In just one month, the US became the gravest threat to western democracies
Never mind the fascist salutes. Mind the fascist coup.
Fascism is back.
It is wearing a toupee and wreathed in a star-spangled banner, but after weeks of Holocaust revisionism, calls for ethnic cleansing, hostilities against neighbor nations, sacking of government agencies, strong-arming of social media platforms and fascist salutes outside the US Capitol, its disguises are in tatters.
When the wealthiest man alive performs Sieg Heil salutes at the presidential inauguration in Washington DC, it should not be cause for debates about whether, oh my, um, didn’t that look a little bit like… I mean, is that really appropriate?
We must call this what it is: A fascist doing fascist things. Nothing mysterious about it.
It is now up to the democracies of the world to mount a defense before it is too late. If we fail, Trump style fascism is going global in the next few years.
Regrettably, most world leaders are still in denial about the fascist turn of the USA. The potential downside of angering the most powerful nation in the world is chilling, and speaking the truth at this moment in time means acknowledging that there is tough work, of historical implication, ahead.
Thus, the stage is set for reality-bending displays of gaslighting, such as the US vice president JD Vance mansplaining democracy and free speech to the Munich Security Conference.
After the Munich event, many European leaders were perplexed by Vance’s focus on a threat not from Russia or China, but “from within” (read: immigration and human rights). One of them was the Swedish foreign minister, who opined that the only serious threat against Europe is Russia. While less wrong than Vance’s tirade, this is still wrong.
The new, fascist USA is a grave threat indeed.
For those still in denial, let us examine some of the fascist traits shaping current US politics and the global information landscape of our imminent future:
Aggressive nationalism and imperialism
Purging enemies, calling for ethnic cleansing
Corruption, enrichment of the ruling class
Historic revisionism, destruction of truth
Autocratic control of government
Silencing opponents while pretending to champion “free speech”
Weaponizing the law
Aggressive nationalism and imperialism
Trump-branded nationalism resumes the US tradition of assuming ownership over all of America. Slogans like “America First” and “Make America Great Again” effectively carry the message that America is the USA, and should be white, conservative, prosperous and world-dominating – enriched regardless of the cost to other nations and people – like in the mythological good old days.
By now, other American nations are used to this solipsist narrative from the neighborhood bully. But as Trump has threatened the sovereignty of Canada, Mexico and Panama, it is clear that the US president thinks of his neighbors as mere appendices to the motherland, allowed some measure of independence only as long as they humor him.
If the US under Trump needs to impose heavy sanctions on foes or allies to make them obey, so be it. If they need to destroy the planet in order to enrich their elites, who cares if a few micronations are sinking into the Indian Ocean, or if Mediterranean countries are burning to the ground? And when those suffering the ravages of climate change happen to be wealthy Californians during fire season, or people in Trump’s home state of Florida, the blame can always be deflected onto democrats and/or woke culture.
As Trump greedily eyes the world map for opportunities to expand the motherland, Greenland obviously seems particularly appetizing, as Trump’s “Drill baby, drill” policies will continue to make the world overheat and permafrost melt, thawing the island’s treasure trove of natural resources.
Ukraine, which has relied on Europe and the US for aid during its war against Russian aggression, finds itself in a new predicament with Trump. The new US has turned out not be an ally of Ukraine, but just another imperial power seeking to exploit it.
As Donald Trump promises to end the war, by negotiating with Vladimir Putin, it is increasingly clear that the US is now parroting Russia’s talking points, pressuring Ukraine to surrender occupied land while also relinquishing their hopes of joining NATO.
The US betrayal does not end there, however. Trump now wants payback for the aid given under Joe Biden. In a neo-colonial move, he is asking for half of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, hoping to extract profits from Russia’s aggression, squeezing a war-torn nation for profits while its desperate for help.
Purging enemies, calling for ethnic cleansing
Every fascist nationalist needs a roster of outsiders to blame for the rot threatening the chosen people. For Trump it consists of Democrats, leftists, queers and immigrants.
