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Law in Contemporary Society
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Should We Be Calling Trump a Fascist?-- By AlexaShyama - 20 Feb 2025 The Wikipedia definition of a fascist leader is of a far-right, dictatorial and ultra nationalist authority figure, who believes in militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, and a natural social hierarchy.I'm not sure why this is the place to begin. "An encyclopedia defines X as Y" is not am obvious introduction to a question for us to think about together.In a reading assigned for the course, Timothy Snyder presents a definition of fascism that seems created from a description of Donald Trump. The first defining feature is that a fascist does not need to attach meaning to the words he uses. A fascist does not need to tell a coherent or consistent story, he does not even need to ensure that his stories fit external reality. This is clearly Trumpian – the classic examples being the depiction of USAID as the deep state, or the assertion that pets were being eaten by immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Another trait of a fascist, is the need to name an enemy. Once again, the enemy need not have any basis in reality, but it should exploit vulnerabilities of the audience. Playing on increasing unemployment and competition for college admissions and jobs, Trump named the Haitian immigrants in Springfield as the enemy. Or the transgender immigrants stealing jobs from Americans. Third, fascists and oligarchs preach that government is the source of all evil and seek to limit it. A weakened government can neither control the oligarchs nor provide sound infrastructure or a welfare state for the populace. In such conditions, one’s own neighbors become one’s enemy in the resultant competition for limited resources. Trump may indeed by a fascist, or a despot, or a rightwing nationalist, or a racist. He may be all of these, as the classical definition runs. However, by labelling Trump, or stereotyping him, or even making fun of him, we run the risk of distracting from the venality of what he does. By focusing on the spectacle of the leader, rather than on his actions or on the consequences of his actions, we ensure that our emotions (amusement, anger, fear) do not go beyond the limited attention span required for a cartoon or its caption or a sound bite. It is easier to laugh or frown and to click to forward, rather than to ask ourselves the question: Who is affected by this action and how? I'm not sure why this follows, even as a "risk." We can limit our sentences to verbs and nouns, on the ground that every adjective and adverb "risks distracting" us from who is doing what to whom by describing how or what it looks and feels like. But so tight a distinction between essence and accident seems, well, reductive. doesn't it? Extraneous Effects of Trump's DecisionsNot even students on law school campuses are talking at any depth about how the world as they knew it from their lives and their constitutional law textbooks, is being changed by the day. Major policy decisions, almost every one of them with legal implications, are being translated into executive orders, and some of them are being challenged in court rooms, but there is no discussion in cafes or study rooms or library corners.Are you sure? Seems to me I spend a couple of hours a day in conversations of this kind most days, not to mention what I'm writing....On the other hand, Gen Z is busy flipping through their cell phones, chortling over memes of orange ducks and Hitlerian outfits.In September of last year, New York Governor Eric Adams was prosecuted for corruption. The charges against him included conspiracy, wire fraud, soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions and accepting lavish travel perks from Turkish business leaders seeking to buy his influence. In December, Adams met with the President designate at the Mar-a-Lago resort and in January, he was skipping his scheduled city events to attend Trump’s inauguration. And by February, Emil Bove, a former member of Trump’s legal defense team and the acting Deputy Attorney General, was asking prosecutors to drop the charges against Adams. Bove wrote that the case had “unduly restricted Mayor Adams’ ability to devote full attention and resources to illegal immigration and violent crime”. Bove could well have dropped the charges himself. But he wanted someone else in the Justice Department to write their name on the motion to dismiss the criminal charges against Adams. In view of the manner in which federal departments, media houses and even private law firms rushed to show greater loyalty to the Republican agenda than that of the President himself, this demand of Bove’s should have met with immediate obedience. But surprisingly, interim Manhattan US Attorney Danielle Sassoon, of impeccable Republican credentials, refused to drop the charges, and resigned, along with five high-ranking Justice Department officials. The assistant attorney who led the prosecution, Hagan Scotten, also resigned the next day, writing that the fact that Bove was asking for the charges to be dropped “without prejudice”, amounted to using a carrot (dismissing charges) and stick (threatening to bring the charges back again) approach to induce an elected official to support its objectives. Finally, after Bove threatened to fire all the prosecutors in the Public Integrity department, one of them stepped up to sign the motion. What Are The Effects?Perhaps the corruption saga of the New York Mayor affects less people and with less long-lasting consequence than the winding up of USAID. But in all these cases, what Trump is doing is not just throwing a tantrum like a toddler in a toy store and demanding that people follow his diktats. Behind the diktat in the Adams imbroglio, is what many people are calling “a deeply corrupt deal”. Trusted lieutenants were needed to carry out this deal, and that too, under their own names. To see this as a fascist in action, is to paint Trump as a person deeply committed to a legitimate political ideology and to distract from the greed, venality and lawlessness underlying his actions. Equally misleading is the use of mockery, both of the social media and the SNL variety, to reassure ourselves that freedom of speech and opposition still exists in the country - because it tends to take away the need to reflect on the deception and inhumanity being translated into policy decisions around us.As I think we agreed in conversation, where you want to take this draft is more easily done without the Adams part, which intrudes more than it illuminates. I think we also gain from an effort to distinguish between the way we describe the political world around us in relation to history—that is, our understanding of the role of contingency (including human character) in social life—as opposed to reporting—that is, the establishing of a record of events sufficient to explain our decisions and states of present mind. What you do all day, as a student and a citizen, may not depend on whether you think of Donald Trump as a fascist, to be sure. But when you consider, from the other end of your career, the decisions that you made in starting out your professional life, what you thought on that subject now and how your views changed over the intervening years are likely to matter quite a bit. You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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