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Water on the Brain

Trump 2.0 and the Crisis of Liberal Rule

June 24, 2025

The pseudonymous Italian writer, Elena Ferrante, explains that her mother left “a word in her dialect that she used to describe how she felt when she was racked by contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart. She said that inside her she had a frantumaglia, a jumble of fragments.”1Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa Editions, 2016), 99. For Ferrante’s mother, this was “the word for a disquiet not otherwise definable, it referred to a miscellaneous crowd of things in her head, debris in a muddy water of the brain. The frantumaglia was mysterious, it provoked mysterious actions, it was the source of all suffering not traceable to a single obvious cause.”2Ferrante, Frantumaglia, 99. Something of the psychic effects of the Trumpian deluge over the last four months is captured in the disquieting image of a brain immersed in debris-ridden, muddy water. Overwrought by the downpour—the real estate fantasies of a cleansed Gaza, China hysteria, the bombing of Yemen, rare earth minerals in Greenland, the appropriation of the Panama canal, the fifty-first state of Canada, the shrinkage and transformation of the executive branch, ruckus with the Ivy League, Hitler salutes, detentions, internments, deportations, tariffs, trans erasure, torture, science wars, cults of irrationalism, and a generalized manic pace of contradiction—an overwhelming cognitive temptation is to lose oneself in the muddy water, to renege on the pursuit of dry land. Prominent voices even wonder if searching for an underlying rationale for the new administration amounts to “sanewashing.”3Adam Tooze, “Chartbook 363 Stockholm Syndrome in Mar-a-Lago: The Belief That ‘Something Must Be Done’ and the Sanewashing of Economic Policy in the Age of Trump,” Chartbook (Substack), March 19, 2025, https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-363-stockholm-syndrome. But dryland is where we might find a logic, a strategy, or a discernible and traceable causation behind the frenetic noise of surface appearances.

The sense of uncertainty, discombobulation, and horror is resonant of Gramsci’s “morbid symptoms,” those that appear in the interregnum characterized by a weakened old order still refusing to die and a new one that cannot yet be born.4Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: International Publishers, 1971), 276. What to make of the Trumpian interregnum, a “storehouse of time” absent the orderliness of a known history, a landscape of debris, littered with morbid symptoms?5Ferrante, Frantumaglia, 100. An empirical recordkeeping of the amassing “aerial and aquatic debris” is insufficient.6Ferrante, Frantumaglia, 100. Is there a logic underneath? Yes. But it’s a logic inbuilt with the contradiction of a period still coming into being—a logic of heightened volatility and an unusually high gradient of contingency.

Trumpism

Donald Trump has returned to the White House better prepared and with a clearer strategic vision than in 2016, including the detailed and comprehensive Project 2025. While genuine signals of ineptitude, capriciousness, indiscretion, and internal squabbling in Trump’s second administration remain, more importantly, the administration has pursued a strategy designed to overwhelm the population with a flurry of executive orders and presidential actions. Migrants, trans people, public sector workers, the “administrative state,” universities, environmental and health regulations, “free trade,” and the traditional US separation of powers are prominent targets in an opening volley intended to weaken the basic norms of liberal democracy.

The harder and more coherent authoritarian thrust to the second Trump administration dates back to his very selection as the Republican presidential candidate. He was chosen despite his attempt to violently block the transfer of power through the 2020 election. Next, during the 2024 electoral campaign, Trump openly vowed to put his rivals in jail, discipline journalists, and unleash the armed forces to contain protest. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court guaranteed Trump a wide girth of presidential immunity over the course of his second term. The Republican Party has been cleansed of any meaningful internal opposition. Judicial opposition thus far has been mainly restricted to the lower courts—an important exception being the Supreme Court’s decision that Kilmar Ábrego García be repatriated to the United States after having been illegally deported to a megaprison in El Salvador. The Trump administration eventually submitted to the court ruling after some theatrical delay.7Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, “The Path to American Authoritarianism,” Foreign Affairs 104, no. 2 (2025): 38, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/path-american-authoritarianism-trump; Alan Feuer, “Lawyers for Kilmar Abrego Garcia Seek Sanctions Against Trump Officials,” New York Times, June 12, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/12/us/politics/abrego-garcia-sanctions.html.