Immigrants are routinely demonized as illegal aliens, eating the good people’s beloved pets. To set the tone for Trump’s new period in office, he ordered that they be rounded up for mass deportation, and has reopened and expanded the US concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay.
Meanwhile, his political opposition is alternately portrayed as evil (an “enemy from within”) and stupid, depending on what best fits the occasion. The fascist rhetoric is not veiled but overt and menacing:
Democrats are not yet sent to Guantanamo Bay. There is hardly any need for it as the current crop of politicians have turned out to be unfit fight for democracy. Instead they serve as an excellent prop, their feeble opposition making the USA look almost like a democracy still, if you squint hard and this is what you desperately want to see.
Trump’s desire for ethnic and political homogeneity is in the open, however. Not only is he deporting immigrants, and doing his best to shut the borders at home. As the Israeli prime minister recently visited him, Trump called for Palestinians to be permanently expelled from their homes in Gaza, so that Trump and his cronies can capture the land and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
Trump really does love building hotels. And making money. He is somewhat new to ethnic cleansing, but so far it sure looks like he is a fan.
Corruption, enrichment of the ruling class
The “Riviera of the Middle East” is not the only Trump scheme to enrich himself and those around him through misuse of presidential powers. From 2016 until his second inauguration, Trump redirected some $37 million of funds into his own businesses, from various committees, PAC:s, candidates, and from the republican party itself, in blatant disregard of the emolument clause of the US constitution, which he calls “phony”.
This might seem damning enough, but recent events suggest he was holding back. The 2025 inauguration was a formidable display of kowtowing industry moguls handing out gifts to the king, with all the major US tech corporations paying their tithe, as well as many international ones.
Curiously, both Meta and X have also agreed to pay Trump “damages” for their decisions to suspend his Twitter and Facebook accounts back when Donald Trump was fanning the flames of the insurrection in Washington DC on January 6th 2021.
Trump’s lawsuits were filed in 2021, but only now, after Trump again became president, did the companies decide to settle. How much did they see fit to pay the president to end up in his good graces? What would be a reasonable amount for suspending someone’s social media account?
Well, X paid Trump $10 million, while Meta coughed up $25 million. It would take the average US citizen 590 years to make this much money. For a US emperor, all it takes is a snarl. And make no mistake, while these transactions are technically legal, they are effectively multimillion dollar bribes.
Elon Musk, of course, was already pouring hundreds of millions into Trump’s campaign. I do not claim full insight into the machinery of Musk’s mind, but I would assume his role as Trump sidekick is mainly a power play. Nevertheless, he stands to reap enormous financial rewards himself, in his capacity as shadow president, vested with strange powers over government spending.
Over the years, in his role of real-life Willy Wonka, Musk has amassed billion dollar contracts with US government departments and agencies, the most lucrative being with NASA and the Defense Department. At the same time, his questionable business practices have embroiled him in conflict with regulators such as the FCC, the FTC, the SEC and the EPA. Now Musk seems to be in a position to cut their funding at will, and cleanse them of ambitious bureaucrats he finds vexing.
He is also using his newly bestowed powers to put pressure on corporations to advertise on his struggling social media platform X. Last year, a number of major advertisers pulled out of X as the platform is a cesspool of hate and disinformation. Musk famously responded but telling them “I hope they stop. Don’t advertise […] Go fuck yourselves.”
Executives at these companies were surely sniggering when Musk subsequently sued them for not advertising on X. But some of them are singing a different tune after Musk’s ascension, so he recently added more companies to his shakedown, in hopes of profiting from his status as unelected shadow president.
Then, of course, there’s the bizarre crypto schemes initiated by Donald Trump and his family. These are not only a callous way to make money off a gullible fan base, they are also a brand-new way for individuals, corporations or nation states to bribe the US president. As Trump holds 80% of all Trump coins – some 800 million coins – any investment in the coin that increases the value of it also bolsters Trump’s personal fortune.
