Trudy Rubin: Trump is a fascist, though many voters don't want to hear it

After the tsunami of racist, crude, and violent MAGA speeches at Donald Trump's Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday, it's no surprise that the label "fascist" is being applied to this wannabe despot.

His behavior during his first term — particularly his thwarted efforts to use the military against his "domestic enemies" — has driven retired generals who served in his administration to use the term. After Trump incited a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the most noted U.S. historian of fascism, Robert O. Paxton, also decided the label fits.

The problem: Many Americans don't know the meaning of the term fascism. They associate it with Adolf Hitler, whose crimes were so enormous that many voters don't believe the term can be applied to Trump. That leads to dismissing the charge as politics as usual — especially since Trump keeps using it to falsely smear Vice President Kamala Harris.

Yet, talking about fascism may be the most important conversation voters don't want to hear.

Political advisers have told Harris to stop talking about fascism because voters are focused on the cost of living. That may be correct, but as Trump's chief of staff, retired Gen. John Kelly, told the New York Times, his former boss fits the definition of a fascist.

Why does this terminology matter? Why not simply call Trump a wannabe strongman, just like the foreign despots he constantly gushes over? After all, Trump probably doesn't even know the meaning of the term fascist.

My answer: Looking at what fascist rulers have had in common, and how Trump fits the mold, helps explain his appeal to his most devoted MAGA followers — and why that poses such an acute danger if he wins a second term.

Fascist behavior, says historian Paxton, is often based on visceral feelings, particularly an "obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood."

In the U.S. case, Trump has built his MAGA movement on the charge that America is in deep decline, shared by his followers. He blames this decline on hordes of dark-skinned and "criminal" migrants — or, as he calls them, "vermin." In Trump's telling, these vermin have besieged U.S. towns, eating pets, killing women, and raping children.

"America has become an occupied country," Trump insists.

Fascist leaders generally attribute their nation's deterioration to "individualistic liberalism and alien influences," according to Paxton. Fascism then justifies "any action without legal or moral limits against its internal enemies" to purify the nation.

Such action, in turn, requires a supreme (male) leader, who is adored by his followers, to save the group and make the nation great again, writes Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism. Violence may be required.

You will notice how the image of the supreme leader ranting against victimhood matches the ugly rhetoric of the Madison Square Garden rally. There, the dehumanizing denunciations went far beyond one comedian's now infamous reference to Puerto Rico as "a floating island of garbage."

A series of Trump cronies and relatives — their speeches all vetted in advance by his team — mouthed grotesque sexual and racial slurs against migrants, Mexicans, Black people, and Harris, using language unthinkable at a political rally prior to the Trump era.

Trump concluded by calling Democrats "the enemy within" and the mainstream media "the enemy of the people" — all while predicting Nov. 5 will bring "Liberation Day."

When queried about the rally's threatening language, Trump called it a "lovefest," and claimed, "There's never been an event so beautiful."

As is his wont, the pied piper of MAGA didn't directly call for violence. But his most ardent supporters know exactly what he means when he rages on, just like they knew on Jan. 6. Trump doesn't have Hitler's army or Benito Mussolini's brownshirts, but he does have intensely loyal followers who are ready to translate his slurs into individual or militia attacks.

Trump told Fox News' Maria Bartiromo that "the enemies within" were an even bigger problem than "the people coming in and destroying the country." However, those internal enemies "should be very easily handled, if necessary, by the National Guard or, if really necessary, by the Army [emphasis mine]."

He added, "The enemy within is more dangerous than China or Russia."

That language echoes Hitler's rallying cry about internal traitors whom he blamed for Germany's defeat in World War I, meaning socialists and Jews. In Trump World, internal traitors include Republicans who reject Trump's Hitler-sized Big Lie that he won in 2020 along with GOP state election officials working to ensure his teams don't try to steal the 2024 election.

Here we come to the essence of why the term fascist neatly fits Trump's modus operandi. Fascist movements differ according to a country's history, but the common thread revolves around how a supreme leader uses violence to "purify" the country and take his enemies out.

That's why Trump's chief of staff Kelly and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, are calling him a fascist who would rule like a dictator. It's why so many other security experts who served in his administration are warning about the threat he poses.

That's why Kelly revealed that Trump sometimes praised Hitler and rejected the idea that the military swears an oath to the Constitution, not a personal loyalty oath to him. That's why Milley — who Trump implied deserved execution — stated, "We don't take an oath to a king, to a tyrant or dictator or wannabe dictator."

Both men fear Trump might recall retired generals for court martial while seeking out senior officers willing to abandon their oath to the Constitution, which bars using the military against civilians except in rare circumstances.

Trump may be too erratic to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants or jail all those on his enemies list, including Nancy Pelosi and Liz Cheney, former Secretaries of Defense, and top Justice Department lawyers. Yet, there will be no Kellys or Milleys to stop him this time. Most of his MAGA movement seems blind to the danger of a U.S. system stripped of checks and balances — a system that may one day persecute their own children or grandchildren.

The choice voters face on Tuesday is clear: fascism with American characteristics, or democracy as described in the U.S. Constitution — based on the rule of law, not the rule of one man.