Paradoxically, the Democrats and the liberal punditry’s response to Trump 2.0 has been comparatively muted. Dylan Riley, a scholar of fascism, recently observed that “there is a curious inversion and maladaptation in the reaction of mainstream Democrats to 2016 and today. It is hard to overstate how much more constrained Trump was after his first election compared with where he sits today. Yet where hysteria followed then, somnolent complacency follows now.”8Tweet by dylanriley032571.bsky.social (@dylanriley032571.bsky.social), Bluesky, January 28, 2025, 12:06 p.m., https://bsky.app/profile/dylanriley032571.bsky.social/post/3lgswuvpwl22l. That liberal hysteria has not completely retreated from the scene is evident in the melodramatic departure of the trio of Yale professors to the University of Toronto and the obscene amount of attention this has garnered from top-tier establishment journalism. See Marci Shore et al., “Opinion | We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S.,” New York Times, May 14, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/opinion/yale-canada-fascism.html. To be sure, the Democratic Party’s “left”—Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and their allied Political Action Committees (PACs)—have organized a number of large rallies. However, they are singularly uninterested in building membership organizations with any independence that could impede their main objective: campaigning for a Democratic victory in the 2026 Congressional election.

If the mainstream Democrats have met Trump’s overtly authoritarian affronts to liberal democratic institutions with placidity, some on the far left have responded with a more impulsive vigor, characterizing the administration (and in some cases, even Trump’s first administration) as fascistic, neofascist, already fascist, end times fascist, or as quickly moving in one of these directions.9John Bellamy Foster, “The U.S. Ruling Class and the Trump Regime,” Monthly Review, 2025, 1–22, https://monthlyreview.org/2025/04/01/the-u-s-ruling-class-and-the-trump-regime/; Prabhat Patnaik, “Why Neoliberalism Needs Neofascists,” Boston Review, 2021, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/why-neoliberalism-needs-neofascists/; Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (London: Verso, 2023); Frieda Afary, “What Is Fascism and How Can We Resist It in the United States?,” New Politics (blog), February 3, 2025, https://newpol.org/issue_post/what-is-fascism-and-how-can-we-resist-it-in-the-united-states/; David Renton, “What It Means to Say Trump Will Govern like a Fascist,” Tempest, January 31, 2024, https://tempestmag.org/2024/01/what-it-means-to-say-trump-will-govern-like-a-fascist/; Carl Davidson and Bill Fletcher, “‘Abolition Democracy’ and a Third Reconstruction,” New Politics (blog), February 25, 2025, https://newpol.org/issue_post/abolition-democracy-and-a-third-reconstruction/; Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, “The Rise of End Times Fascism,” Guardian, April 13, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk. Notably, in some cases, critics even extend such claims to Trump’s first administration. Generally, this is symptomatic of a conflation of the genuinely authoritarian attributes of the Trump government and the particularities of fascism. Liberal scholars Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way are probably correct in anticipating the “likely breakdown” of liberal democracy (understood as “full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties”) over the course of the second Trump administration. But their unusual sobriety as to what form this authoritarian turn is likely to assume is also probable: “What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism.” Under this kind of regime, “the formal architecture of democracy, including multiparty elections, remains intact,” political opposition remains legal and can challenge established power (albeit on increasingly unequal terrain), and there is no fundamental rupture with American constitutionalism. But competitive authoritarianism violates even the minimalistic norms and institutional commitments of liberal democracy insofar as “incumbents rig the game by deploying the machinery of government to attack opponents and co-opt critics.”10Levitsky and Way, “The Path to American Authoritarianism,” 38–39.

