Jason Stanley on “undermining propaganda” with fascism: “Trump is robbing democracy of any meaning”

Donald Trump is a dictator in waiting. He is now publicly declaring that he will be a dictator on “day one” of his regime if he returns to power in 2025.

Like other dictators, Trump is a megalomaniac, possessed by delusions of grandeur and omnipotence. As part of that pathological and extremely dangerous behavior, Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he appears to be profoundly mentally unwell. As seen last weekend in Iowa, Trump is now going so far as to basically declare that he is some type of Chosen One, and that “God” and “Jesus” will intervene on behalf of him and the American neofascists in their campaign to defeat President Biden and the Democrats.

The love and adoration that Trump’s followers feel toward their Dear Leader only grows the more dictatorial, fascistic, and hostile to human decency and the good society he becomes. The cruelty is always the point; Trump hates the same people his followers do; Like other cult leaders, Trump’s relationship to his MAGA followers is both parasitic and symbiotic.

Fascism, as an extension of today’s version of American conservatism, is a form of religious politics (a movement of faith, action, and violence more than reason and reflection) that is largely immune from empirical reality and the type of obsolescent normal politics that the mainstream news media and larger political class are slavishly devoted to.

In total, the MAGA movement and American neofascism are revolutionary projects, decades in the making, to end multiracial pluralistic democracy and replace it with an American Christofascist Apartheid plutocracy. As seen with Project 2025, Agenda 47, and the Red Caesar scenario for example, the Republican fascists and “conservative” movement have made great progress in creating the infrastructure to implement these plans.

The mainstream American news media and responsible political class, however, continue to act shocked and surprised by Trump’s Hitler-like threats and agenda. In so many ways, this is all anticlimactic and obvious: Trump and the other American fascists have been telegraphing and announcing in plain sight their plans to end the country’s democracy for more than seven years. To be in denial for so long is a form of malpractice and betrayal of the responsibilities by the so-called guardians of democracy.

So I spoke with Professor Jason Stanley, one of the first people with a prominent public platform to sound the alarm about Trump and the MAGA movement’s fascist threat to American society. He is the Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of “How Fascism Works.” His new book (co-authored with David Beaver) is “The Politics of Language.”

In this wide-ranging conversation, Stanely reflects on why the mainstream American news media and political class were in denial for so long about the fascist reality, how they are now much too late in waking up to the dangers of Trumpism and fascism, and why such poor decisions and overall failures may doom the country’s future. Stanley also explains, contrary to the self-soothing narrative advanced by too many pundits and commentators that the ex-president is stupid or a buffoon, that Trump is a master propagandist who has deftly outmaneuvered and manipulated the news media into doing his bidding.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity: 

How are you feeling as you take a measure of our collective emotions here in this country at this moment?

I’m experiencing a sense of reality denial. This is from the media and also in the circles in which I operate. There is still a part of the left that still believe that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are not that different. Even after all that has happened, they still believe such a thing. I have encountered members of the professional class, Republicans, who support Trump because the idea of Kamala Harris being president is not acceptable to them. Then there are headlines from the likes of the New York Times with verbiage such as, “A second Trump term may be even as or more disruptive than the first.” Really? Maybe?

In all and from some many parts of American society there is this mass reality denial where people are digging in for stability out of desperation.   

The elite news media is finally waking up, if only for a second, to the reality of Trumpism and American fascism and how he is going to be a dictator. But here is the problem: they sound the alarm, but I don’t think they really believe it because the next day it is back to the obsolete horse race coverage and ill-conceived “hot take” and superficial controversy of the day. These stories about Trump and fascism should be on the front page every day. The mainstream news media is so late to the reality of the situation they really have no credibility left as I see it.

It’s surreal. No amount of reality will change them. I’m shocked, by the way the media is reacting to every new claim that Trump is a fascist as if this were news. Those like me, you, and a select group of others have been saying for years that Trump was a potential fascist dictator and there is a movement behind him. They dismissed us and laughed at us. Now instead of turning to those of us who were accurate and sounding the alarm years ago, the media is turning to people, supposed experts, who only now are realizing that we’re facing a fascist, social and political movement. Such people should not be the ones turned to by the news media to be talking about the near-term future of Trump and this fascist movement and the danger. Why? They have quite clearly demonstrated total unreliability. For example, a person who is so late to this danger and reality can go back instantly to normalization. Who knows what someone who was so blatantly wrong for so long about social reality will believe or say? The current commentators were so far behind the fact that Trump is a fascist that they will not be able to properly comprehend such tricks. Most importantly, in 2023, they are just starting to think about fascism.

