[The end of 2025 means another Year in Review blog series, AmericanStudying a handful of the year’s biggest stories. I’d love your 2025 reflections in comments!]
On overt and insidious ways that Trump 2.0 parallels the worst leaders in world history.
Because the United States has had such longstanding relationships with so many of them, especially in the Western Hemisphere but also everydamnwhere else, I’ve written about dictators quite a bit in this space. For the most part, those relationships have formed after the dictators have taken power, and indeed have reflected America’s realpolitik perspective on what these established authoritarian figures can do to help advance our own national interests (whether foreign policy or economic or both). But there have certainly also been times when the U.S. has actively helped those authoritarian leaders both come to power in the first place and then cement their fascist dictatorial regimes, as was the case for example with Fulgencio Batista in 1930s Cuba. Which gives those of us with historical awareness an unquestionably ironic but also quite well-informed perspective on how the first authoritarian dictator in American history (at least at the presidential level) is seeking to cement his own fascist regime.
Many of the ways Trump and his cronies are doing so are strikingly overt. That includes the story that has understandably dominated the headlines throughout the second half of 2025, starting with Los Angeles in June: Trump’s use of the military to invade (a word I’m using very deliberately) and occupy (ditto) a number of American cities, especially those led by Democratic and/or African American Mayors. But there are plenty of other such striking parallels to world fascisms past and present as well, including nationalizing corporations and industries, using law enforcement to target political enemies, attacking and seeking to shut down critical media, purging “non-loyal” employees from all areas of the government, falsifying basic science and facts to align with the leader’s vision, and much, much, much more. Just writing those sentences and adding those hyperlinks really drives home how widespread and how blatant this descent into fascism has been, and I hope any reader of this blog will know that I don’t use such phrases or framings lightly.
I think there’s an even more insidious layer to the rise of this first fascist regime in American history, though. We’ve obviously had presidents around whom cults of personality formed, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries and even more especially in the media age; from Teddy Roosevelt’s faux-machismo to JFK’s Camelot, Ronald Reagan’s adoring acolytes to Barack Obama’s cheering crowds, these leaders have inspired popular adoration to be sure. But I’ve lived through two of those presidencies, and studied and written extensively about the other two (and every other presidential administration in our history), and I can say definitively that none of them were anything close to the cultish figures that Donald Trump is for so damn many people, from those serving him in his administration to those supporting him around the country. “The state, it is me” is a phrase associated with monarchs like Louis XIV, and of course monarchy was in many ways the original form of authoritarian regime. And it’s no coincidence that Trump loves to share images of himself as a King, nor that his actions align with so many of the criticisms leveled at King George in the Declaration of Independence. An American monarch would be even more ironic than an American dictator, but that’s about where we are in late 2025.
Next reflections tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? 2025 stories you’d highlight?
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