Is Trump a fascist?
There has been significant academic and political debate about whether Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th president of the United States, can be considered a fascist according to consensus definitions of fascism or because of expressed attitudes some critics perceive as sympathetic to the extreme right. Such critiques arose especially in response to his 2024 presidential campaign and during his second term as president. A number of prominent scholars, former officials and critics have drawn comparisons between him and fascist leaders with respect to authoritarian actions and rhetoric, while others have rejected the label.
Trump has supported political violence against opponents; many academics cited Trump's involvement in the January 6 United States Capitol attack as an example of fascism. Trump has been accused of racism and xenophobia with respect to his rhetoric about illegal immigrants and his policies of mass deportation and family separation. Trump's base, referred to as the MAGA movement, is sometimes analyzed as a cult of personality. Especially during his second term, several experts of fascism have characterized Trump and his allies' rhetoric and style of governance as authoritarian, and have compared them to previous fascist leaders'. In contrast, some scholars have described Trump variously as an authoritarian populist, a far-right populist, a nationalist, or of a different ideology.
Donald Trump is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021 and has served as the 47th president since January 2025. He ran three times as the Republican Party's candidate for the presidency, winning against Hillary Clinton in 2016, losing to Joe Biden in 2020, and winning again facing Kamala Harris in 2024.
Fascism is an ideological term which refers to a broad set of aspirations and influences that emerged in the early 20th century, exemplified by the European dictators Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Francisco Franco; and include elements of nationalism, enforcement of social hierarchies, hatred towards social minority groups, opposition to liberalism, the cult of personality, racism, and the love of militaristic symbols.
Since Trump was elected to office in 2016, many academics have compared Trump's politics to fascism. Several have pointed out that contrasts exist between historical fascism and Trump's politics. Many also argued that "fascist elements" have operated within and around Trump's movement. Following the January 6 United States Capitol attack, some voices within the academic community felt that things had changed and that Trump's politics and connections with fascism deserved greater scrutiny.
According to an October 2024 poll held by ABC News and Ipsos, 49% of American registered voters considered Trump to be a fascist, defined in the poll as "a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents", while 23% considered Kamala Harris to be a fascist. Another YouGov survey from the same year reported that about 20% of Americans believed that Trump saw Hitler as completely bad; among Republican respondents, four in ten believed that Trump held such position. The same poll reported that nearly half of Trump voters would continue to support a political candidate even if they stated that Hitler had done some good things, a position that was held by a quarter of all respondents.
Trumpism has been likened to Benito Mussolini's Italian fascism by critics of Trump. Historians and election experts have compared Trump's anti-democratic tendencies and egotistical personality to the sentiments and rhetoric of Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism. Trumpism heavily features authoritarian elements, over the prevalence of fascism and neo-fascism within Trumpism. Several scholars have rejected comparisons with fascism, instead viewing Trump as authoritarian and populist.
During his 2016 campaign, Trump implied that he would not accept the results of the 2016 United States presidential election if he did not win, preemptively claiming that he could only lose due to electoral fraud. Following his defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 United States presidential election, Trump and other Republicans tried to overturn the results, making widespread false claims of fraud. Due to these false claims, in addition to the January 6 United States Capitol attack that Trump incited, political opponents have labeled Trump as a "threat to democracy".
By 2020, journalist Patrick Cockburn stated that Trump's politics risked turning the United States into an illiberal democracy similar to Turkey, Poland, Hungary, Brazil, and the Philippines. According to civil rights lawyer Burt Neuborne and political theorist William E. Connolly, Trump's rhetoric employs tropes similar to those used by fascists in Germany to persuade citizens (at first a minority) to give up democracy, by using a barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, personal invective, xenophobia, national-security scares, religious bigotry, white racism, exploitation of economic insecurity, and a never-ending search for scapegoats. Some research has highlighted Trump's connections to neoliberalism and has argued that his policies represent an intensification of such policies as part of a "fascist creep" on American politics. Corporatocracy and plutocracy are concepts often used to describe corporate elitism associated with Trump.
During his 2024 campaign, Trump has made numerous authoritarian and antidemocratic statements. Trump's previous comments, such as suggesting he can "terminate" the Constitution to reverse his election loss, his claim that he would only be a dictator on "day one" of his presidency and not after, his promise to use the Justice Department to go after his political enemies, and his plan to use the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military in Democratic cities and states, have raised concerns over Trump's rhetoric.
During his tenure as president, Trump and his allies attempted to designate Antifa, an opposition movement, as a terrorist organization. Previous attempts at framing opponents of fascism as terrorists were also done by 1930s fascists.