Trump is doing something very sophisticated right now that is going to take these people who are late to the danger by surprise. Trump is saying that Joe Biden is the real threat to democracy. That is such a smart move. Every horrible thing Trump is accusing Biden and the Democrats and his other opponents of being is a reflection of Trump. These are expressions of intent by Trump. In his own fascist twisted way Trump is the most honest politician of my lifetime. Trump is a master of politics. He says what he means, and he means what he says. If you know how to read Trump correctly then you understand his intentions and plans. If you are just now realizing that Trump is a fascist, you’re going to be looking for signs to assuage yourself that you are just being hysterical, because you spent so many years calling those of us who have been correctly describing reality, hysterical. The people who the media are turning to now as alarm sounders are not equipped to understand what is really happening. 

The commentariat– especially too many centrist and liberal types — really are in denial about Trump’s deep strategy. It is easy for them to call him names and mock him and the MAGA movement and the Republicans. When I look at Trump and his machine, I see something very sophisticated. For example, so many of the usual suspects who have been so late and so wrong about the crisis, are saying that Trump’s attacks on Biden as an “enemy of democracy” won’t work because “who would believe it?” — “It is so obviously wrong.” They aren’t the audience. Their egos and hubris and narcissism will not allow them to see that fact. They are not the center of the political universe.

They have been manipulated by Trump to the extreme. Trump is muddying the waters. For those people who have not been paying attention to politics, it will just seem like two people calling each other names. Biden and Trump are both saying each other is a threat to democracy, which is obviously not true. Trump has been charged with actual crimes. Trump’s literally saying, “I’m going to arrest Joe Biden” and all these other “enemies” because they’re not bowing down to him. In the end, for most Americans, it is all going to seem like “polarization” and “partisanship” with the two sides fighting. The media has consistently normalized and enabled Trump. The American news media keeps featuring these talking heads and experts and the like who will make the American people feel better about themselves and feel better about the crisis. That is irresponsible. 

Do words and language like “fascism” and “democracy crisis” actually have any currency anymore in the popular discourse?

Trump is trying to rob those words of meaning, which is very smart. Trump is so much smarter than the people in the media who he is manipulating. As I discuss in my book, a method of propaganda is to try to rob the language of ideals of meaning. To that point, by accusing Joe Biden of being the one that threatens democracy, Trump is robbing “democracy” of any meaning. That is called “undermining propaganda”. As applied here, the proponent of democracy is labeled as being the antidemocratic one. What Trump is doing with language and propaganda is very clever. Moreover, when you use the correct words to condemn Trump as a fascist or corrupt or what have you, those words will not have any force behind them because of how they have been weakened by Trump and his agents.

Here is something else that is verboten among the mainstream media and political types that I have said repeatedly: Trump is funny and charismatic. He is devious and beguiling and evil. Evil can be entertaining and fun. Trump is compelling. Why are so many people who should know better afraid to say that?

One of the reasons the elite media and mainstream media responded so negatively to those of us who warned about Trump and fascism years ago is that they thought they were the smart and superior ones. They believed that Trump was stupid and a buffoon. No one like Trump could make it through the American system, the guardrails, the institutions, and, especially, people like us! The time has come to recognize that Trump is an incredibly compelling and magnetic figure. He is a cult leader and a master of crowds right out of the history books in his ability to use propaganda. To actually say that Trump is a buffoon makes you, the person saying it, the real buffoon.

The media cannot admit they’re wrong. They cannot go to the people who told them they were wrong from the very beginning. The media has to go to the figures who agreed with them that this was all hysteria. They are all part of the same class and social circle. It’s only those people who finally in December 2023 are realizing that we have a fascism problem in America that the mainstream media will feature. To talk with the people who were telling the truth long before would make the news media look like fools for not seeing what was going on right in front of them with Trump and the MAGA movement at least seven years ago. Most importantly, if you have only realized these things in 2023, you are just starting to think about what that means. Even if you are smart, you are too far behind the curve.

History is going to write about the failures of the American media in the Age of Trump and this democracy crisis and rising fascism. Just as history has harshly judged the conservatives in Nazi Germany for underestimating Hitler because they thought they could control him; the same types of judgments are going to be made about the American media wildly underestimating Trump and laughing at the threat he represents for so long.

When you heard Trump recently channeling Hitler and the Nazis, how were you feeling? What went through your mind?

