‘If you genuinely think Trump is a fascist, go and have a lie down’ Tom Slater
This is an edited version of a speech that was delivered at the Cambridge Union on February 6 opposing the motion, ‘This house believes Donald Trump is a 21st-century fascist’.
Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump. Il Duce, der Führer, The Donald. The Roman salute, the Sieg Heil, the YMCA dance. The comparison is so absurd it practically debunks itself.
Anyone who genuinely thinks that Trump’s America – whatever else you might think of the man or his policies – can be mentioned in the same breath as fascist Italy or Nazi Germany needs to get a grip.
Because let’s be clear about what we are talking about here. Fascism, and especially its Nazi incarnation, was an evil the like of which the world had never seen before. Or, thankfully, since.
Totalitarian control. Messianic dictatorship. A cult of racial superiority. Paramilitaries crushing the left at home. A Darwinian military struggle for supremacy abroad. The worship of war and violence. The mechanised attempt to murder all of Europe’s Jews.
If this sounds anything like America in 2025 to you, then I suggest you leave here right now and go and have a nice, long lie down.
Trump is many things. He’s a right-wing populist. He’s a trenchant opponent of illegal and mass migration. He’s a culture warrior. He can also be a thin-skinned, occasionally conspiratorial, blowhard.
But try as I might, I am struggling to find the extermination camps or the goose-stepping gunmen killing with impunity. Perhaps my colleagues on the other side can enlighten me.
I almost feel sorry for the speakers for the proposition. It must be exhausting – petrifying even – to see fascism everywhere. To see everyone who disagrees with you, about immigration or gender or whatever, as literally Hitler. I’m amazed you can sleep at night.
Of course, the reason I’m sure you can sleep at night, the reason you’re here arguing the toss with us rather than joining some anti-fascist militia in the Midwest, is because, deep down, you know that what you’re saying is pearl-clutching nonsense.
Ladies and gentlemen, I implore you to look at what the ‘Trump is Hitler’ contingent do, rather than what they say.
Look at America. The Democrats spent months – years, in fact – insisting that Trump was a Nazi with a spray tan. That he was an existential threat to the American republic.
And then, he won. Again. With the election over, the scare stories were no longer useful. The Democrats didn’t rush to the barricades, they showed up and made sour faces at his inauguration. I don’t know about you, but that is not what I would have done if I thought a new fascist epoch was upon us.
Similarly, for all of Trump’s tantrums after the 2020 election, for all his shameful spreading of conspiracy theories about the presidency being ‘stolen’ from him, and despite the dumb and senseless riot that was ‘January 6’, he did step down. The peaceful transfer of power took place. Fascists don’t tend to allow that to happen.
The conflation of populism and fascism reflects an enduring myth about fascism. There is this idea that fascism is what happens when you have an excess of democracy, that if you give the voters what they want you are on the slippery slope to a new 1930s. This myth really needs to die.
Hitler and Mussolini were not voted in to power. They never won a majority in free and fair elections. They were handed power by desiccated ruling elites who decided to side with fascism in the hopes of crushing working-class, leftist revolution.
Back to Trump. There are all sorts of things you might want to criticise the US president for. You can absolutely say that Trump is illiberal, that he’s wont to fly off the handle over words that hurt him or democratic votes that do not go his way.
But that doesn’t make him a fascist. If he was in the UK, that would make him a Guardian columnist, or a Labour politician – the sort of people who have spent the past few years taking ostentatious offence to things or demanding a second Brexit referendum, in the hope they’ll get the ‘right’ answer next time.
I have noticed the precise wording of the motion. Particularly, that qualifier, ‘a 21st-century fascist’. That gives the proposition side a bit more leeway to try to make their nonsensical arguments. It allows them to say that Trump doesn’t have to be a carbon copy of Hitler to fit their own tortured definition of ‘fascism’.
We’re being told that the definition of a fascist is one thing, the definition of a ‘21st-century fascist’ is another, and that it doesn’t matter that they don’t resemble one another much at all. That is a ridiculous argument and one we should reject.
We’ve heard a series of cherrypicked quotes, the odd policy, or hand gesture, that, if you squint hard enough, if you ignore all context and suspend all disbelief, bears some vague, superficial likeness to the fascist movements and symbols of the past.
We’ve heard shock and horror about the way Trump talks about immigration, blithely ignoring the fact that Barack Obama, in both of his terms, deported more people than Trump did in his first term. Apparently, because Obama didn’t say mean things on social media while he was doing it, no one in this room is bothered about it.
We’ve heard Trump accused of robbing transgender people of their rights, in proto-fascistic fashion – purely because he is willing to say that someone who has gone through the benefits of male puberty should not be allowed to punch women in the face in a boxing ring.
Still, the proposition would be wise not to make these kinds of points.
Because stretching the definition of fascism is not just grim and incorrect. It amounts to plundering some of the darkest moments of human history, exploiting the unique suffering of those who perished in gas chambers and in ghettos, in order to score some cheap political points.
The insistence on calling Trump ‘fascist’ says less about him and the populist movement he has improbably come to lead, and more about the people relentlessly flinging the accusation at him.
It reveals a clapped-out political establishment that no longer knows what it stands for, that can no longer justify why it should be in charge, and so demonises any opposition to its rule as proto-Nazi.
It also reveals an increasingly bourgeois left that has become so detached from, and disdainful of, working-class people that when the left sees millions of voters rebel against the elites, it instantly assumes they have been whipped up into a racist frenzy. Even when many of those voters are black, Muslim and Latino, record numbers of whom backed Trump in November last year.
This use and abuse of the f-word has been going on for a very long time. Almost as soon as fascism arrived on the political scene, people were throwing that word around like muck, hoping it would stick to their political opponents or people they just happen to dislike.
George Orwell took aim at this tendency back in 1944. He recalled hearing ‘fascist’ applied to conservatives, socialists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, supporters of the war, opponents of the war, farmers, shopkeepers, astrology, women, dogs. The word had been degraded, he concluded, ‘to the level of a swearword’. How true that is.
You might be thinking, okay, but does it really matter? Why get so exercised about the most powerful man in the world being called names in the media? It’s a fair enough question to ask.
Well, firstly, this isn’t just about Donald Trump. The insistence that the populist revolts of 2016 were all about fascist demagogues, manipulating people to their sinister ends, is a smear on ordinary people. It’s a naked attempt to delegitimise democracy. It’s an attempt to shame the working classes for daring to reject an out-of-touch political establishment that – whatever you think of Trump himself – they were absolutely right to reject.
Secondly, I implore you to vote against this motion, because words and historical memory matter. To say that Trump is a fascist – and to allow his hysterical critics to pose as the heirs to the French resistance – is to denude fascism and anti-fascism of their meaning.
Anti-fascism used to mean risking it all to fight Franco’s forces in Spain, as Orwell did. Anti-fascism used to mean facing down Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts in the East End. Today, anti-fascism means trying to get the leader of the free world banned from social media, or shouting obscenities at MAGA-hatted truck drivers in the street. We should reject this degradation of the once-proud tradition of anti-fascism.
Most importantly, if we accept this motion, we accept the dilution of fascism and its horrors. We reduce it to a swearword and a smear. We turn the graveyards of the 20th century into a playground in which to have out our own political spats. That is an insult to the millions of people who lost their lives to fascism, particularly European Jewry.
I hope you will reject this motion.
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