This essay is part of an ongoing discussion concerning the relationship between Trumpism and fascism within the pages of this journal. For earlier entries in this discussion, see Todd Gordon and Jefferey R. Webber’s “The Authoritarian Disposition: Capitalism, Liberalism, Fascism,” DK Renton’s “Trump, Fascism, and the Authoritarian Turn,” and Gordon and Webber’s “Water on the Brain: Trump 2.0 and the Crisis of Liberal Rule,” Justin Reed’s “Fascism, Trump, and Trumpism: A Critique of Gordon and Webber’s Analysis of Trumpism,” and Paul Ginsberg’s “For a United Front Against Neofascism.”
I have read with interest the pieces that Spectre has published as part of the ongoing discussion of Trump. Each of Reed and Gordon and Webber make good points. I do think, however, both sides of the discussion suffer from flaws that are widespread in the debates on fascism. Each seems to believe that explaining Trump is a matter of finding the right label, and that the correct name is the one which best captures the extent of Trump’s ambitions. But Trump has been a presence in global politics for at least a decade; can’t we start thinking less about labels and more deeply about the social structures that either encourage or inhibit his intentions? My previous piece presented fascism not as a thing but a process, one shaped by luck and improvisation.1DK Renton, “Trump, Fascism, and the Authoritarian Turn,” Spectre, April 1, 2025, https://doi.org/10.63478/XIWSTTUP. I wrote that an authoritarian might intend to reach a destination that was akin to fascism without getting there. Given how often the debate narrows down to rival ideas of whether Trump is (or isn’t) a fascist, it’s a shame how little attention historians are paying even now to fascisms other than Hitler’s. I tried to show the differences between fascism in Italy and Germany. Mussolini never set out a plan equivalent to Mein Kampf. Writers can tell themselves that everything Hitler did in power was the working out of a politics he’d written down in advance; it’s harder to tell the story of Italian fascism as the work of unfettered intention. I had hoped that other contributors might take a similar interest in contradictions, failed attempts, and the conflict between tyrants and the people who resist them—people like us.
The fascism debate shows another recurring weakness: an inability to think about Trump without centering US domestic politics. I wrote of Trump as the product of developments outside the United States, the equivalent of such predecessors as Netanyahu, Modi, and Orbán. I described the dynamics of mutual emulation that pushed each of Hitler and Mussolini to the right. I argued that sequence mattered—Trump’s second term comes after Israel’s genocide—and that his relationship to Netanyahu might ease his path to greater authoritarianism. The politics of the United States’ current attacks on Iran show how conventional discourse, which sees Trump as produced solely by events inside the United States, fails to explain how authoritarianism advances. In early 2026, Trump suffered setbacks at home (the Minnesota uprising, the Supreme Court tariff decision, Epstein). He pivoted towards using force abroad because, after Venezuela, military action seemed to offer opportunity without risk. But in Iran, the bombings have failed to bring the expected results. Trump’s antidemocratic instincts are shaped by enmities and alliance—the latter with a cobelligerent Israel, which, like the United States, helps to constitute the global right. Writing as if despotism is shaped only (as in Gordon and Webber’s piece) or predominantly (as in Reed’s piece) by events inside the United States is a self-limiting approach. If democracy falls, as it might yet do on Trump’s watch, it is most likely to be overthrown in more than one country at a time.
There’s no capitalist adjudicator standing above Trump’s shoulder—his conspiracy theories, his attacks on antifa, and his claims to have won the 2020 election—correcting any mistaken utterances. No one in the regime insists that the state’s approach to vaccinations or climate change must still be governed by science. I agree with Reed that capitalism grants authoritarian politicians a degree of freedom…and if that means abolishing democracy, no capitalist rationality will emerge from the heavens to save protesters.
