Fascism in the USA Enters the Fifth & Final Phase

A survey of the work of fascism experts shows that, five months into the Trump Redux, our democracy is reeling. Can it be saved?

I. What a Difference a Year Makes

In “Slouching Towards Dictatorship,” the introduction to my 2024 book Rough Beast: Who Donald Trump Really Is, What He’ll Do If Re-elected, and Why Democracy Must Prevail, I warned that if, God forbid, Trump won a second term,

a rabid battalion of religious zealots, Christian nationalists, and reactionary monarchists [are] poised to make so many drastic changes to the country so quickly that the United States won’t be recognizable by the Fourth of July 2025.

Full disclosure: When I wrote that, I never really believed that Trump would win. I had faith in the wisdom of the American electorate and the essential goodness of humanity. I was accurately reporting all the horrible things Donald had done and the even more horrible things he planned to do, sure, but even I was naïve enough to think that it would never happen here.

But it’s happening.

The Rough Beast was indeed re-elected. We are now just three days away from the Fourth of July 2025. And the America that existed when my book came out last May has, alas, already changed as drastically, and as uglily, as a MAGA woman’s Mar-a-Lago’d face.

Cast your memory back 13 and a half months. (It feels like a decade ago, I realize, but it’s only been a little over a year.) Back then, there was not a masked goon squad kidnapping legal U.S. residents and trafficking them to horrific prisons in El Salvador. Back then there was due process. Back then, members of Congress and mayors of large cities were not being assaulted, detained, arrested, and indicted for trying to prevent these kidnappings from happening. Back then, the National Guard and the Marines were not patrolling the streets of L.A.

Back then, the President was not flying to Florida to ribbon-cut the opening of an Everglades concentration camp called “Alligator Alcatraz,” nor was he peddling “Alligator Alcatraz”-branded merch. Back then, there were no plans to waste resources trying to un-debunk the insidious lie that vaccines cause autism. Back then, there were no plans to build an autism registry. Back then, there were no measles outbreaks.

Back then, we did not award a gargantuan federal contract to a mass data collection and surveillance company owned by a creepy fascist who isn’t sure he wants humanity to survive. Back then, a gaggle of smirking boys had not been granted the authority to use crappy algorithms to mass-fire federal employees. Back then, the idea of a four-year-old rubbing his boogers on the Resolute Desk while his ketamine-high father held court with the White House Press Corps as the President sat idly by was unthinkably preposterous. Back then, our Secretary of Defense was sober, our Attorney General not motivated by personal vendetta, our White House press secretary truthful, our FBI Director not a litigious fabulist who never once was even tempted to utter, in a public press conference, the words “pretty freaking cool.”

Back then, the President of the United States was not actively hawking his own branded memecoin or his own branded cellphone carrier or his own branded social media platform. Back then, the AG and the FBI Director were not board members of a company the President owned. Back then, the President understood that tariffs were dumb. Back then, the Supreme Court hadn’t given the President the power to rule by decree, nor was the President seeking such a power. Back then, everyone with even a cursory knowledge of the Constitution understood that this:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

did not mean this:

The President, through executive orders that the Supreme Court no longer has any right to constrain, may arbitrarily decide that someone born or naturalized in the United States is no longer a citizen of the United States.

Back then, we were not picking unnecessary fights with Canada, Mexico, Great Britain, and the E.U. countries. Back then, we were not scheming to annex Greenland. Back then, USAID still existed. Back then, we did not hold military parades in the nation’s capital to celebrate the President’s birthday. Back then, the President didn’t randomly decide to send our pilots halfway around the world to bomb a foreign nation we were not at war with, without bothering to ask for Congressional approval. Back then, the President didn’t use his social media account to taunt foreign leaders and threaten them with nuclear war.

