On Nazi Salutes and Trumpism as Fascism
My interview with Radio-Télévision Suisse
On May 21, I did an interview with Renaud Malik of Radio-Télévision Suisse in Lausanne. I thought his questions were interesting, and so I have translated my responses into English (the interview was in French) and I am publishing them for you, adding some remarks and images where relevant.
How did you interpret the gesture of Elon Musk, which some people saw as a Nazi salute? What do you think was going through his head at the time?
[Elon Musk kicked off the Donald Trump era and directed attention to himself by performing this controversial action at an inaugural party on Jan. 20, 2025].
For me, it was clearly a Nazi salute, and it was recognized as one by many right-wing extremists, who understand the significance of him performing it on that day. Musk performed the salute with such enthusiasm and force that some people treated it as a joke, as though there was something vaguely Chaplinesque about it. But when I look at his face I see nothing funny. I see aggression and also something else, as though performing this salute in public was a liberation or freeing gesture for him.
The context for this salute is Musk’s work to boost authoritarians and right-wing parties all over the world but especially in Germany. A few days after the salute, he showed up virtually at a meeting of the extremist Alternative for Germany party, which includes neo-Nazis. Musk looks unusually happy as he speaks to “his people,” telling them that they did not need to feel guilty about the Nazi past. It was as though he wanted to give them permission to leave aside this historical and moral burden, so they could feel free to continue Adolf Hitler’s legacy.
Musk’s gesture was meant to break a taboo in America as well, and just a few weeks later, Steve Bannon performed his own, less exuberant salute, at a Conservative Political Action Conference meeting in Maryland.
During Trump’s first presidency there were questions about his mental health, but he was not called a Fascist…do you see him as a Fascist now?
Yes and no. Although I am a historian of Fascism, I have always preferred the word authoritarian, not least because Trump seems to admire Communist leaders, such as Xi Jinping, as much as right-wing leaders, such as Vladimir Putin. Some people did call Trump a Fascist during his first term, but it did not “stick”: many Americans had difficulty in seeing Trump as belonging to any illiberal tradition, and even those who did not like Trump were living under the illusion that “it can’t happen here.”
It was very interesting to me that when I first started calling Trump an authoritarian in 2016 –including in an August 2016 Atlantic piece that compared him to Benito Mussolini—I received many emails from people who had fled foreign dictatorships for America, saw Trump as a familiar and dangerous figure, and were relieved that someone was calling him out.
That said, Trump is a protagonist of my book, which was written during his first presidency, because of his links to Fascist and authoritarian tradition. I think there has been a kind of willed forgetting about how bad for democracy Trump’s first term was, and perhaps this was a result of the combined effects of Covid, Joe Biden’s strong advocacy of democracy at home, and the stress and upset of Trump’s chaos and aggression, all of which created a kind of psychological distance from those four years as soon as they were over.
It is also strange that the narrative that has formed about Trump’s first term emphasizes what Trump was not able to do –because those around him restrained him—rather than what he did do, which was really awful in so many areas, detentions of immigrants included. Trump has always wanted to have the kind of power that Fascist leaders had, and he did not hide it.
Trump also continues Fascist traditions in his use of propaganda to change the way Americans felt about violence. He used his rallies for 10 years to show people that violence could have a positive value and was a valid way to deal with differences between people and achieve political change. This intensive conditioning was one reason why, when all his other efforts to invalidate the 2020 election results failed, he incited his followers to charge the Capitol and many thousands of them responded, deploying violence to save their leader from an unjust fate of having to leave power.
Now Trump has returned to the White House, he is proceeding at lightning speed to do many Fascist things, starting with transforming the state, the federal bureaucracy and the judiciary in particular, into a tool for the consolidation of his executive power. We have not (yet) seen the grassroots violence and mass imprisonment that Fascist regimes directed at the political opposition, but the first arrests of judges and opposition politicians have occurred.
We also see the start of the development of a police state that for the moment is focused on the main state enemy group, immigrants. I am tracking how ICE is evidently being empowered to fill the roles that state security and secret police forces exercise in foreign autocracies, meaning kidnappings, disappearances, surveillance, arrests.
We also see the start of strongman-style deals with foreign autocrats such as El Salvador President Nayib Bukele to offshore detention of and violence against this enemy group. Mussolini shipped state enemies off to Italian islands, and Trump sends his abroad.
But isn’t it an anachronism to use concepts from the 1920s-1930s to analyze today’s movements?
Good question! Yes, in some ways, because in fact authoritarianism has changed over a century. Aside from the Communist dictatorships, we have fewer one-party states. Today, there are “electoral autocracies”: elections are still held, but the leader and his allies domesticate the media, the election apparatus, and the judiciary to “game the system” so election results tend to favor the leader. And nowadays, as we see from Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Nicolás Maduro, election results that don’t go your way are sometimes denied and disregarded.
I want to note the different destinies of these three election deniers, because it highlights the difficult situation America is in. In Brazil, which had a coup and a military dictatorship that only ended in 1985, Bolsonaro and his foot soldiers were quickly prosecuted. The former president was convicted of spreading election fraud, and is now standing trial for trying to overthrow the government.
In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez handed over a largely destroyed democracy to Maduro, his hand-picked successor, and Maduro has used corruption to bind the military and other major stakeholders to him. Even a landslide victory for the democratic opposition was not able to dislodge him.
And then there is Trump, leader of a country that had a form of regional authoritarianism (the Jim Crow South) but no history of national dictatorship, which means many Americans were less prepared to recognize the warning signs.
Over a decade, Trump methodically and relentlessly weakened our democracy and built a formidable personality cult and alliances with religious, business and political elites. All of them backed his repudiation of his electoral loss, his violent coup attempt, and his “comeback” as a convicted felon. And so, he has returned to finish the job of wrecking our democracy.
I am amazed how many deny Musk was doing a nazi salute. His background and support for far-right politics are evidence enough. The fact that he did the salute twice. And the expression on his face. Thank you for pointing this out.
It can, and is indeed, happening here.