Fascism Minus Kampf

Or, our enemy confuses the map for the terrain. This is an adaptation of a thread I wrote on bluesky.

If there's one thing that has defined President Donald Trump, it is that the man has never faced consequences. He bankrupted a series of sure-thing business ventures, including a casino, and kept right on being an extremely rich and famous person. His rise to true stardom was not a redemption arc but rather his projection as the perfect capitalist, archetypal entrepreneur and domineering boss, as week after week he pointed at someone on TV and yelled "you're fired." He committed years of blatant crime, corruption and outrage on the world stage and when he was finally, hesitantly threatened with prosecution, the most powerful judicial body in the history of the world intervened to say "you can't arrest him he's just an innocent lil' scamp."

Being held accountable for your behavior, if done within the context of caring and mutually empowering relationships, is one of the key factors in producing liberatory communities and relational well being. Of course, we never expect that from the lil' lord fauntleroys that rule over our society. If anything, their training, education and social world is designed to make them incapable of truly caring about others, of ever being accountable to the harm they cause.

But even still, this ruling-class learned-sociopathy is just as often accomplished via punishment and harsh discipline as it is by isolation, narcissism, or spoilage. Unlike accountability, punishment doesn't build character, it builds resentment, shame, and fear. It also tends to harden its victims, to make them better at violent struggle against their punishers, and over time teaches them the best ways to punish, dominate and take advantage of others in their turn. Punishment can make you a better strategic thinker.

Trump's absolute lack of consequences, his lack of struggle, his shameless, consequence-free power and constant wriggling out of jams is one of the most powerful appeals for his fans. He is the embodiment of whiteness-as-birthright, maleness as arbitrary power unto itself. The perfect symbol of American fascism, a mirror for all those petty-bourgeois dictatorial settlers grandfathered-in to power and prestige here in the waning of the American empire.

His utterly struggle-free life is the thing that has brought him to the absolute heights of power. And it is the thing that, if we can weaponize it against him, will bring him down.

If we look at the current state of the fascist coup in the US, it is clear that they are making significant material progress while simultaneously losing more and more political and popular ground. The tariffs are a particularly extreme example of this contradiction: Trump has successfully claimed economic power over the entire globe exclusively to his person – let congress, the people, his allies, even his cabinet be damned – but stock markets are in freefall, he's hemorrhaging support from the capitalist class and even his own people have started briefing against him. But this contradiction has been visible in almost all of his moves, as he successfully wields powers constitutionally and legally "unavailable" to the executive, but all the while popular discontent, protest and fury build at a rapid pace.

This contradiction will only lead to accelerating confrontations until it is resolved.

The resolution of this contradiction in Trump's first administration was achieved early, in the Airport shutdowns. Pushback from the streets caused both #Resist Democrats and Republican functionaries within the administration and federal bureaucracy to push back, walk back claims to the press, soften enforcement or even ignore his provacations, so that Trump's claims and demands remained mostly that. While he got some things done, many of his deepest policy desires mostly lived and died as Tweets.

These checks on his power stabilized the regime and popular energies alike. Antifascists eventually defeated the alt-right in the streets, but as Trump's policies were mostly in line with standard rightwing US governance his base of support stayed loyal, libidinally enjoying his lib-owning antics while experiencing little material change in condition.

Small business owners experienced an ecstasy of confidence and flourishing from having their mirror man in the white house, so while their actual business outcomes changed little (until the COVID pandemic), their sense of a booming economy drove media coverage and enthusiasm. This is the classic promise of fascism: a broadly granted sense of permission, the belief that your voice is finally heard, a feeling and aesthetic of sharing in the leader's power simply through admiring and supporting him.

The chart below, shared by Joe Weisenthal on Bluesky, shows self-reported small-business confidence from 2010 to 2025. You can see a spike of 300-700% during the Trump years, an exuberance absolutely detached from any economic "realities". Trump made small business owners feel good about themselves. That's it. That's why so many people thought the economy was better. Contra the liberals trying to find any reason other than genocide to blame for their 2024 election loss, there wasn't a "vibecession" under Biden, there was actually a massive vibe bubble under Trump's first admin.

The lesson Trump and his team drew from this was that the people loved them, that he made the economy better just by being in power, and that the main obstacle to be overcome in a second administration would be the aforementioned Resistance Dems, federal bureaucracy and so-called "RINOs" who slowed his roll. In the Biden interregnum they purged anyone insufficiently obsequious from the entire party apparatus and drew up step-by-step plans to purge the government on day one. They came in to the second administration with a blitzkreig strategy: move too fast and too brutally for those forces to organize.

While most successful fascist movements historically built themselves out of a street-fighting, pogrom-baiting, ground-up organizational struggle, MAGA is entirely top down and media-driven, learning lessons as it does from the Tea Party more even than from its own alt-right. The Tea Party was infamously astroturfed, seeded and guided from the top by party strategists and their billionaire funders. Of course, it wouldn't have worked if it hadn't collided with actual white grievance and picked up a huge coterie of on-the-ground activists who made it successful. But poor students of history, they learned only half the lessons from both the Tea Party and their own 2015 campaign: they recognized the important of messaging from above but severely overestimated the spontaneous organizing capacity of their own grassroots forces.

