Donald Trump is once again the president-elect of the United States, having won both the electoral college—America’s state-based system for choosing the president—and the popular vote, resoundingly. When Trump first won office in 2016, an idea flooded into American culture—not only on the left but in establishment or mainstream media and even on the center-right—that, after eight years with the country’s enormously popular first black president, the U.S. had collapsed into a historical moment comparable to the late Weimar Republic in the 1930s, when the Nazis were at the brink of power in Germany. To millions of Americans, and others around the world, it rapidly became obvious from Donald Trump’s rhetoric that he’s a fascist.
The idea surged in early 2021, after Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an addled and violent attempt to halt the certification of the 2020 election results—but waned as Trump receded from power, however unwillingly. Still, it remained a central theme in the way Trump’s opponents understood him and his followers. In 2022, President Joe Biden called Trump’s Make America Great Again movement “semi-fascism.”
This year, in a moment of confidence, as the Democratic Party moved toward formally selecting Vice President Kamala Harris as its nominee, its rhetoric shifted. Democrats started referring to Trump’s Republican Party—first its vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance, then Trump, too, and the whole thing—as “weird.” But as election day neared, the somber theme of anti-fascism returned. Just two weeks ago, Harris reminded American voters that Trump is still a fascist.
And now the theme is surging again. On the left: “The Democratic Party has had nearly a decade to convince voters of something that should be obvious. Donald Trump is dangerous, radical, authoritarian—even fascistic.” In the established mainstream: “An aspiring fascist is the president-elect, again, of the United States. This is our political reality.” Even on the center-right, just days before the election: “Donald Trump is running the most openly fascist campaign ever undertaken by a major-party nominee for president of the United States.” Is this all true?
Anton Jäger is a lecturer in the history of political thought and political theory at University College, Oxford, and the co-author of The Populist Moment. Jäger says … no. Trump might say things authoritarians say, some that even sound like what a fascist might say. He might also do things that are dangerous and troubling, as he did on January 6, 2021. But none of it is fascism. Which, Jäger says, isn’t just a kind of academic technicality. Projecting fascism onto Trumpism obscures what it is, where its appeal comes from, and, not least, what its actual risks to American democracy could even possibly be …
Gustav Jönsson: Where did the fascism interpretation come from?
Anton Jäger: There are sources for it in American popular culture—but also in academic culture. In academic circles, there’s been a so-called “fascism debate,” prominent in the years since Trump came to power, turning on the question, Is Donald Trump a fascist? Now, while that began mainly as an intellectual question about how to classify and historically interpret Trump as a phenomenon, it carried clear political conclusions: If Trump is, in fact, a fascist, that has to inform how to respond to him. And during Trump’s presidency, and most of the Biden’s, it seemed the Democratic Party and many of its prominent supporters believed Trump should be interpreted, and dealt with, as a species of contemporary fascism.
Briefly, around the time of this year’s Democratic National Conventions, they seemed to shift their positions a little—de-emphasizing fascism, emphasizing weird. That may have spoken to the inflow of more radical millennials into the party. It was conspicuous to me that, at the convention, the progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s speech got the same level of applause as Hillary Clinton’s. And you can see a certain generational sensibility there: Casting American politics as an existential battle between democracy and anti-democracy can feel like electoral blackmail to a lot of younger voters—particularly those looking to the Democrats for some kind of material benefit. These people, are on the whole, much less likely to favor politics they see as essentially pro-establishment. To them, the Biden campaign’s—and eventually the Harris campaign’s—defense of democracy seemed like a defense of a status quo they’d never really appreciated.
Any historian with a sense of long-term patterns in American democracy knew from the start that Trump is not at all exceptional.
Jönsson: The idea of Trump as a fascist came into Democratic rhetoric from sources in popular and academic culture. How do you understand its traction in so much mainstream journalism?
Jäger: It’s clear that Trump became a commercial asset for certain establishment and liberal media organizations after 2016. Those outlets have a very ambiguous relationship with Trump: They’ve considered him politically dangerous, but they’ve also considered him an extremely important source of revenue. We shouldn’t underestimate just how vital he’s been to the business of a lot of established liberal media.
