This Is What American Fascism Will Look Like (with Brynn Tannehill)

A second Trump term would end democracy in the United States.

Donald Trump is a fascist. He’s an authoritarian. He’s a despot. He’s a wannabe dictator. He’s the Mussolini of Queens, an American Hitler.

At this point, no serious commentator doubts this. The neocon dignitary Robert Kagan said as much in a Washington Post op-ed a month ago: “Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day.”

The Godwin who developed Godwin’s Law—that is, that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one”—said that it was appropriate to compare Trump to Hitler: “[W]hen people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy.”

These are not just labels intended to insult the presumptive GOP presidential candidate. These are not words thrown around casually. Trump really is all of those things. Unfortunately, enough voters don’t have the imagination, or the knowledge of history, to understand what this would mean, in practical terms. What would an American dictatorship look like?

In the very short term, it would look like Hungary, where another corpulent Putin puppet with ties to the Russian mob, Viktor Orbán, has set up an “illiberal democracy,” with himself as permanent Prime Minister. Voting rights—fairness at the ballot box—will be the first casualty. The rightwing minority will rule, literally. Like a vampire summoned through the window, once Trump is back in the White House, there will be no getting rid of him. Term limits will apply as little as any other law he doesn’t approve of. Then the country will be reconstituted in Russia’s image.

“Hungary is an intermediate stop to Russia,” says the senior defense analyst Brynn Tannehill, author of American Fascism and my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast. “Hungary is the same as Russia, just ten years behind in terms of the autocratic movement.”

In the U.S., there will be no big surprises. The GOP’s despotic vision has been laid out in a horrific Heritage Foundation document, Project 2025, that would make Sir Oswald Mosely tumesce. Trump has his lieutenants in place this time around—dudes like Stephen Miller, Mike Davis, Kash Patel, and Michael Anton, who are as capable as they are authoritarian.

“Where we are right now is that Donald Trump wants to set himself up as a dictator,” Tannehill says. “They have laid it out very, very clearly in Project 2025’s mandate for leadership. I’ve tweeted about it, I’ve written about it. They are being more and more manifestly authoritarian with a goal of reshaping the United States in ways that would render us unrecognizable in terms of foreign policy, in terms of domestic policy, in terms of making abortion and birth control and healthcare for trans people completely unavailable, illegal. To make it possible for Red States to reach out and grab people they don’t like from Blue States to prosecute them.”

In short, a war on women’s healthcare, contraception, LGBTQ rights, and a lot of the freedoms we take for granted. There will also be state-sanctioned vengeance against anyone who has betrayed Dear Leader. Trump lickspittle Kash Patel said as much, in his recent appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast:

We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. 

We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminal or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice and Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we’re tyrannical. This is why we’re dictators.

And if that weren’t enough, there will also be a fatal dose of rightwing Jesus. You know: the Jesus who hates his neighbor as he hates himself.

“We are looking at a government that is going to elevate one particular brand of Christianity above all others and make it a singular force in both law and public policy,” Tannehill says. “These are things that should be unacceptable and are going to certainly set off protests, but what we’re also seeing is, Trump is talking about invoking the Insurrection Act, clearing out military leadership and replacing it with people who are loyal or at least won’t say no. He’s talked about using the military to shoot protestors, in the past, in 2020. He’s talked openly in the past about admiring how China handled Tiananmen Square. We’re heading for something ugly and brutal.”

And quick. Trump has talked about installing himself as dictator on Day One, and when given the opportunity to walk those comments back, by Sean Hannity and others, doubled down. These intentions cannot be laughed off, or brushed aside as “Trump being Trump.” “Being Trump,” at this point, is perilously close to being Hitler.

“I know I sound crazy,” Tannehill says, “but this is—we’ve seen this historically. They’ve declared their intention to do this. We see them lining up to do all of this. We see them saying they’re going to do this. It’s—this is just taking the next step and saying, okay, if they do the thing that they say they’re going to do, what is going to be the response.”

The best case scenario is the chaos and financial upheaval than comes with the dismantling of the federal government—which Trump has said he’s going to do, by firing 50,000 federal employees and eliminating certain key departments. Regulations will be a joke, leading to poisoned food, bad medicine, crumbling infrastructure, and so forth. There will be more tax cuts, more income inequality. Putin will win in Ukraine. And if you don’t like what Netanyahu is doing to the Palestinians right now, wait until you see how he behaves when given the green light by a president who cares more about building Trump Tower Gaza City than reining in Bibi’s more extreme impulses.

That’s the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is, the constitutional crises brought on by Red States enforcing antiabortion laws that compel them to arrest people in Blue States for performing medical care, and Blue States resisting—Albany telling Austin to go fuck itself—are so great, and SCOTUS so impotent and corrupt, that the union fractures completely, as empires historically do. That would be cataclysmic, and would end badly for Blue and Red States both.

The way to stave off this boot-stomping-on-a-human-face-forever future is to re-elect Joe Biden. Our honorable 81-year-old president is all that stands between us and American fascism.

“Trump will use anything within his power, including breaking the system and corrupting the system, to move stuff through. This is an existential threat to democracy in America the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Civil war,” Tannehill says. “Even more so, perhaps.”

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

S6 E16: Cheerios or Death (with Brynn Tannehill)

We know that Donald Trump is a fascist, but what would MAGA fascism look like in a second Trump term? Brynn Tannehill, senior defense analyst and author of “American Fascism” and “My Child Told Me They’re Trans...What Do I Do?,” lays out the horrors to expect if Trump is sworn in in 2025. Plus: the Trump Days of Christmas.

Follow Brynn:
https://twitter.com/BrynnTannehill

Her website:
http://www.brynntannehill.com/

Buy her books:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Brynn-Tannehill/author/B07MG4MCX4?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

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Photo credit: me.