In four days, Americans will go to the polls with Donald Trump as a presidential candidate for the third time. In the nine years since he came down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his run to become the Republican nominee for President, the Democratic Party has wavered over how to deal with him, veering between laughing at the undeniable weirdness of MAGA Republicans and attacking him as a wannabe strongman and a threat to democracy.

Two weeks ago, John Kelly - a retired US Marine Corps General and Chief of Staff to President Trump between July 2017 and December 2018 - stated in an interview with the New York Times that he believes President Trump fits the definition of a "fascist", and would govern as a dictator if he could. The Harris campaign seized on his comments, and a fierce argument over them has erupted on both sides of the Atlantic.

The suggestion that President Trump is a fascist is not a new one. It was a routine accusation during his first term, and gained greater currency after his supporters stormed the US Capitol in 2021 to prevent the certification of the 2020 Presidential Election result. And General Kelly is not the first ex-officer to level the accusation. According to Bob Woodward, General Mark Milley, who served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under both Presidents Trump and Biden, has said that President Trump is “a fascist to the core.”

The American (and British) political right have characterised accusations of fascism as hysterical. Tim Stanley, writing in The Telegraph, has called the comparison tenuous and amounting to calling President Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, a communist. I have very little time for his brand of pedantry - the comparison between MAGA Republicanism and the fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s is perfectly valid. But MAGA Republicanism isn’t fascism, and President Trump isn’t a fascist. They represent a new brand of authoritarianism, just as dangerous to democracy and even more insidious. Their opponents call them fascist not because that is the best description of their politics but because we lack a better word for what their politics are.

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The MAGA Republicans are what David Renton, historian of the British fascist and anti-fascist movements of the 1930s and 1940s, calls the New Authoritarians. Their politics start out looking like radical, but democratic right-wing populism. It is not until push comes to shove that they are revealed as anti-democratic extremists, as President Trump was when he encouraged the January 6 insurrection.

The successful fascists of the 20th century destroyed democratic institutions the moment they took power, replacing them with totalitarian police states and enforcing loyalty to the party through indoctrination and paramilitary violence.

The New Authoritarians, however, hollow out democratic institutions from within. They pack the judiciary with loyalists, purge and disempower the legislature, undermine the integrity of elections, and transform the professional civil service into a personal, political vehicle.

From Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Türkiye to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, we have watched the New Authoritarian playbook play out for at least the past two decades across multiple democracies. The pinnacle of New Authoritarianism is, without a doubt, Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

President Trump’s admiration for President Putin is public knowledge, as is his desire to govern as President Putin does. Moreover, Putin’s Russia explicitly provides the model for the kinds of alt-right thinkers and strategists surrounding President Trump, Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, foremost among them.

The intellectual backbone of MAGA Republicanism, best represented by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 (directed by Paul Dans, a senior official in the Trump Administration), is New Authoritarianism incarnate. They support dramatically expanding the powers of the Presidency to circumvent the checks-and-balances function of Congress, enabling a future President Trump to govern through executive orders and the use of emergency powers delegated by a Republican-controlled Congress.

This would rely on the compliance of the judiciary, which is why groups like the Federalist Society - from whose shortlists all three Supreme Court justices appointed by Trump were chosen - push unitary executive theory, a radical reinterpretation of the US Constitution which would support the centralisation of ever more power in the White House.

Simultaneously, MAGA Republicans have been systematically undermining election integrity. President Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is complete, with any moderates who accept that he lost the 2020 election thoroughly marginalised. It has become a minority party oriented to grievance-driven, anti-immigrant, undemocratic, reactionary politics. As a minority party, its only hope to win elections is by suppressing the vote of its opponents. To do so, state Republican Parties have passed numerous laws since 2020 to make voting more difficult, states like Florida and Texas have removed millions from the electoral roll, and election officials in key states like Georgia have been replaced with "election deniers".
John Kelly believes President Trump fits the definition of a fascist, and would govern as a dictator if he couldJohn Kelly believes Donald Trump fits the definition of a fascist, and would govern as a dictator if he could (Image: Getty) And President Trump’s official platform, Agenda 47, sets out explicit plans to purge the American civil service - to “Dismantle the deep state”, as Agenda 47 puts it - and replace professional civil servants with new layers of political appointees who would have to pass a loyalty test to be appointed. This new-look government would allow President Trump to bypass the institutional checks on presidential power that often frustrated him in his first term, making it easier, for example, to implement his stated plan to establish a “truth and reconciliation commission” to punish his opponents.

Once in office, the crucial step by which New Authoritarians solidify power is by suppressing dissent. President Trump has repeatedly called for the prosecution of his political opponents in the Democratic Party and the revocation of the broadcast licences of national networks critical of him.

Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini came to power through political violence and intimidating and crushing opposition. Their admirers in Britain, led by Oswald Mosley, found that such tactics do not work in an institutionally strong democracy. Strategists like Mr Bannon understand that paramilitary violence, threats against democracy itself, and the prospect of totalitarianism are all political liabilities. They prefer to push right-wing extremism from within democratic institutions, ultimately reducing democracy to a sham.

President Trump and the MAGA Republicans are not fascists, but does that matter much? Authoritarianism is authoritarianism, whether it walks in jackboots or brogues, and the New Authoritarianism of Trump is as dangerous as the old authoritarianism of European fascism.

Mark McGeoghegan is a Glasgow University researcher of nationalism and contentious politics and an Associate Member of the Centre on Constitutional Change. He can be found on BlueSky @markmcgeoghegan.bsky.social