The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 17, 2024, episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
All of the sudden, the word “fascist” has fully penetrated the presidential race. We just learned that a top general under President Donald Trump described Trump as “fascist to the core.” Trump has been threatening to unleash the military on the enemy within, which numerous observers have described as fascist politics. And at an event on Wednesday, Trump uncorked a long, strange, rambling response to all this, in which he said the real fascists are Democrats. Today, we’re taking a different angle on all this, looking at how the American right really has overlapped with fascist movements in the United States throughout our history. We’re talking to David Austin Walsh, a historian and author of a great new book, Taking America Back, which takes a deep look at the history of the far right in this country. Really glad to have you on, David.
David Austin Walsh: Thank you for having me.
Sargent: Let’s start with Trump’s appearance at a Fox News town hall on women’s issues, which had an all-female audience. He responded to criticism of his recent threat to use the military on the enemy within this way.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): And it is the enemy from within. And they’re very dangerous. They’re Marxists and communists and fascists. And it’s like ... the more difficult part ... you know, Pelosis, these people are so sick, and they’re so evil. If they would spend their time trying to make America great again, we would have ... it would be so easy to make this country great. I heard about that, they were saying I was threatening. I’m not threatening anybody. They’re the ones doing the threatening. They do phony investigations.
Sargent: Let’s clarify again that the prosecutions of Trump are based on evidence. They’re in keeping with the rule of law. There’s zero evidence that President Biden or Vice President Harris have directed any of them. They’re being overseen by judges and heard by juries. That aside, David, what do you think of the fact that Trump called his opponents fascists while reiterating that the enemy within must be targeted and purged?
Walsh: There’s a tremendous irony in how Trump has expressed himself here. He has in the past called his domestic critics “fascists,” “communists,” “Marxists.” He’s also used terms like vermin to describe his political opponents. There are obviously residences with rhetoric from fascist and far-right leaders across the globe who have engaged not just in similar rhetoric, but have actually used that rhetoric as the basis for action against their political opponents. What I think is really interesting is how he has reappropriated the term fascism to describe his political opponents. Ever since 2016, there has been a discussion in academic circles—actually a fairly raging debate—about whether or not you can characterize Trump or Trumpism as fascist or fascistic. I agree with many of my colleagues who are historians who say, Yes, that’s a fair term. Vice President Harris just said this the other day that it’s a fair term to characterize Trump. But the usage of fascist by Trump and other Republicans directed against Democrats, directed against their political opponents either liberals or on the left, in and of itself also has an interesting history.
Jonah Goldberg, who was a pundit at National Review for many years—he has now since left the conservative movement—was actually one of the more prominent Never Trumpers in 2016. He wrote a book in 2008 when it was originally published called Liberal Fascism, which is all about how liberals, and specifically Hillary Clinton, are the real heirs of the fascist tradition in American politics and American progressivism is descended to Mussolini. And that’s the language that Trump is tapping into.
Sargent: David, you write in your book that conservatives have historically reacted very badly when described by liberals and leftists as fascists, but at the same time, parts of the American right really did bleed into fascist movements in the U.S. It’s really true that liberals have historically feared the resurgence of fascism in various forms over the decades with some justification. Can you very briefly recap that history for us?
Walsh: After World War II, there was a general sense in America that on the one hand, fascism had been defeated overseas. Germany was defeated. Italy was defeated. Japan was defeated. But there remained this domestic fascist tradition, which you saw either in Jim Crow or among business leaders in the aftermath of World War II. There was all of this anxiety at the time about whether or not a new fascist strain could reemerge and become dominant again in American politics. This is how so many people understood the rise of Joe McCarthy, because this mapped on exactly to those types of anxieties you have.
Sargent: And the John Birch Society too, right?
Walsh: Exactly, yes. The two are very much interrelated. You have Joe McCarthy emerging as this demagogic, extreme right-wing anti-communist figure in the early 1950s. Then of course he completely implodes after 1954. And the John Birch Society, which is founded in 1958, is founded by the people who were Joe McCarthy’s biggest defenders and cheerleaders, who held that he did nothing wrong, that he was unfairly smeared as a fascist or a Nazi by his political opponents.