Fascism

The identification of the Trump government as fascist stems from a common conflation of authoritarianism with fascism and the concomitant tendency to ignore the authoritarianism baked into the liberal project itself. Insisting on the distinction between different forms of authoritarianism is not an exercise of academic one-upmanship. The point is not the self-satisfaction of having crafted the correct analysis of a shifting and volatile political terrain. Such distinctions bear upon our response to the threats we face. For example, it is not the time to prioritize restrictive, armed self-defense organizations aimed at physical confrontation with mass fascist street thuggery. It would be if fascism were an imminent danger. Fascist street movements do not pose an immediate threat to our side’s existence—to our very lives—which was the situation faced by antifascists in the interwar period. In the United States today, there is still space to emphasize building open, aboveground, mass campaigns for migrant rights, trans lives, and working-class and racial justice. Such movements have the greatest potential of becoming a potent challenge to the authoritarian inclinations of the Trump government. This strategic orientation is tactically compatible with simultaneous, but narrower, confrontations with genuine fascists in the present tense, when and where they do appear and threaten targeted communities.

Authoritarianism assumes different forms. Fascism is but one, extreme manifestation of the general authoritarian disposition of capitalist rule, heightened as it becomes in times of crisis.

In an earlier article for Spectre, we discussed the core constitutive elements of fascism that would characterize any novel iterations of phenomenon across its movement, party, and regime modalities.11Todd Gordon and Jeffery R. Webber, “The Authoritarian Disposition: Capitalism, Liberalism, Fascism,” Spectre 4, no. 8 (2023): 43–55, https://spectrejournal.com/the-authoritarian-disposition/. We cannot rehearse them all again here. It is clear, though, that some of these elements clearly exist today: the severe and sustained crisis of capitalism beyond merely immediate conjunctural instabilities, which can precipitate a radicalization of both the petty bourgeoisie and the ruling class as they search for an exit; an increasing sense of civilizational degeneration and potential societal breakdown (expressed in, among other things, an increased resonance of irrationalism, conspiracy, and perceived threats to “traditional” notions of family and gender), adding another layer to the instability caused by capitalist crisis; and the growth of a militant, nationalistic, and revanchist petty bourgeoisie, which as a class has the capacity to form a mass movement and constituted the compositional core of classical interwar fascism.

But other key features clearly do not yet exist. The depth of the crisis of bourgeois democracy is not comparable to interwar Europe and, notably, the challenge to ruling elites from below has not required more extreme forms of authoritarian intervention. Traditional forms of repression have proven effective in the face of a limited working-class movement and have thus far not necessitated recourse to fascist paramilitaries. At this point, fascist paramilitaries are not anywhere near the strength, coordination, and discipline to play that role if called upon. And finally, fascists have not been integrated into the American state in an organized and systematic fashion.

Undoubtedly, there are dynamics within global capitalism that could accelerate such processes, particularly if geopolitical competition and the intersecting crises of capitalism deepen further. However, the more gradual degradation of liberal democratic forms of rule characteristic of competitive authoritarianism is more likely. This obviously poses a real danger in and of itself, but the nature of the threat is distinct from fascist dictatorship and begs an appropriately tailored riposte from the left.

Fascist Movements and Militias

That fascist movements are growing in the United States is a reality. We can trace their resurgence to the middle-run incubator of a growing militia movement in the 1990s, and the facilitating factor of the state officialdom’s rising racism during the protracted War on Terror. The 2008 financial crisis and subsequent long economic downturn provided a conducive set of stimulants, with the COVID-19 pandemic and accelerating ecological breakdown providing yet more fuel to the fire. The Black Lives Matter mobilizations, the struggle for trans rights, and progressive movements against economic inequality—themselves creatures, at least in part, of the same crisis, downturn, and breakdown—are additional catalytic factors. Geopolitically, the rise of China and relative decline of the United States are important parts of the global context for the rise of the far right in the United States.