The irony here is that these same people – the most greedy and corrupt individuals you could imagine – are now raging against dreamt-up corruption in government, and in the name of rooting it out they are tearing down agencies that many US citizens rely on. All this while firing the actual corruption watchdogs.
Historic revisionism, destruction of truth
In January this year, thousands of Californians were forced to leave their homes or risk burning alive as fires consumed their neighborhoods. Why?
Surely, climate change has nothing to do with it; according to Trump logic the most plausible reason is that woke democrats wanted to preserve “an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California”.
We recognize this disregard for truth – whether talking about science, history or current disasters – from Trump’s previous administration. Its politically charged response to the covid pandemic cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Donald Trump has time and time again displayed his contempt for fact-seeking journalism as well as science and historical records. Just like people, any facts about the world that are not loyal to the leader are to be dismissed and discarded.
From his business adventures, we know Trump’s partner in crime, Elon Musk, shares the president’s disdain for truths that don’t further his own agenda. And in his new political capacity, he has been meddling in European politics, attempting to bolster far-right personalities in a bid to undermine democratic establishment parties.
In one recent example, Musk staged an interview with Alice Weidel, leader of Germany’s far-right party Alternative für Deutschland. The discussion between the two was, unsurprisingly, rife with disinformation. One of the most insidious claims that they both agreed on was that Adolf Hitler was not really right-wing, but communist.
This is a politically motivated lie, meant to mask the common ground between Weidel’s AfD and Hitler’s NSDAP. It would be convenient for AfD, for the Trump-Musk administration and for far-right parties around the world, if Nazi Germany and the Holocaust were not a warning of how dark and inhumane things will become if Europe again lets these forces rise to power. So why not simply agree that Hitler was a communist?
It is no coincidence that the Trump administration, even before it assumed formal power, was leaning on social media platforms to rid them of fact-checking. The narratives far-right politicians rely on are based on falsehoods, and win elections by manipulating voters outside of their base into believing that only they care about the nation, while the opposition is intent on destroying it.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of a company that in 2017 facilitated the killing of thousands of Rohingya in Myanmar, before creating a massive fact-checking and moderation machinery, recently shut down fact-checking in the US to appease Donald Trump. Fact-checkers still serve Facebook’s European users, for now, but Zuckerberg has announced that he will “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world”, to make them stop badgering the poor Silicon Valley companies with regulations.
How quickly he forgot about the slaughter of the Rohingya.
Meanwhile, Google has quietly asserted that it will refuse to follow the regulations of the Digital Service Act in the EU, even though it is law. While Google has not sided with Trump as publicly as Meta has, it seems to be betting on the Trump administration to bail the company out if the EU threatens it with fines for allowing lies and propaganda to proliferate unchecked.
This disregard for truth is a corner stone of fascism and its rise to power. Well-educated, well-informed citizens will not voluntarily elect officials that take away their freedoms, make their lives miserable and isolate their country from the world. So the very concept of truth must be destroyed, as in George Orwell’s 1984.
Autocratic control of government
When the Supreme Court of the USA ruled that presidents are immune to prosecution for any official acts while in office, they set the stage for a full-on coup d’état once Donald Trump again became president.
Trump was already the kind of authoritarian who reviles checks and balances. This time around, he does not care about courts nor Congress, as he has embarked on the destruction of US government agencies that are not part of his master plan.
His picks for cabinet are an impressive gaggle of staggering incompetence. Presumably they are the most intelligent individuals in the USA who would put loyalty to Donald Trump above all else, and the purge of conscientious bureaucrats, beholden to other values, like human rights and the US constitution, is merciless and ongoing.
Elon Musk and his DOGE unit is running the show, apparently following the extremist right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin’s RAGE gameplan. While Musk’s acronym stands for the euphemism Department Of Government Efficiency, the Yarvin acronym spells it out more plainly: Retire All Government Employees.