The idea that Trump is a fascist has played a significant role in that business. It’s not the only idea. Something else that’s been striking since 2016 is the idea of populism—and a convergence between the European and the American understanding of what it means. The way American reporters and commentators used the word “populism” in 2016 was still quite different from the European way—which comes typically from a reflex associating everything populist with the extreme right. Up through 2016, American journalists might associate it, for example, with Senator Bernie Sanders and the left wing of the Democratic Party. After 2016, that changed. That’s when in American liberal circles, populism became a reference almost exclusively to an emergent right-wing politics.
These are different ways of expressing the notion that Trump is exceptional in American political life, in a way that requires an exceptional kind of attention from journalists—and of course, from media consumers.
Jönsson: One theme in all the coverage expressing this notion is that—whether or not Trump is a fascist or even, you could say, merely a populist—he in any case represents an exceptional break with the norms of American political history. How would you view that?
Jäger: From my perspective, the best American historians—or really, any historian with a sense of long-term patterns in American democracy—knew from the start that Trump is not at all exceptional. There’ve been political figures like him in American politics for a long, long time—Andrew Jackson, for instance, in the 1820s and 1830s. Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”? That came from the Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1980. So the idea that Trump has been such a deviation from an American norm is, to me, almost laughable. If you look at the United States’ historical record since the 19th century, “strong men” figures—“men on horseback,” as one historian called them—aren’t exceptional in the least. Trump is perfectly legible as an expression of that kind of figure and the tendencies that have gone with it down through American democratic life.
So I don’t think fascism is the right way to understand Trump: Adam Tooze once pointed out that Trump laughed about dead veterans and refused to visit one of them at a cemetery, which would have been unimaginable to anyone in the 20th-century galaxy of fascists, where the experience of collective military combat was absolutely crucial. I don’t think populism helps understand what’s distinctive about Trump: These rhetorical appeals to a majority of the American people that’s somehow outside established party politics—politicians have always been doing that. And I don’t think it’s historically true to say that Trump is exceptional or embodies tendencies that are somehow alien to American democratic life. None of these three frames—fascism, populism, the idea that he’s an exception—have helped anyone make sense of what Trump represents.
Trump didn’t invade the American constitutional state from outside; he operates within it.
Something that’s changed in this last presidential campaign, meanwhile, is that Trump established a new base among certain business elites who now didn’t see him as a dangerous gamble but as their preferred candidate. Which means he’s not simply an outsider but an outsider who’s integrated himself within the established American political system. He now associates with crypto companies, with Elon Musk, and with the tariff-interested quarters of American business. This benefits him politically in obvious ways—but it also makes him seem more and more like a regular politician.
Jönsson: How do you understand January 6 on this view?
Jäger: It was very bad—but it certainly wasn’t fascism. In Weimar Germany, the ruling elites were struggling to stave off a militant proletariat. So in order to maintain their hold on state power, these elites turned to the parties of embittered military veterans—and mainly to the National Socialists. That situation isn’t comparable to today’s America.
Trumpism isn’t just the expression of the quirks of one man; it’s a historical tendency—as the continuity between Trump and Biden shows. I think that’s slowly starting to dawn on people. I think it’s becoming unavoidably clearer that Trump is in many ways a normal politician. I think people can now have conversations about Trump that implicitly understand, he’s not such an extraordinary phenomenon; he’s very much a man of the 21st century—with predecessors in the 20th and 19th.
Ultimately, Trump didn’t invade the American constitutional state from outside; he operates within it. His strategy was never to overthrow the American constitutional order but to exploit its most anti-majoritarian features.
Jönsson: Features such as …?
Jäger: The electoral college. It’s how Republicans tend to win presidential elections—although now in this election, Trump won the popular vote, too.
The Supreme Court, of course. Big American political battles are largely won through Supreme Court appointments. The Supreme Court is almost like an unelected American Vatican—even though you might say that the Vatican has a more democratic selection procedure.
Voter suppression—that’s another. Republicans want to create obstacles, like purging voter rolls, that make it harder for people to vote.
