Tag Archives: Trump

Fascism Versus Market Capitalism

Thomas Edsall’s columns in the New York Times share a consistent pattern: Edsall poses a question or initiates an inquiry, then contacts several experts, posing the relevant questions, and sharing their responses. Most recently, he explored the mechanisms that have characterized the Trumpian replacement of market capitalism with a “bend the knee in order to earn government’s blessing” approach that–like so much of Trump’s administration–is reminiscent of bygone fascist regimes.

It has become common to label Trump’s administration fascist, but usually that accusation arises in the context of ICE thuggery, the attacks on minorities and the evisceration of constitutional rights–actions echoing the Fascist regimes that focused on whitewashed pasts, and claimed traditional class structures and gender roles were essential to the “social order.”

These comparisons are accurate but incomplete; fascism also–and importantly–engaged in a thoroughgoing and intentional subversion of market economics.

Fascism is sometimes called “national Socialism,” but its approach to the economy differs significantly from socialism. The most striking aspect of fascist systems, of course, is the elevation of the nation—a fervent nationalism is central to fascist philosophy. That nationalism accompanies a union between business and the state; although there is nominally private property, fascist governments control business decisions.

In one of his recent columns, Edsall explored the current echoes of that approach, and how dramatically it differs from former Republican agendas and beliefs. As he notes, Trump and his administration regularly apply a “financial and regulatory chokehold” on businesses, corporations and nonprofits that he believes are antagonistic to him, from electric cars and wind energy projects to service-providing nonprofits and television networks.

“The administration has terminated, to use one of Trump’s favorite words, wind energy projects and ended tax and other incentives for electric-powered vehicles, two industries he believes are the creation of Democratic policies.”

As Edsall notes, the Trump administration’s extensive intrusions into the private sector are in direct conflict with traditional Republican and conservative beliefs, which held that government interference with the free market should be limited. Trump, of course, is  neither conservative nor Republican–for that matter, he appears incapable of developing anything remotely like a coherent agenda, economic or otherwise. For him, government regulation is not ideologically an anathema; it is a tool to exercise power and control in his constant pursuit of self-aggrandizement.

Trump is often referred to as “transactional,” but a more accurate description of his corrupt dealings would be “quid pro quo.” Private sector businesses needing government approvals (or needing government authorities to ignore improper activities)  “bend the knee” in exchange for those desired outcomes. In effect, they have acquiesced to the government’s control of business decisions–the sort of control that characterized fascist regimes.

The administration’s growing chokehold on the private sector are also tools allowing Trump and MAGA to pursue their culture-war aspirations. According to an email to Edsall from a political historian at George Washington University,

The president’s use of the government’s power to approve corporate mergers, the fear — and the actuality — of lost research funding and government contracts have enabled Trump to shift the culture in his ideological direction. Social media companies have lifted bans on far-right hatemongers and made X and Facebook more hospitable to pro-MAGA content. Universities such as Columbia; law firms like Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom; and media institutions like ABC News have reached settlements with the Trump administration to stave off existential threats, including canceled licenses, loss of research funding and revoked security clearances.

CBS, once a key source of critical reporting on the Trump administration, has, for example, been taken over by Larry and David Ellison, Trump allies, who put Bari Weiss, the anti-woke publisher of The Free Press (and a former writer and editor for Times Opinion), in charge of the news division.

The takeover of information sources may be Trump’s most politically consequential victory. As Edsall reports, “key platforms and hubs in the social media complex — TikTok, Meta, X — have been taken over by Trump allies or have shifted right to accommodate Trump,” shielding low-information voters from vital information, and spreading bigotry and propaganda.

These incursions haven’t been limited to the private sector; as noted sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele wrote:

The entire nongovernment community (or — as we might say in tax parlance — the 501(c)(3) sector) has been threatened with a combination of loss of tax exemptions, cuts to federal funding and potential investigations.

Some statistics indicate that fully one-third of NGOS incorporated in the U.S. lost funding in the first half of 2025.

