The F-Word

As the alt-right billionaire to whom Trump has delegated his core Article II powers engages in an orgy of illegality in order to bring down the foundations of the administrative state, John Ganz revisits the always strange and ahistorical idea that Trump is too “weak” to pose a genuine threat to the constitutional order:

“Trump is Weak”

This is a common insistence of critics of the fascism thesis, like Corey Robin. This is based on the misguided notion that fascism represents power itself, a notion ironically borrowed from fascist propaganda itself. The story goes that Trump has very little power over Congress, is still not very popular, and therefore his record will be marked by failures more than successes. They point to his difficulty in getting his cabinet picks through. In terms of the Constitutional system, yes, Trump is weak and ought to be checked as such, but that is precisely why he is trying to bend and break the Constitutional system and replace it with rule by decree. He must lean hard on executive power. This is in line with historical fascist movements, none of which ever got close to the popular vote that Trump did, by the way. They had to use force to offset a lack of political consent. Their justification for taking extraordinary action was the sclerotic and corrupt process of parliamentary legislation, hence the need for “a strong hand.”

Corey Robin now calls Trump 2.0 a “hostile takeover” presidency, but commentators have observed this for some time and used it to describe Trump 1.0’s initial success in shaping an agenda through executive actions alone. In their 2020 book, Trump, the Administrative Presidency, and Federalism by Frank J. Thompson, Kenneth K. Wong, and Barry G. Rabe, the authors applied the very term “hostile takeover” to describe how the first Trump presidency “pushed the envelope of executive action to unprecedented levels in the annals of the administrative presidency.” What we are witnessing now is just the intensification of this use of the executive. The fact that Trump must rely on the idea of an all-powerful executive makes his regime more dictatorial in nature not less.

Another part of the weakness thesis is that the coalition of Trump has significant divisions and contradictions. Again, critics of the fascism thesis are taken in by fascist propaganda that depicts the party as moving in unity with the will of the leader. Historical fascist movements were highly fractious and even incoherent. Both Italian Fascism and Nazism contained a populist “left” that was sidelined—or even destroyed—in the interests of taking power and calming the nerves of an anxious bourgeoisie. Dylan Riley, a major critic of the fascism thesis makes this analogy himself, in the revised preface The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: “Like Mussolini and Hitler, Trump faces a Fronde under Bannon, who reminds one of Farinacci.”1 (Roberto Farinacci was chief of the pro-worker “national syndicalist” wing of the party whose power declined as Mussolini grew closer to industrial interests.) This move from “populism” to the frank embrace of capitalists is in keeping with historical fascist movement dynamics.

“Trump still relies on the constitutional order”

I wonder how much that is the case anymore?

Back in 2020, Robin said this in an interview with Jewish Currents:

It’s ironic to me that people would choose this moment, and Trump’s presidency, to assign the label “fascist” to the right, for what fascism is about, above all else, is a politics of strength and will. That’s why fascists traditionally loathe the constitutional order: because they think it constrains the assertion of political will. The irony of Trumpist/GOP politics is that it is completely dependent upon the constitutional order. In that regard, it’s almost the complete opposite of fascism.

The fact of the matter is that no less than Trump, the historical fascists came to power through the existing institutions of a constitutional system, both in the legal and formal sense—they were invited to form government by the head of state—and the political sense—they ruled—initially—in coalition with other parties. It’s true that historical fascisms strained against this framework and sought to undermine it and destroy it, but they had to cooperate with features of the old regime as well, in keeping with the limits of their political power.

It’s often said by critics of the fascism thesis that it’s absurd to compare Trumpism to fascism since we clearly didn’t live under a repressive fascist regime in Trump 1.0. Very few people said we were living under a fascist regime, they said Trump was substantively a fascist, a different stipulation. The critics try to elide the difference between a fascist movement and a fascist regime to ridicule their opponents, but they also ignore what actually—existing fascism looked like. In Italy, Mussolini governed in tandem with the old political system from 1922 until 1925, when the true dictatorship phase started in the wake of the Matteotti crisis, a debacle that seriously threatened his rule. At first, Mussolini tried to avoid a confrontation on the question of dictatorship vs. parliamentary rule even though radical members of his movement demanded a revolutionary move because he was uncertain he had the political strength to force the issue. He attempted to consolidate power and conservatives tried to normalize his movement and channel its energies into conventional political forms. The first years of fascism saw the coexistence of fascist rule and accelerating repression with competitive elections, a free press, and a pluralist public sphere. (Giacomo Matteotti was murdered for publishing a book and giving speeches in parliament, where he was a socialist deputy.) And until a crisis forced Mussolini’s hand, it appeared that the situation had stabilized into a kind of hybrid regime.

Complacency about a second Trump term based on internal bureaucratic resistance in the first term ignores the obvious fact that the people who would determine the direction of Trump 2.0 were very aware of this limitation, and put their plan to overcome it on a website and everything. That Trump himself is not supervising this on micro level is beside the point; Hilter himself was not exactly a detail man either,

In addition, I think that arguments about “weakness” that focus on dysfunction within the Republican congressional conference fundamentally misunderstand the asymmetry between reactionary and progressive goals. You’ve probably seen people react to President Elon with “but why didn’t Obama/Biden do this?,” a question which as Dylan Matthews observes has an obvious answer:

This reflects a deep misunderstanding of why Trump and Musk are going so hard on impoundment.

It’s an inherently asymmetric power. It gives the president the power to destroy existing programs, but not to create new ones. You can end Medicare, but never do Medicare for all. https://t.co/jZ92hrGcDC— dylan matthews (@dylanmatt) February 4, 2025

The political left needs a functioning Congress and a strong administrative state to accomplish its most of its core goals. MAGA does not, an in many respects these things are antithetical to its goals. Unilateral, illegal executive action is therefore far more useful to the latter than the former, and this goes double in a context in which the federal judiciary restricts the ability of Democratic presidents to use even powers expressly delegated to it by Congress.