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100 Years After Mussolini's Dictatorship, a Trumpian US Flirts With the Long Night of Authoritarianism
The comparisons between Mussolini's declaration of dictatorship in 1925 and Trump’s re-election are striking.
Nov 30, 2024
In June 1924, Benito Mussolini—the Prime Minister of a tottering Liberal Italy—ordered the assassination of a left-wing Member of Parliament, Giacomo Matteotti. When Matteotti’s body was discovered two months later in a wooded area north of Rome, political rumors and controversies exploded into a full-fledged political crisis for the National Fascist Party. Facing the potential collapse of his coalition government, and with it the loss of his prime ministry, Mussolini resolved to confront his party’s political crisis headlong.
On January 3, 1925, Mussolini delivered a contentious speech in the Chamber of Deputies, intending to bring about a resolution, one way or another, to the so-called “Matteotti Crisis.”
“Gentlemen! The speech that I am about to deliver to you should not, strictly speaking, be considered a parliamentary address,” he arrogantly explained, since a “speech of this type could lead to a vote on policy.” “Let it be known,” the Prime Minister continued, “that I do not seek such a vote” as “I have had too many of those.”
Having established his decidedly anti-democratic intentions, Mussolini explained to his colleagues that Article 47 of the Italian Constitution allowed for the members of the Chamber to “impeach the King’s Ministers” and “bring them before the High Court of Justice” for any high crimes and/or misdemeanors committed. “I formally ask you,” the Duce-in-waiting boldly proclaimed, “is there, in this Chamber or outside of it, someone who would like to apply Article 47 [to me]?”
Mussolini’s cynical invitation, of course, was imbued with the not-so-subtle suggestion of reprisals for anyone who dared speak out against the National Fascist Party, its political violence during the previous six or so years, and no less important, its authoritarian Leader.
Unsurprisingly, nobody stood up to apply Article 47 to Mussolini. And in the absence of any political or judicial consequences for his involvement in the political violence leading up to and including Matteotti’s assassination, Mussolini demonstrated himself to be above law and order in Italy. In short, Mussolini was no longer a Prime Minister—he was a dictator.
During the subsequent two years, a now unleashed National Fascist Party utilized its position to pass a series of laws—known as the “Extremely Fascist Laws”—which brought about an end to multi-party democracy and civil liberties in Italy and, in their place, the legal foundations for a single-party Fascist State.
One century later, Mussolini’s declaration of dictatorship, which inaugurated twenty or so years of democratic backsliding and authoritarianism in Europe, continues to haunt the halls of power in liberal democracies throughout the Western world.
The recent re-election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States of America serves as a chilling reminder of the appeal of anti-democratic strongmen in times of social, political, and economic flux. Similar to Mussolini one hundred years ago, Trump has demonstrated a contempt for the Constitution and the universal application of law and order.
In a December 2023 exchange with Fox News personality Sean Hannity, for instance, Trump pompously proclaimed his intentions to serve as a dictator on “day one” of his presidency. Many of his followers, too, have glibly embraced this unconstitutional and anti-democratic political rhetoric, going so far as to produce celebratory campaign t-shirts bearing the slogan: “Dictator on Day One.”
In July 2024, moreover, Trump informed the attendees of the Turning Point Believers' Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida that, were evangelical conservatives to help him win the general election in November, “you won’t have to vote any more.”
Perhaps equally as concerning, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement has resonated with American neo-fascist groups, including Patriot Front, which frequently holds public marches and rallies bearing MAGA-adjacent slogans, and neo-Nazi groups, one of which recently marched through Columbus, Ohio wearing blackshirts and flying swastika flags, ostensibly in celebration of Trump’s re-election.
Stemming from his roles in the January 2021 MAGA-led insurrection at the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. and the subsequent standoff with the FBI over his illegal possession of classified documents, Trump was, leading up to November 5th, facing 91 felony charges, which, if convicted, would have almost certainly resulted in substantial legal consequences for the twice-impeached POTUS. With his re-election, however, these charges will almost certainly be dropped, due to a longstanding Department of Justice policy of applying legal immunity to serving POTUSes. Like Mussolini before him, Trump is now effectively above law and order in the United States.
In addition to winning the presidency, the now MAGA-dominated Republican Party won majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, providing Trump with what could very well turn out to be a “rubber stamp” legislator for his far-right objectives.