As a professor of public policy noted in his email, every part of Trump’s government is intent upon bringing private institutions to heel.

The old GOP is long gone.

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Harnessing Hate Only Goes So Far

When the Electoral College installed Trump in the Oval Office in 2016–allowing Red states to overrule his loss by some three million votes cast largely by voters in Blue ones–it seemed clear to me that his appeal rested largely on his willingness to abandon “dog whistles” for out-and-proud bigotry. The people who had been appalled by the presence of a Black man in the White House applauded Trump for “telling it like it is”–and took his “candor” for permission to express sentiments that “political correctness” had  suppressed.

Those of us who immediately made that connection ran up against the protests of (far nicer) folks who wanted to attribute Trump’s electoral success to economic distress, or other, more typical political reasons, but by the end of his first term, political science research had largely confirmed that “racial resentment” motivated most votes for Donald Trump.

 By the conclusion of 2025, the first year of Trump’s second term–there was no longer room for doubt.

As an article in Lincoln Square recently put it, overt racism and antisemitism are the defining features of what is now Trump’s  GOP.  That article listed several examples, but the one that managed to astonish me was language included in the administration’s recently published National Security Strategy.

That document said, among other things, that the NATO treaty was signed with Europe when Europe was overwhelmingly white, and that since immigration has changed the continent, the NATO treaty might no longer be valid. The strategy joined naked racism to a pro-Putin approach to Europe and appalled the entire foreign policy establishment. The publication of the strategy shined a bright new light on the ugly bigotry that had been in plain sight all along. A few weeks later, at a meeting of Turning Point USA, J.D. Vance gave a speech where he invited Nazis, Groypers, and other hate-groups into the administration’s political coalition.

I’ve previously reported on the administration’s numerous domestic efforts to turn back the clock to a time when racism and misogyny were considered “normal” and “Christian,” and I won’t repeat that litany here. Suffice it to say that most sane Americans (a somewhat smaller percentage than I’d previously. hoped, but still a majority) are now fully aware that continued support for MAGA and Trump is grounded in hate of the “Other.” 

As that awareness has grown, comparisons with Nazi Germany have also proliferated–but increasingly, with an interesting twist. Historians and pundits who previously highlighted the measures that allowed Hitler to come to power have begun focusing on the decisions that ultimately defeated him. 

I no longer recall where I read this, but one historian has pointed to a fatal error in judgment: as the tide on the battlefields was turning against Germany, the Nazis increasingly deployed their scarce strategic resources toward the destruction of the Jews. Trains that could have moved troops, for example, were used instead to deliver human beings to death camps.

The parallel is instructive.

To the best of our knowledge, Trump, Miller, et al aren’t yet establishing death camps, but they are creating horrific “holding areas” like Alligator Alcatraz, throwing humans in foreign dungeons in places like El Salvador, and spending enormous amounts unleashing ICE thugs on Americans who don’t present as lily-white.  The administration is redoubling efforts to re-legalize discrimination against women and minorities, and increasingly engaging in language demeaning those who aren’t White Christian males. Their hatreds consume them.

As the linked article noted, the administration is ramping up its cruelest race-based policies at the very moment when the forces of resistance are turning the tide.

At a time when majorities of Americans are deeply opposed to all of this–a time when polling and survey research confirm that Trump and MAGA are deeply unpopular, a time when millions of citizens keep taking to the streets in protest and Republicans have been losing election after election–the Trump administration is doubling down on the bigotry, cruelty and stupidity that have powered the resistance and been responsible for their plunging approval ratings.

I am increasingly convinced that we are at an important turning point–that 2025 was the low, and that 2026 will see the growth of a resistance that not only takes advantage of the daily missteps of a monumentally inept administration, but that –especially–rebels massively against the bigotries that fuel Trump and MAGA.

A number of pundits scorn those of us who insist that “America is better than this.” But we are better than this–and I am increasingly convinced that this is the year we will prove it.