The growth of the American far right in general, and of fascist paramilitaries in particular, is best understood as feeding off­—just as it nourishes in return—a global resurgence of far-right movements that include fascists and the myriad far-right governments around the world. However, fascist movements in the United States are neither the most immediate authoritarian threat, nor do they define the Trump government. Authoritarianism assumes different forms. Fascism is but one, extreme manifestation of the general authoritarian disposition of capitalist rule, heightened as it becomes in times of crisis.12Gordon and Webber,  “The Authoritarian Disposition”

Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election was an important setback for the MAGA movement, as was the fiasco of the January 6 Capitol Hill riot, in which paramilitary and street-fighting organizations played a leading role. However, the regression was short-lived. The movement regrouped and radicalized. With vocal support from Trump himself, Three Percenters, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other extremist MAGA activists strategized to takeover local Republican organizations—Steven Bannon’s “precinct strategy”—where they would be able to set the party agenda and install their members and allies in key positions. These far-right activists have taken thousands of local Republican positions in the last several years, giving them significant influence in the party throughout the country. Many Republican politicians have close ties to paramilitary groups and have participated in protofascist political actions with them, including intimidation at voting centres, threatening violence against the courts and political opponents, and aestheticizing violence in their political propaganda.13MacFarquhar, “Two Men Charged With Plotting to Blow Up California Democratic Headquarters,” New York Times, July 16, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/us/ian-rogers-jarrod-copeland-indicted.html; Jeff Sharlet, “The Congressman Telling Trump Supporters to ‘Buckle Up,’” Atlantic, June 11, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/the-congressman-telling-trump-supporters-to-buckle-up/674367/; Luke Broadwater and Matthew Rosenberg, “Republican Ties to Extremist Groups Are Under Scrutiny,” New York Times, January 29, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/us/republicans-trump-capitol-riot.html; Isaac Arnsdorf, “Trump Just Endorsed an Oath Keeper’s Plan to Seize Control of the Republican Party,” ProPublica, March 2, 2022, https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-just-endorsed-an-oath-keepers-plan-to-seize-control-of-the-republican-party; Adrian Morrow, “Michigan Republicans Lament Rise of ‘band of Pirates’ Trump Loyalists in State GOP,” Globe and Mail, December 9, 2023, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/us-politics/article-michigan-republicans-lament-rise-of-band-of-pirates-trump-loyalists-in/; Andy Campbell, We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered In a New Era of American Extremism (New York: Hachette Books, 2022), 116–28, 138, 179, 259; Lane Crothers, Rage on the Right: The American Militia Movement from Ruby Ridge to the Trump Presidency (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 158–59; Alejandro Beutel and Daryl Johnson, The Three Percenters: A Look Inside an Anti-Government Militia (Washington: Newlines Institute, 2021), 9; James Politi, “The Trump Machine: The Inner Circle Preparing for a Second Term,” Financial Times, March 26, 2024, https://www.ft.com/content/8aa2d8c1-cc3a-46fe-9145-53d05b19a50d.

Still, the militia phenomenon in the United States can easily be exaggerated. Given that mass-based paramilitary organization—essential to the rise and victory of fascism in Italy and Germany—is a key feature distinguishing fascism from the rest of right-wing nationalist politics, such exaggerations can distort Trumpism’s proximity to historical fascism. In a recent piece for Spectre, DK Renton argues that Trump enjoys “a militia that supports him,” comparing it explicitly to Hitler’s and Mussolini’s paramilitary formations. Trump’s “building, emboldening, and adapting to a street movement,” according to Renton, is “the way in which Trump comes closest to the politics” of insurgent interwar European fascism.14DK Renton, “Trump, Fascism, and the Authoritarian Turn,” Spectre, April 1, 2025, https://spectrejournal.com/trump-fascism-and-the-authoritarian-turn/. This is far-fetched. Take Germany’s Sturmabteilung (Stormtroopers, SA) as a comparator: The SA was formed in 1921 as the reorganized paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party (NSDAP). It grew rapidly from a paramilitary force of roughly thirty thousand men in mid-1929 to a mass movement of over one hundred thousand by 1931, before reaching its (pre-Nazi state) zenith in January 1932, with almost four hundred and fifty thousand members.15Conan Fischer, Stormtroopers: A Social, Economic and Ideological Analysis, 1929–35, Revised ed. (London: Routledge, 2015), 4–6. The population of Germany in 1932 was roughly 66 million. Today, the population of the United States is roughly 347 million. For a paramilitary force in the contemporary United States to be proportionally comparable to the SA on the eve of the Nazi’s assumption of state power it would require about 2.3 million members. And this is to say nothing of the relatively scattered and uncoordinated nature of contemporary US militia groupings compared to the disciplinary unity of the SA.