Thus, when Trump is inaugurated as the United States’ 47th president on January 20, 2025—merely three weeks following the centennial of Mussolini’s declaration of dictatorship in Italy’s Chamber of Deputies—he will be in the position to strong arm political, judicial, and military power without any meaningful checks and balances. He will be immune from prosecution while in office, which will motivate him to fulfill the promise he made to the Turning Point Believers’ Summit: to gerrymander our political system in a way that precludes any electoral opposition to the MAGA movement moving forward. Trump will be, as he promised in December 2023, a dictator on “day one.”
And with these, and many more, authoritarian promises fulfilled, Americans will be faced with a significant, and rather urgent, question: If the comparisons between Mussolini’s declaration of dictatorship and Trump’s re-election are so striking, as I have insisted, we may well be witnessing the twilight of American democracy, and the beginning of the long night of authoritarianism in the United States.
And, in a related vein, with authoritarian movements popping up everywhere across the Western world, and the steady erosion of support for international law and order and human rights, are we building a global order based around the liberal democratic values of the United Nations Charter? Or are we increasingly living—like the Europeans of the 1920s and 1930s—in another interwar crisis?
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There Is No Longer Room for Debate: Trump Is a Fascist
Flash forward some 90 years and you can hear echoes of Hitler’s Frankfurt address in the persistent messaging of Donald Trump.
Nov 14, 2023
One of the few foreign correspondents to be granted personal access to Adolph Hitler and his inner circle in the dark winter of 1933 was Welsh journalist Garreth Jones. Assigned by his home paper, the Western Mail, to cover Hitler’s push to absolute power, Jones accompanied the newly appointed chancellor and his entourage to Frankfurt for a massive political rally that was held on March 2 of 1933.
Jones’ eyewitness account of the event is bone-chilling because it looks so much like what we are seeing today at Trump rallies.
“For eight hours, the biggest hall in Germany has been packed with 25,000 people for whom Hitler is the savior of his nation,” Jones began his story. “They are waiting, tense with national fervor... I have never seen such a mass of people; such a display of flags up to the top of the high roof, such deafening roars. It is primitive, mass worship.”
Trump’s fixation on Hitlerian imagery, memes and tropes is not an accident. The orange-haired demagogue has had a longstanding fascination with Hitler.
Then Hitler took the stage to a “roar of applause and the thumping and the blare of a military band and the thud of marching feet.” Hitler, Jones observed, “is… a master in repeating [his] leitmotiv in many varied forms, and the leitmotiv is: ‘The republican regime in Germany has betrayed you. Our day of retribution has come.’”
The rally closed with Hitler’s pledge to “complete the work which I began 14 years ago as an unknown soldier, for which I have struggled as leader of the party, and for which I stand today as Chancellor of Germany. We shall do our duty.”
“Again,” Jones wrote, “the hall resounds.”
Three weeks later, Hitler secured passage of the Enabling Act, bringing the Weimar Republic effectively to an end.
Flash forward some 90 years and you can hear echoes of Hitler’s Frankfurt address in the persistent messaging of Donald Trump. Speaking at the ultra-right Faith and Freedom Coalition’s 14th annual “Road to the Majority” conference in Washington, D.C. on June 24, the former president proclaimed:
In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.
Trump delivered a similar message earlier in June, telling an audience of enraptured supporters in Columbus, Georgia, that he was being persecuted by federal and state prosecutors. He insisted that the “deep state” was also out to get those who followed him. “In the end,” Trump complained, “they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you—and I’m just standing in their way.” This was the usual stuff of Trumpian spectacle. In a rambling tirade delivered on Veterans Day in New Hampshire, Trump vowed to “root out… the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
Trump’s fixation on Hitlerian imagery, memes and tropes is not an accident. The orange-haired demagogue has had a longstanding fascination with Hitler. According to a 1990 Vanity Fair article, Trump’s first wife Ivana, who died last year, told her divorce attorney that the former president kept a compilation of Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet by his bed. Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender remarked on Trump’s interest in Hitler in his book on the 2020 presidential campaign, Finally We Did Win This Election. Bender writes that Trump told his then-chief of staff Gen. John Kelly during a 2018 trip to Europe that “Hitler did a lot of good things,” particularly for the German economy. (Trump vehemently denied Bender’s account.)
The cult-like bond between the movement leader and his most ardent followers, a bond characterized by pledges of mutual aid, threats of revenge, and shared delusions of victimization, is one of the bedrock features of fascism. This was graphically illustrated by the ascent to power of the two pillars of 20th-century fascism, Hitler and Bennito Mussolini, whose personal style Trump is often said to emulate.
