As the evidence that Donald J. Trump poses a mortal threat to constitutional democracy in America became stronger the political and electoral power against him became weaker. Indeed, when the prospect of authoritarian rule became undeniable, the political response became anemic.
Why?
A concatenation of processes normalized Donald Trump and turned the fire alarm triggered by his rhetoric and by insider accounts of his behavior into mere background noise. Most Americans experienced the campaign and the electoral result as if it were a normal partisan contest.
At this moment, criticizing the choice of the Democratic nominee, who ran a stunningly impressive campaign and who continues to model responsible constitutional leadership, parsing the concerns of voters who voted for Trump, or analogizing the loss to that of other post-Covid incumbents worldwide — all typical punditry — completely obscures the significance, and needs, of this political moment in American history.
A fascist was elected President of the United States.
This was not a normal election. It was not even a critical election — the kind of unusual election that periodically upends the normal partisan divide and shapes policies and institutions for a generation. The election of 2024 was a regime demise election — the moment when the frailties of constitutional democracy in the United States are laid bare and exposed so clearly that the potential death of the republic comes into view.
Analyses of voting behavior intended to inform the Democratic party or some third party on strategies to win in 2026 and 2028 can wait. Between now and the inauguration in January, mechanisms for resistance need to be put in place.
To respond effectively to this political moment requires that we describe Trump as a fascist and explain why so many want to ignore or deny it. Politicians, civil servants, journalists, clergy, intellectuals — citizens generally will not resist fascism if they think it is something else — such as hyperbolic campaign rhetoric or mere showmanship and crude entertainment.
I am confident that I am not wrong about the danger Trump poses. Many who are experts on fascism and tyranny, such as Timothy Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Jason Stanley, and William Connolly have been sounding this alarm since 2016. That Trump poses the danger they describe does not mean that he will succeed. That is why they have been sounding the alarm and why I join them here.
I would be delighted if Trump chooses to prove his critics wrong and abandons his agenda of revenge, retribution, politicization of the Justice Department, and the use of the military for unconstitutional and illegal purposes. Toward the end of his campaign for election in 2016, Trump said he could and would be “presidential” when he wanted to be. For a fleeting moment he seemed to say that campaigning was different from governing. Unfortunately, Trump never became “presidential,” so I would be shocked if he did so now or ever. The initial roll out of cabinet nominees does not give one confidence that Trump intends to be “presidential.”
If there is any silver lining in the misguided voting choice of a majority of Americans, it is that relatively few Americans think they are choosing a fascist, or some kind of dictator. According to some exit polls, about a third of Trump voters embrace the idea that “one strong leader would be preferable to two parties” suggesting an authoritarian inclination. Our dire predicament would be far worse if there were evidence that most Trump voters want fascism. Most Trump supporters think they are getting a leader that somehow falls within the broad spectrum of constitutionally acceptable presidents. Rather than embrace fascism, they have embraced Trump by denying or ignoring his fascism.
The first process of normalization began when Trump ran for President and won in 2016. Although his rhetoric then was not as overtly fascist as it became in the 2020 and 2024 campaigns, he did say so many outrageous things that observers wondered how he could prosper electorally when so many had faltered due to comparatively minor gaffes and lapses in the past. Trump was able to succeed by wedding Orwellian innovations to the traditional demagogue’s playbook.
In addition to appeals to passion over reason, Trump used three Orwellian innovations to normalize the abnormal. He repeated his outrages incessantly so that over time ordinary citizens came to believe them, most notably, “the big lie.” He proliferated these outrages constantly, adding new ones so fast that no “war room” could effectively respond to any, and diminishing the significance of each one to derail him as unusual “gaffes” had derailed others. Finally, he projected his vices onto his foes. If he was corrupt, he called them corrupt; if he was lazy, he called them lazy and so forth. Sometimes he did this preemptively, falsely labeling his opponent with his vice before the law caught up with his own. This rhetorical style was honed and perfected throughout the past nine years.
