@ChrisMayLA6 rightly draws attention the flaws of " #fascism" as a label for the #Trump regime. The Bear's essay is a good read.

May's alternative of " #gangsterism" is v useful, drawing focus to the thuggery & avarice.

But for me, the most important label for Trump is #American, prefixed with a superlative such as hyper or ultra.

Trump takes core American values to the max: empire, colonisation, narcissism, big lies, greed, bullying, doublespeak. #HyperAmericanism is not new, just unveiled.

@ChrisMayLA6 It seems to me that people go out of their way to avoid using the term fascism.

He (and his movement) use the same tactics that the Nazis used and have many of the same moralistic standpoints as the Nazis. But they are not identical and things have certainly changed.

Using the same tactics that failed before with Nazi Germany will obviously not work, so we had practice the first time round.

However, the anti-fascist movement was correct about the rise of fascism and a modern fascist has been spawned out of what was continuing fascism that never really went away after ww2.

@ChrisMayLA6 I disagree. If we think of fascism as just Mussolini and Hitler, yes, Trump is different. But fascism is more complex than that. It didn't disappear after WW2, but lived on as regimes supported by the US. They had varying degrees of theatrics and grand ideas, but a fiercely nationalist regime in cahoots with oligarchs was the model everywhere.
Trump looks very much like a dictator in Latin-America or Africa from the 1970s or 80s, including the love for gold and glamour, the gangsterism and the use of state power to enrich himself.
Nazism has been described as "boomerang imperialism", where the genocidal tactics of imperialism were brought back to Europe. I think Trump could be seen through the same lens where the imperialist tactics of US in the late 20th century are applied to US itself.
I wrote more extensively on this in April https://buttondown.com/audunmb/archive/is-trump-a-fascist-or-is-he-voldemort/

@ChrisMayLA6

That author really is doing everything they can to avoid thinking the line "it turns out that the antifascist movement were right all along, we should have listened to them back then, we should be listening to them right now."

I wonder why they're avoiding thinking that? There are several common reasons why people do, but I'm not familiar enough with them specifically to hypothesise about their personal motivations.

@ChrisMayLA6 aye

The merging of corporate & state authority, who’s to say the advance of that union : Pigs - Animals | Pink Floyd

Jason Stanley states plainly Trump is a fascist

50/seventy years of agenda to strip political clout from everyday people, here we find ourselves what we call-what name lands to encompass it’s nature

Fuck regardless don’t shite on us and say it’s raining #pigsOnTheWing # ‘AmiShaddai -enough
,_,,
'if not now, when

#TheThreeEvilsOfSociety #LoveYourEnemy

@ChrisMayLA6
I found some quotes attributed to Nehru on fascist methods, both definitely describe Trump's:

Fascism has the unique distinction of having no fixed principles, no ideology, no philosophy, only a definite technique of violence and terrorism.

The fascist method consists in creating a popular mass movement, with some slogans which appeal to the crowd, meant for the protection of the owning capitalist class.

@ChrisMayLA6

‘We cannot fight a corporatised, oligarchical, tech enabled, self-aggrandising, celebrity driven authoritarianism with the institutional muscle memory of the mid-20th century anymore - we need new tools. New forms of coordination, new shapes of regulatory ambition and new thinking about democratic control over transnational power.’

Agree.

@ChrisMayLA6
Yes, I found myself earlier this morning characterising Trump as a "Mob boss". "Nice country you have there. Shame if anything happened to it.."

@ChrisMayLA6
I know a couple times when I refused his advances he threatened me by saying he was mob. Gangsterism is far more appropriate for him and Putin.

@ChrisMayLA6 It’s refreshing to see someone present a consistent analysis of today’s systematic overloading of the term ‘fascist’ which has now just recently seen its 80-th anniversary following a very similar publication by no one else but George Orwell https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc 🤦