Trump’s checklist for building a fascist goverment (Part I)

Whether US President Donald Trump and his supporters are establishing a fascist dictatorship is a question that’s been asked since his first election. And as his second administration proves to be focused, organised and swift in a way his original was not, this question has only taken on an increased urgency.

The common retort to calling the Trump administration “fascist” is that it’s merely the left upset that someone they don’t like is doing things in government they don’t like. And indeed, many items on this checklist are legally permitted under the purview of the president.

But it is important to judge these actions cumulatively, and to keep in mind the stark warning of General John F. Kelly — Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff — in the lead-up to last year’s poll that returned Trump to power:

Looking at the definition of fascism: it’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterised by a dictatorial leader, centralised autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy … certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America … Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure … He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.

This is Crikey’s first instalment of Trump’s dictator checklist. We have strived to avoid cataloguing rhetoric unattached to a concrete action — if we were to list every time Trump sounded like a fascist, we would never know when to stop.

Installing loyalists at the head of state security apparatus

In February Trump abruptly fired Air Force General CQ Brown Jr as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sidelining a history-making fighter pilot and respected officer as part of a campaign led by his defense secretary to rid the military of leaders who support diversity measures and “wokeism”.

Brown was replaced by Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, who failed the legislatively mandated prerequisites of the role, including serving as either the vice chairman, a combatant commander or a service chief. However, these can be waived by the president.

In his speech to CPAC in 2024, Trump said he had met Caine in a 2018 visit to American troops in Iraq.

“He said, ‘I’ll kill for you, sir,” Trump claimed. “Then he puts on a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat.” (Unnamed officials close to Caine have denied this account.)

Trump then installed Kash Patel, a full-throated Trump loyalist with no law enforcement or executive experience, as head of the FBI. Patel has said the FBI is part of a deep state conspiracy against Trump and that the Trump administration will “come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections … We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly — we’ll figure that out”.

Dan Bongino, a podcaster who helped spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, has been appointed as Patel’s deputy.

As director of the CIA, politician and attorney John Ratcliffe, one of Trump’s most loyal defenders in Congress, has been installed.

At the end of January, there were more than a dozen firings at the Justice Department of the investigators who had worked on criminal investigations into Trump.

At the Federal Communication Commission, the broadcasting watchdog, Trump has appointed Brendan Carr as chairman. Carr has been “appearing non-stop on Fox News and other outlets with an uncharacteristically partisan message on pending FCC and, notably, non-FCC, issues,” as one expert told NPR, and has fawned over Trump on social media. Trump has expressed his desire to punish broadcasters who fact-check or criticise him.

This leads us nicely to the FCC having dutifully demanded that CBS hand over the raw material of its 60 Minutes interview with Democratic candidate for president Kamala Harris. Trump ally and unelected budget slasher Elon Musk has argued that “60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election. They deserve a long prison sentence.”

CBS rolled over rather than mount a First Amendment defence. Which isn’t a great sign given this is not an isolated incident. The Associated Press is currently fighting the Trump administration’s decision to ban it from the White House press pool, on account of the organisation’s refusal to update its style guide to conform with Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker has said: “Having served as a Moscow correspondent in the early days of Putin’s reign,” the Trump White House’s pool takeover “reminds me of how the Kremlin took over its own press pool and made sure that only compliant journalists were given access”.

Writer Masha Gessen has written an entire book on the parallels between Trump and Putin, and Nobel Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa compared Trump to the actions of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, whose government prosecuted her in 2019: “I feel like I’m living through this twice. What you’re seeing is exactly that — think about it as death by a thousand cuts. You’re bleeding so much that, at some point, the body politic dies.”

Elsewhere, Trump is also suing the Des Moines Register and threatening to sue The Wall Street Journal.

Attacks on the judiciary

As the AP case demonstrated, the best way for a president to head off disputes with the judiciary is to simply appoint enough friendly judges that your decisions are always upheld when challenged.

But if that can’t always be done, you can simply try to get judges removed. Musk and the White House have attacked judges and called for their impeachment several times in the short time Trump has been in office, unsurprisingly, given the unconstitutional nature of many of Trump’s executive orders.

In mid-February a federal judge ordered health agencies to restore websites that had been swiftly taken down after Trump’s executive order regarding “gender ideology extremism”, and there were successive setbacks to the administration’s attempts to freeze federal spending.

A Republican congressman with the unimprovable name of Dan Ogles has gone a step further, filing a resolution seeking to have US District Judge Amir Ali impeached. The move will almost certainly fail, and possibly has more to do with Ogles’ attempts to top the competitive category of Trump’s most reliable lickspittle — he made headlines earlier this year by trying to amend the constitution so Trump could serve a third term as president:

[Trump has] proven himself to be the only figure in modern history capable of reversing our nation’s decay and restoring America to greatness, and he must be given the time necessary to accomplish that goal.

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Stay tuned for Part II: attacks on the constitution, greater control of intellectual life, and imperialism.

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