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A Lunatic Goes To Venezuela

Where to start?

Trump’s defenses of the assault on Venezuela have been as incoherent as most of his actions. Granted, Maduro was a very bad man–but if being a very bad man justified his kidnapping by a foreign power, leaders of other countries might justifiably kidnap Trump.

More to the point, if there were sound reasons to take these actions, those reasons should have been shared with Congress, and Congress–not our would-be king–should have authorized them. Instead, as several members of that body have attested, the administration did not consult them. Worse, it out-and-out lied, assuring the appropriate committees that the administration’s previous actions (including bombings of small boats) were not in pursuit of regime change.

Indeed, the administration defended those illegal bombings, which were clearly war crimes, as part of an effort to halt drug shipments and deter “narco-terrorists.” Trump’s pardon of a major narcotics kingpin–who had been tried and found guilty of transporting massive amounts of drugs into the U.S. and sentenced to 45 years for those crimes–illustrated the extent to which that excuse was a hypocritical lie.

Call me naive, but I see very little difference between Trump’s invasion of Venezuela and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine–especially in light of Trump’s announcement that America will now “run” Venezuela, a country that (I’m sure co-incidentally) has the world’s largest reserves of oil. (That “coincidentally” was snark…) Trump is on record saying America should have appropriated Iraq’s oil when we launched an unjustified war on that country (you will recall that it was Saudis who brought down the twin towers). On Saturday, NBC reported that the U.S. will tap Venezuela’s oil reserves, and The Hill reported Trump’s assertion that we will be “very strongly involved’ in Venezuelan oil. A video posted to Instagram showed Trump announcing that he is sending American oil companies to Venezuela to “help them” upgrade their facilities…

The announcement that America will be “managing” Venezuela smacks of colonialism, which fits MAGA’s clear preference for returning us to the 18th Century. Colonial powers claimed a right—and duty—to govern others because those others were less competent–or “civilized” (i.e. White).

The international implications of this Wag the Dog effort are likely to be profound. The administration has arguably violated the United Nations Charter, which prohibits the use of force against sovereign states without Security Council authorization or a clear self-defense rationale. The Secretary-General of the U.N., António Guterres, has warned that the action sets a “dangerous precedent” for future use of force, and further weakens important post-World War II norms. Rather obviously, if the U.S. can act with impunity and without any obvious justification, other major powers like China or Russia become more likely to cite those actions to justify their own uses of force (e.g., around Taiwan or Eastern Europe), further undermining the already tenuous  international legal order.

It is highly unlikely that the incompetents in Trump’s government understand–or are prepared for– potential negative consequences of this lawless act–including escalation of civil unrest by loyalists within Venezuela and/or regional destabilization due to spillover into neighboring countries. Renewed fighting could also spur another surge in migration from Venezuela, exacerbating humanitarian and border pressures on neighboring states like Colombia and Brazil.

Needless to say, this latest example of Trump’s erratic, impulsive and unilateral behavior–not to mention the corresponding lack of legislative restraints– has deepened the already well-founded concerns of our allies, whose confidence in America’s stability and reliability has taken a huge hit since Trump’s election. That loss of confidence and respect have demonstrably weaken­ed our ability to rely on diplomatic cooperation.

In an embarrassing speech on Saturday (I mention the day so that you will know which speech I’m citing, because all Trump’s speeches are embarrassing), Trump stuck for once to the teleprompter, engaging in a halting, low-energy reading of words he clearly had neither written nor reviewed, and several of which he obviously didn’t understand. Among those was his invocation of the Monroe Doctrine, which he’s evidently been told justifies American dominance of Latin America. Trump evidently believes the doctrine is sufficient to turn intervention into “stewardship” and colonialism into security policy.

It will be interesting to see how this latest dangerous buffoonery plays with the public. A quick-and-dirty poll found 17% approving of the invasion (but only 11% agreeing that Trump could take this action without Congressional approval). MAGA folks who had been attracted by his promises of isolationism and “taking America out of wars” are furious.