Vice president JD Vance reveres Yarvin, and explicitly stated in a right-wing podcast before he was picked for VP:
I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left, and turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.
I think Trump is going to run again in 2024. I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.
This apocalyptic fantasy is now being realized. It is carried out by vandals with precious little knowledge of how these government agencies work, or what work they actually do. It is all done without legal authority - these institutions were set up by Congress and can only be legally dismantled by Congress - but the combination of presidential immunity from prosecution and the presidential power to pardon anyone who commits crimes on his behalf, makes it hard to stop the self-styled dictator.
The fallout? Not only will a great many career bureaucrat find themselves unemployed; millions of disadvantaged citizens will be underserved and, for lack of polite language, fucked for life.
The sacking of USAID in itself will lead to deaths around the world, from starvation, disease, terror and natural catastrophes. At this time no one can fully predict what the gutting of US government agencies will mean long-term. But know this: it is not a bloodless coup. It is a coup executed by the richest man in the world, that will end the lives of many of its most disadvantaged.
Silencing opponents while pretending to champion “free speech”
Donald Trump and Elon Musk both feign concern about free speech. On closer examination, however, what they seek is not to safeguard everyone’s right to speak their mind without fear of repercussions. Freedom of speech to these people is the unchecked freedom for their sympathizers to spread disinformation and bully those with different beliefs and values.
Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech extremist”, but he has repeatedly cracked down on the free speech of his employees (through non disclosure agreements) and his users (by banning critics from X). As mentioned above, showing your discontent with X by not advertising may result in a Musk lawsuit.
Ever since Donald Trump’s accounts were suspended on multiple social media platforms, following his role in the assault on the US Capitol four years ago, he has been on the war path. Not only has he launched a rival platform, Truth Social, but he has also sued Meta, Google and Twitter, accusing them of censorship.
Twitter, of course, has since been bought Elon Musk, who swiftly rolled back fact checking initiatives, fired most content moderators and dissolved the Trust & Safety Council. Meanwhile, thumbscrews have been applied on rival platforms. In November 2024 Donald Trump wrote that Mark Zuckerberg may be spending the rest of his life in prison. Lately Trump has been pressuring all US tech giants to scrap fact checking, DEI initiatives and protections against hate speech and disinformation.
The pressure has yielded desired results. Meta has made a humiliating display of its obedience to the Trump agenda by announcing that they are scrapping fact checking in the US, removing tampons from men’s restrooms in its offices and amending Facebook’s code of conduct to specifically allow attacks on some minority groups, like transgender persons and immigrants, while continuing to protect religious groups.
In recent days Google, too, has abandoned its DEI ambitions, as well as its pledge not to develop AI for surveillance and military purposes. As mentioned above, Google has also stated that it will refuse to comply with EU directives mandating fact checking. This would seem like a risky gambit, if not for the fact that Mark Zuckerberg, too, has stated that Meta will “work with the Trump administration to push back on governments who do not share our view on free speech”.
In other words, the US tech giants and the White House are preparing a joint assault on the EU Digital Services Act, pushing for hate speech and disinformation to flow freely in the EU as well as in the USA.
“Free speech”, to Musk and Trump, is making sure public spaces let bullies, hate mongers and right-wing propagandists reign with impunity, manufacturing a toxic environment where minorities are harassed and reasonable voices are drowned out - the perfect information landscape for fascist ideas to take root and proliferate.
Weaponizing the law
Donald Trump’s grip on the Supreme Court is a critical problem for the survival of US democracy. As the court has granted him immunity for official acts as president, he can freely pursue the dismantling of US government agencies even when it is clearly illegal for the president to do so. He risks nothing and will not be held accountable.
The worst case scenario for Trump is that courts, at times, manage to hinder his assault on democracy. But even then, if push comes to shove, Trump has the option to ignore the courts, gambling that armed police will not be deployed to enforce their rulings.