“Mussolini put his hands on his hips, thrust his chest, jutted his lower jaw,” Jonathan Blitzer wrote in a 2016 New Yorker article that profiled the work of New York University history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, one of the foremost authorities on fascism.
“It’s all about showing that he cannot be contained,” Ben-Ghiat told Blitzer. “It was the same with Mussolini.”
If he is reelected next year, Trump could make the January 6 coup attempt look mild.
“I’ve been studying cult leaders for a hundred years’ worth of them,” said Ben-Ghiat in an appearance on Democracy Now last June. Trump “has all the signs. He is not a conventional politician of either the Democratic or Republican [Party]… He is a cult leader. And the GOP has long been… submissive to him. He put them under an authoritarian discipline, and then he made them complicit. And this is what corrupt, violent authoritarians do. They make you part of their crimes.”
As I have written before in this column, fascism is an emotionally loaded and often misapplied term. But if understood correctly, it can never be dismissed as a vestige of the past. As a form of political behavior, discourse, and ideology, Trump and the MAGA movement are clearly fascist. There is no longer room for debate.
Fascism has deep roots in the United States, from the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, to the rise of the German-American Bund in the 1930s, to the ascendance of Depression-era demagogues, and, fast-forward almost a century, the election of Trump in 2016.
There’s a long-running class factor in the current of American fascism. University of London professor Sarah Churchwell’s June 2020 essay in The New York Review of Books exactly nails it when she quotes rabbi Stephen Wise: “The America of power and wealth is an America which needs fascism.”
Churchwell’s essay, fittingly titled, “American Fascism: It Has Happened Here,” offers a working definition of fascism. She notes that while fascist movements differ from nation to nation, they are united by “conspicuous features [that] are recognizably shared.” These include:
“[N]ostalgia for a purer, mythic, often rural past; cults of tradition and cultural regeneration; paramilitary groups; the delegitimizing of political opponents and demonization of critics; the universalizing of some groups as authentically national, while dehumanizing all other groups; hostility to intellectualism and attacks on a free press; anti-modernism; fetishized patriarchal masculinity; and a distressed sense of victimhood and collective grievance. Fascist mythologies often incorporate a notion of cleansing, an exclusionary defense against racial or cultural contamination, and related eugenicist preferences for certain ‘bloodlines’ over others.”
If he is reelected next year, Trump could make the January 6 coup attempt look mild. The Washington Post and Politico have reported that Trump and his allies on the extreme right hope to transform the federal government into a virtual presidential dictatorship. Trump and his allies, states Politico, are “collecting the ingredients and refining the recipe for an authoritarian regime.”
The fear is that Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to deploy the military. This vision of horror includes Trump in the Oval Office using his immense power to quash civil unrest and dismantle civil service protections for government workers in order to secure their loyalty. And all this while weaponizing the Justice Department to do his bidding.
The New York Times warns that a second Trump term will be especially dire for undocumented immigrants, with mass arrests and the construction of detention camps on a scale not seen since the racist “Operation Wetback” of the Eisenhower era. The Times also reported that Trump plans to cancel the visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
Fascism thrives in moments of widespread social anxiety and moral panic, when large segments of the population are persuaded that liberal democracy no longer serves their interests. We are living in such a moment now. The urgency we face cannot be understated.
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Rise of Fascism Feeding Off a Meaner, More Violent United States
Violence is the cardinal characteristic, the logo, the brand identity of fascism. Every fascist movement in history has lifted itself to power on the scaffold of violence.
Jun 24, 2022
Blood alone moves the wheels of history.
-Benito Mussolini
"Have you noticed that people are getting meaner?" the villain asks in a Paramount+ promo for their new show Evil.
"What does it mean?" asks the "nice" character.
"It means," says the evil character with a note of triumph in her voice, "that your side is losing."
And here we are. The lede of an above-the-fold story in yesterday's Washington Post lays it out:
"In the past 24 hours, there has been an uptick in the number of violent threats against lawmakers on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and all lawmakers on the committee are likely to receive a security detail..."
We need to discuss the violence and threats of violence now endemic to the GOP, because they signal a hopefully reversible--but possibly terminal--slide into fascism.
Fascism is violence.
Its philosophy is rooted in violence: the domination of the many by a few, whether the main instrument of that domination is personal physical violence, the violence of great wealth or political power being used to destroy one's enemies, or unjustified violence inflicted by the state under color of law.