The new aspect that one can see now in 2024 is that the truckload of individually damaging facts about Trump outside of his control — the hearings, indictments, convictions, judgments, and testimonies affected the public mind in a way that is very similar to Trump’s Orwellian rhetoric. The repetitive drumbeat and the array of charges and misdeeds was massive. The whole ensemble replicated the formal qualities of Trump’s rhetoric — repetition and proliferation. For many attentive partisans, each piece of evidence added to the overall case of unfitness for office. But for most voters, including some Democrats apparently, the mass of evidence diminished the significance of each piece. And there was also the element of projection: Joe Biden was corrupt, and against the evidence of conspiracy to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power, Trump claimed that the whole array of charges and cases was a conspiracy by the Democrats against him.
The judicial processes paradoxically reinforced the processes of normalization. We had expected that the judicial processes would present the voting public with clear evidence that Trump was unfit and unqualified for office. Through trials and testimony and likely conviction, the American public would come to understand anti-constitutional behavior in vivid and palpable ways. Two decisions by the Supreme Court thwarted that prospect. In one case, the Court declined to rule on whether Trump’s self-coup disqualified him from federal office according to the Constitution itself. Instead, it returned the issue to the people to decide in the upcoming election. Doing so normalized the matter, by teaching the voting public that the matter of disqualification was suitable for ordinary partisan contestation. Similarly, in ruling in the immunity case that presidents were immune from criminal prosecution for acts in their official capacity, the Court not only licensed Donald Trump to act badly were he to be elected, they also taught the voting public that the most serious indictments of Trump might not be all that serious if, as Trump himself says, “as President I can do what I want.”
This process of normalization was furthered by public intellectuals, commentators and academics who claimed and still claim today that “fascist” is an exaggeration, category error, or calumny. A Facebook post during the last weeks of the campaign by the conservative academic Robert George, at Princeton, is a good illustration.
“There is such a thing as fascism. There are people who are fascists. There is such a thing as communism. There are people who are communists. Donald Trump, for all his many and profound faults, is not a fascist. His support base is not a bunch of Nazis. Kamala Harris, for all her many and profound faults, is not a communist. Her support base is not a bunch of Marxists. Trump is not Hitler. He’s not even Mussolini or Franco. Harris is not Stalin. She’s not even Kruschev or Brezhnev. Both presidential candidates and their supporters should cut it out with the hyperbolic accusations and name-calling. It’s unseemly and contributes to a climate of catastrophism”
Here we have the cachet of Princeton and the pose of being above the fray joined to a ridiculous “both-sides” argument. Fascists are not defined by the identities of their supporters but rather by what they say they are or what they say they plan to do. And, as Umberto Ecco showed in his now-classic essay “Ur-Fascism,” no fascists are identical to previous ones. Rather they share varieties of characteristics among different family resemblances. These differences stem from the variety of regimes and political cultures that fascists subvert as well as from different personalities of the fascist leaders themselves.
Incredibly the purported “name-calling” by Harris ignores the fact that she used the word for the first time when asked if she agreed with Donald Trump’s own longest serving former Chief of Staff John Kelly and his Joint Chiefs Chairman, Mark Milley who each said that Trump was a fascist based on what Trump had tried to do as President and as conforming to a classic definition of fascism that Kelly specified.
This is what Kelly said to The New York Times:
“’Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,’ Kelly said. ‘So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America.’ Kelly continued: ‘Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.’”
Kamala Harris never said she was a communist, admired communists, or offered a communist agenda. In fact, she repeatedly said she was a capitalist. There is no record of any White House staffer, or colleague of Harris anytime in her long career ever saying she was a communist. That was said by Donald Trump, who also called her a fascist — and Robert George repeats “communist” to suggest it is just as wrong as Kamala Harris agreeing with John Kelly. Trump could not have wished for better assistance in his Orwellian strategy of projection to diminish the significance of the fascist label for himself.
According to Kelly, Trump admired the control he wrongly thought Hitler had over his generals and he proposed an agenda to amass and deploy personal power for anti-constitutional purposes. For Robert George, both candidates are normal candidates, typical presidential candidates — not aspiring dictators– even though only one, Kamala Harris, is actually a normal candidate.
