On October 27, 2024, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump—now president-elect—stood on a podium in Madison Square Garden, surrounded by thousands of fans.

“On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history,” the candidate says. “And I am calling for the death penalty for any migrant who kills an American citizen.”

The crowd went wild. Trump told them that from the moment he returns to power, he will begin targeting his political opposition, including journalists and critical academics. He continued calling his opponents the “enemy within.” 

“U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!” the crowd chanted.

The reaction was swift from the liberal class. Trump, they said, is a fascist—an authoritarian thug who plans to dismantle the longstanding institutions of American democracy. The Democrats’ presidential campaign, particularly in the home stretch of the election, really stressed this. The Democratic Party, with Kamala Harris as its presidential candidate, represented a continuation of American liberal democracy, while Trump represented an external—and existential— threat, backed by a growing coalition of global anti-democratic forces. Democracy, they said repeatedly, was on the ballot.

Harris tried to tap into Americans’ positive vision of their role in the world—the deeply American myth of the country as a shining city on a hill, a beacon of democracy and freedom that guides the rest of the world towards liberty. It’s a deeply rooted piece of the American psyche, one that is more or less accepted as gospel across the mainstream political spectrum in the country. America, they say, is a force for good in the world.

Trump, in the narrative of American liberals, represents a break with that history—with his disrespect for democratic institutions, his open racism and sexism, his desire to target political opponents and wide swaths of the population with violence. This, we heard repeatedly, isn’t America.

On November 5, Americans went to the polls. In a landslide, they chose to reject the notion that “this” is not America. That choice is as American as apple pie. 

1934

A group of lawyers, jurists, and officials sat in a room in Germany on June 5, 1934. It was a year and a half into the rule of Adolf Hitler. The group had been given an urgent task by leadership—to write laws creating a racial definition of citizenship in the Reich. 

While all participants agreed that excluding Jews and non-Aryans from citizenship rights and preserving the “Aryan” and “Nordic” character of the German “race” were laudable goals, the “moderates” at the meeting pointed out that defining Jewishness—and racial identity more broadly—was fraught with problems. How could judges be expected to convict people for the “crime” of racial intermarriage, for example, when race is impossible to scientifically define?

On the other side, fascist hardliners argued that race should not be defined scientifically, but politically, according to the principles of Nazi ideology. There were many examples that the Nazi state could follow, the hardliners argued, pointing to white South Africa and other ethno-states. Among them, one stood out as the country with the most highly developed race laws in the world—the United States of America. 

In the U.S., the hardliners argued—an argument outlined in stenographic detail by the historian James Whitman in Hitler’s American Model—the Aryan state could find a clear example of racial hierarchy codified into law, defined on political terms. Such laws ran through every facet of American jurisprudence, from immigration law to property law to laws governing private sexual activity between consenting adults.

Hitler himself agreed. In Mein Kampf, the future architect of the Holocaust lauded the USA for “excluding certain races from naturalization” and suggested that American laws point towards the types of racial conceptions of citizenship that he envisioned for Germany. 

“The racially pure and still unmixed German has risen to become master of the American continent,” he wrote, “and he will remain master as long as he does not fall victim to racial pollution.”

The Nazis’ interest was not just in American race law inside territories it governed, but in the formation of the United States. Hitler, a man who loved American cowboy films and wild west mythology, viewed the U.S.’ westward expansion—and its contingent genocide of the territory’s Indigenous Peoples—as the core inspiration for Germany’s lebensraum, the Nazi program of eastward territorial expansion into the lands of the Soviet Union.

“Our Mississippi must be the Volga, not the Niger,” Hitler once said, contrasting the American model of a continental, land-based empire against overseas European colonies held by countries like England and France—a parallel explored in greater detail in The American West and the Nazi East by Caroll P. Kakel. In order to reach the Volga, the Nazi state would need to pass through the territories of Slavic and Jewish untermenschen—or “under-men,” a term originally coined by an American Ku Klux Klanner. 

“I don’t see why a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword,” Hitler remarked. “When we eat wheat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indians.” 

The American-inspired hardliners won the day at the 1934 meeting. The resulting document provided the foundation for the Nuremberg Race Laws, which stripped German Jews of citizenship in the “Aryan” nation.

1970

It had been 11 days since Chile’s 1970 presidential election, in which the candidate for the left-wing coalition, Salvador Allende, won a plurality of votes on a platform of nationalizing key resources, redistributing wealth, and building economic democracy. American president Richard Nixon, on advice from a council of American businessmen, authorized an operation to overthrow the Chilean government, which had not yet assumed office.

Three years later, the operation was successful. On September 11, 1973, an army officer named Augusto Pinochet, with the backing of the United States, led troops to the country’s presidential palace, dropping bombs from the sky on the besieged building. Allende’s final speech before his death, broadcast over the radio from inside the palace, denounced the “fascism” that “has been already present for many hours” in the country.

