Trump administration 2026: Fascist dystopia or farcically incompetent clown show?

Trick question!

First, Michelle Goldberg (gift link) notes that those of us who have been pointing out the fascist essence Donald Trump and Trumpism have been right all along, while the “it doesn’t check this box right here perfectly so the guardrails are still there” types have been spectacularly and disastrously mistaken:

From the moment he descended his golden escalator, Trump’s message, the emotional core of his movement, has been textbook fascism. In his 2004 book “The Anatomy of Fascism,” the eminent historian Robert O. Paxton described the “mobilizing passions” that form fascism’s foundation. Among them are a “sense of overwhelming crisis” that renders traditional solutions obsolete; a belief that one’s own group has been victimized, justifying almost any action in redress; “dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict and alien influences”; and the need for a strong male leader with instincts more powerful than mere “abstract and universal reason.”

The premonitions of our current regime in Paxton’s work don’t stop there. Fascism, in his telling, is marked by its contradictory attitude toward modernity: a hatred of atomized urban life combined with a fetish for technology. Fascist movements “exploited the protests of the victims of rapid industrialization and globalization,” he wrote, though in power, they doubled down on industrial concentration. And, of course, fascists “need a demonized enemy against which to mobilize followers.”

If Trump didn’t always act on his most fascistic predilections in his first term, it was because he was restrained by the establishment types around him. Mark Esper, Trump’s former defense secretary, said that Trump repeatedly broached the idea of bombing Mexico. In 2019, Trump canceled a meeting with Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark after she refused to entertain the idea of selling him Greenland. His taste for violence against his political enemies has never been secret, and was made clearest on Jan. 6, the event that led a once-doubtful Paxton to conclude that the word “fascist” applied to Trump.

None of this means that America is destined to become a fully fascist country. For now, we are trapped in the space between the liberal democracy most Americans grew up in and the dark, belligerent authoritarian state that our government seeks to impose. The important thing isn’t really the name we give to this political development, but our ability to see what’s happening clearly and make sense of its likely trajectory.

On the last page of “The Anatomy of Fascism,” Paxton offers a warning. “We know from tracing its path that fascism does not require a spectacular ‘march’ on some capital to take root,” he writes. “Seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of national ‘enemies’ is enough.”

I had a horrifying realization yesterday, when I was trying to explain to a bunch of law students who are almost all more than 40 years younger than I am, that what’s happening in America is not in any way normal. For example, Donald Trump’s weaponization of the DOJ to abuse the criminal legal process to extort a federal agency into submitting to his demands is a very reminiscent of the Saturday Night Massacre in 1973 (naturally I explained what that was), which was a cataclysmic political scandal at the time. In America 2026, it was Monday.

The realization was that, to these bright, curious, and — relatively speaking — politically engaged young people, all this is normal. They were almost all in middle school/junior high when Donald Trump got elected the first time. Trumpism and the to this point largely ineffective resistance to it has simply always been the way of the political and cultural world in America, since they began to become conscious of it in a concrete way. They were more or less the same age in 2016 that I was in 1973, when Watergate exploded, and became the first political event that I followed with a level of interest comparable to that which I had previously reserved for Michigan football games and Detroit Tigers’ box scores. The big difference in this analogy is, when Gerald Ford ascended to the presidency upon Nixon’s resignation and declared that “our long national nightmare is over,” he was referring to a period of approximately 18 months! Needless to say the current nightmare from which we are trying to awake has been going on for a full decade, and shows no sign of ending any time soon. To me, the past decade has been an often surreal and always disturbing rupture in the flow of normal political life. For my students in their mid-20s, it is simply life in America.

Relatedly, left-wing journalist and ardent Trump opponent Laura Jedeed — I am told by the internet that Jedeed is an Arabic word that means “new,” “fresh,” or “innovative” — took her on its face terroristic name and flagrantly seditious Google history to an ICE recruiting event in Dallas last August, to see how far she could get in the recruiting process for what she has repeatedly called in cyberprint “America’s Gestapo.” Hilarity (of a sort) ensued:

“I clicked through to my application tracking page,” she wrote. “They’d sent my final offer on Sept. 30, it said, and I had allegedly accepted. ‘Welcome to Ice… Your duty location is New York, New York. Your EOD was on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025.'”

”By all appearances, I was a deportation officer. Without a single signature on agency paperwork, ICE had officially hired me. Perhaps, if I’d accepted, they would have demanded my pre-employment paperwork, done a basic screening, realized their mistake, and fired me immediately.”

“And yet, the pending and upcoming tasks list suggested a very different outcome. My physical fitness test had been initiated on Oct. 6, it said: three days in the future. My medical check had apparently been completed on Oct. 6.” . . .Though Jedeed declined to accept the employment offer, she did note some who had joined the organization were being told to prepare for on-the-street action rather than administrative work.

Jedeed wrote, “The officer ran down other departments I might end up in: Prosecutions, Removal Coordination Unit, or Detention. The point being that I should not expect to be a badass street officer on Day 1.”

“’I have so many guys that come over to me, they’re like, “I’m gonna put cuffs on somebody. I’m gonna arrest somebody.” Well, you need to master this first and then we’ll see about getting you on the field.’ I told him that I was fine with office work—with my analyst background, it seemed like a better fit for my skill set anyway.”

“His attitude shift was subtle, but instant and unmistakable; this was the wrong attitude and the wrong answer. ‘Just to be upfront, the goal is to put as many guns and badges out in the field as possible,’ he said.”

Jedeed went on to suggest the “only thing ICE is screening for is a desire to work for ICE: a very specific kind of person perfectly suited for the kind of mission creep we are currently seeing.”

The columnist concluded that ICE was falling well behind where due dilligence is concerned. “But given all of the above, it seems far more likely that ICE is running an extremely leaky ship when it comes to recruitment,” Jedeed wrote. “With no oversight and with ICE concealing its agents’ identities, it’ll be extremely difficult for us to know.”

Again this is someone who literally five seconds of googling would reveal was an enemy of the state, bent on the destruction of the herrenvolk and its leader, who has been personally chosen by Confederate Jesus to save America from people who look and most of all think exactly like Laura Jedeed.

Buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy [fill in with alarmingly long time period].