Mainstreamcommentators acknowledge that the second Trump administration is authoritarian or right populist, but can’t bring themselves to use the term fascist. Like Harvard’s Steven Levitsky and University of Toronto’s Lucan A. Way in their recent piece in Foreign Affairs, “The Path to American Authoritarianism: What Comes After Democratic Breakdown,” they opine that the breakdown of democracy will not give rise to fascism or “a classic dictatorship.” This is because, presumably, constitutional and democratic norms will remain in effect, elections will happen, and courts will review and check outrageous executive orders. Trump’s official conduct, statements, and government by sycophancy threaten to take all of those safeguards off the table.

For many Americans, it’s becoming harder and harder to believe that Trump will simply step down and walk away from power when his four-year term concludes. His willingness to offer a peaceful transfer of power becomes even more uncertain as reasons mount to believe he continues to engage in criminal misconduct. Just as an example, although the Supreme Court’s 2024 opinion grants a president absolute immunity for exercise of core constitutional powers, and a more limited immunity for other “official actions,” it would be ludicrous to deem criminal insider trading in advance of an imminent pause on tariffs to be official action, should that be proven upon investigation.

Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional seizure of power is not unimaginable, at the most yoked end of the spectrum by advancing his feigned interpretation of the constitution as permitting a third term. Beyond this, perhaps emboldened by the Supreme Court’s broad immunity ruling, Trump could conceivably declare martial law, suspend the ballot upon proclaiming a fair election to be impossible, or develop some other plan. These are all possibilities that, once suggested by the leader, are likely to be militantly pressed by the base, which has repeatedly displayed its willingness to mobilize in support even of his most extreme promptings, including a violent, insurrectionist assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

As far as judicial checks on abuse of executive power go, the Trump coterie continually insists that judges who don’t agree with their positions are not legitimate, and should be impeached or outright defied. Even in its first month the new administration conveyed the specter of a coming disobedience to court orders. This disobedience appears to be happening already, a constitutional crisis in progress. It is not clear, for example, whether the administration is fully obeying the Supreme Court’s order halting its freeze on foreign aid disbursements. The federal court in the District of Columbia hauled Department of Justice lawyers back into court to answer for the administration’s apparent flouting of the court order immediately halting flights deporting Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador under an obscure eighteenth century wartime law. And, as one more example, in concert with El Salvador’s strong-arm President Nayib Bukele, the Trump team is flouting Judge Paula Xinis’s directives that the government “facilitate” the return of wrongly-deported and imprisoned Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia.

Based on their confidence in the continuation of elections and judicial review of executive misconduct, Levitsky and Way conclude that Trump’s reign brings what they term “competitive authoritarianism” but not fascism. Those fragile safeguards and the competitiveness they engender — by virtue of contested elections or checks on power by the other branches of government – are in reasonable doubt.

But apart from the suggestion of a “competitive authoritarianism,” there is still the idea that the second Trump administration will continue as a “right populist” regime, also short of fascist. By Jan-Werner Müller’s widely-cited explanation, populism’s core features include participants’ class consciousness and an ostensibly moral campaign against elites deemed corrupt. Trump does not harness this sort of apparent moral impetus. Illustratively, his vociferous ally Stephen Bannon favors a populist agenda formulated against elites and wealthy interests, resulting in his deep animus toward “interlopers” such as Elon Musk. Trump, however, courts political investments, arguably quid pro quo bribes, from fossil fuel company executives on promises of dismantling existing environmental initiatives. He maintains an uneasy collaboration with the very sorts that populism, but not fascism, would rule out.

Let’s next marshal the constellation of attributes that, when present in sufficient combination, have historically been seen as rendering a ruling order fascist. A caveat is that definitions are inherently limiting, and may, as Hannah Arendt explained in The Origins of Totalitarianism, leave us unprepared to cope with evolving realities. At the same time, however, whether the regime is seen as fascist is not merely a semantic exercise, but rather has real-world impacts in planning for what sort of activist resistance is called for, and at what level of intensity and personal commitment. As a practical matter, believing that court review and competitive elections will continue generates confidence that the future will likely restore some level of sanity and enable the continuing struggle for equality and justice via institutional channels or, beyond that, restrained militancy. The clear possibility of an all-out slide into fascism, however, deflates confidence in progressive institutional support, and should ignite more widespread and fervent grass-roots resistance.

Our constellation of attributes signifying a fascist turn begins, first, with legal and rule-of-law factors: resistance to judicial review of executive orders, systematic abuse of power consisting in arbitrary official action and decision-making, and the doling out of punishment for the exercise in a disfavored way of liberal constitutional rights, such as free speech, association, assembly, even religion.

Second, sociopolitical factors: spawning of a friend-enemy zeitgeist in pursuit of a nationalist ideology, rooted in the ruler’s own embracing of a fairly homogeneous friend cluster and scorning of an imagined enemy population that includes political opponents and other groups singled out as undesirable. Those denying the propriety of this demarcation at all, by virtue of a universalist or humanitarian ethos, fall on the enemy side. As an example, consider Trump’s Executive Order 14168, titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”, assailing the LGBT community. Another executive order, EO 14147, is arbitrary and deceptive by purporting to remedy “the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” while in fact itself weaponizing the government against those who legitimately assisted in legal actions against Trump or Trump-affiliated individuals during the “prior administration.”

Third, control factors: denial of the orderly transition of power, official legitimation of the marginalizing, repressing, expelling, or otherwise eliminating disfavored groups, as occurs via EO 14168 just mentioned. While fascist control is typically implemented via a militarized domestic state, this could also happen conceivably by alternative means given contemporary digitalized dependencies.

