What is the state of Trump? He is failing at fascism. For Trump to succeed in is fascist transition, he needs a bloody, popular, victorious war. And that is out of his reach. The State of the Union was full of fascist atmospherics. But it was also blowhard exhaustion.
Trump’s problem is not with idea of fascism. It suits him well. Just consider the atmospherics of last night. Fascism celebrates a leader who transcends law and aims to unites the people with their destiny. It denies truth in favor of grand stories of struggle against a chosen enemy. It posits an imaginary golden age. All of that was in the speech.
Fascism demands a chosen enemy, and victims. Trump called the Democrats in the audience “crazy” and associated them with illegal immigration and crime. The United States is engaged in an enormous cleansing project. ICE raids celebrate physical force in the cities and our concentration camp system is landscape of domination in the countryside. The murder of civilians in Minnesota was greeted by big lies about the victims.
All of this is awful. But it is also stasis. Trump is unpopular, the economy is weak. When the government murdered Americans, this did not deter protest. To actually change the nature of politics, to move beyond the current state of affairs (competitive authoritarianism) to something else, to fascism, Trump needs another kind of conflict.
Fascism demands a major foreign war to kill one’s own people and thereby generate a reservoir of meaning that could be used to justify indefinite rule and further oppression, to make the world seem like an endless struggles and submission to hierarchy as the only kind of life.
Trump senses that he needs such a war, but, characteristically, he wants a short cut. In the State of the Union, Trump portrayed Olympic hockey as a major international conflict, with the weird announcement that a goalie would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. After the extraction of Maduro from Venezuela, Trump compared the action the Second World War, which is absurd.
To complete the fascist transition, Trump has to give the country a war it does not want, and win it, and transform the society. He has brought us to the doorstep of a major war with Iran: but in the State of the Union, speaking about war preparations, he was looking around hopelessly and waving his hands. He is happy to talk about war with Iran, and hope somehow that others will deliver it. But he cannot do it himself.
Americans do not want such a war. But that is not exactly Trump’s problem. Germans did not want a war with Poland in 1939, either. But Hitler fought one anyway, and won it quickly. Trump’s problem is that he does not know how to fight a war. And he flounders.
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So what happens next in Iran policy? One could imagine a patient pressure campaign on Iran, a mixture of sanctions and promises, with demands for freedom of expression and support of civil society. But not, of course, from this administration. They have abolished the relevant institutions and forsaken the appropriate tools. There are only two real scenarios.
In one, nothing much happens in Iran. Trump forgets about the tens of thousands of murdered protestors he claims to champion. The navy sails away. Maybe some missiles are fired first, maybe not. And Trump claims that somehow this has all been an incredible victory and that now there is a miraculous peace. But this will have no effect on domestic politics.
In the other scenario, we invade. That is the only escalation that could possibly work to advance the fascist transition. But it would not work. Trump is incompetent and so are his advisors. And war is hard. And Americans will not be patient. Perhaps they would change their minds if Trump had an explanation of what he is doing, but he doesn’t. Or if there were a rapid victory, which there won’t be. An invasion of Iran would likely be so catastrophic in domestic politics that Trump would not see the end of his term, or even the end of this year, as president.
Trump wants it both ways. He wants to be the warlord whom everyone fears, but he also wants to make lots of money and to have his corruption defined as peacemaking. The word “deal,” which he always uses in the context of Iran, means: “we can be bribed.” And if there is a common thread running through American foreign policy under Trump, it is this. And then Trump wants to be told that the combination of threats and bribes makes him a great peacemaker and that he deserves a prize.
Consider the biographical trajectory. A guy from Queens wants to break rules and make money in real estate so that he will be accepted and admired in Manhattan. He fails at that. And then he attempts the whole venture again on a larger scale. He breaks rules and does make money as the president of the United States. But at the end he wants the acclamation, the acceptance, the bourgeois recognition of a remodeled house and gold trinkets.
And so the state of Trump is that he is stuck. He is failing at fascism. He can break things, but he cannot make things. He can bluster, but he cannot triumph. He is tired, and every day is harder than the day before, and there are rivals in the wings, and elections coming.
Between now and November 2026 he has two moves: win a war, which he cannot; and suppress the vote, which he has telegraphed that he will try to do. This is a man, after all, who has already tried to steal an election. But he failed then. And the fact that he tried and failed once means that he should certainly fail again.
There is one more (obvious) trick which Trump can try, a combination of the two: he can claim that the very disaster of the war that he himself started in Iran (or elsewhere) means that there can no elections because of the associated terrorist threats. But if journalists and judges and others are prepared for this gambit it will fail.
What is the state of the Union? Fascism does not fail on its own. People have resisted: millions in protests, thousands or tens of thousands in cities when it mattered. Individual expressions of courage and commitment are everywhere. Even as many major media outlets collapse and concede, others do good work, and local reporting keeps us informed. Civil society groups make plans and file lawsuits. Trump has brought us to a threshold that he cannot cross. But there is no such thing as normality. There is no going back. What comes next is open.
Trump is stuck, but he is stuck in a terrible place. The United States remains in competitive authoritarianism, with fascists in positions of authority, and federal institutions carrying out policies of oppression that cannot be reconciled with the rule of law. There will be more bad news in the next six months, and more moments of courage and organizing.
There will be elections in November, but they will not be unusual elections, requiring an unusual effort. The opponents of authoritarianism can certainly win, in an uphill struggle, involving building big coalitions and thinking about better futures. We cannot go back but we can do much better.