Reliable figures on the size and composition of far-right militias in the United States are difficult to acquire, but, suffice it to say, the comparison with Nazi militias is extremely weak. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) publishes an annual Year in Hate and Extremism report. In 2024 it documented 1371 hate and extremist groups across the country, compared to 1430 such groups in 2023. More narrowly, the 2024 report documents 533 “active hate groups” which include organizations expressing views that are anti-LGBTQ+, anti-immigrant, antisemitic, and anti-Muslim, and which range in their activities across “hate crimes, flyering, protests and intimidation campaigns.”16Léonie Chao-Fong, “Number of US White Nationalist Groups Falls as Extremist Views Go Mainstream,” Guardian, May 22, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/22/white-nationalist-hate-extremist-groups. But the SPLC reports do not define membership, provide no membership figures, nor make any rigorous effort to distinguish militias from other groups.

…the leaders of the largest American corporations may very well harbor concerns about the MAGA base, Trump’s tariff policy, and his erratic behavior. These debits on the Trump ledger seem to have been more than counterbalanced by the promised credits stipulated in regulatory and tax commitments…

According to a mid-2020 report in the New York Times surveying expert findings on the subject, there were “some 15,000 to 20,000 active militia members in around 300 groups.” However, the report goes on to note that, “gauging the size of these groups is difficult and imprecise, because much of their membership is limited to online participation. The estimates are based on samplings of militia member data gleaned from social media profiles, blogs, online forums, militia publications, interviews, assessments from watchdog groups and news reports.”17Jennifer Steinhauer, “Veterans Fortify the Ranks of Militias Aligned With Trump’s Views,” New York Times, September 11, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/us/politics/veterans-trump-protests-militias.html. In any case, even if these dated estimates are conservative relative to today’s numbers—and it is not at all obvious that membership is either larger today than it was in mid-2020 or more concentrated in fewer or more highly coordinated groups—it is safe to say that American militias at this stage pale in comparison to militia strength during the high rise of fascism immediately prior to the Nazi seizure of state power in Germany in 1933. That many of the disparate and fragmented far-right militias in the United States are sympathetic to Trump, have been further emboldened by his second term, and pose a serious danger to vulnerable communities (especially queer, trans, immigrant and African American) is undeniable. But it is a considerable leap to assume that they constitute a disciplined presidential militia that Trump can simply mobilize. Moreover, Trump’s recent use of the National Guard and deployment of Marines to Los Angeles in the context of protests against widescale immigration raids suggests that, thus far, he has not found it necessary to use whatever influence he does enjoy over these disparate US militias.

Red Meat, the Petty Bourgeoisie, and Republican Capital

Trump’s tone and demeanor during his 2024 campaign for the presidency clearly had an aggressively authoritarian quality, suffused at times with rhetoric reminiscent of interwar fascists. He peddled conspiracy theories like the antisemitic and white supremacist Great Replacement theory, which claims that the Democratic Party is trying to supplant the white American voting base with immigrants from the Global South under the guiding hand of George Soros (the contemporary stand-in for yesteryear’s Rothschild). Paranoid fantasies amplified by the presidential podium have inspired stochastic violence against immigrants and politicians by Trump supporters. The president’s speeches referred to the threat from “the enemy within” and included calls to “root out…the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country…that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”18Caleb Ecarma, “Detention Camps, ‘Vermin’ Rivals, and a Government Purge: Trump Wants to Go Full Authoritarian,” Vanity Fair, November 13, 2023, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/11/detention-camps-vermin-government-purge-trump-full-authoritarian.

