Since U.S. President Donald Trump entered national politics, his critics have regularly called him an authoritarian or even an out-and-out fascist. They point to his repeated praise of strongmen around the world: He’s lauded the “genius” of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and said China’s President Xi Jinping has “the look, the brain, the whole thing,” so much so that “if you went all over Hollywood to look for somebody to play the role of President Xi, you couldn’t find it.”
Neither is praising foreign strongmen the only thing that’s worried his critics. Most remarkably, Trump led a concerted effort to overturn the result of his loss in the 2020 presidential election, which culminated in the riot at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021.
At the same time, Trump’s Make America Great Again movement has little to do with the defining qualities of fascism. Which usually involve, for example, the state bringing a country’s largest companies, and most of its economy, under direct central control. Most fascist leaderships have also been virulently anti-conservative. But the Trump administration hasn’t done the one and isn’t the other.
And yet Trump clearly isn’t entirely business as usual in American politics, and some of the reasons why are the tendencies toward illiberal politics and disregard for the rule of law that have triggered his critics into seeing him as a sort of führer.
If he isn’t, then, what is he?
Stephen Hanson is a professor in the Department of Government at the College of William & Mary. Hanson says Donald Trump’s style of leadership belongs to a type of governance that goes back centuries, predating modern democracy: patrimonialism—meaning he effectively runs the state as if it were a family business. He accordingly expects personal loyalty from those beneath him, punishing impartial civil servants while doling out rewards to those who pledge fealty. That’s what we’re now seeing play out in practice, with Trump firing people in the American federal bureaucracy en masse, while giving loyal backers like Elon Musk favors—as with the recent Tesla car show on the White House lawn.
Trump’s brand of personal leadership resonates strongly with a lot of Americans, but Hanson says it has certain weaknesses, too. If his gutting of the bureaucracy—and his global tariffs—hurt the pocketbooks of American voters, their tolerance for seeing Trump reward his loyal backers might soon strike them as not just possible conflicts of interest but as outright corruption …
Gustav Jönsson: What do you make of the descriptions of Trump as an authoritarian or even fascist?
Kateryna Hliznitsova
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