Turns Out, Trump Isn’t a Fascist — He’s a Stooge
Question is, who’s really in charge?
by ANDREW DOBBS
Two months into Donald Trump’s rule, it looks like calling him a fascist was giving him too much credit, after all. Less a coherent project, his regime has emerged instead as an unprincipled terrain of struggle for a variety of reactionary opportunists and extremists.
To put it another way, we’ve been talking a lot on DEFIANT about whether there’s a coup brewing against Trump. But the better question may be just how many coups are brewing, and which of them are likely to succeed?
Fascists such as Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini were certainly motivated by narcissism and obsessive needs for personal power — like Trump is — but they also displayed the capacity for self-sacrifice and austerity in the pursuit of deeply-held political goals.
Trump doesn’t even work on weekends.
Hitler and Mussolini were driven not just by their egos, but by values — namely hatred for specific enemies. They were willing to go to jail, wreck their regimes and even die in pursuit of victory over them.
Trump, on the other hand, went from months of China-bashing to a dramatic change of tune right around the time the People’s Republic offered his companies extraordinary trademark protection. At the same time, his months of unprecedented fealty to Russia seem to have given way in recent weeks to a change of heart as he appoints hardline critics of Vladimir Putin into high-profile positions such as NATO ambassador and ambassador to the United Nations.
Trump got his payoff from Russia, it seems, and then his political demands made it better for him to screw Russia — so he did so without hesitation.
Trump isn’t motivated by a fascist vision, but narcissism, corruption, reaction and incompetence. But what about Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller — who is such a fascist he even looks like Joseph Goebbels? Don’t they prove that Trump is a Nazi?
Not exactly. They are instead just two of the most visible players in the intense and complex struggle to seize the advantage offered by Trump’s disregard for the power of his position.
Past dilettante or overwhelmed presidents — most notably Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding — presided over profoundly corrupt administrations full of bandits who found room for their abuses in a space the president couldn’t be bothered to keep clean.
Right now the various factions vying for control of the federal government under Trump can be broken down into two large categories — the coup and the collaborators.
The coup is comprised of so-called “Deep State” elements, led by the CIA, that certainly don’t mind Trump’s corporate giveaways and generally reactionary policies, but they see his corrupt dealings with foreign states and his resulting policy payoffs as threats to U.S. imperial power.
They seem to be scheming to undermine his power and potentially even remove him by one means or another. They would prefer Vice Pres. Mike Pence in the driver’s seat, but the rest of the regime — minus a few figures who are more loyal to Trump than they are to the empire — is fine with them.
The collaborators are, on the other hand, comprised of two major factions. First are the “alt-right” fascistic true believers such as Miller who see the Trump regime as their best chance to enact their racial policies and to strike a blow against liberal modernity at its roots. They have an apocalyptic and ideological agenda.
Alongside them are what we could call corporate marauders — Scott Pruitt, Wilbur Ross and other billionaires and billionaire-allies that want to both eliminate federal checks on corporate power and to expropriate private resources for the private gain of the ruling class.
These elements would have been in any Republican administration, but their free rein is, in many respects, much freer under Trump because of his lack of nuance or experience — he doesn’t understand the consequences of his policies, or he just doesn’t care.
The corporate marauders and the coup can easily align with each other, but there are in fact some authentic patriots among the coup faction, folks whose politics probably resemble former CIA operative and conservative protest presidential candidate Evan McMullin — their imperialism is encoded even to themselves in the terms of American exceptionalism and they see Trump as a threat to its noble values.
They, admirably, hate the fascists in Trump’s regime and they see this faction as their ideological enemy in terms much deeper than some of their more cynical comrades.
At this point we arrive at a very important discovery. Trump can split the coup and easily neutralize a significant chunk of this threatening faction just by flipping on his foreign commitments. They see Trump as an internal threat to U.S. imperial power because of his corrupt relationship with our rivals.
If he flips on those rivals they have little cause for opposing him and a number of them are likely to back out of whatever plots may be brewing. This sort of loss of resolve is deadly for efforts like these.