Trump has stated that he would deploy the military on American soil to fight "the enemy from within", which he describes as "radical left lunatics" and Democratic politicians such as Adam Schiff. His political rhetoric since 2016 has been based on an us vs. them framework, with the in-group being defined as "real Americans" and the rival, out-groups including Muslims, leftists, intellectuals and immigrants. He has repeatedly encouraged weaponized chants at his rallies, including calls to imprison 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and has promoted the conspiracy theory that Jewish philanthropist George Soros was responsible for a large influx of illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States. Since 2020, he has lashed out at school and college teachers deemed to be "marxists" controlling the American institutions. Philosopher Jason Stanley linked this strategy to former and current fascist statesmen who try to undermine democracy by replacing teachers with loyalists.
Trump has repeatedly voiced support for outlawing political dissent and criticism he considers misleading or challenges his claims to power. After General Mark Milley said that Trump would start persecuting his political opponents if he won the 2024 presidential election, Trump suggested that Milley should be executed for treason, with Republican representative Paul Gosar further stating that, in a better society, "sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung". Retired general Barry McCaffrey said, regarding Trump's statements, that "what we are seeing is a parallel to the 1930s in Nazi Germany". Trump's formal policy plan for a second term, Agenda 47, has been characterized as fascist. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat stated that the similarities between the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 and Mussolini's "Laws for the Defense of the State", which transformed Italy into a repressive regime, are "striking", citing the elimination of judicial independence and the strengthening of executive authority.
How Democracies Die author Daniel Ziblatt said that Trump's combined employment of false allegations against his political opponents and allusions of retribution by American patriots is similar to tactics used by Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and 1930s European fascists. An analysis by NPR found that between 2022 and October 2024, "Trump has made more than 100 threats to investigate, prosecute, imprison or otherwise punish his perceived opponents."
In February 2025, Trump posted a computer-generated image of himself wearing a crown, declaring "Long live the king!" Critics took this as evidence of Trump having monarchist tendencies.
Trump has repeatedly expressed support for violent actions by law enforcement and his supporters since the early days of his first presidential campaign in August 2015. He was reported to, during his presidency, have called for undocumented immigrants to be shot in the leg as a way of deterrence. He suggested that his hecklers be "knocked the hell" out by his supporters and praised then-House candidate Greg Gianforte after he body-slammed The Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs while he was asking questions, stating that, "any guy who can do a body slam is my kind of guy." Trump said at a 2016 rally that, "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters." He had previously joked about the topic of killing journalists several times prior, including when he said that he "would never kill them", before reconsidering: "Uh, let's see, uh? ... No I wouldn't. I would never kill them, but I do hate them. And some of them are such lying, disgusting people, it's true." Some historians consider Trump's praise of violence against his critics, among other behaviors, as fitting a characteristic of fascism.
In a Missouri rally that resulted in multiple fights and arrests, Trump complained, after being interrupted by protesters, that there were no longer any "consequences" for protesting and stated that, "You know, part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore, right?" In a 2017 speech directed at law-enforcement officers, Trump encouraged them to be "rough" on suspects. Trump has described, in 2016, instances of violence at his rallies as "appropriate".
He said during the 2016 election that "the Second Amendment people" could prevent the nomination of Democratic Supreme Court justices. In 2019, he stated that, "I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump, I have the tough people, but they don't play it tough, until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad." In a 2018 interview with Axios reporter Jim Vandehei, the interviewer asked, "when you're saying 'enemy of the people, enemy of the people', ... what happens if all of a sudden someone gets shot, somebody shoots one of these reporters?", to which Trump answered, "it is my only form of fighting back." Trump has praised modern authoritarian leaders several times. In 2016, he expressed respect for Kim Jong Un for murdering his uncle, saying, "It's incredible. He wiped out the uncle. He wiped out this one, that one." He has praised Vladimir Putin several times, and, in 2018, he spoke positively of Xi Jinping's ability to eliminate his term limits. About the Tiananmen Square protests, he said that, "When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength." Trump has often used negative terms to describe democratic leaders, calling Germany's Angela Merkel "stupid", Canada's Justin Trudeau "two-faced" and France's Emmanuel Macron "very, very nasty". He called Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi "my favorite dictator".
During the George Floyd protests, Trump urged his general Mark Milley to take charge of dealing with the protesters. After Milley resisted, saying that the National Guard should be deployed instead, Trump told his staff, "You are all losers!" and asked Mark Milley, "Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?" Subsequently, Milley wrote a letter of resignation for Trump, which stated, referring to America's role in the Second World War, that, "That generation, like every generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism... It's now obvious to me that you don't understand that world order. You don't understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against." He ultimately decided not to send the letter to Trump and stayed in his position.
