As Democratic strategists debate whether or not their attack ads calling Donald Trump a fascist were effective, experts and academics told the Guardian that his campaign and the Republican Party he now leads have clear autocratic sympathies and political qualities who have closely aligned with fascism movements in the past.

All in all, any Trump victory this week and his return to the White House for a second term as president is a clear threat to US democracy, they added.

“There could not be a more obvious example of a fascist social and political movement about to take power,” said Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale University whose new book, “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control.” the Future” deals with the fascists’ global playbook from the perspective of America and beyond.

Stanley continued: “Trump and the people behind him have already promised to replace government at all levels with loyalists.” (LGBTQ+) citizens, especially trans citizens and their families, must leave the country. Political opponents are targeted in one way or another, ranging from fines to imprisonment.”

Even Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff during his time in the White House, John Kelly, placed his former boss in “the general definition of a fascist,” the same political category as the infamous Axis leaders Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Kamala Harris openly agreed with this assessment.

Dr. Brian Hughes, deputy director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, said Trump has been accused for years, and with good reason, of emulating the rise to power of Hitler and Mussolini.

“I think it’s important to remember that fascism is not a binary. Fascism is a process,” Hughes said in an interview with the Guardian. “There has been a lot of denial and a lot of graveyard catcalling since the Trump campaign began in 2015, but the symptoms continue to add up.”

Earlier in his term, Hughes said, Trump introduced the Muslim ban and described Latino immigration as a kind of plague, all classic fascist attacks on “an enemy within, a group that can be scapegoated for all of society’s problems.” “.

Then came the strongman tactic to overturn the 2020 presidential election — a cause still haunted by many Trump supporters who view him as a “fascist imaginary,” as Hughes puts it.

“Now we have finally declared the political goals of targeting political enemies, not just through litigation but also through violence and countless other examples of plots to govern in a way that reflects 20th century fascism,” said he.

Both Hitler and Mussolini equally practiced the classic display of shouting and gesticulating at rallies to threaten their enemies during their rise to power. Trump’s spontaneous speaking style has now and in previous campaigns become synonymous with this kind of machismo and callback to the 1930s.

Even during his time in office, Trump set the stage for his comeback and the foundation for what Stanley sees as a surefire fascist state.

“The courts are being replaced by loyalists, as we have already seen in the Supreme Court of the United States,” he said, referring to three ultra-conservative justices Trump appointed during his time in office. In Nazi Germany, government officials at all levels, both legal and bureaucratic, were required to declare strict loyalty to the party.

Since those Trump appointments, the nation’s highest court has handed down landmark rulings striking down abortion rights and giving the presidency royal powers almost comparable to the Third Reich or Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who ruled his country until 1975.

Critics say LGBTQ+ rights are next on his death list for the courts if Trump returns to power. In particular, the fascist governments of Hitler and Mussolini outlawed queer people, Roma, and Jews, and disappeared those they deemed politically undesirable in a series of mass killings or imprisonment that led to their so-called “Final Solution” and the Holocaust.

But the first phase of Trump’s potentially fascist state will, as Stanley told the Guardian, be to consolidate the authority of a single party, much as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán (often described as a “neo-fascist”) has undermined any semblance of an opposition in the former Eastern Bloc country.

Should Trump win, Stanley said, “America will be a one-party state from now on” and predicted that “JD Vance or perhaps Donald Trump Jr.” will replace Trump in the cult of personality as he grows older or dies.

“There will be no more meaningful federal elections,” he added.

Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), has been a chief critic, analyst and academic authority of the American far right for decades and said she fears the current political climate is leaning toward fascism.

Beirich drew attention to how nationalist flirtations and pro-nativist periods in the 19th and 20th centuries had already spawned organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, as well as eugenics and the terrorist oppression of blacks across the country in several eras, as well as the civil rights movement establishing legal equality .

“There was also a movement to support the Nazi government, with groups like the American Bund before World War II,” Beirich said, referring to a pro-Hitler German-American political organization founded in 1936 that openly supported Nazism propagated.

In 1939, just months before the invasion of Poland, the Bund held a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Many critics compared this rally to Trump’s own campaign rally at the famous arena last weekend. During the “lovefest,” as the Republican candidate called it, speakers made several racist statements, including a joke about the entire island of Puerto Rico being “trash.”

“So my conclusion is that the anti-immigrant sentiment and racial science espoused by our growing white supremacist movements have an American pedigree,” Beirich said. “There is a concern that we may be entering a new phase that rekindles this abhorrent history.”

Beirich has been exposing the inner workings of several American neo-Nazi groups for years and says such groups see the current political climate as an opportunity.

“The far right is certainly in a more powerful position today than it has been in decades,” she said, describing extremists who are desperately afraid of the racist Great Replacement theory that Tucker Carlson promoted on Fox News before his firing.

Beirich said: “Whatever happens on Election Day, these growing, powerful far-right movements are not going away.”

“They will form a unified political force in the coming years, especially as demographic changes inevitably transform this country from a white-majority country to one without an ethnic majority,” she continued.

Many of the neo-Nazi terrorist groups that have recently emerged in America and that Beirich has tracked down were also admirers of the past. Members of the Atom Waffen Division were known to revere the Third Reich and Mussolini and made a point of collecting artifacts from that period.

Francesco Marone, an assistant professor at the University of Teramo and a researcher at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, whose own country gave birth to fascism, is less worried or convinced that Trump is a fascist than that his aggressive actions pose a greater threat represent Western political cohesion.

“On the other hand, experts can identify partial similarities between Trump and Mussolini and fascist tendencies, such as a charismatic personality that can promote a personality cult, the emphasis on a supposedly profound decadence and humiliation of the country, racist and male-chauvinistic attitudes, authoritarian tendencies (albeit in different forms). “Degrees), ultra-nationalism, a tendency to demonize the political opponent,” he said in an email.

Marone says Trump is a universal character and not a fascist per se.

“These general characteristics are shared by right-wing leaders active in other liberal democracies in the West,” he said. “Certainly the growth of an illiberal radical right in our time appears to be a problem on an international level.”

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