The MAGA movement, and the far right more generally, retains its core constituency from a radicalized layer of the petty bourgeoisie—the key social base of fascist movements historically. In 2024, the American petty bourgeoisie experienced its highest level of “uncertainty” in half a century, exhibiting persistently low levels of “optimism.”19“Record Uncertainty Found in Latest Optimism Index,” NFIB, October 9 2024, https://www.nfib.com/news-article/record-uncertainty-found-in-latest-optimism-index/. Preelection polling indicated sharply disproportionate petty-bourgeois support for Trump. Nevertheless, despite the “precinct strategy,” the Republican Party has not yet become a fascist organization. In the absence of an existential threat to property, accumulation, and capitalist hegemony, it has not needed to establish a state of exception, violently smash the opposition, or assume physical control of the streets—central goals of the fascist authoritarian project. The Republican Party under Trump 2.0 is clearly expanding the remit for the authoritarian exercise of state power, but it has not yet committed itself to the full replacement of liberal democracy by fascism.

The GOP continues its historic position as a party of large capital. Trump’s 2024 campaign gained more financial contributions than Kamala Harris’s from a majority of industries. Trump also led Harris among the top one hundred biggest donors during the 2024 election cycle, the beneficiary of sixty of them, and the donations to Trump from these “megadonors” tended to be considerably higher than what “megadonors” donated to Harris. Trump’s megadonor supporters, furthermore, came from a range of economic backgrounds, including banking, shipping, pharmaceuticals, tech, oil and gas, consultancy firms, real estate, insurance, entertainment, agriculture, department stores, and manufacturing.202024 Presidential Race,” open secrets, accessed December 22, 2024, https://www.opensecrets.org/2024-presidential-race. While some of these contributors may be committed MAGA supporters—and it is worth noting here that despite their ultimate support for Hitler, fascism was not the German bourgeoisie’s first choice for an authoritarian exit from Weimar democracy—it is more likely that they support Trump because they thought he was better on taxes and regulations. Additionally, the leaders of the largest American corporations may very well harbor concerns about the MAGA base, Trump’s tariff policy, and his erratic behavior. These debits on the Trump ledger seem to have been more than counterbalanced by the promised credits stipulated in regulatory and tax commitments, especially if the president’s approach to tariffs can be tamed.

A party engulfed in tensions engendered by its evolving and combustible composition—large capital sitting alongside a radicalized petty bourgeoisie, traditional conservatives next to far-right elements (including genuine fascists)—the Republican apparatus cannot always keep a lid on its domestic rumblings. But the containment of the constitutive elements within the big tent is less haphazard and personalistic than in 2016. While traces remain of the patrimonial rule characteristic of Trump’s first administration—“government run as a household, with little if any distinction between the public and private interests of the ruler, whose favours secure the allegiance of dependents and followers,” and with “bonds of purely personal loyalty bind[ing] the seedy milieu of lumpen-millionaires…and hangers-on of various sorts to Trump”—the second term signals a relative move away from a revivified precapitalist patrimonialism and a step towards a pattern of institutionalized behaviour more typical of modern capitalist bureaucratic-rationality in a period of world stagnation.21Dylan Riley, “What Is Trump?,” New Left Review 2, no. 114 (2018): 25, https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii114/articles/dylan-riley-what-is-trump. Of course, Trump tests the limits of liberal institutional constraints and both his taboo-breaking and personal charisma remain central to gluing together the pieces of this disparate puzzle, but it is important that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner have exited the stage and the breathtaking turnover of insiders symptomatic of Trump 1.0 has been replaced with a tighter regime of internal discipline—and a lower rate of replacement.

The second Trump administration’s sustained pursuit of unitary executive theory has not yet amounted to a project of counterrevolutionary futurity linked to violent control of the streets. Such strategic machinations are less evidence of fascism immanent within the Trumpian regime than evidence of the immanence of authoritarianism within liberalism itself.