But at its core, fascism is rooted in physical violence, intimidation, and murder. It's war brought into politics and governance.
Violence like this has its own power and its own attraction.
The media is drawn to it, making it the most powerful recruiting tool a fascist movement has.
Insecure, frightened men (and the occasional woman) participating in fascist violence find a sense of agency, of individual power and meaning, a sort of orgasmic release from a life of ordinariness and political impotence.
And make no mistake: the GOP has become the party of political violence.
Democrats treat the violence associated with today's Republican Party as if it were coming from outliers, as if it's "a few bad apples," as if it's simply a troublesome weirdness on the extreme periphery of the conservative movement.
We see this in their response to the violence of January 6th, to the threats of violence directed at members of the January 6th Committee who are now getting security details, and to the frequent but scattershot violence that erupts across the country almost daily.
Democrats watch threats of violence against school board members; against nurses and hospitals treating Covid; against abortion providers; against racial minorities and queer people who Republican legislators declare--and try to put into law--are less than human or "aberrations" that must not be tolerated in a "free society."
The media continues to largely ignore those frequent moments when fascist-infiltrated police--the only group within our society who are legally authorized to use violence without consequence--overlook or overtly encourage the violence that breaks out when Americans dare stand up to fascist militias.
\u201cProud Boys stormed the Pine Valley Public Library in Wilmington, North Carolina. I did some research from people who witnessed things on the ground and took pictures, and it would seem that not only was the Sheriff's office ineffective - they ESCORTED the proud boys to the room!\u201d— Erin Reed (@Erin Reed) 1655915559
"It's the exception," the media notes, and moves on to the next story.
In fact, these displays of violence and the willingness to use violence are declarations. They are statements of purpose. They're spoken and executed with pride.
They are assertions by fascists that they intend to exercise violence and its power up to and including the ultimate: the power to take human life.
Republicans and their media lionize Kyle Rittenhouse for showing up at a Black Lives Matter protest and killing two protestors. They celebrate police violence with "thin blue line" flags, and wave the all-black US flag that signifies the willingness to kill one's political opponents.
They show up at protests heavily armed and wearing tee-shirts evoking General Pinochet with the slogan, "Free helicopter rides for liberals." Their leader said there are "very good people on both sides" after his fascists murdered a young woman named Heather Heyer.
Republicans running for office feature guns or imply threats to kill people in their television and online advertising. Eric Greitens is just the latest in a long list of GOP shooters glorifying assault weapons and implying political violence. This is Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie's Christmas Card:
\u201cMerry Christmas! \ud83c\udf84 \nps. Santa, please bring ammo. \ud83c\udf81\u201d— Thomas Massie (@Thomas Massie) 1638642123
These are all expressions of fascism.
When men like Rusty Bowers and Brad Raffensperger--who dared stop Trump's criminal attempts to steal the 2020 election--describe how they were and continue to be threatened with violence, elected Republicans fall silent.
Arizona House Speaker Bowers endured violent threats outside his home through night after night as his daughter lay dying: this kind of violence is devoid of compassion. It is evil.
Not a word from Ronna Romney McDaniel about the embrace of violence by the base of the Republican Party she leads, not a word from congressional Republicans about the violence their own fellow conservatives now face, not a word from Republican media other than to cynically mouth phony excuses and justifications.
Because violence is now their brand. They revel in it.
They boast of it in ways that are often misinterpreted as either hyperbole or jokes, like when Sharron Angle (and others) warned of "Second Amendment solutions" to Democratic efforts, or when Donald Trump said he could murder someone on Fifth Avenue and still get elected.
Their fascist followers know better: these are proud statements of their willingness to use or endorse violence, and carry explicit threats.
Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism:
"[T]he propaganda of totalitarian movements which precede and accompany totalitarian regimes is invariably as frank as it is mendacious, and would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones.
"The Nazis 'were convinced that evil-doing in our time has a morbid force of attraction,' ... and experience has proved time and again that the propaganda value of evil deeds and general contempt for moral standards is independent of mere self-interest, supposedly the most powerful psychological factor in politics.
"The attraction of evil and crime for the mob mentality is nothing new. It has always been true that the mob will greet 'deeds of violence with the admiring remark: it may be mean, but it is very clever.'"
When a nation goes fascist, it happens quickly. It takes people by surprise.
In 1919, Benito Mussolini started out with 300 armed volunteers, his Blackshirts. They began by terrorizing gay men, striking union members, and socialists; newspaper reports of their violence, beatings, and the occasional murder swept across Italy.