The Pinochet dictatorship, which held power for nearly two decades, worked in close collaboration with its main sponsor in Washington, DC. It rounded up political opposition, including artists and academics, and sent thousands of them to their deaths in concentration camps. With training from the United States, the Chilean state began an international campaign of terrorism called Operation Condor, in which South America’s U.S.-sponsored right-wing dictatorships engaged in a cross-border program of assassinations against leftists, journalists, trade unionists, and dissidents. 

The United States backed Condor, just like it backed similar programs elsewhere in the world—such as the mass killings in Indonesia in 1965, in which U.S.-backed death squads murdered up to three million people and installed a military dictatorship that would last three decades.

The United States has, for many in the world, been a harbinger of fascism and dictatorship. From the first successful CIA-led overthrows of democratically elected governments in the 1950s, in Iran and in Guatemala, the United States has been the world’s greatest champion of anti-democratic regimes and organizations. It sponsored right-wing extremist terrorist groups in Western Europe, under the banner of Operation Gladio, to prevent leftist political parties from winning elections. It provided weapons and diplomatic cover to apartheid regimes like white South Africa and Israel. It provided support to death squads in Central America as they exterminated Indigenous populations in the 1980s and 1990s. This has always been the face of Uncle Sam in the world.

The Martinique-born poet, author and politician Aimé Césaire, in his seminal 1950 work Discourse on Colonialism, wrote that fascism should be understood as colonialism turned inward. Among the ruins of the Holocaust, Césaire wrote that fascism represents a continuation of the European colonial project—not an outgrowth of unexplained and exceptional violence, but, rather, the violence that European empires commit elsewhere in the world, coming home.

This explanation came in direct opposition to another, still-common explanation of the Holocaust—as a freak event, an exceptional deviation from the tradition of European liberalism, a type of collective insanity that descended on the German people as a result of their specific circumstances. A form of pure evil that exists outside of history or context. 

Like the liberal view of Trump, this perspective prevents us from placing fascism in its historic context and learning the lessons of it.

Colonization, Césaire wrote, “works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism.” Hitler, Césaire wrote, “applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”

Other scholars have come to term this phenomenon the “imperial boomerang,” a process by which the techniques of repression that empires—like the United States—develop in conquered territories eventually come home to the imperial metropole.

2024

“The thing that I kept thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020 is that these guys have all read Carl Schmitt—there’s no law, there’s just power,” then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance told columnist Ross Douthat during the 2024 campaign. “And the goal here is to get back in power.”

Donald Trump has probably not read Carl Schmitt, but JD Vance, who went to law school at Yale, certainly has—and his reference here might provide insights into what’s to come. Arguably the single most influential jurist associated with the German Nazi regime, Carl Schmitt was a proponent of using the power of individual rulers—kings, dictators, and so on—to act as sovereigns. His early work, written during the Weimar era as critiques of liberal democracy, provided much of the legal justification for Hitler’s dictatorship. He spent his time as a faithful lapdog to the Nazis during their time in power.

What Vance summed up as “there’s no law, just power” was a bastardization of a classic Schmitt phrase—“sovereign is he who decides the exception,” from the text Political Theology. The rule of law, Schmitt argued, is never fixed, and always subject to being broken in “exceptional” circumstances. To wield power is to decide when those circumstances are.

Donald Trump, who has openly expressed his intentions to be a “dictator on day one,” spent much of his first term governing through executive order and presidential power. Trump’s executive was a muscular one—and his second term is likely to be even more so.

Trump was not the first president to embrace a quasi-Schmittian view of executive power. Every modern U.S. president, particularly since 9/11, has done so. One of George W. Bush’s chief legal advisors, John Yoo, was a proponent of the “unitary executive theory,” which argues that U.S. presidents have sole jurisdictional authority over the entire executive branch of the government. 

Yoo also could have been pulling directly from Schmitt when he helped to draw up the U.S. justification for its global network of torture black sites and concentration camps during the War on Terror. Barack Obama, for his part, was the first U.S. president to personally sign off on the targeted assassination of a U.S. citizen—Anwar al-Awlaki—without a trial, a decision which his judicial advisors justified using language around exceptional circumstances. If Schmitt were still alive, he might say that such is the nature of sovereignty.

Trump, then, should be viewed not as some historic aberration, but as a particularly extreme manifestation of a phenomenon that has always been present in the American project. Now, though, the chickens are coming home to roost. 

Articulating a vision that challenges Trumpism means grappling with this reality. Trump, the man, will eventually disappear. But without changing the dynamics that produce American fascism—that is, white supremacy and empire—there will be more Trumps to come in the future.