That said, the political strategy was transparent–for the past couple of days, no one’s been talking about the Epstein files…

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It’s Not Your Fault…

Heather Cox Richardson recently explored the success of Trump’s “sales pitch,” which she attributed to his ability to leverage a belief in the victimization of White folks that Republicans have increasingly embraced since the 1980s. As she put it, the message boiled down to “the reason certain white Americans were being left behind in the modern world was not that Republican policies had transferred more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%, but that lazy and undeserving Black and Brown Americans and women were taking handouts from the government rather than working.”

I think this is exactly right.

After all, as a man and a candidate, Trump is repulsive. His “policies” are laughable when they aren’t appalling, raising the question why anyone would support him. Political scholarship has answered that question by linking his ability to generate votes to “racial resentment,” and that link becomes more obvious every time he talks about “shithole” countries, calls Black immigrants “garbage,” or attacks “woke-ism” or DEI. But it isn’t just race–Trump and MAGA have built their appeal on resentment of every American who isn’t a White Christian male: the “uppity” women who’ve forgotten their proper role, the LGBTQ+ folks who had the nerve to open the closet door, Jews and Muslims. Etc.

The base of the appeal, as the Richardson quote suggests, is the festering anger of victimhood. There are thousands of White “Christian” nationalists whose lives haven’t gone the way they wanted or intended. Perhaps it’s that they haven’t accumulated the wealth they once thought they’d enjoy, or generated the admiration or applause or familial love to which they felt entitled. Perhaps they’re among the self-described Incels. 

We have all encountered people nursing these grievances. Sometimes, their complaints are very understandable; other times,  disconnected from their public-facing financial or social positions. Whatever these White “Christian” men feel is missing, whatever the nature of the deeply-felt disappointment, their lives aren’t providing something to which they feel entitled. Not only do they resent the fact that their lives have failed to meet their expectations, they need to believe that–whatever it is–it simply cannot be their own fault. 

They need to see themselves as victims. 

Scholars who have explored the concept of “white victimhood” describe it as a belief that, in today’s America, white people–especially White Christian men– are being systematically disadvantaged, a belief that is then used to justify racial animus and extremist ideologies. It’s sometimes described as “competitive victimhood.” It isn’t related to actual discrimination or oppression; rather, it’s in reaction to a perceived threat: that women and minorities are eroding the historically dominant status accorded to White Christian men in American society. 
 
Weaponizing victimhood may be Trump’s one true talent. As an article from Medium put it,

In the history of American political speech, few phenomena have been as widespread (or as damaging) as Donald Trump’s systematic creation of victimhood stories. From his accusations of “witch hunts” to his depiction of America as a nation “raped” by foreign powers, Trump has turned the language of suffering into a powerful tool for political rallying and authoritarian control. Recent academic research shows that this is not just another example of political exaggeration, but a sophisticated tactic now known as “strategic victimhood”: a deliberate performance intended to justify retaliation, weaken democratic institutions, and strengthen his hold on power.

The bottom line: Trump’s victimhood rhetoric is more than just political theater. It is what researchers refer to as an “anti-democratic, coercive, and illiberal” strategy that both predicts and fosters authoritarian rule, with significant implications for American democracy and social cohesion.

An article in Salon traced the connection between “winning and whining.” 

The article began by questioning how a “once-proud party of masculine self-reliance and personal responsibility” had become “such a bunch of whiny snowflakes?” and reviewed the findings of an academic paper by Miles Armaly and Adam Enders, titled “‘Why Me?’ The Role of Perceived Victimhood in American Politics.”  The authors concluded that feelings of victimhood did explain various (otherwise unfounded) “views of government, society and the world. They found it was especially explanatory with regard to perceived corruption and conspiratorial thinking, and that it was linked to personality traits such as narcissism and a sense of entitlement.