You see, the Republicans haven’t mobilized some kind of dangerous majority in the streets. Instead, they’re trying to empower a small minority—through the existing features of the American state. Democrats have been wary of criticizing these aspects of the American constitutional order—apart from voter suppression. Some in the Democratic camp may be skeptical about the electoral college, but it’s not as if they’re going to abolish it. They’re not talking about a constitutional convention.
Jönsson: It’s clear Trump’s success as a politician has made its impression throughout the Republican Party—in political style and also in policy substance. Do you see any of that influence extending into the Democratic Party?
Jäger: Sure. Politicians—Democrats, Republicans; left, right—used to get their campaign message out to voters through their party’s local branches. Party members would knock on doors, hand out flyers, and so on. But given the structural weakness of the parties, politicians now can’t rely on old practices like this to reach voters. Instead, they have to rally voters by speaking directly to them—for instance, by engaging with them on digital platforms. Trump was just one of the first politicians properly to understand that new strategic imperative. Other politicians are learning from that—including Democrats.
Some in the Trump camp would love to see him become an American Orbán. But America is not Hungary.
And then there’s policy. A lot of what Trump has said he wants to do—when it comes to tariffs or reordering global economic flows to disentangle them from Chinese supply chains—are things Biden has already been doing. Which means there’s going to be almost a perfect continuity through what Trump did in his first term, what Biden has been doing in his, and what Trump says he is going to do in his second. One description I heard of the plan Vance and Trump have for their administration, at least on economic policy, is Biden minus woke. Especially in international policy or global economic policy, there really isn’t too much that separates Trump from Biden.
Of course, there are these typical American wedge issues, where there really is a lot of heated polarization—whether it’s abortion or debates about school curriculums. But when it comes to economic policy, all the talk of “polarization” is quite dramatically overstated.
Jönsson: What about the global context? It’s not uncommon to hear people compare Trump to political leaders in other countries—such as Hungary or India—maybe not as fascists but often as populists. What do you make of comparisons like these?
Jäger: I’d say they illustrate another way in which Trump is unexceptional: In the U.S., there is no Trumpism without Trump: There is no Trumpian party infrastructure; there’s no Trumpian ideology; there’s no class of intellectuals that can somehow carry his movement without him. He’s an example of a leader who gets the masses to come together, but once that leader disappears, the mass also disappears.
We’ve been seeing that phenomenon in all kinds of political systems around the world over the last 10 to 15 years, when this kind of leader-oriented politics really began accelerating and intensifying.
There’ve been a growing number of political figures who’ve exploited the weakness of existing political systems by building coalitions in this loosely charismatic way. It’s a pattern that makes Trumpism unexceptional. There are plenty of other examples: Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Narendra Modi in India, as you suggest—or even Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.
There’s a caveat, though: This might sound like a platitude, but Trumpism is specifically American in its emphasis on the libertarian idea of negative freedom—freedom from interference. Even when American politicians with authoritarian tendencies are looking to enact coercive policies, they’ll pitch it to voters using rhetoric that evokes this kind of freedom.
It’s something that distinguishes Trump from other leaders—from Modi, for instance, who appeal to different ideas, associated with Hindu nationalism. Trumpism may have some kind of authoritarian streak, but it is couched in and conditioned by the language of negative freedom. Listen to at his speeches. They’re almost rhetorical rituals of freedom. He speaks without a prompter, without written notes, without restrictions. They’re exercises in unstructured freedom. Trumpism appeals to that American mindset of liberty. That explains its strength, because invoking liberty is rhetorically powerful—but it also explains its weakness: Restructuring the state might encroach on supporters’ freedom.
Jönsson: You’re saying Trump is entirely different from Orbán?
Jäger: Here’s what I’d say: It’s true that some in the Trump camp would love to see him become an American Orbán. But America is not Hungary. There are these basic cultural differences between the two countries, on account of which it would be hard for Trump—or anyone else—to implement a project like Orbán’s in America. And then, Trump himself has no ideology: There are some in his orbit who might want to use him as a vessel for their own agendas, but that doesn’t mean they can convince him of those agendas. He’s unpredictable. He’s a perfect paragon, in his way, of unstructured, negative freedom.