Sargent: And the John Birch Society bled into fascist movements at the time, right?
Walsh: One of the founding members of the John Birch Society was a man named Revilo Oliver, who was a professor of classics at the University of Illinois. He was a renowned Sanskrit scholar. He’s also a contributor to National Review magazine and close friends with William F. Buckley. He became a founding father of the modern American Nazi movement. He was instrumental in the creation of the National Alliance in the late ’60s and early ’70s, which is historically one of the most important white supremacist organizations in the U.S. These were not people who were at the periphery of ... The John Birch Society was hardly at the periphery of American conservatism in the ’50s and ’60s, and people who became neo-Nazis were hardly in the periphery of the John Birch Society.
Sargent: Right. To return to Trump’s rant for a second, he called his opponents fascists—including the Pelosis, which is funny since a crazed lunatic savagely attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband in a violent assault, and Trump and MAGA figures have actually mocked that and made light of it. This language of flirtation with political violence and really almost directly calls for it, the valorization of the January 6 rioters as patriots and heroes, the intimations from people like Marjorie Taylor Greene of political violence—this stuff sounds fascistic to a lot of people. You actually hear echoes of past right-wing language in that current stuff, right?
Walsh: Absolutely. There have been these fantasies of regenerative violence on the American right for a very long time. I write about this a little bit in my book. In the mid-’60s, the John Birch Society organized these things called American Opinion Bookstores. The idea was that it would be this outlet in your local town that sold right-wing literature about how the civil rights movement was infiltrated by the communists, that sort of thing. In practice, what happened was these became spaces for extreme right-wingers to come and congregate and talk about the need for violence against their perceived domestic political opponents: liberals, leftists, communists, the civil rights movement, student radicals.
This is in the mid- to late-’60s. You would see people like George Wallace and, even to a certain extent, not necessarily Richard Nixon himself, but Spiro Agnew came close to embracing this kind of language. It’s the need for violence to suppress student unrest on American college campuses in the late ’60s and early ’70s. There was a lot of violence deployed against campus protesters back in those days, infamously at Kent State in 1970, but the list goes on. There were Berkeley, elsewhere. That rings some alarm bells. That’s not something that can just be dismissed as rhetorical excess.
Sargent: General Mark Milley sounded an alarm bell himself. Former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Trump years described Trump as “fascist to the core” and “a total fascist,” according to Bob Woodward’s new book. Milley discusses a 2020 meeting at which Trump, as president, threatened to retaliate against two retired military officers who criticized him. We’re now seeing a marked escalation in the language of retribution and the threats from Trump. He’s now running on an explicit platform promising authoritarian violence. Can you put that in the historical context for us? Is that something new on the right to run on a promise of retributive violence in this way?
Walsh: I think yes, certainly in modern American history. For the sake of argument, let’s just say modern begins in roughly the ’20s. That’s typically how I periodize this when I teach modern U.S. history, starting in the ’20s. There really hasn’t been a campaign from a major political party that has so openly run on the desire for and the prescription for restorative violence, restorative state violence and also non-state violence against domestic political opponents. The closest one that comes to mind is George Wallace’s 1968 third-party presidential run. One of the things that I find really disturbing—and I’ll take them off my historian’s hat and put on my political pundit hat—about the 2024 campaign cycle, the election this year, is Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate and the codification of a proto-platform in Project 2025, which of course Trump has disavowed.
I personally don’t take that disavowal all that seriously because JD Vance is exactly the guy you would pick to be the major influence in the administration if you were serious about implementing that vision. You at New Republic have covered this very, very extensively. It is a vision to establish an authoritarian presidency, certainly beyond the scope of any authoritarian presidency that we’ve seen in the past, including Nixon. It’s the combination of the rhetoric of violence, which again, to be fair from Trump, is not new. He did talk like this, not quite so extremely, in 2016 and 2020.
Sargent: Although, David, I think he has been more explicit in threatening the use of the military.
