It was wrong to treat Donald Trump as a series of absences. The standard critique has always been that he lacks something that we imagine to be a prerequisite for high office: breeding, or grammar, or diplomacy, or business acumen, or love of country. And he does lack all those things, as well as pretty much any conventional bourgeois virtue you can name.
Trump’s skills and talents go unrecognized when we see him as a conventional candidate—a person who seeks to explain policies that might improve lives, or who works to create the appearance of empathy. Yet this is our shortcoming more than his. Trump has always been a presence, not an absence: the presence of fascism. What does this mean?
When the Soviets called their enemies “fascists,” they turned the word into a meaningless insult. Putinist Russia has preserved the habit: a “fascist” is anyone who opposes the wishes of a Russian dictator. So Ukrainians defending their country from Russian invaders are “fascists.” This is a trick that Trump has copied. He, like Vladimir Putin, refers to his enemies as “fascists,” with no ideological significance at all. It is simply a term of opprobrium.
Putin and Trump are both, in fact, fascists. And their use of the word, though meant to confuse, reminds us of one of fascism’s essential characteristics. A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meanings. He does not serve the language; the language serves him. When a fascist calls a liberal a “fascist,” the term begins to work in a different way, as the servant of a particular person, rather than as a bearer of meaning.
That is quite a fascist achievement. Faced with the complexity of history, liberals struggle with the overwhelming volume of questions to be asked, answers to be offered. Like communism, fascism is an answer to all questions, but a different kind of answer. Communism assures us that we can, thanks to science, find an underlying direction in all events, toward a better future. This is (or was) seductive. Fascism reduces the imbroglio of sensation to what the Leader says.
A liberal has to tell a hundred stories, or a thousand. A communist has one story, which might not turn out to be true. A fascist just has to be a storyteller. Because words do not attach to meanings, the stories don’t need to be consistent. They don’t need to accord with external reality. A fascist storyteller just has to find a pulse and hold it. This can proceed through rehearsal, as with Hitler, or by way of trial and error, as with Trump.
That requires presence, which Trump has always had. His charisma need not resonate with you: probably, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s would not have reached you, either. But it is nevertheless a talent. To be a fascist and to call someone else a fascist requires a cunning that is natural to Trump. And in that naming of the enemy, absurd as it is, we see the second major element of fascism.
A Leader (“Duce” and “Führer” mean just that) initiates politics by choosing an enemy. As the Nazi legal thinker Carl Schmitt maintained, the choice is arbitrary. It has little or no basis in reality. It takes its force from the decisive will of the Leader. The people who watched Trump’s television ads during sporting events had not been harmed by a transgender person, or by an immigrant, or by a woman of color. The magic lies in the daring it takes to declare a weaker group to be part of an overwhelming conspiracy.
The one thing that is not arbitrary about the choice of an enemy is that it must exploit vulnerabilities. The Trump ads projected a fantasy of Kamala Harris allowing millions of sex-changed foreigners to take jobs from Americans. This touches, all at once, on gender, economic, and sexual vulnerability. We are unprotected and impoverished and will be replaced by something alien. And this is all orchestrated by a shadowy enemy in the background—in this case, a woman of color who knows how to laugh.
The “great replacement” theory is an example of an unoriginal fascist lie: conspirators will make you impotent and bring others to take your place in the world. The apparent complexity of the world resolves itself as a conspiracy, just as the attendant anxiety is resolved by hatred. This works with almost any combination of enemies. It can be a conspiracy of deep-state politicians to kidnap babies, or a conspiracy of Jews to corrupt women. Fascism wins when the enmity summoned begins to tell the story itself.
A fascist marries conspiracy and necessity. Not everyone can tell a spontaneous Big Lie, as Trump did, when he lost the 2020 election. And the Republicans around him did not challenge him. The Big Lie came to life when his followers stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Crucially, he paid no price for that. That made the Big Lie true, in a fascist sense. His de-facto impunity and then de-jure immunity also generated a sense of the untouchable, the heroic.
Trump’s presence has always been a co-creation: his and ours. From the moment when he first came down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, he was treated as a source of spectacle. Because he was good for television, he was accepted as a legitimate candidate. In the print media, he grew through the doctrine of both-sides-ism: no matter how awful his deeds, his opponent had to be presented as equally bad. This empowered him to be both wicked and normal. During every campaign’s final months, polling had a similar effect. By displacing policy differences and reducing politics to two faces or two colors, polls reinforce the notion that Trump belonged where he was, and that politics was just a matter of us or them.
“Only real New Yorkers take the sewer system.”
Cartoon by Chris Gural
What amplifies Trump’s presence more than any other medium is the Internet. He is a natural with its quirky rhythms. And its algorithms make the rest of us open to exactly his sort of talky fascism. On social media, we are drawn away from people of complexity and toward blunt stereotypes. We ourselves are categorized, and are then fed content that brings out, in Václav Havel’s term, our “most probable states.” The Internet does not just spread specific conspiracy theories; it primes our minds for them. This was already true before Elon Musk reshaped Twitter in Trump’s image.
Our engagement with the machine illuminates a difference between the fascists of the twenty-twenties and the fascists of the nineteen-twenties. Back then, the machine was seen as bold and beautiful, a brutal instrument that would return us to our nature by wrenching us from the hold of soft civilization. The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti had an epiphany after an automobile accident in 1908, which led him to Futurism and then to fascism. For Hitler, the internal-combustion engine hastened a “Blitzsieg,” a lightning victory. The superior race with the superior technology exterminates other races, takes other peoples’ land, and thrives.