Personifications of the major fault lines are easily identified in the inner circle at the heart of Trump’s second administration. Their competing proclivities find expression in policy, if not in equal measure. Who are some of the representative figures? Howard Lutnick and Scott Bessent are the demigods of finance, though they have played important roles in Trump’s trade war. Until the recent demise of his bromance with Trump, Elon Musk—a billionaire whose entrepreneurial ingenuity amounts to securing a consistent flow of state handouts for his private accumulation activities ($38 billion in subsidies and federal contracts)—stood in for Silicon Valley libertarians bent on dramatic government cutbacks and radical deregulation, but who also support specialized immigration for technology professionals.22Edward Luce, “Maga World’s New Split: Bannon vs Plutocrats,” Financial Times, May 20, 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/66855f9b-5eed-4d14-a5a0-a08f139ec132. Musk also criticized the implementation of tariffs. Among other things, Musk’s recent departure is inflected by contention among Trump’s capitalist supporters over ballooning budget deficits and their inflationary impact. Christina Bobb, a backer of the efforts to overthrow the 2020 election results, expresses key sentiments of Trump’s hardcore base. So, too, does Peter Hegseth, whose arm is adorned with the tattoo of a white supremacist slogan. The militant opposition to immigration on the part of myriad additional Trump insiders also tends the fires of the MAGA grassroots.23Tyler Pager and Maggie Haberman, “The Populist vs. the Billionaire: Bannon, Musk and the Battle Within MAGA,” New York Times, March 9, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/us/politics/stephen-bannon-elon-musk-maga.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare. We discuss below the ire towards Silicon Valley and tech capitalists in the writing of far-right intellectuals.

Unitary Executive Theory

Trump’s aggressive use of executive orders to attempt to reconstitute US governance and concentrate power in office of the president has evoked comparisons to fascism among many observers. Trump has sought to waive away the controversy with hackneyed Napoleonic allusions: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”24Tweet by Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), X, February 15, 2025, 1:32 p.m., https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1890831570535055759?lang=en. However, rather than interwar European fascism, the most notable reference point for the ideas animating Trump’s executive decrees, dismissal of recalcitrant bureaucrats, usurpation of control over federal agencies, and insertion of unqualified allies into the civil service is the home grown “unitary executive theory.” Unitary executive theory dates back to Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and attempts to centralize presidential control and weaken checks to executive authority within the US political system.25Jeffrey Crouch, Mark Rozell, and Mitchell Sollenberger, “The Unitary Executive Theory and President Donald J. Trump,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 47, no. 3 (2017): 561–73, https://doi.org/10.1111/psq.12401; Mark Rozell and Mitchell Sollenberger, “The Unitary Executive Theory and the Bush Legacy,” in Taking the Measure: The Presidency of George W. Bush, ed. Donald Kelley and Todd Shields (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013), 36–54; David Driesen, “The Unitary Executive Theory in Comparative Context,” Hastings Law Journal 72, no. 1 (2020): 1–54, available at https://repository.uclawsf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/hastings_law_journal/article/3911/&path_info=Driesen_16__Final_.pdf; Adam Chilton and Mila Versteeg, “Courts’ Limited Ability to Protect Constitutional Rights,” University of Chicago Law Review 85, no. 2 (2018): 293–335, https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclrev/vol85/iss2/10/. The theory was extended by George W. Bush during the War on Terror and then further consolidated under Barack Obama (witness the invasion of Libya without congressional approval, drone strikes, targeted killings of alleged terrorists, the administration’s reliance on state’s secret privileges against forms of oversight).26Ryan J. Barilleaux and Jewerl Maxwell, “Has Barack Obama Embraced the Unitary Executive?,” PS: Political Science & Politics 50, no. 1 (2017): 31–34, https://doi.org/doi:10.1017/S1049096516002055. Trump’s second term represents the radicalization of a tradition with an incontrovertibly American pedigree. Of the many potential international comparators, Victor Orbán’s Hungary or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey are much closer to Trump’s second administration than Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany.

The intellectual proponents of the unitary executive theory defend it through explicit reference to the American Constitution. Likewise, Trump’s officials insist that their orders are legal, and his legal team is doggedly contesting judicial challenges in the lower courts. In other words, Trumpian state managers have not yet launched a revolutionary attack on the constitutional order. They have neither sought to overturn constitutionalism like interwar fascism, nor mounted a violent defense of their particular reading of that notoriously white supremacist document against the extant juridical order. Instead, the Trump administration has relied on the existing legal apparatus to further its authoritarian ends, even while testing the limits of judicial oversight and due process. Those goals include a radical diminution of the US state, the concentration of power in the office of the president, and the removal of recalcitrant bureaucrats and obstreperous regulatory architecture that might impede orders emanating from the White House.