Heck, May of 2024 is when a Manhattan jury convicted Donald Trump on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in the Stormy Daniels “hush money” scheme. That was a thing that actually happened! Like Hitler, the GOP presidential candidate was literally a convicted felon. And the New York case was a failure-to-yield summons compared to the stuff Jack Smith charged Donald with: 32 counts of willful retention of national defense information, one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, one count of withholding a document or record, one count of corruptly concealing a document or record, one count of concealing a document in a federal investigation, one count of scheme to conceal, three counts of false statements and representations, and two counts of altering, destroying or concealing an object. Had the putrescently corrupt judge Aileen Cannon—not born in the U.S., incidentally, but I’m sure ICE won’t go near her—not done everything in her considerable power to kibosh the trial, Trump would absolutely have been found guilty. Now? All those boxes of stolen top secret documents have been swept into the memory hole.

In writing Rough Beast, one of my objectives was “to impress upon [my readers] the ugly future we have to look forward to if the Rough Beast prevails—especially if we’re trans, gay, Black, brown, a Trump-critical journalist, an immigrant, a migrant, a refugee, a rape victim, from another country, from a Democratic-leaning voting district, poor, working class, or a woman.” Obviously I failed to impress this upon enough people.

It’s still possible for most of us to pretend this isn’t happening, I realize. School’s out, the summer’s here, baseball is in full swing, the Dow is soaring, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez just enjoyed a lavish June destination wedding—all normal stuff. We can still delude ourselves and insist, like the cartoon dog in that classic meme, that THIS IS FINE. But the truth is that the “ugly future” I warned about 13 and a half months ago is already here.

Like pre-MAGA headshots of Lara Trump, Kristi Noem, or Kimberly Guilfoyle, the old United States is no longer recognizable.

And the Fourth of July isn’t until Friday.

---

II. Fascism Defined

“Fascism,” a word I find myself spitting out often these days, is notoriously hard to define. It is best thought of as a syndrome—that is, per Merriam-Webster, “a group of signs and symptoms that occur together and characterize a particular abnormality or condition.” This makes it easier to diagnose.

As a thought exercise, let’s review some definitions put forth by esteemed scholars of the subject, in reverse chronological order, and see how (note: not “if”) they apply to our current government:

“Mussolini’s paradoxical definition of Fascism as a ‘revolution of reaction’ is perhaps the most accurate,” the NYU fascism scholar and Strongmen author Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote in 2022 on her Substack, Lucid. She continued:

Fascism aims at radical change brought about by violence and backed up by law to shut down political and social emancipation and take away rights. Soon nothing much beyond rhetoric remained of Mussolini’s leftist past, and indeed leftists were the first and most consistently persecuted targets of Fascism. This pleased his powerful conservative backers, as did his prompt privatization of the insurance and other industries.

Fascism spawned anti-Fascism, and the Communist International’s early 1930s definition of Fascism as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital” captured the logic of expansion and plunder that led Italian Fascism and Nazism into war (while ignoring Communism’s own repression). By the time it was defeated in 1945, Fascism had become synonymous with racism, imperialism, and genocide.

So: racism (duh), imperialism (look out, Greenland), genocide (ICE, Alligator Alcatraz), alliance with finance capital (Musk in the Oval, Thiel at Palantir, Bezos and his fiancée at the Inauguration), privatization (federal land for sale), erosion of rights (every recent Supreme Court decision), open terrorism (masked kidnappers with federal authority and no accountability).

“I think of fascism as a method of politics,” Yale University’s Jason Stanley told VOX in a 2018 interview. “It’s a rhetoric, a way of running for power. Of course, that’s connected to fascist ideology, because fascist ideology centers on power. But I really see fascism as a technique to gain power. . . . The key thing is that fascist politics is about identifying enemies, appealing to the in-group (usually the majority group), and smashing truth and replacing it with power.”

So: rhetoric (Make America Great Again), identifying enemies (everything on Trump’s Truth Social feed), appealing to the majority (anti-DEI, anti-woke), smashing truth (duh).

Louie Dean Valencia-García of Texas State University, writing for Open Democracy in 2017, posited that fascism is “a formula with variables,” writing:

Some scholars have tried to create a sort of “fascist checklist”: is there a strongman figure? Is there violence? Do they use an imagined past to legitimise their actions? Is there a militarized police? Imperialist tendencies?