Even well meaning, public spirited and usually insightful commentators who I admire and who have been clear eyed critics of Trump over most of the last nine years are unintentionally normalizing Trump today. Having studied the presidency for about five decades, I think Jen Psaki, for example, was the best White House Press Secretary ever, and in all senses, political and moral. Yet it seemed that her analytical toolkit and extensive experience serving normal presidents and presidential candidates was inadequate to explaining the unprecedented moment of Trump’s reelection.
When listing her “take-aways” on a panel analyzing the Harris loss the day after the election and on her own show a few days later, Psaki concluded that it was a big mistake to make “fascism” a major theme in the closing argument of the campaign. That theme didn’t speak to voters’ main concerns. If Trump is a fascist, how could it be a mistake to say so? The hesitation regarding this word and this issue suggests either that “fascist” was an inappropriate label, or that Trump is correctly described as fascist but the voting public was incapable of understanding the massive stakes of this election.
In the week following the election journalists, in general, are struggling to reinvent their practices to better report on this unprecedented moment. It is difficult to do because like most citizens they are rightly committed to the peaceful transfer of power and to respecting the will of the majority. Respecting the will of the majority need not require that one concede that the majority is correct, that the majority did not make a potentially fatal mistake. But rightly conceding the loss and rightly transferring power tends to normalize fascism because, as Tocqueville famously showed, majority rule as a mechanism of decision and conflict resolution suggests to the public mind that the majority is right. In this case, the relevant majority opinion would not be that fascism is right, but rather that Trump is not a fascist.
During the transition this problem is enhanced by the good behavior of incumbent President Joe Biden. He welcomed Donald Trump to the White House, congratulated him on his victory, and pledged a smooth transition. One might reasonably wonder: if Trump is a fascist, how could anyone congratulate him on his victory? It is a fair question that highlights the difficulty President Biden faced throughout his term as he sought to restore democratic norms and constitutional fidelity.
Throughout his term, Joe Biden sought to model constitutional fidelity and respect for the norms that support it. He retained the U.S. Attorney appointed by Donald Trump who was investigating his son, Hunter Biden. He appointed an Attorney General committed to the independence of the justice department on prosecutorial decisions and they established a firewall between the White House and the Department of Justice with respect to investigations of Biden, his family or his administration. Biden cooperated with a Special Prosecutor appointed to investigate his own failures to secure government documents when he left office as Vice President. He pledged not to pardon his own son when he was convicted and as of this writing has kept that pledge. His Vice President refused to talk about Trump’s impending trials or his indictments — saying, we are leaving that to the judicial process. To the objective observer this marks a stunning contrast between constitutional and the authoritarian style of leadership practiced by Trump.
But nobody was making the contrast in speeches and on the campaign. The virtuous actions were left to speak for themselves. They were a subject left undiscussed in campaign rhetoric by the side faithful to the Constitution . Trump and his supporters, of course, talked about the subject in their own terms all the time in the campaign. Biden was corrupt, his son’s laptop was the smoking gun, and the justice department was weaponized against him. This asymmetry is a structural source of normalization. And it is very much at work in the transition.
It did not go unnoticed by the commentariat that President Biden congratulating Donald Trump and welcoming back to the White House smiling was jarring and disconcerting. The scene and the interchange between Biden and Trump suggested that campaign rhetoric was merely that — the sometime hyperbolic excess of engaged partisans.
Is there a way out of the dilemma that President Biden faced — how to continue to model responsible leadership while calling out and staving off fascism at the same time?
Perhaps there is, but it requires that he reinvent the conventions of transition. Instead of congratulations and instead of a warm sit down with a photo-op, Biden could have had a more formal ceremony in which he spoke and invited Trump to speak as well. Biden could have said that it is a vitally important tradition to show the world that we are having a peaceful transfer of power in the United States. Perhaps something like this:
During my term I have had very harsh criticisms of my predecessor and what a second Trump administration would do. You all know what I have said. I meant what I said. I want to say here that I very much hope that I was wrong. I hope he rises to the expectations of this office. On the more usual difference of policy between Democrats and Republicans, President Trump knows the arguments will continue in Congress, as they should. And, like nearly all Presidents before me who have left office have said to the President-elect about these normal partisan differences, I wish him success.
