life squeezed out of him by a policeman’s knee on his neck. Yet 500 seconds was all Trump needed to cross the Rubicon toward fascism.

A few years back there was a flurry of speculation about whether Donald Trump was a fascist. Specialists like me mostly preferred terms like ‘narcissist’ or ‘plutocrat’. At the time, this view was as close to consensus as fractious academics get. We may have missed the forest for the trees. Monday’s actions, at the very least, smacked of radical-right extremism, if not full-blown revolutionary nationalism — that is, fascism.

Focusing largely upon riots and looting in the week since Floyd’s murder, the President threatened to use the 1807 Insurrection Act to unleash the military on American streets. He called for tougher state-security measures against left-wingers, even as an internationally banned agent — tear gas — was liberally lobbed at peaceful protesters gathering nearby in Lafayette Park. This cleared the way for an astonishing photo-op outside the progressive St John’s Episcopal Church, where Trump swung an upside-down bible as if it were a noose.

This sacrilege will be praised by his defenders, many of whom are white evangelical Christians. Their inversion of the biblical tenets of mercy, justice and hope have travelled a long path toward this consummative moment: Christianism. Although President Trump likely can’t name a single biblical verse, he personifies a peculiarly American ‘prosperity gospel’, even as he now confronts American democracy as its political antichrist.

The point is less about Trump’s personal history in all this, from Fred Trump’s berobed KKK activism to his son’s many racist utterances. Like Christianism — a perversion of the faith, which is to Christianity as Islamism is to Islam — this is less about the man than what he represents. A moral defective like Trump is fortunate for this comportmental pass, so that he is free to assume the role of artifex. In other words, supporters can guiltlessly venerate him as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose” rather than “a policy maker and leader”.

Those quoted words, by the way, are from the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto from last year. They speak for others who will soon make their presence felt in the US. And how could they not? The perceived breakdown of law and order; rioting in cities; the myth of anti-fascist terrorists and seditious leftists: these narratives have always been a staple for the American radical right. Reports of white vigilantes roaming Fishtown, MA, or American Identity fascists setting up fake Antifa accounts to promote looting, are but the start.

As ex-CIA analysts noted yesterday, this is classic democratic regression. We are living through the stuff of radical right dreams. They will do all they can in coming weeks to make this a reality.

In recent years, thanks in large part to Trump’s lawlessness, right-wing extremists have bet the house on an American race war. It has merged with less genocidal fantasies of civil war that animate the Boogaloo, Big Igloo, Big Luau and those absurd Hawaiian shirts. Like militant Christianity, this is a bastard with many fathers and one dangerously promiscuous goal.

As every expert also knows, right-wing extremism is the greatest domestic terrorism threat in the US today. This disparate movement has just been prescribed steroids by the events of the last week. It is hard to envision a situation where things don’t go from bad to worse. And it is the worse that confronts us now, Americans and international observers alike. It can happen anywhere.

Those were powerful words of warning written by Sinclair Lewis 85 years ago, as the fascists first trampled Europe. The dictator of his novel It Can’t Happen Here, withstanding his military background, bears an uncanny likeness to Trump: “They’ve realized that this country has gone so flabby than any gang daring enough and unscrupulous enough, and smart enough not to seem illegal, can grab hood of the entire government and have all the power and applause and slates, all the money and palaces… they want”.

This “they”, of course, could today apply to an Attorney General who declared a non-organization a terroristic threat. Or congressional enablers like Cotton and Gaetz, floating state violence to quell unrest. Abetted by his Twitter account and sycophantic administration satrapies, Trump’s authoritarian instincts have been given free rein as of June 2020. It is happening here. We’ve seen the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, decked out in fatigues to survey a battlefield — right next to the Lincoln Memorial. Yesterday’s pictures of armed soldiers guarding monuments to freedom and emancipation look more like scenes from The Turner Diaries.

But is “it” fascism? Granted, the Trump administration increasingly walks and quacks like a duck. Perhaps the answer no longer matters; or rather, it is not urgent enough now. Whether fascism or merely ‘illiberal democracy’, what Trump is unleashing is deadly, both for constitutional freedoms as well as for ethnic and religious minorities in the US.

True, a quasi-legality that drives a coach-and-horses through the spirit of lawfulness is a key aspect of fascism’s irresistible interwar takeover. But Trump is no ideologue, preferring impulse over planning, and PR over leadership. As gargantuan a problem as he is, it is what the President is unleashing that is truly the stuff of fascist regimes.

Sinclair’s novel — let alone short dictators saluting in paramilitary uniform — is not where we should be looking for evidence of fascism. Far more applicable lessons are the already militarized politics, the traducing of liberal-democratic norms, and the lack of popular support for the rule of law, especially in the European democracies first emerging from imperial rule after World War One. We would do better to focus on these open wounds in the US than looking for tidy fascist comparisons in history or fiction. Believe me, the fascists will out themselves soon enough anyway.

If not yet a Reichstag Fire moment, then the fire alarm is ringing unmistakably. Democratic institutions and the people that uphold them are now at risk. So too are the most vulnerable in society, who are always first against the wall for radical right bullies. Many will even believe they are immune, forgetting Martin Niemoller’s famous warning, “First they came for the Jews…”

The US may not be able to save itself from what happens between now and the 2020 presidential election. The infection already may be too gangrenous. The international community must act. Summoning ambassadors, multilateral condemnations, and even sanctions on the US may not be enough to stem this tide. Even the Josep Burell’s unprecedented intervention on behalf of the EU must go still further, while equally recognising that recent events may well aid Trump’s bid to win re-election in November.

Yes, things are that bad, and there’s no sign in the President’s behavior that he’s likely to back down. For nations around the world watching, speechless, take note: If this radical right fantasy is not stillborn, what is happening here could happen there too.