As the article from Medium put it, Trump and MAGA weaponize the grievances by giving these “victims” people to blame– those “others” who are stealing the social status of White “Christian” men.

It explains a lot.

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The Pro-Death Administration

One of the outcomes of Trump’s “culture war” approach to the pandemic during his first administration was the documented excess death rate of the MAGA partisans who refused to wear masks or get vaccinated. Although I’m unaware of research into the survival rates of the even more hard-core cult members who imbibed bleach and/or Hydroxychloroquine per Trump’s suggestions, I assume those outcomes were similarly unfortunate.

This time around, Trump is doubling down on his “angel of death” approach. 

Thanks to his “Big Beautiful Bill,”  health care costs are poised to go through the roof. As a recent essay in the New York Times put it, health spending in the United States since 1975 “has pushed down wages, fueled inequality and left families drowning in unaffordable medical bills.” The essay’s author, who teaches public health and economics at Yale, says the administration is making it worse, and that  rising health care spending is killing the American dream.

The imminent sharp rise in health insurance premiums has been front page news for several months, but unaffordable costs are just one of the health threats faced by the vast majority of Americans who cannot pay exorbitant costs out of pocket. The installation of Mr. Brain Worm as Secretary of Health and Human Services has turned America’s public health agencies over to cranks who elevate conspiracy theories over vetted medical science.

Lincoln Square recently enumerated the threats. For example, as we’ve just seen, the CDC just voted to end universal Hepatitis B vaccine recommendations for newborns, despite the fact that the mandate has demonstrably saved lives.

Now, under Trump guidance, only infants of mothers who test positive (or whose status is unknown) receive the recommendation. Everyone else? Optional. Delayed. A ‘maybe’ if the parents decide to go that route in two months.

And here’s the thing RFK Jr. and the Trump regime aren’t talking about:

Medicare and Medicaid only cover vaccines that are recommended by federal bodies like the CDC. If you cut the recommendation, you cut the coverage. And when you cut the coverage, vaccinations become a commodity. The wealthy will pay out of pocket to protect their kids. The poor will hope and wait – and hope doesn’t prevent liver cancer.

As the article points out, this most recent assault is part of a pattern that has emerged during Trump’s second term. Health protections have been shifted from a public good to a private luxury, and preventative care is being turned into something you buy, not a human right. The wealthy get immunized; the poor get sick.

The Trump administration has raised healthcare costs, reduced Medicaid access, and increased premiums and deductibles. Working individuals can’t keep up with the costs–and fewer Americans are working. 

Americans have now watched 1.1 million jobs vanish in 2025 – the most since 2020 – with Amazon alone cutting as many as 30,000 corporate positions. Not part-time workers, but white-collar analysts, engineers, and project managers who were told they would be insulated from the automation. And rather than sounding the alarms, the Trump regime has been covering for their billionaire buddies. Jobs reports? Non-existent, because the truth is politically inconvenient when corporations are firing workers in droves during the holidays.

And in a country where healthcare is tied to employment – where those who lose work fall back on Medicaid, and Medicaid only covers vaccines recommended by the CDC – the consequences compound quickly. If parents can’t access affordable healthcare, can’t find work, can’t afford fresh food, and can’t protect their children from preventable disease, then the future looks less like a safety net and more like a prison shiv. A slow attrition of the working class. A world where the wealthy live longer, healthier lives while everyone else is riddled with disease, hungry, and desperate.

For much of my adult life, I have marveled at the idiocy of America’s approach to healthcare. We pay far more–and get far less–than other first world countries, countries that long ago recognized that healthcare is a human right, and incidentally, that national coverage offers efficiencies leading to very substantial cost savings.

Trump and his MAGA GOP are rolling back Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act–America’s incremental “baby steps” toward more universal coverage–and substituting magical thinking for medical science. They are also ensuring that only the rich will be able to protect their health and that of their children.

As the linked article asks, “Is this the collateral damage of incompetence, or the blueprint of a ruling class preparing for a future where most of us just aren’t needed?”

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