Walsh: Yes, I think that’s right. I remember having this conversation with friends and colleagues back in 2020. I was not concerned that Trump would be able to successfully hold onto power after the November election if he lost. I was saying this back in July or August, which is not to say that I wasn’t concerned about the potential for violence. There was, of course, a tremendous amount of violence with the January 6 attempted coup. But I was not concerned that that would be successful. The reason was that in the summer of 2020, Trump wanted to use the military to suppress the George Floyd uprisings. I was living in D.C. at the time and we were very concerned—those of us who were living there in the district itself—that at any moment the 101st Airborne could come in and you could see the military on the streets in a very explicit way. That didn’t happen. And that didn’t happen because of the opposition of people like Milley, the generals, because he clearly did not have the support of the military that limited his ability to impose his will in the aftermath of the election.
Now, what Project 2025 suggests—what his various staffing decisions have suggested, the fact that he is so keen on talking about using the military in this election cycle—is that they are serious. They have a plan to install loyalists in these various positions. They are serious about the deportation of 10 or 15 million people, depending on which figure they feel like using at any given time. In order to do that, you need a robust state infrastructure, a robust enforcement mechanism to deport that number of people. Really, some people have dismissed that policy platform is unserious as not in keeping with Project 2025 and this idea that you’re going to defang or purge the federal government. Well, how are you going to do that while also building up this new enforcement mechanism? To me, the purpose of that is to create a powerful law enforcement/paramilitary institution that is loyal to Trump and his closest associates primarily.
Sargent: Let me hop in here and say that we should remember that Trump has explicitly talked about using the National Guard to carry out some of these mass deportations, which is a direct declaration that he will use the military in some sense to carry out domestic policy. Stephen Miller has endorsed the idea of red state National Guards going into blue states to carry out some of these operations. This is very much in keeping with what you’re talking about. Let’s also remind people that when there was a crackdown on the protesters outside the White House in 2020, those generals who resisted actually stepped forward and had to reaffirm the military’s commitment to the Constitution over Trump, which I think really underscored what you’re talking about here: that there was really a sense in which Trump was trying to win their loyalty to him and over the country for all sorts of nefarious ends.
Walsh: Exactly. It strikes me that the big question, and hopefully this is not something that is going to have to be ... because hopefully he will lose decisively or at least conclusively in November ... but the civil institutions held barely in his first term. Again, between Vance and Project 2025 and some of the other key staffing decisions, it does, to me, suggest that there is a serious plan to try to undermine and unravel those institutions in a very serious and strategic way.
Sargent: I think people should realize also that Project 2025 contains a blueprint for purging the federal government and replacing hundreds or thousands of officials with Trump loyalists. That’s really key to carrying out the type of thing you’re talking about. I want to go back to your book for a sec. One thing you draw out is that we need to take the history of fascist movements in the U.S. more seriously as a genuine component of the American political tradition, and that this should inform our understanding of the right more broadly. I want to ask you to apply that to MAGA. It’s a movement that’s all about purging and purifying the nation with mass expulsions, fantasies about the nation being in decline, about retribution for all kinds of resentments and humiliations over imagined victimhood, and so forth. Trump speaks to those impulses very directly. How do you think about all that?
Walsh: One of the things that I try to get at in the book is to not think about fascism as something that is alien or foreign to the American political tradition. You have fascistic movements on the right that emerge during the ’30s. Ironically enough, this gets back to what we were talking about earlier, many of them will start out by saying that, Well actually, FDR is the real fascist for building up the New Deal. So much of where that political energy comes from in the ’30s is opposition to organized labor, and its influence in creating what becomes a dominant framework in American politics, the New Deal Coalition for the next 30 or 40 years. There’s a tremendous amount of antisemitism in the movement at the time as well, which I think extends through to the present day. But that comes from a combination of broader conspiratorial antisemitism about Jewish radicalism and global conspiracies. In the case of one specific figure I wrote about in the book, Merwin Hart, [that comes from] a political calculation of, Actually it is these immigrants, many of whom are Jews, that are ultimately responsible for the electoral coalition that’s putting his hated enemy, Franklin Roosevelt, into the White House. You see resonances of this throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Pat Buchanan, who was of course a prominent figure in the Nixon administration, later the Reagan administration—
Sargent: And really a precursor to Trump in many ways—
Walsh: Exactly. He ran for president in 1992 on a platform that ... He has, I believe, said in the past couple of years, that he basically takes credit for Trumpism because what Donald Trump was saying in 2016 is what he was saying in 1992. And rightly so. John Ganz wrote that wonderful book, When the Clock Broke, about this subject earlier this year. There is this deeper history and it’s also not, again, that far removed from mainstream conservatism. One of the things I talk about in the book repeatedly is how people in mainstream conservative institutions—I focus on National Review, the William F. Buckley’s famous magazine—so many people in that orbit end up becoming explicit Nazis over the course of their careers. Revilo Oliver, mentioned before; George Lincoln Rockwell, who became the head of the American Nazi party, worked for National Review briefly; Joe Sobran—who was one of Buckley’s protégés in the 1970s, his replacement for Garry Wills after Wills wrote Nixon agonistes and became a critic of American conservatism—became a Holocaust denier in the ’90s.