For years scholars have argued Donald Trump had “X” quality, but not “Y.” These academics looked at the worst-case examples, where fascism resulted in war and genocide, and started their point of comparison from the worst-case scenario rather than considering what does fascism look like before it gains power or a following. What is fascism at its core?

A more simplified definition of fascism, would be a sort of formula like: racism + anti-intellectualism + anti-liberalism/anti-socialism + xenophobia + ethnocentrism + nationalism + queerphobia + misogyny = fascism.

While the quantity of each X-factor varies, the combination of these in any quantity forms fascism. Most other tendencies, such as militarism, cult of personality, etc., are determined by the amount of power and organisation acquired by particular groups and individuals.

So: racism (duh), anti-intellectualism (dismantling of Dept. of Education, war on the Ivy League, Project 2025’s open contempt for expertise), anti-socialism (MAGA treatment of AOC and now Mamdani), xenophobia / ethnocentrism / nationalism (ICE kidnappings), queerphobia (anti-trans laws and court rulings, “manosphere” movement), misogyny (Dobbs).

In The Anatomy of Fascism (2004), Robert O. Paxton, the Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science in the Department of History at Columbia University, wrote, “Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

So: obsession with decline (Make America Great Again), nationalist militants (ICE, local police in military gear protecting ICE), cults (MAGA), collaboration with traditional elites (legacy media, Wall Street, big law firms), abandoned liberties (no due process, posse comitatus now very legal and very cool), no legal restraints (presidential immunity, SCOTUS no longer constraining executive order power of POTUS), internal cleansing (Alligator Alcatraz).

Both the complexity suggested by Paxton and Valencia-García’s “formula with variables” track with what the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco wrote in the New York Review of Books in 1995, in a famous essay called “Ur-Fascism”:

There was only one Nazism. . . But the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change. The notion of fascism is not unlike Wittgenstein’s notion of a game. A game can be either competitive or not, it can require some special skill or none, it can or cannot involve money. Games are different activities that display only some “family resemblance,” as Wittgenstein put it. . . .

Suppose there is a series of political groups in which group one is characterized by the features abc, group two by the features bcd, and so on. Group two is similar to group one since they have two features in common; for the same reasons three is similar to two and four is similar to three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have in common the feature c). The most curious case is presented by four, obviously similar to three and two, but with no feature in common with one. However, owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one.

Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.

Fascism is a syndrome, then.

Elsewhere in the piece, Eco notes:

Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian fascism was the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing — far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be.

So: folklore (“Self-made billionaire Trump sacrifices his own fortune to lead us, save us from the secret network of pedophiles, and make the country great again!”) and a distinct way of dressing (For the men: blue suit, white shirt, red tie, red branded baseball cap. For the women: dyed-blonde hair, Botox, plastic surgery, tight dresses, golden crosses).

Unsurprisingly, George Orwell was able to both capture the multitude-containing breadth of fascism and distill it to its raw essence, writing in the Tribune in 1944:

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

There it is: a fascist is a bully, and fascism, therefore, is rule by bullies. Bullies come in many shapes and sizes, but they have in common a thirst for power, a contempt for the rules, an attraction to violence, and a sadistic and cruel nature.

Does any sane human objectively think that Donald Trump is not a bully?

---

III. Taking the Fifth

I quote at length all of these learned scholars, philosophers, and writers to make a point: While their definitions are not identical, all of them describe, to some degree, the political system already established by Donald Trump in his second term—what I call the Redux.

Unlike Mussolini, Trump has not centered his messaging around militarism (although he’s done that more and more in recent weeks). Unlike Hitler, he is not nakedly expansionist (his obsessive desire to seize Greenland notwithstanding). That doesn’t matter. If we think of fascism as a syndrome, the Trump Administration has presented more than enough symptoms to make a positive diagnosis.

