It’s Not the Fascism That Should Bother Us
The debate over Trump's style of politics obscures his profound indecency.
The publication of new interviews with Donald Trump’s longstanding chief of staff John Kelly have been in the news since last week, and the Harris campaign has picked up on Kelly’s use of the word “fascist” to describe his former boss. This has reignited a longstanding debate over whether Trump and his MAGA movement represent the threat of genuine fascism in the United States were he to be re-elected.
This debate misses the point in several respects. Most Americans don’t have a clear definition of “fascist” in their minds, except to know that it means something very bad. But they also know that it’s been an epithet thrown around a lot, especially at Republican candidates. Indeed, as one Republican campaign ad shows, virtually every one of their presidential candidates over recent decades has been described as a fascist by the Democrats. The term “authoritarian” would be a much more accurate description of Trump’s inclinations, but that term is even less clear in the minds of voters and doesn’t have the heavy negative connotations of the comparison to Hitler or Mussolini.
What people should have focused on were other parts of Kelly’s interviews. The former general reiterated his previous claim that the former president didn’t want to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, asking “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” and called the 1800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood “suckers” for getting killed. Visiting the grave of Kelly’s own son, killed in Afghanistan, Trump said “I don’t get it. What was in it for him?” He refused to be photographed with grievously wounded military amputees because that “wasn’t a good look for him.” This attack on veterans who gave their limbs and often lives for their country started, of course, with his 2016 attack on John McCain, and his assertion that McCain wasn’t a hero, because “heroes don’t get captured.”
From Ronald Reagan onwards, contempt for public servants has been part of the Republican repertoire. But Reagan always distinguished the military from other parts of the public sector, and honored veterans as the best America had to offer. I do not believe that the fact Trump got away with his criticisms of McCain means that Americans on the right no longer respect military service, much as they may distrust the institutional military for standing up to Trump. How many times have you heard someone stop a soldier in an airport and thank them for their service? I don’t think that Trump himself believes that his supporters share his contempt for veterans or self-sacrifice. When he was asked about the “suckers and losers” comment as reported in Jeffrey Goldberg’s 2020 Atlantic article, Trump denied that he ever said that, and went on to attack Goldberg as a promoter of “fake news.”
Rather than calling Trump a fascist, I would focus on Kelly’s account of Trump the draft-dodger who wouldn’t, when push came to shove, stand up and serve his country. He attacks wounded and imprisoned soldiers out of a barely disguised feeling of inadequacy, having suggested that he made sacrifices as well by building hotels and avoiding getting sexually transmitted diseases. Those few swing voters still sitting on the fence need to see him as one of the most selfish individuals ever to enter American politics, one of the country’s true suckers and losers.
Francis Fukuyama is Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He writes the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
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Dr Fukuyama makes an excellent point. I’m a year older than Trump, so I’m all too well aware of what was going on here about the time he found a way to avoid military service. He certainly wasn’t the only one to do so. A number chose Canada over military service. A number were able, like Trump, to find medical excuses, not all of them valid. Some choose conscientious objector status, some for valid reasons and some not. A number hid in one way or another - some successfully, some not.
We continue to debate the validity of the Vietnam War (as well as several of those which followed). By the time I had to make that decision in early 1967 after three years of college exemptions, it was already clear that the war was at best a murky business, fraught with mixed motives, questionable goals, and a growing awareness of its capacity to tear us apart.
I did not want to fight in a war, and especially not in that one. Call it cowardice, and that would be partly right. Call it a growing understanding that we were involved in a no win situation over there, and that would be partly right. So when I met with the local army recruiter when it seemed the draft was opening its arms to me, I took the standard battery of tests and found I qualified for the Army Language School in Monterey, California and a slot in communicaions intelligence. It meant a four year active duty commitment, and it did not guarantee that I wouldn’t go to Vietnam, but I felt it was the best option I had short of draft avoidance, which I was not prepared to attempt. I’m not entirely sure why not, even today, but I knew that if I did, I would regret it. And I did know that I didn’t want that regret following me through my life.
Turned out I spent the next four years in army schools in Texas and California, eighteen months on Okinawa, and a year in Colorado. I certainly wasn’t always happy with what I was doing, and, partly due to what I learned through that service, I continued to grow in my understanding of the mistake we were making in Vietnam. But for a number of reasons I won’t go into here, I’ve never regretted my decision, It was an invaluable experience, and, yes, unlike so many thousands of my generation, I was able to come home alive and unscarred..
Trump willingly gave up the opportunity to gain that experience of service, and in doing so, lost something not entirely definable, but equally devastating; the hard knowledge of a kind of failure not ever recoverable. It must indeed eat at him, as it certainly would still be eating at me.
Warning: I am a baby boomer, and will be making some Beatles references.
I'm not sure if Trump meets the technical definition of fascist or if he's just Fascistmania, an incredible simulation. Either way, Fukuyama's right that to people who aren't seriously into politics, it just sounds like this-ism, that-ian, ism ism ism.
I've always said that the best way to understand Trump is as an abuser: as someone who sincerely believes that life is abuse or be abused. (Who doesn't understand that the point of things like democracy and human rights and the rule of law is to increase the space where those aren't the only choices.) His supporters are convinced that he'll only abuse the people they want him to: "He'd never abuse US, he LOVES us!" That's not how it works with abusers.