When Fascism Comes to America

There's a relatively obscure quotation, sometimes attributed to the 20th-century American author Sinclair Lewis, that reads, "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

Although no one’s actually sure that Sinclair Lewis ever wrote or said this, his 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here, centers around a flag-hugging, Bible-thumping politician named Berzelius (”Buzz”) Windrip. Despite having no particular leadership skills other than the ability to mesmerize large audiences by appealing to their baser instincts (and to bully those people who aren’t so easily mesmerized), Windrip is elected President of the United States. Shortly after Windrip takes office, through a flurry of executive orders, appointments of unqualified cronies to key governmental positions, and then a declaration of martial law, Windrip quickly makes the transition from a democratically elected president to a brutal, fascist dictator. The novel’s title, It Can’t Happen Here, refers to the mindset of key characters in the novel who fail to recognize Windrip’s fascist agenda before it’s too late.

The question now is whether the people of the United States have the necessary critical thinking skills, moral compass, and political courage to reverse the rise of fascism in our country before further harm is done.

Written almost a century ago during the rise of fascism in Europe prior to World War II, It Can’t Happen Here is disturbingly prescient today. Buzz Windrip’s personal traits, his rhetoric, and the path through which he initially becomes the democratically elected U.S. president, and soon afterward, the country’s first full-fledged fascist dictator, bear an uncanny resemblance to the personality traits and rhetoric of Donald Trump and the path through which he has come thus far to be the 47th President of the United States, and through which he appears to be on course to become our country’s first full-fledged…. But no! It can’t happen here! Or can it?

Trump’s uncanny resemblance to the fictional dictator in Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel is disconcerting. The far more important concern, though, is the degree to which Trump resembles real-life fascist dictators, past and present. A study of notorious 20th- century fascist dictators, including Hitler and Mussolini, concluded that they and their regimes all had several characteristics in common. (The current regimes of Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China, and Kim Jong Un in North Korea also share these characteristics.)

Fascist Dictators Encourage and Condone Violence Against Their Political Enemies

After losing the 2020 presidential election, Trump urged a large crowd of supporters on the morning of January 6, 2021 to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” After the violent assault on the Capitol had been going on for more than three hours, when Trump finally posted a video message urging the rioters to go home, he told them, “We love you, you’re very special.” On his first day back in office in 2025, he granted clemency to the more than 1,500 rioters who were charged with crimes related to the attack on the Capitol, including rioters convicted of assaulting police officers and rioters with past convictions for other violent crimes, including sexual assault.

Fascist Dictators Blur the Distinction Between Private Business Interests and the Public Good and Put Wealthy Business Leaders in High Governmental Positions

At the beginning of his second term, Trump appointed Elon Musk, reportedly the world’s richest man and the CEO of companies that have received tens of billions of dollars in federal funding, to head the ad hoc “Department of Government Efficiency,” with the power to summarily fire vast numbers of federal employees without cause and to potentially steer federal funding away from other companies and toward his own.

Fascist Dictators Promote Bold-Faced Lies and Other Propaganda

Some of Trump’s most notorious lies include his claims that he won the 2020 presidential election; that the January 6, 2021 insurrectionist attack on the Capitol was a “day of love;” and that the Ukrainians themselves, not the Russian invaders, are responsible for starting the war in Ukraine. The Washington Post catalogued more than 30,000 other demonstrably false or misleading statements that Trump made during his first term as president. Currently, a special team within the Trump administration is spewing out pro-Trump propaganda at a prodigious rate on social media, including a portrait of Trump wearing a golden crown with the caption, “Long Live the King,” via Elon Musk’s “X” platform.

Fascist Dictators Promote the Myth That Their Citizens Are Being Threatened by Scapegoats

Trump’s favorite scapegoats are undocumented immigrants whom he frequently refers to as “criminals,” “gang members,” and “killers,”and who he claims are stealing jobs and benefits from U.S. citizens. In fact, undocumented immigrants do the work that most U.S. citizens are unwilling to do; they pay far more in federal taxes than they receive in federal benefits; and, unlike Trump himself, they are convicted of committing serious crimes at a lower rate than the U.S. population as a whole.

Fascist Dictators Put Grossly Unqualified Sycophants in Key Governmental Positions

The many grossly unqualified sycophants who Trump has nominated or appointed to key government positions in his second administration include Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a favorite Fox News interviewee who has himself been accused of alcohol abuse, sexual misconduct, and mismanagement of nonprofit financial funds, and who has spoken in defense of U.S. soldiers charged with war crimes; Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who seeds doubt concerning vaccine effectiveness and promotes other medical quackery; and FBI Director Kash Patel who endorses the “deep state” theory and who has previously described jailed January 6 insurrectionists as “political prisoners.”

Fascist Dictators Exhibit Flagrant Sexism

Trump boasted in a 2005 video recording about not only groping women and kissing them without their consent, but about an incident involving a married woman in which, in his own words, “I moved on her like a bitch.” He added, “I failed, I admit it, I did try and “f—k her.” Trump called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” during their final 2016 presidential debate; he has repeatedly referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as “Pocahontas;” and he entertained a joke during a 2024 campaign rally implying that past Vice President Kamala Harris once worked as a prostitute.

The list of common characteristics in the study of 20th-century fascist dictators and their regimes includes 14 categories in all, and Trump and his MAGA disciples have already exhibited characteristics in most of these categories. One common characteristic not mentioned in the study is the fact that all the 20th-century fascist dictators met ignominious ends—but not before they had caused enormous damage, including the deaths of millions of innocent people.

Questions about what fascism might look like when it comes to the United States of America and whether it can or cannot happen here are no longer merely hypothetical. Fascism has come to the USA. It is happening here. The question now is whether the people of the United States have the necessary critical thinking skills, moral compass, and political courage to reverse the rise of fascism in our country before further harm is done, or will we be like the characters in Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel; the people in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy; and the people in current day Russia, China, and North Korea and allow our system of government to devolve into a full-fledged fascist dictatorship.