Donald Trump, September 2016. John Locher/AP/Press Association. All rights reserved
More than any time in over fifty years, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign has provoked a serious discussion of the threat of fascism at the level of presidential politics. Martin O’Malley twice called Trump a fascist from the stage of the Democratic Party’s primary presidential debates. Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat began considering the question of Trump and fascism as early as last December, months before the first votes were cast in the Republican presidential primaries. In the spring, neoconservative éminence grise Robert Kagan saw in Trump’s campaign “how fascism comes to America.” This week the Washington Post published a scorecard grading Trump’s fascist “attributes.”
Is the Trump movement a variant of fascism?