Over the next three years Mussolini's Blackshirt militia burgeoned to over 20,000 men, so when, on the last day of October 1922, he directly confronted King Victor Emmanuel III with the threat of violence, the king gave in, dissolved the government, and appointed Mussolini Prime Minister of Italy.
No campaign, no election, just three years of unrelenting violence and the threat of more violence.
Hitler rose to power on the wings of violence as well, first in the Beer Hall Putsch and later, when he became Chancellor, through his volunteer militia the Brownshirts terrorizing gays, Jews, and union members. Paul von Hindenburg thought Hitler would set aside the violence, as promised, if he was given the power he demanded. Hindenburg didn't understand fascism.
Violence is the cardinal characteristic, the logo, the brand identity of fascism. Every fascist movement in history has lifted itself to power on the scaffold of violence. And then continues to rule with violence.
Fascist media revel in the language of violence. They dehumanize the victims of their violence with words like "invaders" and "vermin" and "illegals."
To justify the violence at the heart of their movement, they squeal a phony claim to victimhood: They think Democrats are trying to take their tax dollars. They fear gays are trying to groom their children. They believe teachers are indoctrinating their youth in socialism. Violence, they say, is their only option.
Over the past two decades, as this fascist movement has arisen in America and taken over the GOP, more than three-quarters of all politically motivated murders have been committed by rightwing often-Republican-aligned terrorists.
Terrorism is fascism. Isis and Al-Qaeda are fascist organizations, just like the various militias that attacked our Capitol on January 6th and today stalk our streets from the backs of pickup trucks while brandishing assault weapons.
For the Republicans in Congress, this is not a problem until violence is threatened against one of their own; when a lone mentally ill man calls police to confess he's hallucinating voices telling him to kill Brett Kavanaugh, legislation is passed within days to protect the Court's justices.
Two years earlier, when "men's rights" advocate Roy Den Hollander murdered the 20-year-old son of Judge Esther Salas and was carrying detailed plans to kill Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor next, Republican Senator Rand Paul blocked legislation in the Senate to provide federal judges with that protection.
Not even one Republican objected to Paul's obstruction, and Mitch McConnell let it stand. Violence is their brand.
When violence is threatened against the few remaining non-fascist Republicans, theoretically members of their own tribe, that's just fine with the "base voter" fascists who now control the levers of power in the party. Just ask any of the Republicans who have testified before the January 6th Committee or who voted to impeach Trump.
Fascists justify their violence as necessary to protect their faith, their families, and the "identity" of their homeland. They will tell you it's the unfortunate last-ditch "necessity" provoked by the "others" who "threaten our way of life."
In reality, violence is not the fascist's final, last-gasp option: it's their first.
- It's their most powerful recruiting tool, showing, as it does, their dominance of society and society's institutions.
- It's how they cow dissent.
- It's the weapon that provokes action, and fascists are all about action.
- It creates chaos, and fascism needs chaos to tear down the existing structures of governance and law that they intend to replace.
The final cause to which fascist violence is directed is what Jefferson (and Hobbes) called bellum omnium in omnia: war of all against all. Every murderous act is designed intentionally to bring society closer to breakdown, so the fascists can openly kill their enemies--particularly people of color and "liberals"--in the streets of the nation.
It's why Tim McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building in 1995, killing 168 people and injuring another 680. It appears to be what motivated both the Las Vegas shooter who killed 58 people and the Boston Bomber. It was claimed by the Buffalo killer of 20 people in a supermarket, and the 2019 El Paso shooter who murdered 23 people.
It's the story line of the two best-selling books within the militia movement, Camp of the Saints and The Turner Diaries. Each ends with mass slaughter leaving a nation of "pure" white Christian survivors, most holding well-used assault rifles as they stand atop piles of bodies.
Hannah Arendt noted in her 1969 essay "Reflections on Violence":
"[T]he danger of the practice of violence, even if it moves consciously within a non-extremist framework of short-term goals, will always be that the means overwhelm the end.
"If goals are not achieved rapidly, the result will not merely be defeat but the introduction of the practice of violence into the whole body politic. Action is irreversible, and a return to the status quo in case of defeat is always unlikely.
"The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently demanded that Republicans "take back their party." So far, they're not listening.
Every day that Republicans refuse to seize and root out the fascist violence now associated with their party is another day closer to a dystopia like the one through which Hannah Arendt lived.
It can happen here.
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