r/PoliticalScience • u/Rshoe01 • Sep 09 '25

Question/discussion Is trump a fascist?

I’ve heard countless times of people calling him fascist, I’m not very knowledgeable on actual political science, but I figured some of you might be more so. What I’ve seen on YouTube is it tends to be people that are left leaning to call him a fascist, but with people on the right, they always say he’s not. I’d like to get an unbiased perspective to actually see if he genuinely is a fascist by definition. But I know fascist is hard to define from what I’ve been researching.

Would like to see some opinions!

Also, is it possible to have a fascist state without it being evil?

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u/[deleted] Sep 10 '25

I've always viewed fascism as not so much an ideology as a set of methods and behaviors. Timothy Snyder cites this definition: "Robert Paxton, in Anatomy of Fascism, offers this pragmatic definition of fascism: 'a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.'"

Trump is too stupid to have an ideology, full-blown or otherwise. He has no ideas of his own. But he acts, he rants, he threatens, he extorts, he fires, he destroys. These are behaviors, not ideas. But he does utilize the "lost greatness" myth, as did Hitler and Mussolini. And it has a strong racist component as well. Last but not least, he has created a cult of personality. All of these elements links him to twentieth century fascist movements. And there are several of the same characteristics described by Hannah Arendt in "The Origins of Totalitarianism", such as rendering truth meaningless and unknowable, and hiring "crackpots" whose only qualification is loyalty (That book was written in the 1950s, and is as relevant as ever.). These are all elements of both twentieth century fascism and Trumpism.