The League of Premature Anti-Trump-Fascists

Now at least no one can say they don’t know

When did you first say Trump was a fascist? Frankly, looking back on my writings over the years, I see I was a little later to the game than I had imagined. In 2019 I said, “At the event the President made some stupid and frankly fascist comments about what [does] and what does not constitute free speech in the banana republic of his dreams,” etc. And in September 2020 I finally bit the bullet and said of Trump and his goons, “There’s no need to sugarcoat it: These guys are fascists, and their fight for Trump’s reelection is a fight to make America a fascist state. Plan accordingly.”

That’s better than most! Now, after years of bothsider dipshits telling us that “fascist” is just too too impolite a term to apply to Trump, there’s a groundswell of fancy people calling him the F word out loud, including his former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and his former Chief of Staff. As in all the other times I’ve been ahead of the curve — see also the Iraq War — I’m a bit proud of that, though in a slightly embittered, Cassandra-ish way because being right in these cases seems never to do any good.

But at first, in review, I wondered: Why didn’t I start using the term from the start of Trump’s presidency? If nothing else the Muslim Ban should have had me saying it.

I thought of all the ways use of the term had taken on a bad odor over the decades. Back in the 60s and 70s it was always a good joke on hippies to have one call anyone who was giving them a hard time “fascist.” The gag was that such accusations were unserious when applied to anyone except self-admitted fascists such as Francisco Franco and George Lincoln Rockwell. Imagine calling someone like George Romney a fascist!

That opprobrium lasted a good long while. I would never say his timing was deliberate because the guy is such a moron, but when Jonah Goldberg came in with his “Liberal Fascism” bullshit in 2008 people were just starting to catch on that the Republican Party had shit the bed on foreign policy, the economy, and everything else, and that maybe there was more to their malfeasance than simple venality and stupidity — perhaps the collusion between Moral Majority witchfinders and amoral tycoons was at least vaguely reminiscent of certain bundled-sticks movements in years gone by. Calling them fascist was still a hard sell, though, and Goldberg got all the bright rightwingers saying “actually liberals are the real fascists,” which increased the difficulty.

Thereafter Republicans increasingly showed themselves fash-friendly, particularly in the Obama wilderness years when they suffered not only voter rejection but also humiliation at the hands of a non-white person. They talked out loud about how non-rich Americans were worthless takers (remember that, from resistance hero Mitt Romney?). They fantasized about taking back power through judicial and extra-constitutional shenanigans (prefiguring not only many shitty Supreme Court decisions but also the January 6 attempted coup). And of course they cranked the racism up to 11.

But I have to admit, all those old inhibiting cultural forces kept me from connecting the dots sooner. It took Trump and the MAGA movement pretty much jumping up and down, yelling “Yes, we’re fascists, how much clearer can we make it,” to finally break the ice.

Oh, well, live and learn. The dots are connected now. And despite the slippery demurrers of good-taste conservatives like John Bolton and the Wall Street Journal editorial board, everyone sees it — the liberals who oppose fascism, and the conservatives who either endorse fascism or don’t mind it so long as it hurts people they don’t like. The only remaining question is whether there are more of the former than the latter. I’m slightly optimistic.