Trump has supported political violence against opponents; many academics cited Trump's involvement in the January 6 United States Capitol attack as an example of fascism. Trump has been accused of racism and xenophobia with respect to his rhetoric about illegal immigrants and his policies of mass deportation and family separation. Trump's base, referred to as the MAGA movement, is sometimes analyzed as a cult of personality. Especially during his second term, several experts of fascism have characterized Trump and his allies' rhetoric and style of governance as authoritarian, and have compared them to previous fascist leaders'. In contrast, some scholars have described Trump variously as an authoritarian populist, a far-right populist, a nationalist, or of a different ideology.
Donald Trump is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021 and has served as the 47th president since January 2025. He ran three times as the Republican Party's candidate for the presidency, winning against Hillary Clinton in 2016, losing to Joe Biden in 2020, and winning again facing Kamala Harris in 2024.
Fascism is an ideological term which refers to a broad set of aspirations and influences that emerged in the early 20th century, exemplified by the European dictators Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Francisco Franco; and include elements of nationalism, enforcement of social hierarchies, hatred towards social minority groups, opposition to liberalism, the cult of personality, racism, and the love of militaristic symbols.
Since Trump was elected to office in 2016, many academics have compared Trump's politics to fascism. Several have pointed out that contrasts exist between historical fascism and Trump's politics. Many also argued that "fascist elements" have operated within and around Trump's movement. Following the January 6 United States Capitol attack, some voices within the academic community felt that things had changed and that Trump's politics and connections with fascism deserved greater scrutiny.
According to an October 2024 poll held by ABC News and Ipsos, 49% of American registered voters considered Trump to be a fascist, defined in the poll as "a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents", while 23% considered Kamala Harris to be a fascist. Another YouGov survey from the same year reported that about 20% of Americans believed that Trump saw Hitler as completely bad; among Republican respondents, four in ten believed that Trump held such position. The same poll reported that nearly half of Trump voters would continue to support a political candidate even if they stated that Hitler had done some good things, a position that was held by a quarter of all respondents.
Trumpism has been likened to Benito Mussolini's Italian fascism by critics of Trump. Historians and election experts have compared Trump's anti-democratic tendencies and egotistical personality to the sentiments and rhetoric of Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism. Trumpism heavily features authoritarian elements, over the prevalence of fascism and neo-fascism within Trumpism. Several scholars have rejected comparisons with fascism, instead viewing Trump as authoritarian and populist.
During his 2016 campaign, Trump implied that he would not accept the results of the 2016 United States presidential election if he did not win, preemptively claiming that he could only lose due to electoral fraud. Following his defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 United States presidential election, Trump and other Republicans tried to overturn the results, making widespread false claims of fraud. Due to these false claims, in addition to the January 6 United States Capitol attack that Trump incited, political opponents have labeled Trump as a "threat to democracy".
By 2020, journalist Patrick Cockburn stated that Trump's politics risked turning the United States into an illiberal democracy similar to Turkey, Poland, Hungary, Brazil, and the Philippines. According to civil rights lawyer Burt Neuborne and political theorist William E. Connolly, Trump's rhetoric employs tropes similar to those used by fascists in Germany to persuade citizens (at first a minority) to give up democracy, by using a barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, personal invective, xenophobia, national-security scares, religious bigotry, white racism, exploitation of economic insecurity, and a never-ending search for scapegoats. Some research has highlighted Trump's connections to neoliberalism and has argued that his policies represent an intensification of such policies as part of a "fascist creep" on American politics. Corporatocracy and plutocracy are concepts often used to describe corporate elitism associated with Trump.
During his 2024 campaign, Trump has made numerous authoritarian and antidemocratic statements. Trump's previous comments, such as suggesting he can "terminate" the Constitution to reverse his election loss, his claim that he would only be a dictator on "day one" of his presidency and not after, his promise to use the Justice Department to go after his political enemies, and his plan to use the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military in Democratic cities and states, have raised concerns over Trump's rhetoric.
During his tenure as president, Trump and his allies attempted to designate Antifa, an opposition movement, as a terrorist organization. Previous attempts at framing opponents of fascism as terrorists were also done by 1930s fascists.