Trump’s blanket pardon of January 6 insurrectionists serves as a warning that not only he, but also his loyalist mobs, enjoy immunity for crimes they commit in his name. As protests against the Trump administration intensifies there will be more violence, both from the government itself and from fascist mobs.
The fact that Donald Trump is the first convicted felon to take office in the USA says something about the disdain for laws and norms, not only in his administration but among the voting public. The conviction itself looks more like a badge of honor than a slap on the wrist. After a New York justice found Trump guilty of 34 felonies related to his cover up of the hush money paid to porn actress Stormy Daniels, Trump was ultimately sentenced to… nothing.
After decades of weaseling out of lawsuits, maneuvering settlements and slipping hush money to accusers, Trump scored the ultimate victory: even when convicted for 34 felonies, he got off scot-free.
Under Trump, justice means the rich getting richer, violent Trump loyalists being untouchable and his enemies having targets on their back. This extends to the international scene as well, where Trump has ordered sanctions against the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for his investigation into Israel’s war crimes in Gaza.
In short, the Trump position on international justice is a carbon copy of Vladimir Putin’s:
There is no rules-based world order.
Where does this leave us?
The territorial threats against Panama, Canada, Denmark, Mexico, Palestine and Ukraine must be taken seriously. Not because Donald Trump necessarily has a well-thought-out plan to take these territories by force, but because these threats are emblematic of the new fascist world order, aggressions intended to weaken allies and enemies alike, sowing division among citizens and among nations.
The end goal is making the world bend in fear to Trump’s will. By making clear that he will use the economic and military might of the USA to achieve his goals, he expects counterparts, both within the country and outside of it, to fall in line and do his bidding. Ideally without him even needing to ask for it.
These are tactics normally associated with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Trump’s expansionist rhetoric mirrors that of his Russian homie, only at a grander, global scale. By claiming that the US might take Gaza, Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal and Ukraine’s natural resources, Trump not only legitimizes expansionist efforts from Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping – he makes them look like underachievers.
European politicians are currently watching Trump with furrowed brows, still unwilling to fully believe what they are seeing. In just a couple of weeks, the USA has gone from important ally to a more formidable threat against Europe than Russia and China. Nota bene, Russia is very much still a threat, actively waging war against its neighbors. It remains to be seen if Trump will send troops to accomplish his expansionist goals, and if the USA still has the means to do it after gutting the CIA and populating the highest level of leadership with sycophants.
But even if the USA seems to be headed down a path of self-destruction, it is a formidable influencer. Far-right movements in the EU are salivating as they are watching the US coup unfold, dreaming of similar fascist revolutions in European countries. The development in the USA, and the active propaganda campaigns directed toward the EU, are far more dangerous influences on world politics than Vladimir Putin’s troll armies ever were.
If a fascist wave washes over Europe, it will hit us from the west, not from the east.
For the democracies of the EU, it is urgent to revisit the paradox of tolerance, articulated by Karl Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies. According to this paradox, if tolerant societies extend tolerance to those who are intolerant, they risk eventually becoming dominated by their enemies, who will pursue their goals with a ruthlessness foreign to the tolerant.
Thus, even societies who embrace the values of tolerance must act forcefully against those who promote intolerance. Here and now, this means the democracies of the world must strike back hard against fascism. If we want to protect the open society, anti-democratic forces from Russia, China and the USA must all be met not just with meek objections but with condemnation, legislation, and by strengthening alliances between democracies.
This is not the time for European politicians to engage in wishful thinking. This is not the time to pretend like the US administration is still an ally, and to feign surprise when Donald Trump does outrageous things over and over again. This is the time to speak clearly about the new state of the world.
Yes. Elon Musk made fascist salutes at Donald Trump’s inauguration. No. This should not shock us. The fascist salute is just a gesture, after all. Something fascists like to do to inspire one another. But these fascists are doing many other things, right now, that are deeply damaging to individuals and the fabric of society.
These, we must face with open eyes.
These, we must fight.