Sargent: The lines between the fascist movements and parts of the far right have been pretty blurry. Just to wrap this up, David, one thing that really strikes me listening to you talk is that this debate about whether Trump is a fascist, whether the word is appropriate and so forth, is amazing that it’s confined to mostly academics. Take Milley’s description of Trump as a full-blown fascist. A top general describes the Republican presidential candidate as a fascist, [and] the American press has not really covered that extensively. Media Matters found very little broadcast news coverage of it and not a lot in the major papers. But this should have prompted a major national debate, no? As a historian, does the reticence to go here surprise or even alarm you? And should we be talking about this a little more right now?
Walsh: One of the problems is that there has been this debate. It’s been primarily among academics, but it’s filtered out from time to time into the broader media about this question of whether or not Trump is a fascist. It’s gotten pretty vociferous at times. But the broader point is we’ve been having this conversation for almost a decade now and yet he is still in a position where he could ... I was just looking at the polls before I came on at 5:38 pm. It’s a coin toss, it seems. There’s some cause for optimism in North Carolina, but it’s a coin toss. What does that say about the health of American political institutions when a guy who has been accurately described as a threat to democracy, as an authoritarian—I find it difficult to just even express this—[as] a man who attempted to violently subvert the outcome of a presidential election is still in a position to potentially win, possibly even fair and square, the next election cycle. To me, that just speaks to the real degradation of our democracy and our political institutions.
When people make the Weimar analogy, which often comes up in these conversations about fascism, there is just a tendency to think about history as a blueprint for, OK, Well, the Beer Hall Putsch failed when Hitler tried to seize power in Munich in ’23, but that means that there is still this danger of some seizure of power in the future by Trump, in this analogy. OK, that’s all well and good, but the real value of the Weimar analogy is about the fragility of German political institutions, the poor strategic decisions made by all sorts of German political leaders in the ’20s and ’30s, along with broader macroeconomics and political trends. We know what ails American democracy, right? We know what the structural problems in American politics are, and for a variety of reasons, we have not been capable of solving them. And there are, of course, real political reasons, real political obstacles to that, like abolishing the filibuster, that sort of thing. But there are consequences to that lack of structural reform. Unfortunately, one of the real dangers here is that it puts somebody like Trump within a spitting distance of the White House yet again. Here we are again.
Sargent: Absolutely, well said. Really alarming. I would just add that I think a lot of this goes to how screwed up our discourse is and our information environment is. There’s been polling that shows that a lot of swing voters are simply unaware of Trump’s most vivid and explicit authoritarian threats. That’s a big contributor to the problem. And Trump knows how screwed up our discourse is. He just goes out and he just laughs off the label and just applies it to his opponent.
Walsh: If I can interject here and add something real quick, part of the other problem is the people who know don’t believe it. They don’t believe that Trump is ... There’s been a lot of reporting about this recently that people who hear Trump saying these things don’t think he’s serious about it or don’t think that he’s referring to them. That’s a problem that I don’t know how to solve, but it’s a real, real serious one.
Sargent: Well, we may have to learn the hard way. David Austin Walsh, thank you so much for coming on. Fascinating, if harrowing, discussion.
Walsh: It’s my pleasure.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.