Harris called Trump a 'fascist.' Experts debate what fascism is — and isn't
Since before his first presidential run in 2016, former President Donald Trump has been accused of invoking the leadership style of the world’s most infamous fascists, namely Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator who popularized fascism, and Adolf Hitler.
With Election Day looming, the fascist accusations against Trump grew louder this past week.
Retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, said in an interview with The New York Times published on Oct. 22 that Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist.”
The next day, the Republican presidential candidate’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Harris — when asked on CNN whether she thought Trump was a fascist — said, “Yes, I do.”
She later added that many people care about “not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”
Name-calling, especially in the final act of a presidential race, is common. But many experts who say the fascist label is apt argue that it’s more than just political polemics. They say the term is useful — serving as a distress signal for the threat to democracy.
Other experts say it’s an imprecise critique that obscures other, very real threats of Trumpism.
The Trump campaign responded to NPR's request for comment on the accusations with a statement insulting NPR.
Here's a closer look at what fascism is — and what it isn’t — according to scholars who study the ultranationalist ideology.
What is fascism?
Scholars have long argued over the definition of fascism.
Roger Griffin, an emeritus professor of modern history at Oxford Brookes University in the U.K. and a widely cited political theorist on the topic, offers one explanation: an authoritarian, “revolutionary form of extreme nationalism” that often incorporates racism, xenophobia, male chauvinism and the culture of violence.
“It sees things like communism and liberalism as a threat to society,” he told NPR. “Fascists themselves want to overthrow either a communist or a traditional conservative or a liberal state to create a new order.”
Historically, as with Mussolini and Hitler, fascists have relied on military power to suppress the opposition.
In October 1922, Mussolini, head of the National Fascist Party, declared his plan to assume power before members of the armed fascist militia — known as Blackshirts — marched on Rome. In Germany, Hitler’s Nazi Party had an army of “Brownshirts” to carry out a violent intimidation campaign against leftists and the Jewish population. Both leaders censored the press and encouraged racism through propaganda.
The word “fascist” has since taken on a looser definition, Griffin said. It’s not just Trump — it’s become a favorite epithet in the political sphere on both sides. Many on the left have lobbed the term at other conservative and right-wing leaders, including Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Conservatives, for their part, are also known to compare Democrats to fascists.
“Anything that smacks of authoritarianism or chauvinism or being a control freak can be dismissed as fascist,” Griffin said.
Why some scholars use "fascist" to describe Trump
Those who endorse the fascist label for the former president have pointed to the following marks of Trump’s campaign and presidency: Upon announcing his 2016 presidential bid, Trump maligned Mexican migrants as rapists and pledged to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. He’s cited Mussolini and, according to former staff, has spoken highly of Hitler. He’s sought to delegitimize news media, calling the press an “enemy of the American people.”
He tried to overturn a free and fair election that he lost, convinced most Republicans that President Biden’s victory was illegitimate, and promoted lies about a stolen election, sowing distrust in the democratic process.
For many scholars, the answer to whether Trump meets the qualifications of a fascist boils down to what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump’s followers stormed the Capitol to stop the democratic transfer of power.
“If Trump [on Jan. 6] intended to overthrow the American Constitution and inaugurate a new order based on charismatic power exercised by him, then he was absolutely a fascist,” Griffin, the British political theorist, said.
But, according to Griffin, Trump himself lacked intention on that day because he has no fixed ideology.
“You can associate him with racism, xenophobia, male chauvinism, extreme capitalism and the whole load of -isms,” he said, but he sees “no evidence that Trump has a coherent enough ideology, let alone a coherent ideology of the overthrow of the state through a coup to merit the word fascism.”
For Robert Paxton, a foremost scholar on fascism, focusing on the followers is just as important in trying to understand fascism, according to the Times.
Paxton, a former Columbia University professor and author of The Anatomy of Fascism, was previously only convinced that Trump bore some staples of fascism. But he said his mind changed after Jan. 6. In a Times interview published last week, he confirmed that he was no longer opposed to calling Trump a fascist after the Capitol siege.
Trump’s brand of fascism, Paxton told the Times, is “bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms,” when Mussolini and Hitler leveraged mass discontent to gather support.
Trump's "enemy" rhetoric
A recent NPR investigation found more than 100 instances in which Trump has said his opponents, critics and private citizens should be investigated, prosecuted, jailed or otherwise punished.
He's accused ideological opponents of being “the enemy from within.”
For Kelly, the highest-profile Trump-era official to publicly denounce the former president, it was these comments that moved him speak out against Trump, he said in an interview with the Times.
The “enemy from within” rhetoric is a key facet of fascism, said Griffin, author of The Nature of Fascism.
“Fascists are obsessed with the idea that the present state of the nation is decadent. The world is falling apart. It's got inner and outer enemies. There are forces at work destroying sacred, eternal truths or important things about the nation or the race,” he said.
Jason Stanley, who is a philosophy professor at Yale University and author of How Fascism Works, said Trump is also targeting the same people Hitler did. He told WNYC’s On The Media last week that “the word is required now to keep us out of the history books as being complicit in the rise of fascism.” But he also acknowledged that it’s not a perfect fit: “I use the word fascism because we don’t have another word for something that looks so much like fascism.”
Griffin, however, said the fascist label is a red herring. What we’re witnessing with Trump is “far more dangerous because it can sit in a democracy,” in his view.
“Trump is dangerous not because he's a fascist," he said, "but because he is systematically trying to destroy the fundamental principles of liberal democracy — freedom of speech, and respect for experts and open mindedness — all this stuff which is fundamental to healthy democracy all over the world.”