Where Reed’s article is at its strongest is when he challenges the assertion that counterrevolutionary movements cannot go further than the interests of the ruling class. Gordon and Webber believe that “the challenge to ruling elites from below has not required more extreme forms of authoritarian intervention.”2Todd Gordon and Jeffery R. Webber, “Water on the Brain: Trump 2.0 and the Crisis of Liberal Rule,” Spectre, June 24, 2025, https://doi.org/10.63478/XT55M7G4. They view this absence as a brake preventing Trump from unleashing horror. In that passage, the word “required” is doing a lot of ideological work. They seem to believe that, in a system heading in an authoritarian direction, the capitalists—and not the politicians—remain in control. For Gordon and Webber, industrialists will not agree to measures of dictatorship and will stop them if they exceed what rationality requires.
The historical experience of fascism wasn’t ever that tidy. As Mussolini pointed out in a famous debate with Gramsci in the Chamber of Deputies, plenty of businessmen did not see him as the only option.3Antonio Gramsci, Contro la legge sulle associazioni secrete (Rome: Manifestolibre, 1997), available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1925/05/speech.htm. Two years after his regime had been established they were still funding centre-right alternatives to fascism. When Mussolini won, that faction of capitalists lost. Democracy may well have seemed superior to them, but they were still unable to save it.
The insistence on the system’s essential rationality does even worse when applied to the events of the Second World War. Of that conflict and its underlying logic, Peter Sedgwick (the British Marxist, psychologist and veteran of the New Left) once wrote:
Courses of action were chosen not because they made any kind of economic (or even military) sense but because the belief-system of the leadership demanded these measures…the extermination of the Jews (gassing scarce, Polish metal workers just when they were needed most, commandeering a transport system already unable to meet military demands, and above all serving no propagandist, scapegoating purpose since it was conducted in secret) defies reason no less than conscience. The ‘primacy’ of Nazi politics is exerted not only against economics but against politics (i.e., policymaking) itself.4Peter Sedgwick, “The Problem of Fascism,” International Socialism, no. 42 (1970): 31–34, available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/sedgwick/1970/02/fascism.htm.
The same Hitler who managed to convince himself that Jews were behind every unwelcome event in history had previously convinced himself that Germany, in 1933, was on the brink of a Communist revolution that needed to be crushed. No doubt, a section of German capitalists believed that the arrest of Marxists in their thousands was unfortunate and excessive. Fascism was going further than history required. Their protests were as quiet as the complaints of Zuckerberg and Bezos after Trump’s second inauguration speech. There’s no capitalist adjudicator standing above Trump’s shoulder—his conspiracy theories, his attacks on antifa, and his claims to have won the 2020 election—correcting any mistaken utterances. No one in the regime insists that the state’s approach to vaccinations or climate change must still be governed by science. I agree with Reed that capitalism grants authoritarian politicians a degree of freedom (that is, Sedgwick’s primacy of politics) and if that means abolishing democracy, no capitalist rationality will emerge from the heavens to save protesters.
For all his good criticisms, Reed shares with Gordon and Webber certain assumptions, including the idea that taxonomy…is explanation.… Neofascism sounds like it ought to be a compelling theory…but, in the end, it suffers the same flaw as the dogged insistence that Trump isn’t and couldn’t be a fascist. Both versions are stuck in a permanent present, in which left theory has been caught…
Where I am closer to Gordon and Webber is in the discussion of Trump’s street militia, although their points were made in criticism of me. My first piece was largely written before the start of Trump’s second term. In writing it, it seemed likely to me that Trump would keep the support of the street movement he’d summoned in 2017 and 2019–20. Gordon and Webber then correctly objected, pointing out that since 2025 the Trump regime has neglected this element of its support.5Gordon and Webber, “Water on the Brain.” Reed wrote that a (neo)fascist might not need such support: “A regime that has already placed its most loyal supporters in the highest positions of the state’s repressive apparatus would not need to rely on militias to maintain order. Its control is already deeply institutionalized.”6Justin Reed, “Fascism, Trump, and Trumpism: A Critique of Gordon and Webber’s Analysis of Trumpism” Spectre, March 6, 2026, https://doi.org/10.63478/WYICINFC. Reed argues that Trump doesn’t need an army on the scale of Hitler; to which you could add that even in their present demobilized state, there are probably more members of armed militia in the present-day United States than there were supporters of the fasci di Combattimento who participated in Mussolini’s march on Rome. But neither of those points obscures the reality that Trump’s street support is less today than it was in 2020.
