There is a lazy reflex, common to people who consider themselves sober, to file every new political ugliness under a familiar heading. We say “populism,” we say “the right turn,” we say “the usual demagoguery,” and having named the thing we feel we have understood it. I want to resist that reflex here, because I am convinced that what we are watching in the United States is not a louder version of something old. It is a genuinely new political organism, and like any new organism it deserves to be looked at directly rather than translated back into the vocabulary we already had. My claim is blunt and I will defend it slowly: Trumpism is a form of fascism. Not a metaphor for fascism, not “fascism-adjacent,” but a real, postmodern variant of the disease — one that has discarded the old machinery of violence and replaced it with an engine of lies, and one that, for the first time in history, has seized control of a country that is genuinely free.
A scale of lies and violence
The cleanest way I know to think about fascist regimes is to refuse to treat them as a single undifferentiated horror and instead to place them on a scale. Every such regime runs on two fuels at once: violence and lying. Someone once observed that violence and the lie are inseparable partners, because violence has nothing to clothe itself in except falsehood, and a sustained lie cannot survive without violence to protect it. That pairing is constant. What changes from regime to regime is the proportion — how much of each fuel is in the tank.
At one extreme sits Hitlerism, which represents maximum violence. Its lying was high, but lying was never its defining instrument; the camps and the conquests were. Closer to the middle sits Putinism, at least in its treatment of its own population: moderate internal violence — I am bracketing for the moment the obvious savagery it exports to Ukraine — combined with very high levels of domestic deception. And then there is Trumpism, which sits at the strangest end of the scale of all. It is, so far, almost without internal violence. There are no mass arrests of citizens, no death squads, no camps. And yet its lying is of a scale and intensity that has, I believe, no precedent in human history.
This is not rhetorical exaggeration. When researchers sat down to actually count the false statements made over the course of a single presidency and campaign, they arrived at figures around thirty thousand. Tens of thousands of false claims, several significant ones essentially every day, for years. That is not the ordinary mendacity of a politician shading the truth. It is a qualitatively different phenomenon — a continuous, industrial production of falsehood that becomes, in the end, the very medium the movement breathes.
A regime that does not buy its people, it deceives them
Here is the detail that, to me, marks the deepest break with everything that came before. Every prior fascist regime, however brutal, understood that it had to buy its base. It had to deliver something material in exchange for loyalty. Hitler eliminated unemployment and raised living standards before he marched his nation into a suicidal war; for a time he genuinely tried to earn the gratitude of his people. Putin, for many years, presided over a real rise in ordinary comfort, and that comfort was the price he paid for consent. The transaction was ugly but it was, recognizably, a transaction.
Trumpism abolishes the transaction. It does not purchase its supporters’ loyalty with prosperity — on the contrary, its tariff policies began damaging ordinary living standards almost immediately. So how does it retain its base? Through pure, unadorned deception. It has constructed, by sheer volume of lying, an entire fictional reality, and a vast number of its voters now live inside that reality and vote, with conviction, against their own concrete interests. I think of the polled supporter who was certain that a twenty-five percent import tariff meant foreign countries would be writing checks to America, who had no idea that the cost would land on his own grocery bill. That is the achievement, if we can call it that. Not even Putin managed this. Earlier regimes deceived people about distant matters of state; this one deceives people about the price of eggs in their own kitchen, and they believe it. A politics that sustains itself on falsehood alone, with nothing real underneath, is a genuinely new thing in the world.
Empathy declared the enemy
If lying is the method, there is also a doctrine, and the doctrine has been stated out loud with a candor that should have frightened more people than it did. One of the most powerful men now attached to this movement announced, in plain words, that empathy is the fundamental weakness of Western civilization — that compassion is a flaw being weaponized against us, that humanism itself is the vulnerability through which the West is being destroyed. He called it civilizational suicide by empathy. The masks, as the saying goes, came off.
I want to be precise about why this matters, because it would be easy to wave it away as one provocateur’s edgelord posturing. It is not new. It is, in fact, the oldest refrain of the totalitarian songbook. The Nazis and the Bolsheviks alike built their projects on the deliberate overcoming of “abstract humanism” and “rotten liberalism.” Mercy was a word for the weak and the sentimental; the enforcer’s creed was no sympathy, only the bullet, as one shoots a rabid dog. To stand up in the twenty-first century and declare empathy the enemy of civilization is not to invent a new philosophy. It is to consciously and publicly rejoin that exact line of descent. And the consequences are not abstract. When aid programs are gutted — food for a million people facing starvation, treatment for malnutrition, the campaign against malaria, the emergency plan that had kept tens of millions alive against AIDS — and the gutting is defended by the principle that empathy is what will destroy us, then the doctrine has stopped being a tweet and become a body count. The starving are simply allowed to die, and the cruelty is presented as wisdom.
