The Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump Proves that He is a Fascist Dictator
The Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump Proves that He is a Fascist Dictator
Politico runs a column explaining how failed assassination attempts empower politicians to become military dictators
Everything that Donald Trump does, and everything that happens to him is proof that he is a fascist who would use the power of the presidency to turn the United States of America into a military dictatorship despite the fact that he did not do this while in power previously. Politico is running a column by Ruth Ben-Ghiat clearly making the case that, if elected, Trump will use the assassination attempt against him to consolidate power exactly as Benito Mussolini, Italian fascist dictator and ally of Adolph Hitler in World War II, did.
By the time Gibson fired her gun, Mussolini had used the string of attacks as justification to issue a series of “Laws for the Defense of the State” that transformed Italy from a democracy to a regime. Grounded in a huge expansion of the powers of the executive branch at the expense of the judiciary and parliament, Mussolini and his Fascist Party ended press freedom, banned all opposition political parties, prohibited strikes and non-Fascist unions, created the notorious OVRA secret police, and more. The laws made it clear that any attack on the leader would be considered an attack on the state and on national unity.
For Fascists, the leader did not just represent the nation, as in democratic tradition, but physically embodied it. He took the hits for the nation, and so his wounds were his own, but also belonged to the people on whose behalf he toiled. That is why Mussolini, a journalist by training who attended to every detail of his image, posed for pictures after the attack, the bandage becoming a kind of badge of honor. And it is why each failed attempt became fodder for his personality cult by seeming to prove his macho toughness, resilience and invincibility. “The bullets pass, Mussolini remains,” the Italian leader wrote of the assassination attempts in his 1928 autobiography.
The history of Mussolini’s consolidation of power and the attacks that punctuated that process carry lessons for our understanding of the mentality and methods of Donald Trump after the attempt on his life at a rally last month.
So, you see, the assassination attempt against Trump, far from being evidence that portraying Trump as a fascist dictator or “literally Hitler” led to political violence against a person for whom she merely has a few petty political differences, is actually evidence that Donald Trump truly is, or at least will be, a fascist dictator if he wins the 2024 election, per Ben-Ghiat. She does try to temper her column somewhat to make it appear like she’s being reasonable, “The comparison between Mussolini and Trump can be overstated, and for one thing, Trump is not in power at the moment,” but that is exactly the point of her column: To overstate that comparison. She continues:
[Trump] is an aspiring strongman… What is clear already is that the assassination attempt has made Trump’s personality cult more robust and more powerful for his followers. His claims of being a victim targeted on their behalf are now more credible and his persona cemented as an indomitable fighter. And he knows it.
So Trump is definitively an “aspiring strongman” despite the fact that she admits that she does not know how he would have responded had he actually been in power when the assassination attempt happened, and despite the fact, as I pointed out previously, that he did not become a strongman during his previous term in power when he presumably had the opportunity.
There is something of a point buried in this nonsense, which is that Donald Trump being shot will help him in the election even though there is no logical reason for it to do so. Trump being shot changes nothing about his policies or whether he ought to be president, but it will make some people more likely to vote for him. Ben-Ghiat’s column here is clearly a response to that reality, but it goes too far the other way. There is no reason that Trump being shot should make him less worthy of your vote anymore than it should make him more worthy of it. Being shot does not make him a hero or an aspiring dictator anymore than either of those things were true prior to the shooting. The problem is that calling Trump a fascist strongman before was ridiculous, and it comes across as more ridiculous after his shooting.
Hyperbolic partisan politics portraying itself as disinterested intellectualism has been the strategy of the corporate media, intelligentsia, and Democratic Party, but I repeat myself, since Donald Trump began running for president in 2016, and this is just another example. They really don’t have anything other than various different ways to call him a fascist and every attempt is dumber and more transparent than the last. Maybe the political winds will shift in their favor come November, but if they’re running with this nonsense I think it shows that they’re more concerned about Trump beating Harris than they are currently letting on.
As an aside, Ruth Ben-Ghiat has her own newsletter here on Substack, and her bio reads: “Historian of authoritarians, propaganda, democracy protection. NYU Professor.” I will link to her Substack below. I don’t mention this in an effort to have her harassed or anything like that, but merely to let people read her work for themselves to decide if she’s acting as an unbiased intellectual, as she’s portraying herself, or merely a partisan hack who hates Donald Trump, as I believe her to be.
