Former president Donald J. Trump is loved and hated in the contemporary US and elsewhere. So, it came as no surprise that in the second and final part of the ABC TV Four Corners program on the forthcoming US presidential election, titled The Battlegrounds (presenter Mark Willacy, producer Amy Donaldson), the political F-word was used.
Willacy had this to say: “Donald Trump has made immigrants and border security key themes of his presidential election campaign, using hate-filled rhetoric his critics describe as Hitler-esque.” Well, many of Trump’s critics believe he is a modern-day fascist. But there is no reason for the ABC to report the claim as if it contains considerable veracity.
To be fair, the representation of Trump as a modern-day Hitler is not confined to Australia’s taxpayer-funded broadcaster. On the cover of its June issue, left-of-centre magazine The New Republic depicted Trump as Adolf Hitler. While the left-of-centre The New Yorker suggested on its January 15 cover that he might be a contemporary buffoon channelling Benito Mussolini. That’s journalistic talk.
The link between the former president and various fascists has been embraced by influential members of the Democratic Party. At a fundraiser on August 25, 2022, Joe Biden said the Make America Great Again philosophy inspired by Trump was “almost like semi-fascism”.
On US ABC News’ The View on November 8 last year, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton compared Trump to Hitler and said if he were elected president again, “it would be the end of our country as we know it”. She added: “I don’t say that lightly.” The obvious point here is that any comparison between Hitler and Mussolini and contemporary US politics is an insult to many of those who died due to, or suffered under, the dictatorship of Italian fascism (1925-43) or the totalitarian regime of German Nazism (1933-45). Moreover, it’s impossible to imagine a second Trump presidency could amount to the end of the US as we know it or the end of democracy. After all, the US got through the first Trump administration well enough.
Most US presidential elections in recent years have been relatively close affairs. It remains to be seen how well Vice-President Kamala Harris will perform in the forthcoming November election.
But it is clear that Trump has significant support outside California and New York. He will prevail if he is successful in states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Trump is not the only politician in Western democracies to exhibit narcissistic tendencies or who, at times, uses somewhat brutal language. But this does not make him a Hitler or a Mussolini, or a danger to democracy. Also, the media has been highly critical of Trump while giving Biden a soft run until recent weeks.
The US president is often described as the most powerful person in the world. This overlooks the checks and balances in the US political system. The US executive is not represented in congress. It is the House of Representatives and the Senate that passes or rejects legislation. Sure, the president can issue executive orders – but they do not have the long-term force of legislation.
Then there is the US Supreme Court and other federal courts. Plus the executive, legislature and judiciary in 50 states. Plus federal, state and local police forces. The president is commander-in-chief of the US military. But evidence of the Trump presidency indicates that the military is in no sense a slave to the president’s wishes.
Former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd appears to have performed well since taking up the position of Australia’s ambassador to the US. Rudd was interviewed by former Coalition treasurer Joe Hockey (a one-time Australian ambassador in Washington) on Sky News Australia at the recent Republican convention in Milwaukee.
Rudd told Hockey: “If … you think ‘My god this (a Trump victory in November) is beyond the pale’ and reach for the smelling salts, well … it’s going to cruel you from day one. It’s actually the wrong conclusion. I say a lot to the Euros (Europeans) along these lines – which is: chill, Bill.”
This advice makes sense. Western society survived the Trump presidency and will do so again if the Republican Party attains the White House in November. The Republican candidate comes from an old American tradition. He is a fervent nationalist with protectionist tendencies. This may cause problems to trading nations such as Australia that have scant levels of protectionism. But Australia did well during the Trump presidency.
Then there is the allegation that Trump is an isolationist. This issue was addressed well by Mary Kissel, a senior adviser to US secretary of state Mike Pompeo in the previous administration.
Kissel, a former member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board who has close contacts with Australia, was interviewed by Sky News’ Sharri Markson last Wednesday. Kissel told the Sharri program the Trump administration encouraged NATO to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, to the displeasure of Russian President Vladimir Putin. And that the Trump administration encouraged nations to get rid of Huawei and to wake up to Chinese influences overseas. Then there was US support for the Quad (Australia, India, Japan and the US) and the pressure put on NATO to increase defence spending.
Kissel described as “ridiculous” the idea that the Trump administration was not active internationally. And she made the point that Putin never invaded another country when Trump was president.
It remains to be seen what any second Trump administration may be like. But it’s hyperbolic scaremongering to suggest it would resemble Hitler’s Reich and lead to the abolition of democracy.
In the conclusion to his 2004 book Fascists, American scholar Michael Mann distinguished between the 20th-century European fascists and the “few crackpots and thugs” of the 21st century “who call themselves fascists or Nazis”. He added: “As a word in usage today, it appears largely as the exclamation ‘Fascist!’ – a term of abuse hurled at people we do not like.”