While the use of the term fascism to describe the Trump administration increases in popularity, opponents of the term continue to voice opposition to it. Seemingly every month, a new opinion piece is published in a mainstream outlet arguing Trump’s escalations might be concerning, but his governance and movement do not qualify as fascist. Their arguments tend to be working with a static, unmalleable understanding of fascism, furthering a position that limits how Trump’s opponents articulate resistance to him. Certainly, Trump’s political project has twenty-first century peculiarities, but those specifics are not disqualifying.

Robert Paxton, an authority on fascism, wrote in his famed piece for Harper’s Magazine that while fascistic overtones could be detected during Trump’s 2016 campaign, Trump was not a fascist because unlike Trump, “Mussolini and Hitler had no desire to leave economic, social, or environmental matters to unchecked market forces, nor did they think that the population could be unified without forceful state action.” However, following January 6, Paxton recanted. In an op-ed titled, “I’ve Hesitated to Call Donald Trump a Fascist. Until Now,” he wrote, “Trump’s incitement of the invasion of the Capitol…removes my objection to the fascist label.”

How could it be that Trump leaves so much to unchecked market forces but still qualifies as a fascist? Trump’s fascism must be of a new order. While the backdrop of twentieth-century fascism was world war, imperialist scrambles for Africa, and industrial labor dynamics, preceding Trump were globalization, post-industrial society, and neoliberalism, a political ideology adopted by those in power since the 1970s. David Harvey defined neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” 

Naturally, if Trump were a fascist, his economics would be neoliberal rather than, say, National Socialist. In Trump’s first term, over one hundred federal rules protecting the environment were rolled back, and recently Trump has moved to gut the Endangered Species Act, favoring timber corporations. The White House boasted that the 2017 tax cuts were “the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history,” while the recently passed Big Beautiful Bill extends those tax cuts and is expected to add $3.3 trillion in federal deficits over the course of the next ten years. All this despite massive cuts to food benefits and Medicaid.

Wendy Brown noted neoliberalism has “a business model of the state.” In a March 2017 interview with the Washington Post, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and one of his senior advisors at the time, said, “The government should be run like a great American company.” While Elon Musk and Trump have had their public falling out, their shared neoliberal values informed the formation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In the name of efficiency, DOGE suggested $9.4 billion of cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting which Trump followed through on.

While some have claimed “Liberation Day” ushered in the beginning of the end for the neoliberal global order, I wouldn’t be so sure. In Trump’s first campaign speech in 2015, he clarified “Free trade can be wonderful if you have smart people, but we have people that are stupid.” By the time Trump left office in 2020, over 200,000 jobs had been offshored. The near daily developments regarding Trump’s tariff policies makes comment difficult, however, Trump’s consistent backtracking suggests the neoliberal global order’s story may still be being told. Further, the low job numbers reported for July that led to Trump firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner suggests jobs that were shipped overseas are simply not returning. 

Paxton noted in 2017 that unlike twentieth-century fascists “Trump seeks no territorial gains”. However, following World War II, US foreign policy rebranded, replacing antiquated imperial occupations and colonialism with covert action, the utilization of international legal and financial institutions, and neocolonialism. The CIA covertly orchestrated coups; the UN approved interventions, as in Korea and Libya; dictators throughout the western hemisphere were armed and funded by the US; the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund created Africa’s debt crisis; and regime-change efforts in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan cost millions of lives.

During Trump’s first term, while he didn’t expand US territory, he dropped the Mother of All Bombs on Afghanistan; struck Syrian government targets; and waged an air war that killed thousands of civilians in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. While Trump didn’t formally colonize any country as Mussolini did Ethiopia, it seems the US under Trump’s rule covertly assisted in the overthrow of regimes in Brazil and Bolivia while US arms sales were used to perpetrate a genocide by Saudi Arabia in Yemen.