They come by such misunderstanding honestly. Where would Trump have had those misconceptions corrected? He beat the entire Republican field in 2015 despite the fact that his campaign clearly started as a fundraising and branding ploy. Launched with no professional staff to speak of and built entirely around media appeals from Mar-a-lago poolside for cash donations, the Republican party was so moribund and out of touch that he rode his golden escalator all the way to the top. The media then gave him unlimited free press as he faced three extremely unpopular Democratic candidates, and still he lost to one and only squeaked by the other two. Political campaigning at the top has been little more than tweeting, throwing money at various underlings, watching the news, and occasionally appearing before adoring crowds.

So while Trump et. al. recognized the utility of the street fighters in the Alt-right and later Q-Anon, they never grasped their centrality to MAGA's ongoing momentum, and he and his inner circle were neither of nor among them. The closest he got to real experienced political fighters were Republican strategists who he hated, calling them RINOs and firing them for massaging his image and moderating his policy, and Steve Bannon, who was himself only a money and messaging man for other more openly fascistic astroturf campaigns.

If they misunderstand the centrality of their own activists, they sorely lack an analysis of the antifascist forces that ultimately defeated his regime the first time around. His constant evocation of "antifa" as boogeyman was not matched by an understanding of the movement as such, and the further the Alt-right has retreated from memory, the more abstract "the enemy" has become. George W Bush appointed judges get accused of being "far left lunatics", while Kash Patel goes after ActBlue, MoveON and Soros' Open Society as though they're actually the center of left movement.

So while Trump 2.0 has successfully purged the RINOs, ripped apart the bureaucracy and steamrolled the Dems, they did so completely misunderstanding the role of popular struggle, both for and against his forces, in the first administration. This is a boardroom coup applied to the federal government.

Of course, it is not that Trump has no interest whatsoever in the public or its opinions. He is absolutely obsessed with his popularity, with his image, but the administration makes one of the most embarrassingly fundamental errors of analysis within the Spectacle: they confuse the media for a real reflection of the public mood. They mistake the map for the territory.

In MAGA world, the media is understood and experienced as the real source of popular power, rather than one of power's most subtle tools. Such confusion is unsurprising. Trump's whole career is built on media manipulation, he rose to power on it, campaigned on it, and has always used it as a bully pulpit to achieve his goals. The real, massive effectiveness of this media power – and it has put him into office twice, given Musk the keys to the treasury and kept both of them from facing charges for extremely blatant criminal acts – has seduced them entirely, such that they purposefully live within a hallucinatory false information sphere, the better to reenforce their confidence in their own total power.

By failing to understand the extent to which media and mediated power translates across and into society, they believed that capturing the media would be enough to capture the public. Thus, with the media in hand and a strategy to smash the RINOs, bureaucracy and Dems, they believed they had enough to achieve their goals and their dictatorship. It wasn't totally wrong: they have been quite successful in sidelining the other branches and smashing the bureaucracy.

Alas, however, the rubber does eventually hit the road. Libidinal red meat loses a lot of its power when the Fox News viewer can't afford actual steak. Combined with waning charisma, a perennial lack of focus, a fully polarized and divided information sphere and the collapse of any rebellious, underdog positioning, and the media fluffing isn't producing MAGA enthusiasm nearly as well as it used to, at the exact moment they're leaning on it harder than ever.

They really only had this two-pronged strategy – control the media and purge the government while robbing the till as fast as possible – but they attacked everywhere at once, as though they had much broader control of the situation. This blitz maximized popular resistance while actively demoralizing their base and their street forces.

You can see this confusion in the extremely sloppy handling of the military, who hate Hegseth so much congressional town halls are being shutdown by military families chanting for his firing, and of the national guard, who have had their payment structures threatened by DOGE fuckery. Even their preferred attack dog, ICE, has faced public chewing-outs from Trump and reorganization when the department failed to hit media-friendly targets of deportations.

To the extent that they're pursuing repression, they've been laser-focused on politically attacking Curtis Yarvin's "Cathedral" – universities and the press – which was a terrible analysis of the left in the Obama era, when he first developed it, but which has only gotten less and less accurate after 15 years of austerity, corporate consolidation and rightward drift.

The upshot is that Trump has very quickly and successfully built the image of a fascist dictatorship (See also: videos of El Salvador) but with none of the heft, solidity or popular adoption that would guarantee it sticks. If it weren't for Biden priming the pump on universities and hospitals through Palestine repression Trump wouldn't even be getting as many of those concessions to his policy.

This is a backwards way to go about establishing dictatorial power. Almost every successful dictator in history used a normal and normalizing image to entrench themselves while picking off potential enemies on the ground and strengthening their forces, until such time as they're secure enough to go full fash. It's only twenty years into AKP dictatorship that Erdogan is willing to openly and directly undermine national elections.

It is appropriate that this fascist regime which has only ever witnessed the world through the mirror of the spectacle should do a fascist coup so exactly backwards and upside down.

None of this means it wont work. None of this means they don't have the exact same goals and dreams as the dozens of puffed-up pathetic little men who did it before them, or that the popular base doesn't exist within the US for a christo-fascist dictatorship. Just because they did it badly doesn't mean they havent thus far done it. The contradiction could successfully be resolved through extreme repressive violence and compliance, through an unexpected surge of patriotic unity through war, via a capitalist coup that only entrenches the fascist power, or through the simple exhaustion of popular forces in the face of power's sheer inertia.

But it does mean that they're all the way out on a limb right now, and if they fall, it will be extremely obvious in retrospect just how alone they were on it.