Trump has stated that he would deploy the military on American soil to fight "the enemy from within", which he describes as "radical left lunatics" and Democratic politicians such as Adam Schiff. His political rhetoric since 2016 has been based on an us vs. them framework, with the in-group being defined as "real Americans" and the rival, out-groups including Muslims, leftists, intellectuals and immigrants. He has repeatedly encouraged weaponized chants at his rallies, including calls to imprison 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and has promoted the conspiracy theory that Jewish philanthropist George Soros was responsible for a large influx of illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States. Since 2020, he has lashed out at school and college teachers deemed to be "marxists" controlling the American institutions. Philosopher Jason Stanley linked this strategy to former and current fascist statesmen who try to undermine democracy by replacing teachers with loyalists.
Trump has repeatedly voiced support for outlawing political dissent and criticism he considers misleading or challenges his claims to power. After General Mark Milley said that Trump would start persecuting his political opponents if he won the 2024 presidential election, Trump suggested that Milley should be executed for treason, with Republican representative Paul Gosar further stating that, in a better society, "sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung". Retired general Barry McCaffrey said, regarding Trump's statements, that "what we are seeing is a parallel to the 1930s in Nazi Germany". Trump's formal policy plan for a second term, Agenda 47, has been characterized as fascist. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat stated that the similarities between the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 and Mussolini's "Laws for the Defense of the State", which transformed Italy into a repressive regime, are "striking", citing the elimination of judicial independence and the strengthening of executive authority.
How Democracies Die author Daniel Ziblatt said that Trump's combined employment of false allegations against his political opponents and allusions of retribution by American patriots is similar to tactics used by Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and 1930s European fascists. An analysis by NPR found that between 2022 and October 2024, "Trump has made more than 100 threats to investigate, prosecute, imprison or otherwise punish his perceived opponents."
In February 2025, Trump posted a computer-generated image of himself wearing a crown, declaring "Long live the king!" Critics took this as evidence of Trump having monarchist tendencies.
Trump has repeatedly expressed support for violent actions by law enforcement and his supporters since the early days of his first presidential campaign in August 2015. He was reported to, during his presidency, have called for undocumented immigrants to be shot in the leg as a way of deterrence. He suggested that his hecklers be "knocked the hell" out by his supporters and praised then-House candidate Greg Gianforte after he body-slammed The Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs while he was asking questions, stating that, "any guy who can do a body slam is my kind of guy." Trump said at a 2016 rally that, "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters." He had previously joked about the topic of killing journalists several times prior, including when he said that he "would never kill them", before reconsidering: "Uh, let's see, uh? ... No I wouldn't. I would never kill them, but I do hate them. And some of them are such lying, disgusting people, it's true." Some historians consider Trump's praise of violence against his critics, among other behaviors, as fitting a characteristic of fascism.
In a Missouri rally that resulted in multiple fights and arrests, Trump complained, after being interrupted by protesters, that there were no longer any "consequences" for protesting and stated that, "You know, part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore, right?" In a 2017 speech directed at law-enforcement officers, Trump encouraged them to be "rough" on suspects. Trump has described, in 2016, instances of violence at his rallies as "appropriate".
He said during the 2016 election that "the Second Amendment people" could prevent the nomination of Democratic Supreme Court justices. In 2019, he stated that, "I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump, I have the tough people, but they don't play it tough, until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad." In a 2018 interview with Axios reporter Jim Vandehei, the interviewer asked, "when you're saying 'enemy of the people, enemy of the people', ... what happens if all of a sudden someone gets shot, somebody shoots one of these reporters?", to which Trump answered, "it is my only form of fighting back." Trump has praised modern authoritarian leaders several times. In 2016, he expressed respect for Kim Jong Un for murdering his uncle, saying, "It's incredible. He wiped out the uncle. He wiped out this one, that one." He has praised Vladimir Putin several times, and, in 2018, he spoke positively of Xi Jinping's ability to eliminate his term limits. About the Tiananmen Square protests, he said that, "When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength." Trump has often used negative terms to describe democratic leaders, calling Germany's Angela Merkel "stupid", Canada's Justin Trudeau "two-faced" and France's Emmanuel Macron "very, very nasty". He called Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi "my favorite dictator".
During the George Floyd protests, Trump urged his general Mark Milley to take charge of dealing with the protesters. After Milley resisted, saying that the National Guard should be deployed instead, Trump told his staff, "You are all losers!" and asked Mark Milley, "Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?" Subsequently, Milley wrote a letter of resignation for Trump, which stated, referring to America's role in the Second World War, that, "That generation, like every generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism... It's now obvious to me that you don't understand that world order. You don't understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against." He ultimately decided not to send the letter to Trump and stayed in his position.
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