Don't drop the F-bomb!

Calling Trump a fascist plays into his hands

Should liberal Americans get out? Should they take what they can carry and scram, skedaddle, head for the hills and claim asylum when they get there?

Eminent American intellectuals have already fled. They believe that the United States in June 2025 is like Germany in January 1933. Trump coming to power now is like Hitler coming to power then. Unlike all those German Jews, socialists and communists, who didn’t think the Nazis would be so bad, and paid for their complacency with their lives, they do not intend to wait for the knock on the door in the middle of the night.

Marci Shore, an authority on Nazi and communist Europe, resigned from Yale to take a job at Toronto University. Her husband, Timothy Snyder, the great authority on the bloodlands of Nazi Europe and the author of On Tyranny, a rousing defence of democratic freedom, joined her.

Their friend and colleague Jason Stanley the author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them and Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, also fled Yale and did not stop until he had crossed the Canadian border.

They are explicit: America is living through its equivalent of Hitler entering the Reich Chancellery.

In an interview with the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland on Monday Shore said of Trump’s insistence that the military march through Washington:

“It was almost too stereotypical. A 1930s-style military parade as a performative assertion of the Führerprinzip. As for Los Angeles, my historian’s intuition is that sending in the national guard is a provocation that will be used to foment violence and justify martial law.”

In a video made with Snyder and Stanley [see above] she announced. “The lesson of 1933 is: you get out sooner rather than later.”

If I wanted to, I could knock out a polemic denouncing them in minutes. I’d use George Orwell’s line that “one has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool,” and take it from there.

If you seriously believe that fascism may come to your country, the honourable course is to stay and fight, not run away.

In any case, what is this fascism Trump is bringing? The academics were free to leave the US. The secret police didn’t strip them of their belongings and freeze their bank accounts. Border guards didn’t try to gun them down.

One of the strangest features of the modern world is the number of people who want to pose as persecuted dissidents while living lives of perfect security. In place of “stolen valor,” when imposters claim to be military heroes even though they have never heard a shot fired in anger, we have stolen dissent where intellectuals pretend to be persecuted for their beliefs, even though no prosecutor has sent them to court.

Right-wing intellectuals are just as bad as their left-wing counterparts. There may once have been a golden age when conservatives were stoics. But now they embrace victimhood and babble about the “liberal elite” silencing them.

I won’t rant, however.

Although there is a market for prof baiting – bashing the pretensions of intellectuals always sells well – going after Shore, Snyder and Stanley is a distraction.

People with fewer privileges and resources than academics already have good reason to leave the US, and many more may soon be joining them. And although dropping the F-bomb by calling the Trump movement “fascist” is a rhetorical excess that plays into the enemy’s hands, the dismal fact remains that it is dictatorial enough on its own terms – and will get worse.

At the same time as the Guadian talked to Marci Shore, I interviewed the Washington-based British journalist Ben Cohen, for the Lowdown podcast. (You can find it here.)

The conversation turned from the political to the personal as he talked about getting his Hispanic partner and children out of the US.