No, President Trump is not an American version of the 1920s-1930s British fascist Oswald Mosley.
I make this point having recently watched the fifth season of Netflix’s Peaky Blinders. That season of the British drama focuses on Mosley’s British Union of Fascists political movement. It offers some not-so-subtle efforts to parallel Trump and Mosley. This fits with a broader cultural trend of presenting Trump as a fascist-in-waiting.
But let’s focus on Peaky Blinders. Nick Schager identifies what’s going on in his interview with series creator Steven Knight. “Lucky for [Peaky Blinders] and unluckily for the world,” Knight told him last year, “there are huge resonances between what was happening in the early 1930s and what is happening now in terms of nationalism, populism, racism — it’s almost like history and fate were pointing this out to us.” Linking to Trump, Knight observes Mosley’s speeches “in which he talks about ‘false news.’ That was really there. It’s not me making it up. And his slogan was ‘Britain First.’ So make of that what you will.”
Here’s what to make of it.
Yes, Trump says some idiotic and unnecessarily nasty things. Trump rails against “fake news” for the same reason as Mosley: to delegitimize the media’s threat to his political interests. But he does not and cannot beat journalists up, nor can he throw them in jail. Yes, Trump is a nationalist populist, but not all nationalist movements are the same. Moreover, there are three defining distinctions between Trump and Mosley — along with his fellow fascists Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.
First, where Trump holds a democratic mandate to the American presidency, the 1930s fascists were authoritarian losers.
Mosley never won any significant support among the British population, was directly challenged by much of it, and lost more support the more voters saw of him. Mussolini was a clown who relied on Hitler to fight his wars and save his life. Hideki Tojo’s delusion led him to believe his small nation could defeat a nation 10 times its size in a fight across the Earth’s largest ocean. Hitler is ultimately measured by catastrophic political, economic, military, and mathematical failure.
Second, Trump is bound to the democratic rule of law.
While this is an obvious truth, it bears repeating for the sake of some people — such as Chris Cillizza. Trump’s political fate is matched to the mandates of the Constitution rather than some blackshirt organization of morons. Just as Trump’s presidency rests incumbent on the Senate’s vote to acquit him on the two articles of impeachment, Trump will not remain in power past 12 p.m. on January 20, 2021, absent a new electoral mandate.
Yes, some might believe that Trump should be impeached by the Senate. Regardless, the elected Senate is voting with free authority. This speaks to something: For all his rants about fake news and election fraud, Trump has given no serious indication that he would attempt to escape the law — nor, as Mussolini and Hitler did, could he hope to escape the law. American institutions are simply too strong.
Third, where Trump leads a big-tent movement, the fascists led explicitly exclusionary movements.
Consider Trump’s Super Bowl election commercial. Does anyone seriously believe that Mosley, Hitler, or Mussolini would have a campaign ad highlighting criminal justice reform that primarily benefited minorities? Of course not.
Yes, Trump stokes anti-immigration rhetoric in ways that are anathema to the American spirit. Yes, he seeks to mobilize a particular class of white male voters in his favor. But so also does Trump regularly sell himself as the candidate of blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and even Muslims. That he does so at all evidences a key difference between his ideology and fascism. At the heart of the various 1930s fascist movements was the sense that the “other” had to be purged to protect the “pure.”
As an exemplifying extension here, note Trump’s particular concern for the protection of Syrian Muslim lives. Trump often criticizes Russia over its support for Bashar Assad’s slaughter of Syrians. This is one of the few areas where Trump chooses to attack Vladimir Putin publicly. Would Trump do so if he truly believed, as Mosley did, that all Muslims are evil?
The key here is that where Trump finds support from a few freaks and many decent Americans, Mosley’s fascist movement, like all fascist movements, was a predominantly male mix of intellectual puppets, angry racists, and societal failures.
Today, Mosley’s legacy is measured by fictional TV shows and his relentlessly ludicrous son Max Mosley. In so, he finds shared ignominy with his heroes: Hitler, the failed 1,000-year emperor after whom no one wants to name their children; Mussolini, the Roman emperor wannabe who ended up as an upside-down corpse in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto; and Tojo, who invited America’s delivery of a new rising sun over his cities.
Trump, in contrast, continues to lead the most powerful democratic nation on Earth. He does so with a highly credible opportunity to win reelection.