So far in Trump’s second term, he has green-lit Israeli genocidal policies in Gaza. Malnutrition and starvation have overtaken the Strip as more people have been killed by Israeli forces attempting to retrieve aid from the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation than Israelis were killed on October 7. Some estimates place the death toll in Gaza since the start of the genocide as high as 300,000. The US relationship with Israel is a neocolonial one. The Trump administration has greenlit Israeli adventurism throughout the Middle East as a way of combatting Iranian influence. Since Trump took office, Israel bombed Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon. Of course, this has now escalated to direct confrontations between Israel and the US and Iran. Trump’s bombing of the Iranian nuclear sites was an escalation not even the Bush administration was willing to make.

However, Trump has voiced ambitions that are in the territory of traditional fascism. As Naomi Klein has noted, Trump’s musings about Canada being the 51^st state correspond to genuine proposals regularly made by Steve Bannon on his show. Trump’s eye has been on Greenland since his first term, when he assigned a team to produce a memo on proposing possibly leasing the island. Trump’s threats against Panama are daunting, considering in 2019 Trump’s then National Security Advisor John Bolton said the Monroe Doctrine was “alive and well,” the same doctrine that informed Theodore Roosevelt’s acquiring of the Panama Canal in the first place.

While Paxton initially objected that calling Trump a fascist obscured his “social libertarianism,” this was commentary that came less than a year after Trump had said on social media Caitlyn Jenner could use the bathroom of her choice in Trump Tower. Since then, the LGBTQAI+ community and the trans community specifically, have been the subject of abounding repression, with trans members of the military being forced out and the Trump administration ordering the NIH to initiate studies relating to trans “regret” and “detransition.” Citing the “shifting policy landscape,” Trump’s executive orders, and threats to cuts to funding, early in June, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles announced it would close its Center for Transyouth Health and its Development and Gender-Affirming Care surgical program. 

It should not be controversial to say Trump is not a social libertarian. Trump ran on a platform of deporting ten million undocumented immigrants. As we’ve seen, ICE agents are attempting to fulfill quotas by targeting working people in food trucks and at Home Depot. Over 100 US citizens have been picked up in these raids. Immigrants who have been critical of Israel’s genocide in Gaza have been targeted, like green-card holder Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk. 

Significantly, much of this has tested the bounds of legality. Trump’s deployment of the California National Guard to Los Angeles against the will of Governor Gavin Newsom was contested in the courts, while the Marines Trump deployed detained a civilian, blurring a dangerous line that for centuries has prevented Marines from partaking in domestic law enforcement. While Kilmar Ábrego García has been brought back to the US, the Trump administration’s initial refusal to return him was in violation of a Supreme Court ruling.

In 2003, attempting to pin down the nature of neoconservatism, Sheldon Wolin offered the phrase “inverted totalitarianism.” He noted, while big business was subordinated to the state in Nazi Germany, Wolin pointed out, “corporate power has become so predominant in the political establishment, particularly in the Republican Party, and so dominant in its influence over policy, as to suggest a role inversion the exact opposite of the Nazis’.” While this analysis applies to Trump, Trump has added a level of nationalism, extraterritorial ambition, social conservatism, and a strain on legal, political, and constitutional norms that calls for a new term: inverted fascism. 

Inverted fascism it could be said, resembles traditional fascism in that it is populist; concerned with community decline and victimhood; nationalist; and supported at least tacitly or materially by traditional elites, media, and capitalists. It differs in that it is an outgrowth of late capitalism, supplementing adoration of the state with a more vigorous adoration of capitalism. It ushers in at a policy level, modes of inverted totalitarianism connected to neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and neocolonialism.

To be clear, while inverted fascism is a useful term, I don’t expect the protesters in Los Angeles to yell at ICE agents that they are “inverted fascists!” In that situation, “fascist” should do. Trump’s peculiarities, and I’d argue those of Benjamin Netanyahu, Narendra Modi, and Viktor Orbán, should be thought of as representing the twenty-first century brand of fascism, not a deviation from fascism. Despite his politics differing massively from Adam Smith’s, we call someone like Hakeem Jeffries a liberal. It’s time we unfix the term fascism from its twentieth-century context.

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