For all his good criticisms, Reed shares with Gordon and Webber certain assumptions, including the idea that taxonomy (“nam[ing] the true nature of the threat”) is explanation.7Reed, “Fascism, Trump, and Trumpism.” The problems of declaring Trump a fascist can be resolved, he argues, if you see Trump’s as a fascist regime (that is, politicians intending to introduce fascism) ruling over a nonfascist state. This isn’t an unusual formulation; it is very close to a phrase you can find in Albert Toscano’s Late Fascism, where that author writes of “fascists without fascism.”8Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Fascism, and the Politics of Crisis (New York: Verso, 2023). The reality Toscano was addressing was simultaneously Trump’s first term and Western politics in the 1970s. In both cases he addressed liberal democratic societies ruled over by a conservative party. Neofascism sounds like it ought to be a compelling theory, it uses the word “fascism” to signify its radical disapproval of the present condition of things. But, in the end, it suffers the same flaw as the dogged insistence that Trump isn’t and couldn’t be a fascist. Both versions are stuck in a permanent present, in which left theory has been caught for years or, possibly, decades. Neither approach delivers a set of metaphors capable of explaining rapid change.
In terms of authoritarian consequences, Trump’s current administration is going further and faster than his first term. If he has always been either a “nonfascist” or indeed a “neofascist”, what explains his radicalization compared to a decade ago? To Reed, I am asking what conditions would need to change before Trump’s fascist regime became a fascist state: what have been the limiting factors which stopped this happening earlier? To Gordon and Webber I am asking: how far are the Trumpian state managers really from launching a revolutionary attack on the constitutional order and, assuming that we see some attempt at a repeat in this election cycle of January 6, could such an attack win?
I began my original piece by writing, “when leading Democrats debate whether Trump is a fascist, they’re asking if he’ll change the voting system so that they can’t win an election again.”9Renton, “Trump, Fascism, and the Authoritarian Turn.” It wasn’t the only instance I gave of the distinction between democracy and dictatorship, but it is the one that will be discussed most over the next two years. The next Presidential elections are due to be held in November 2028. Readers who think that Trump is already, or could become, a fascist are predicting that in those elections Trump will follow an authoritarian path. The most obviously undemocratic options would be to cancel the elections altogether, or to say that he intends to defy the 22nd Amendment and dare the Supreme Court to overrule him. There are also lesser paths he can choose. He might, for example, stand a proxy candidate who would be under his control (as Vladimir Putin did in 2008, to avoid a similar term limit) while at the same time taking such control over the press, encouraging such open voter suppression and gerrymandering as to decide the election result in advance.
Institutional power, alone, would not permit Trump to cancel the elections or issue a Presidential decree overriding the two term limit. Just sending in the police wouldn’t be enough, nor seemingly (judging by the Hegseth sackings) does he have enough support in the army to announce a coup. If Trump intended to follow either of these openly authoritarian measures, he would need the support of journalists, politicians, and judges. He would need to have people with guns capable of standing outside the homes of any wavering, non-Trump, Republicans. Compared to what he would require, Trump has so far neglected his base. Things might change. In his first term, Trump neglected to maintain his personal support in 2018 before rebuilding his base as the election approached in 2019. If I understand Reed correctly, I take him to be saying that Trump has done enough already and would be able to achieve a coup without needing backing from popular forces outside the state (if so, I disagree). If I have read Gordon and Webber right, their argument appears to be that Trump isn’t yet committed to that course. If that’s their point, I agree—for the moment, it is only one option among several—but the direction in which he’s heading is pretty clear.