None of this is new. Trump has been making these types of threats, using racism and white supremacy, etc for a long time. The media is now picking up on it more than they were before. In 2018, the media didn’t recognize what Trump was doing as a coherent set of patterns. They’re slightly better now in terms of recognizing what Trump is doing as Nazi propaganda. But the media is still insisting on believing that Trump does not mean what he says. Trump always means what he says. Trump is going to come after me and other people who have been identifying the danger and telling the truth about fascism. For ordinary citizens, as long as you don’t say anything about politics, you will be fine. For immigrants, it will be truly horrifying.

Trump is saying that anyone who criticizes him is a “Marxist” who’s going to be targeted as harshly as he “legally” can. Trump will target leftist intellectuals in universities, non-profits, and media. More specifically, he will target the concepts and structures that expose him, such as Critical Race Theory, as “Marxists”, and threats to the nation. That’s just how this stuff works.

How do you make sense of those people who are still saying that Trump is just being hyperbolic? That he won’t be a dictator, that these are just exaggerations because he won’t be able to do it anyway.

The more extreme the situation, the more intense the denial. As the saying goes, we are truly living in “historical times.”

How do we balance hope and optimism?

I think a sense of urgency is required. Unfortunately, the news media is intentionally trying to destroy that sense of urgency. The mainstream media is all about telling people what they want to hear, and what makes them feel good, and not about real news that is upsetting. And if you tell people that the country is experiencing an extreme emergency from Trump and this fascist threat to the country, most Americans don’t want to hear that. And again, when the media goes to “experts” who are willing to sound the alarm, it is mostly people who are too late realizing it. We are at the end of 2023. The election is less than a year away. 

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How are you orienting yourself? How do you suggest people orient themselves when they’re literally living in such an era?

When a war is happening, people deny it until it’s in their front yard. And so, these levels of denial and doubling down and tripling down on it, that these are not historical times, that this is business as usual, is what people do in these times of crisis. That behavior continues especially when you’ve been wrong so many times. It gets worse: When you’ve been wrong so many times, you’re invested in being wrong. So how do you wake people up who not only run the levers of power and media, but are invested in continuing with the same errors? It’s very difficult.

One thing that has helped me to navigate these historical times, the Trumpocene, is that I am not an American exceptionalist. I think this is a fine country in many ways. It’s my home. But I don’t think that the United States is somehow magically imbued with a power to resist the horrible forces that have afflicted other countries. Jim Crow was a fascist system. Once you understand that, there’s no guarantee of any of these rights or no guarantee of any fairness in this country. We have a classic fascist situation in this country right now. Trump is a fascist leader who intends to overthrow the country and democracy — and he’s very good at it. It’s all now finally dawning on people. The cognitive dissonance must be enormous for those who laughed, and mocked, and didn’t take this threat seriously.

How does the right-wing assault on education as seen in Florida and across the country fit into the fascist model?

In Florida, DeSantis and the Republicans are doing what Orban did in Hungary with Central European University. New College of Florida has basically been destroyed. Authoritarian systems go back to previous practices. In this country we’re going to return to a kind of Jim Crow education. The Trumpists and the fascists understand something that liberals don’t, which is that education shapes and molds people. Liberals have this idea that you learn some facts and then you make your own decisions. That is simply not how it works. Education shapes and forms people. Every authoritarian regime understands that fact. In terms of replacing textbooks with nationalist drivel, policing teaching, the school systems, and the whole educational system the American fascist movement is way ahead of liberals. They know this is going to keep the fascists in power in the future.

Yesterday, Trump publicly said that he is going to be a dictator but “only on day one” of his new administration because then he will stop after he gets certain things done. Because it demands engagement even though the answer is obvious, do dictators ever just stop?

What Trump really means is he’s going to change all the laws, and then the new laws will enable him to do what he wants. According to the new laws, Trump will no longer be a dictator. The new laws that Trump puts in place will be about fealty to him. He will declare a state of emergency and change the laws.

How are you making sense of the decision to stay here in the United States if Trump and the American fascists take over vs the decision to leave? Lots of people are struggling with that right now.

I am thinking about that decision for myself. There is so much reality denial out there. The inertia is too great for many people. Their friends and family may talk about leaving the county, but in the end, they will remain in denial. If you have transgender kids, or you’re transgender yourself, you’ve got to try to leave the country if Trump and the fascists win. But if you are someone like me you probably have to stay. This is my country. If I leave, I will have less of a voice in the opposition. There are family considerations too. I think for all of us, we want to stay where our loved ones are. And either you bring them all together or you stay here and fight.