The hard core: a sect immune to facts
Not everyone who voted for this is a fascist, and it is important to say so clearly. Tens of millions cast a protest ballot against a party they had come to despise, choosing what they took to be the lesser evil; many of them dislike what is now being done in their name and simply do not grasp it. The true believer is a narrower and more specific figure, and he can be identified by a constant cluster of traits. First and above all, the absence of empathy — for him compassion is not merely undervalued but genuinely impossible. To that add a worship of the strong and a contempt for the weak, a frank social Darwinism, the conviction that the powerful are entitled by their power. And around that core: anti-liberalism, anti-humanism, anti-democracy. You will not find a real adherent who is at the same time warmly empathetic, devoted to liberty, and committed to human dignity. Strip away every surface difference — some are imperialists, some are not; some adore the leader personally, some are indifferent to him — and what remains, identical in all of them, is that cold cluster. Remove even one element of it and you are no longer looking at a believer.
This is why the hard core behaves less like a constituency than like a totalitarian sect. Facts do not reach it, because it does not live in the realm where facts operate. It lives inside the manufactured reality, and inside that reality contrary evidence is simply experienced as enemy noise. You cannot argue someone out of a position he did not arrive at by argument.
Why liberalism is the true enemy
People often assume fascism’s great hatred is for the left, for communism, for socialism. I think that is a historical reflex that no longer describes the present. Communism, as a serious global rival, is gone. The system that now stands across the field from fascism — the thing it cannot tolerate, the thing whose very existence indicts it — is liberalism. Liberal democracy, with its courts and its free press and its insistence on the dignity and rights of the individual, is fascism’s one surviving competitor, and therefore its principal enemy. Fascism hates liberalism above all else because in liberalism it senses its own death. This is why the war is waged, with such peculiar urgency, against the sources of truth: against independent media, against funded journalism, against the institutions that exist precisely to wake what one might call the sleeping dog of the truth. A movement that lives by lying cannot abide a free press, because a free press is, structurally, the thing that exists to puncture lies.
And there is, I should add, an intellectual scaffolding being erected around all of this. The notion that liberal democracy is decadent and should be replaced by an unapologetically hierarchical, authoritarian order — a kind of dark counter-Enlightenment — has migrated from fringe corners into the circle around real power. This is the genuinely dangerous development: not the loud provocations, which are easy to mock, but the patient supply of an ideology that gives the movement a sense of historical mission. It is, in my judgment, a more potent neofascist current within its host than any comparable court philosopher ever managed to be elsewhere.
A free country contending with its own fascists
I have saved for last the feature that makes this episode genuinely unprecedented, and it is also the one slender reason for hope. Every fascism we have known until now took root in soil already prepared — in broken republics, in defeated and humiliated nations, in places where the institutions of freedom were weak or absent. This one has done something no fascism has done before: it has captured the commanding heights of a country that remains, at the level of its society, genuinely free. The courts still function. The legislature still sits. The press is still independent. There is still an enormous population of free people who are not fooled. What is unfolding, then, is a contest with no historical precedent — a battle, in real time, between a nation that is still free and a fascist faction that holds power at the top and commands the loyalty of something like half the population, though much of that half does not understand what it is loyal to.
I will not pretend to know how it ends, and I refuse to offer the false comfort that it must end well. But I notice that this movement, for all its menace, has a record of running its bluster into reality and losing. It would buy a great island and was sent packing; it would annex a neighbor and was ignored; it would relocate a whole people somewhere offstage and was laughed at. You can hypnotize your own voters indefinitely — that is the one trick it has truly mastered — but no one has ever succeeded in hypnotizing reality itself. A lie, however vast, eventually meets the world.
Fascism is always terrible. But in this postmodern form — almost bloodless at home, drowning in falsehood, openly contemptuous of mercy, jeering at compassion as a weakness while real bombs fall on real cities and real children die — it acquires, on top of its horror, a particular quality of repulsiveness. It asks us to admire its cruelty as strength and to despise our own decency as a defect. The correct response is not despair and not the comfortable old labels, but recognition. We should call the disease by its name, understand that the name is new only in its mutation, and refuse the one thing it most demands of us — that we agree to stop feeling.