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Friday
I see that my labeling Donald Trump a fascist this past week tracks fairly closely with yesterday’s Atlantic daily essay, written by political science professor and NeverTrumper Tom Nichols. Like me, Nichols was reluctant to apply the term until this past weekend. Then, in a Veterans Day speech, Trump “crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism” with the following threat:
We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country … On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.
Rather than a red line, I see Trump crossing the Rubicon, so get ready for a discussion of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
First, here’s some more from Nichols. In the past, he says, he warned his classes against the indiscriminate use of fascism. That’s because, he explains,
I suspected that the day might come when it would be an accurate term to describe him, and I wanted to preserve its power to shock and to alarm us. I acknowledged in August 2022 that Trump’s cult “stinks of fascism,” but I counseled “against rushing toward the F-word: Things are poised to get worse, and we need to know what to watch for.”
This is what he was watching out for. Nor is it only the word “vermin” or Trump’s description of immigrants as “disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are ‘poisoning the blood of our country'” that has Nichols concerned. It’s also “the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office.” These changes include
establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans.
Now, Nichols is also urging us not to panic. Careful political scientist that he is, he points out that we’re in a better place than were Germany and Italy when fascists there came to power:
[A]lthough he leads the angry and resentful GOP, he has not created a coherent, disciplined, and effective movement. (Consider his party’s entropic behavior in Congress.) He is also constrained by circumstance: The country is not in disarray, or at war, or in an economic collapse. Although some of Trump’s most ardent voters support his blood-and-soil rhetoric, millions of others have no connection to that agenda.
Still, we can’t be complacent, as Shakespeare’s play teaches us. I’m particularly concerned when I revisit Brutus’s famous speech green-lighting the assassination of Caesar:
[W]e have tried the utmost of our friends,
Our legions are brim full, our cause is ripe.
The enemy increaseth every day;
We, at the height, are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures.
Nichols doesn’t mention that there are Brutuses out there who think this is their last shot at taking over America. People like Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn, Roger Stone, and Stephen Miller see themselves “at the height” and “ready to decline.” They are at the height in that Trump (according to polling) leads Biden in a number of the critical swing states, but they also see themselves “ready to decline.” Trump, after all, is getting old, may be facing jail time, and shows signs of mental stress. He certainly won’t make it to 2028.
In other words, they see themselves on “a full sea.” Either they take “the current when it serves” or they forever lose their ventures.
Brutus and Cassius, to save the Roman republic, choose the assassination route. Bannon et. al. are planning modern day equivalents. After all, look at everything they attempted their first coup attempt: going to court over fraudulent claims of voter fraud, pressuring electors, stealing voter data, pressuring Mike Pence, and finally unleashing shock troops on the U.S. Capitol. And while they didn’t achieve their end that day, they scared a number of senators that would otherwise have voted to convict Trump of insurrection. In Mitt Romney’s biography we hear of legislators who didn’t vote against the former president because they were afraid his supporters would come after them and their families.
Many commentators have warned that the failed January 6 coup was a rehearsal, just as the beer hall putsch was for Hitler, and that the Trump plotters will hold nothing back this second time. In next year’s election, I expect we will see things we’ve never seen before in American elections—shock troops sent to intimidate voters from going to the polls in every heavily populated Democratic districts; election officials in those same districts threatened if they don’t produce pro-Trump results; GOP legislators, attorneys general, and local authorities brought into the process to disenfranchise voters (we already saw that happen on a small scale in Virginia’s 2023 election); X, Fox, and other rightwing media and social media outlets unleashed on the country in ways never before seen; Russian and rightwing billionaire money overwhelming the system; and so on.
If Biden were to be returned to office, these Trumpists already think that “the voyage of their life” will be “bound in shallows and in miseries.” As they see it, they have nothing to lose from extreme tactics.
Of course, our situation is the reverse of what occurs in the play. Rather than safeguard our republic from one-man rule, our conspirators want to establish Trump as Caesar. It is multicultural democracy that they want to stab.
Although Democrats and the FBI were caught off guard by January 6, they now have a clear view of the lengths to which Trump and his followers will go to seize power. Will they heed those warnings as Caesar in Shakespeare’s play does not? Julius may have an inkling of what Cassius is willing to do—”Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look”—but he is unwilling to appear a coward. As he memorably observes,
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
Unfortunately for him, his death comes far earlier than it should. Pray that does not happen in our case.