A key premise of unitary theory is that the executive powers of the constitution are vested solely with the president and therefore grant the president autocratic authority (particularly when Congress is compliant). This is subject to sharp legal criticism.27Crouch, Rozell, and Sollenberger, “The Unitary Executive Theory and President Donald J. Trump”; Driesen, “The Unitary Executive Theory in Comparative Context.” But as Trump officials are undoubtedly aware, the law is never prepolitical; quintessentially, it is a contest of political power, the outcomes of which are not decided by legally consistent or rigorous argument.28 Robert Knox, “Strategy and Tactics,” Finnish Yearbook of International Law 21 (2012): 193–229, https://doi.org/DOI:%2010.5040/9781472566263.ch-014. This is patently evident when we consider the strict limits of the judiciary’s willingness and ability to defend constitutional rights against power. Law is therefore a political battlefield, but not all political projects attempt—revolution or fascist counterrevolution—to uproot its foundations. The second Trump administration’s sustained pursuit of unitary executive theory has not yet amounted to a project of counterrevolutionary futurity linked to violent control of the streets. Such strategic machinations are less evidence of fascism immanent within the Trumpian regime than evidence of the immanence of authoritarianism within liberalism itself.

What are the ultimate horizons of Trump’s authoritarian ambition? Supreme Court rulings against Trump’s executive orders inhibiting the administration’s pursuit of the most far-reaching elements of its agenda would provide a good litmus test.29As we write, a judicial drama unfolds vis-à-vis Los Angeles. Most recently, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit opposed the decision by a lower court earlier that same day to temporarily prevent the federal government from deploying the National Guard to Los Angeles. Stefania Palma, “US Court Halts Order Demanding Donald Trump Return Control of California’s National Guard,” Financial Times, June 13, 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/0f25d7ff-de1f-4f56-b22b-0524b6afe17a. Would such a move precipitate open defiance by Trump, thus provoking a genuine constitutional crisis? If the police and military failed to align with him against the constitutional order, Trump would need to turn to the available far-right paramilitaries. But their current capacities are not remotely comparable to their interwar European counterparts. And without paramilitaries, fascist counterrevolution in Italy and Germany would have been stillborn. It is also important to note that evading due process (including the suspension of habeas corpus some Trump officials have publicly fantasized about), politicizing deportations, trampling free speech, repressing dissent, and using concentration camps are very much a part of the liberal tradition—including in the United States itself.

Return to the Beginning

In the 1990s, Ferrante found herself unable to write satirical fiction on Silvio Berlusconi: “even if I had invented some other more effective, stinging, amusing, grotesque, anguished, satirical parable, would it make political sense, today, to express oneself obliquely, by apparently talking about something else?”30Ferrante, Frantumaglia, 92. The present moment demands careful scrutiny and excavation beneath both the surface-level appearances and larger-than-life toxic personalities. Oblique allusions to fascism do not make political sense. Given the global resurgence of authoritarianism, including fascist movements, explicit theorization is necessary in order to distinguish the fascist phenomenon from other reactionary movements and regimes with which it shares certain ideological and sociological features, including that of competitive authoritarianism. This demands a historical understanding of fascism, including its emergence, growth, and consolidation through state power in the interwar period. At the same time, a meaningful theoretical approach must also avoid foreclosing, through the hypercontextualization of the interwar years, the intelligibility of possible fascist reemergence in adapted forms today. The goal is to avoid both hypercontextualization and a theoretical understanding of fascism so capacious as to render the term analytically useless.31On the methodological challenges of contextualization, decontextualization, and portability within boundaries, see Eley, “What Is Fascism and Where Does It Come From?” Geoff Eley, “What is Facism and Where Does it Come From?” History Workshop Journal 91, no. 1 (2021): 1–28, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbab003. Keeping an eye on history, while cultivating sensitivity to the fluidity of the present, is our best hope of finding dry land. Fascism has not yet seized power anywhere. That it is coextensive with capitalism’s tendency toward civilizational crisis and decline, however, suggests little room for comfort. What is more, many horrors are possible before the potentiality of a fascist arrival.

 

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