Fourth, programmatic factors: uneasy collaboration with certain sectors of the wealthy and those holding traditionally elite status toward further concentrations of riches in the hands of the privileged and power in those of the ruler.

Fifth, propagandist factors: the continual engagement in lying and deception toward the creation of a false reality capable of both cloaking the regime’s machinations and engendering a willing mass complicity in the programme. Evocative of the present scene, Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (© 2024 p. 422) summarizes fascism’s totalitarian aspiration never to pause “to think about the world as it really is” or to compare the lies with reality, but to rest on its most cherished virtue, “loyalty to the leader, who, like a talisman, assumes the ultimate victory of lie and fiction over truth and reality.” Researchers pinpoint tens of thousands of Trump’s “false or misleading claims” espoused in his first term alone.

And sixth, the methodological glue cementing all of the above factors, and enabling their realization in practice. This is an element intimately entwined with arbitrary decision-making characterizing rule of law disintegration, but more insidiously enveloping the dictatorial leader in an aura of near-divine or ultra-charismatic authority, mythologizing the leader’s near-infallible capability to decide when and how to depart from legal, constitutional, diplomatic, even economic, norms, and detaching the regime from the need for a process of thoughtful deliberation over the consequences of official action in relation to the public good.

The only apparent ground for many of Trump’s precipitous directives is that they jibe with the cult of personality dedicated to his blitzkrieg against an imagined “deep state” that has been out to persecute him, and against perceived enemy populations whose objectives conflict with a white Christian nationalist agenda. An executive order issued March 6, 2025, for example, pursues punishment of one particular law firm for its representation of Trump’s erstwhile political opponent Hillary Clinton. The important point is that Trump and his circle believe, or act as if, this sort of thing is permissible, notwithstanding the Constitution’s inclusion of two provisions explicitly prohibiting bills of attainder, these being measures that inflict punishment on specifically designated individuals without the benefit of judicial trial. Attainder violates the rule of law requirement that laws be sufficiently general such that like cases are treated alike and laws not draw arbitrary or irrelevant distinctions between individuals.

But let’s focus on the sixth factor listed above, instilling the leader with supreme and arbitrary decision-making power as a core element underlying the fascist ethos. Practically applies to the present situation, frenzied measures being taken toward decimating the regulatory apparatus do not, in fact, aim at having the federal government disengage from matters addressed by the targeted agencies and projects. These measures ought not be interpreted as neutral disengagement from substantive federal matters that had been subject to regulatory supervision. Quite the contrary, the desire is for a shift from institutionally constrained to unfettered decision-making, an administrative regime responsive to the president’s arbitrary and capricious whims. For instance, while an executive order is reportedly in the works for jettisoning the Department of Education, EO 14190 directs “American schools . . . to instill patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation,” along with a slew of further propagandist dictates.

The dictatorial ruler’s systematic abuse of power consisting in arbitrary official action and decision-making cloaked in a veneer of near-infallibility harkens back to what refugee scholar Ernst Fraenkel termed the “prerogative state.” Decision-making that holds out rational deliberation as objectionable – Trump’s constant refrain — and instead responsive predominantly to the ruler’s will and pleasure is a core fascist attribute.

This does not mean that the fascist ruler abolishes the constitution or rules in a fully monolithic manner. As Robert O. Paxton counsels, “we must see fascist rule as a never-ending struggle for preeminence within a coalition, exacerbated by the collapse of constitutional restraints and the rule of law.” This formulation is an apt characterization of the Trump modus operandi, which continually rebuffs rule of law constraints and wrestles for primacy in “deal”-making by keeping political and economic entities, both foreign and domestic, walking on egg-shells in the face of commandeered American power.

Intimations of an emergent fascism under Trump have sometimes conjured theoretical underpinnings set out in the works of Nazi-era political philosopher Carl Schmitt. New York University School of Law Professor Stephen Holmes has explained the notion of “decisionism,” an approach to governing prescribed in Schmitt’s political realism, which imbues the leader with “a secularized version of the theological idea of divine authority, which scorns bargaining and the rule of law, while apotheosizing ‘hard’ political decisions – the choice of an enemy, for example,” as Holmes emphasizes. “This decisionism,” wrote Schmitt, “is essentially dictatorship, not legitimacy.”

Reminiscent of Trump’s infamous comment that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters, Jan-Werner Müller at Princeton has described Schmitt’s alignment with counter-revolutionary theorists such as Joseph de Maistre, whose own notion of decisionism came “closest to making dictatorship a matter of pure despotism, as true sovereignty consisted of ‘doing evil with impunity’.” And several of Trump’s executive orders, such as EO 14156, “Declaring a National Energy Emergency” over “critical minerals,” and EO 14159, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” call to mind Schmitt’s well-known definition of the sovereign as “he who decides the state of exception,” namely, the leader not constituted by law but who by his own lights decides both when there is a state of emergency or exception and how to respond.

In conclusion, openings and opportunities still exist for mass struggle against the breakdown in liberal constitutional rule wrought by the second Trump administration. At the same time, the administration’s daily prevarications, unrestrained subversions of constitutional norms, expansionist claims and abandonment and vilification of international allies on mendacious premises, and intimations that it will respect neither judicial interference nor routine electoral mechanisms are readily construed as steps taken toward realizing the sort of decisionist ethos that characterizes fascist rule.  Reconstruction of an overriding commitment to liberal democratic norms and the rule of law in governance is requisite to the people’s capability to struggle for deeper, egalitarian gains and non-oppressive conditions of existence.