It is too late to reinvent the welcome to the White House ceremony. It is not too late to craft a Farewell Address that explains the fascist threat, warns that it is on the horizon and explains to Americans how they can resist it. Such a speech would be a very bold decision and it would require care and craftsmanship. It could help break the spell of normalization.
There is a shared opinion today among much of the commentariat that the big lesson from the startling 2024 election of Trump is that we need to listen better to the demos — that we need to better understand what ordinary voters care about. But if Trump’s dictatorial ambitions are a genuine threat, it is rather the case that we need to better understand how to break through the processes of normalization and better inform the majority of Americans.
Breaking through normalization is necessary to energize and fortify sites of resistance during the Trump presidency and to better enable a large majority of Americans to go beyond “understand the stakes” as a campaign slogan. They need to begin to feel the doom that is impending.
The sense of dread and the feelings of trauma experienced by well-informed college students and many others who have followed politics closely for the last nine years can be made a constructive power for resistance and repair. Those who call such students “snowflakes” or who ask fellow citizens to “get over it” are obtuse as well as uncaring.
As it happens, the aforementioned Robert George is one who has publicly complained that traumatized Princeton students are snowflakes and urged that his university deny them resources to deal with their trauma. Informed students are traumatized not because “their candidate” lost — their trauma is testimony to the truth that Trump intends to destroy the American constitutional order. For these students, the fire alarm never stopped ringing. The students’ visceral reaction testifies to the truth that the Trump phenomenon is truly awful. Their perceptions and insights deserve respect. They understand what Professor George fails to see. Their collective moral compass is a political resource for resistance in a time when we need every resource we can find.
In the last couple days, I have been engaged in a conversation on Facebook with my friend Professor Roderick Hart, who is also my colleague at The University of Texas at Austin. We both have been teaching about American politics for a long time — Rod longer than me. We both have written books on presidential rhetoric — Rod many more books than me.
Our interchange was provoked by an elegant essay that Rod wrote to the students in his class who were traumatized by the election result. Rod assured his students that things would be alright — that we need to pick ourselves up, relax and not worry because there will be another election and things will get better. Rod is a very talented teacher. I have no doubt that the reason his students needed this reassurance is that they were so well informed, unlike most ordinary citizens.
My response to Professor Hart’s reassuring message is that maybe there won’t be another presidential election or if there is another one, maybe it won’t be run by the familiar rules. Maybe fascist rule is on the doorstep and the students mental state is testimony to the seriousness of the moment.
And his response back to me: “We disagree, my friend. Democratic traditions plus Republican disarray plus the fickle nature of the American people will sustain us.”
It seems to me that democratic norms have already been shattered, MAGA has complete control of the Republican party, and a fickle people sounds like a coin toss on dictatorship.
Rod Hart’s prognosis is sunny and optimistic and mine is dark and alarmist. Neither of us cares about winning a debate. We both just want the best civic education for our students and for our country.
I can see very little downside to my choice to sound the alarm and lots of potential risk to being so optimistic.
If I am wrong, if we really are still in the normal cycles of partisan politics, if the constitutional order is not on the verge of collapse, my way of thinking might increase a sense of anxiety in some, perhaps fuel the sale of Xanax unnecessarily. But in the big picture little harm will be done.
If the nation reflects my friend’s instincts — and as I have suggested in this piece it does now share them — and Trump actualizes the fascism he publicly aspires to — what then? In the words of Timothy Snyder — we will have obeyed in advance.
If we are alarmed now, we will be attentive and responsive to every authoritarian move that the Trump administration takes over the next six months. And if we are attentive, if we are a watchful people, maybe we can stop it.
Jeffrey K. Tulis is Professor of Government Emeritus at The University of Texas at Austin.
Why We Should Be Alarmed