Back in 2022, after then-President Biden called MAGA “semi-fascism,” the progressive Public Leadership Institute published a useful primer, drawing on the work of Paxton, Stanley, Eco, and Madeleine Albright, called “The Three Pillars of Fascism.” These are the three “essential fascist tactics” for “gaining and holding power”:

(1) Demonization of domestic enemies

Fascism creates a myth of victimhood, that the majority population is in a humiliating decline from a past greatness because of singled-out minority populations. It’s an us-against-them crisis, the myth goes. The targeted racial, ethnic, religious or gender minorities, and the “liberals” who support them, are thus framed as not just opponents but enemies, demonized so the majority can feel justified in hating and repressing them.

In fact, “Make America Great Again” is the quintessential fascist slogan. It’s a myth that celebrates the good ole days of white supremacy. . .

(2) Preposterous lies

Fascism relies on outrageous and absurd disinformation, “Orwellian” lies, designed to distort its supporters’ perception of reality, bending “truth” to fit the fascist mythology. Because it is based on lies, fascism must be anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-logic in order to defend itself, which means it must oppose and attack news media outside its control. Trump’s continuous attacks on the free press, calling them “fake news” and the “enemy of the people” could not be more stereotypically fascist. . .

(3) Contempt for democratic institutions

Fascism encourages contempt for democratic institutions, particularly elections, and the rule of law. Instead, it calls on the majority group to turn over power to a strongman and his lieutenants, while glorifying the use of violence in support of fascist myths and goals.

What was already true in September 2022 is exponentially so now.

The demonization of immigrants is so acute that the ICE Gestapo is about to become the largest and best-funded law enforcement in the country.

The lies are even more preposterous, magnified by the professional gaslighters and chaos agents spewing bullshit behind ubiquitous smirks: Karoline Leavitt, Stephen Miller, RFK, Jr., Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, etc.

And rule of law? Between the corrupt DOJ, the corrupt FBI, and the six Trump-fluffing gimps on the Supreme Court, I’m not so sure there are laws anymore. And whatever Jeffries and Schumer might be telling themselves, at the rate we’re going, and given the usual trajectory of fascism, we assume the midterm elections will take place at all at our peril.

In 1998’s “The Five Stages of Fascism,” Columbia’s Robert Paxton, as the title of his paper suggests, maps out the five stages of fascism—the phases nations pass through on the road to establishing and expanding a fascist government: “Emerging out of disillusionment, establishing legitimacy as a political party, gaining power via right-wing partnerships, using power to dominate institutions, and implementing radical reforms.”

As I type this on July 1, 2025, the first three of these stages are already complete. Obviously MAGA has long ago 1) emerged and 2) established itself as a viable political party, hijacking the GOP and perverting it to its own liking, while Trump has 3) aligned himself with autocrats like Putin, MbS, Xi, Orbán, Erdoğan, and Nayib Bukele, while simultaneously sabotaging relations with our democratic allies.

From the NIH to NPR, from the Kennedy Center to the Smithsonian, from the National Archives to NASA, from the legislative branch to the judicial, Donald has spent the last 162 days 4) dominating our institutions—and with great success. He is now working to 5) implement his radical reforms, many of which are contained in the looming piece of legislation with the appropriately Orwellian name: Big Beautiful Bill.

This means that on the Paxton scale, we’re in the fifth and final stage of fascism.

What can we do about it? Call it out: honestly, loudly, and unrelentingly. Demand that our politicians and our legacy media not sugar-coat it, as happened with Franco in Spain. Make sure our friends, our family members, our neighbors, our coworkers understand what’s happening. Let our voices be heard.

I close with the most prescient passage from the Eco essay on “Ur-Fascism,” or “eternal Fascism,” at the end of his piece:

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling:

I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.

Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

There is still time.

The fifth stage is not yet complete; the Death Star is not yet operational.

Do not go quietly.

---

Photo credit: Public domain. The Irish Fascist leader O’Duffy during WW2 with activists of the Blue Shirt Movement.