So Trump should just flip, and as noted earlier he may be doing just this right now. But this choice is not itself free of consequences — some of Trump’s own alt-right true believers view his commitments not as corrupt alliances but as the principled unification of Western anti-modernists against both liberalism and the subhuman hordes.
Whether he can afford to make this shift and undercut the coup is determined by the balance of powers between the fascists and the corporate marauders in his collaborator faction.
These two elements are, of course, dependent upon and in competition with one another. The true believers created the political conditions which allowed the more opportunistic corporate types to get into power, and the true believers have only been given a seat at the table because they benefit and are aligned with the larger objectives of corporate power.
There are lots of extremist factions out there and the only ones that get a shot at real power are the ones the powerful decide to let through. Nazis clear that bar, it seems.
The relationship is uneasy because some fascist priorities are not very good for business. Isolationism and protectionism don’t really help the multi-nationals, and there seems to be very little reason to rid their ranks of Jewish folks or Muslims or people of color so long as they are making money. The fascists see the corporate commitment to money-making over all other values as a form of liberal corruption, no doubt caused by Jewish influence or whatever.
The final resolution here is that even among this hardcore element there is another split. Some are ideologues who cannot brook any compromise whatsoever, others are “realists” — as much as anybody who believes such inane bullshit can be called realistic — willing to play the long game. The corporate faction can always play ball with these folks, and together they can easily jettison the extremists back to irrelevance.
This tendency is exemplified in the person of Bannon — a one-time Goldman Sachs banker who hates Jews, a Nazi who made his fortune off of syndicating Seinfeld, a white nationalist happy to slow play his vision and cooperate with Reince Priebus, et al. It is very likely that Bannon that is advising Trump to fuck over the Russians, kicking the slats out from underneath the coup faction, isolating their own true believers — likewise easily suppressed and dispatched with by their more realistic elements.
Trump is nothing if not volatile, so he may flip again. But if he continues down the Russia-phobic path he’s switched to in the last few weeks, it will create a new stability for the competition between economic opportunists and quasi-fascists within his regime. The deep antagonism we have seen to this point could very easily be transformed into a sustainable and secure rivalry that no longer threatens the regime’s survival.
What this means is that while liberals have clung to scandal stories in the hope that it might drive Trump out of power quickly, we still have extensive, horrifying consequences to come for letting him win, for tolerating a political order that made that victory possible and inevitable.
Our best hope right now is for revolutionary elements of the grassroots uprising evoked by his victory to consolidate in a way that can resist liberal attempts to co-opt or suppress them. This will either force the liberals to accommodate their position — thus engaging constituencies who might actually help them beat Trump — or to capitulate altogether, making way for new left political institutions.
Consolidating this progressive position is not easy, but there are a number of groups — Democratic Socialists of America, Our Revolution and a multitude of local grassroots organizations popping up all over the country — that can form vehicles for the work.
The crucial, indispensable piece is that they align on terms that opportunists and liberals cannot co-opt. They must explicitly reject capitalism and demand root-and-branch economic change in this country. They must also explicitly stand apart from the Democratic Party.
There is room for debate about whether all engagement with the party should be rejected, but they must continue to put the Democratic Party at the heart of their criticism and critique.
Finally, they need to start talking seriously about imperialism. Imperialism made it possible for Trump to portray the world beyond our borders as dehumanized commodities we need to either dump or exploit. Imperialism has taught us that certain populations within our borders are likewise designated for value extraction and disposal.
Imperialism has allowed corporate power to buy off big parts of the so-called working class and make oligarchy attractive to them. Imperialism wrecked social democracy in Europe and it will corrupt any new progressive movement in this country unless they start from a position of solidarity with the colonized, brutalized victims of U.S. power.
Neither the regime nor liberals have an answer for imperialism. They are on the same side at the end of that day. Only a resistance to this deepest core of the Trump movement, the only thing within his thought with enough substance to sustain his self-aggrandizing self-dealing, can actually provide a basis for a real resistance.
It’s been just two months, and this fight is still getting started. This kind of look makes it clear that the odds are starting out against us, but there are some clear first steps that have a shot of beating not just Trump, but the very systems that created him in the first place.
It’s the work of a lifetime. As always — stay defiant.
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