Amid the many extraordinary revelations at the committee’s first hearing on Jan. 6 at prime time on Thursday, one stood out for his pure depravity: that during the assault, when the mutineers chanted “hang Mike Pence” in the hallways of the Capitol, President Donald Trump suggested that the crowd really should run for its vice president.
“Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” he said, according to a committee source. “[Mike Pence] he deserves it. “
Approving violence is not new to Trump; it’s something he’s done repeatedly, often in a supposedly joking tone. But the January 6 report is qualitatively worse given the context: in the midst of a real violent attack that helped feed and one that did little to stop it. The committee verified that the president did not take any action to defend the Capitol building, did not call the National Guard, did not even talk to his secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security.
While he was de facto allowing the mafia a stir, he was privately encouraging the most violent declared target of the people he recognized as “our supporters.”
During the Trump presidency, there was a heated debate among experts as to whether it was right to describe him as a “fascist.” One of the strongest counter-arguments, that his political movement did not involve the kind of street violence characteristic of Italian and German fascism, was undermined on January 6, although some scholars still argued that the term was a bit vague.
But when a leader raises a crowd to attack democracy in order to maintain power in defiance of the democratic order, then he privately refuses to stop them while endorsing the murderous goals of the people he claims to be his own. supporters, it’s hard to see. he as anything but a leader of a violent anti-democratic movement with important parallels with interwar fascism.
This does not prove that fascism is, in all respects, a perfect analogy for the Trump presidency. However, when it comes to analyzing Jan. 6, both Trump’s behavior and the GOP’s broader response to the event, last night’s hearing showed that the analogy can’t just be successful, but also enlightening.
January 6 is the culmination of a long history of fascist rhetoric
In The Anatomy of Fascism, Columbia University historian Robert Paxton sets out a fairly clear definition of political leanings:
Fascism can be defined as a form of political behavior marked by an obsessive concern for community decay, humiliation, or victimization, and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass party of committed nationalist militants, working restlessly but effectively collaborating with traditional elites, abandoning democratic freedoms and pursuing with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restrictions goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Most of this seems to fit pretty well with trumpeting. “Obsessive Concern for Community Decline, Humiliation, or Victimization”? Check. “Compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity”? Check. “Awkward but effective collaboration with traditional elites”? Check. “No ethical or legal restrictions”? Check, check and check.
A key factor that was missing, at least for most of Trump’s presidency, was violence. Paxton’s definition underscores the centrality of force in fascist politics: that “a mass party of committed nationalist militants” uses “redemptive violence” to pursue “goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
However, Trump personally had long held a fascination with political violence. In a 1990 interview with Playboy, he praised the Chinese government’s violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square.
“When the students dumped in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost knocked it down,” Trump said. “It simply came to our notice then. That shows you the power of force. “
During the 2016 campaign, Trump suggested that “people of the Second Amendment” could be justified in killing Hillary Clinton if she won the race. He repeatedly encouraged his supporters to attack the counter-protesters, even offering to pay their legal fees. The dangers were obvious; During the Republican primary, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) warned that his language could lead to mass violence:
He is a man who in the demonstrations has told his supporters to basically beat the people in the crowd and he will pay his legal fees, someone who has encouraged people in the public to mistreat anyone who stands up. and say something that he. does not like. ⁇
But leaders cannot say what they want, because words have consequences. They lead to actions that others take. And when the person you are supporting for the presidency goes around and says things like, “Go ahead and slap them, I’ll pay you the legal fees,” what do you think will happen next?
During his presidency, his fascination with extralegal violence arose over and over again.
In 2017, he described some of Charlottesville’s white supremacists as “very good people.” During a 2019 rally, he “joked” about shooting migrants at the border, in the spirit of the crowd. In a 2020 tweet, he used a segregation-era slogan to call for violence against George Floyd’s protests (“when the looting begins, the shooting begins”). During a presidential debate with Joe Biden, Trump told the Proud Boys, a far-right militia that would later lead the assault on the Capitol, to “stand back and stand on the sidelines.”
What this record shows is that the potential of a Trump-led political movement to provoke bloodshed has always been there. The president seemed to believe in the power of cleansing and redemption of violence; it has been a hallmark of his thinking for years, even decades. That he sometimes frames these comments as jokes, or even backtracks after offering them, is characteristic of right-wing political movements, which often present their most extreme positions in a kind of ironic tone that allows to his supporters simultaneously embracing radical ideas while moving away from them.
The question about Trump was whether his fascination with violence would ever manifest itself in a mass movement: that he would align himself with an illegal violent action designed to ensure his own control of power.
This, of course, happened on January 6th. But as the facts unfolded, there was crucial information we did not know: to what extent Trump intended to encourage violence and how he reacted as it unfolded in real time.
In the first point, committee chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) suggested in an interview that they had evidence that Trump’s team was in direct contact with both the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers, the other militia group. who led the attack. His test was not presented last night; There is also evidence that Trump’s subordinates would not allow him to communicate directly with extremist groups. This makes it still difficult to assess the issue of intentionality.
But on the second point, the committee’s evidence is compelling. The comment about hanging Pence, along with his refusal to do anything to stop the violence, clearly indicates that the president was right with the violence procedure: that he saw it as in favor of his cause. This is certainly fascist.
Does the label “fascism” matter?
Like my colleague Dylan Matthews, I have long hesitated to describe Trump as a fascist.
Unlike the interwar fascists, Trump has not presented an ideological alternative to liberal democracy that involves the abolition of elections; in fact, it seems to have no coherent ideology. The biggest threat that the Trump-led GOP poses to democracy is not the explicit overthrow of democracy, but its emptying from within, an end that is much more like Jim Crow South or contemporary Hungary than in Nazi Germany. There is a real concern, in my mind, that hyperfocusing in the interwar model may bog us down in a definition debate that distracts from more resonant and informative parallels.
But when we talk about January 6 in particular, the analogy of fascism is really useful.
Events such as the 1922 March in Rome or the Putsch of the Beer Hall in 1923 help us to understand how attempts to seize power by force, even the failed Putsch, can play a role in the rise of far-right radical movements. They help us understand the clarifying and organizing power of violence, how joining together to hurt others can help consolidate dangerous political tendencies.
And it helps us understand the potential for recurrence of violence, especially given the Republican Party’s continued January 6 fit.
One of the defining elements of the interwar fascist rise is the complicity of conservative elites: their belief that they could manipulate fascist movements for their own ends, empowering those movements while remaining in the driver’s seat. This is precisely how the dominant Republican Party has approached Trump, even after a violent attempt to seize power exposed how far it is willing to go to maintain power.
In the midst of last night’s hearing, the Republican’s official Twitter account in the House Judiciary Committee mocked and repeatedly downplayed the importance of the committee’s hearing, even calling it “old news”.
Everyone. old. News.
– Judicial House GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) June 10, 2022
It wasn’t. Although some of the revelations had been widely telegraphed by leaks, including comments about hanging Pence, the details were yet to be made public, and there were many revelations that were simply new.
But the problem here is not the inaccuracy of facts on the part of the House GOP. The fact is that the official organs of the Republican Party saw his work as covering for Trump, although there was evidence that …